For years I’ve been wondering how so many people can afford to such expensive cars, with 40, 50, $60,000 SUVs running around.  Now I know.  They can’t.  It’s hard to believe but there is something even more idiotic than the real estate bubble.  I wrote an Autoblog post that went up today about people who frequently buy new vehicles and rollover debt to the new car loan.  Imagine buying a $30,000 car that’s worth at most $20K two years later. But you still owe $23K on the loan.  Take that $3,000 and tack it on to the loan on a new $35,000 vehicle that you put no down payment on .  Rinse and repeat a couple of times.  Now all of a sudden, after 6 or 7 years, you’ve made tens of thousands of dollars in car payments, your vehicle has a trade-in value of $27,000 and you have a $40,000 loan balance.  Hard as it might be to believe, a lot of people and banks apparently are this stupid.  I’ve never bought a new car when I still owed money on the previous one so the thought of doing anything so ridiculous never even occurred to me.  It’s mind boggling how stupid this capitalist system has made us.  Just wait until India and China catch up!

Just in case you haven’t been paying any attention for the past six months there is a new cell phone going on sale next week. Some company called Apple is putting it out. Apple apparently has a reputation for great industrial design in their products and this phone sure looks cool. Now looking cool and actually working well don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Certainly an iPod looks cool and the click wheel interface definitely works great, but the touch screen interface of the iPhone is a whole new ball game. It remains to be seen how well it work and it may be great. Or not! Not having actually tried an iPhone I’ll stick to outlining some other reasons not to buy one regardless of how well it works.

1. AT&T. This alone should be all the reason anyone needs to stay away from the iPhone regardless of how good it may be. AT&T has cooperated willingly in the NSA domestic spying program and for that they should be punished by everyone refusing to do business with them. They have also recently announced plans to monitor the data that their DSL customers are sending and receiving so that they can notify the extortionists at the RIAA and MPAA when suspect content is being transmitted.
2. Cost. The 4GB model will be $499 and the 8GB version is $599. These are the kinds of prices usually charged for unlocked phones that can be used with any cellular provider. Usually when you buy a phone from a company like AT&T or Verizon they subsidize the price in exchange for signing up for a one or two year contract. If you leave your contract early you pay a hefty early termination fee. AT&T will be charging the ETF even though they are not subsidizing the phone.
3. More Cost. The phone goes on sale next Friday and AT&T has just released the service plans for the iPhone and they start at $60 a month for 450 minutes.  If you have a family plan you’re SOL, no sharing minutes.
4. If you currently have a GSM phone and plan, you can’t just buy an iPhone and pop in yor SIM card.  You have to sign up for a new two year service plan with AT&T
5. With a regular iPod you can enable disk mode and drag files onto the drive and use it for portable storage.  The iPhone has no disk mode.
6. With most phones today you can drop any mp3 file on the phone and use it as a ringtone.  The iPhone you can’t use your own files as ring tones.  You’ll have to buy from AT&T.
7. You can’t record video with the iPhone camera, stills only
8. You can’t swap out the battery.  If you have a cell phone that you use with any regularity you know the chances of the phone having any useful life by the middle of the second year is slim.  Presumably you can open up an iPhone like an iPod and replace the battery but it’s not trivial.  No one should sell a phone or media player without a user replaceable battery.
9. The durability of the glass face on the iPhone is still a very open question.  I’d wait and see on that one.
10. Finally and most importantly, AT&T is the only service provider. See reason No. 1 above.

The audio of the downtown Ypsi business forum is now up on the feed where I had the recording of the mayoral debate. I’m still working on the video part. I’m going to split the video into smaller chunks and put on the feed over the coming days. You can listen or watch directly from this page, or if you have iTunes or some other podcatcher or feed reader you can just subscribe with the link in the sidebar and it will automatically get downloaded to you computer when it’s available.

We unfortunately made the mistake of trying out CiCi’s Pizza on Ellsworth tonight. It’s located in the new structure in front of Wal-Mart. First let me get this out the way. The “food” sucked. There tag-line is “The Ultimate Pizza Experience is a Gourmet Buffet”. This place has no business using the word gourmet in any description of their food. I’m not going to get into all the details of the culinary experience because Jules is planning on writing about that over on YpsiBites. Suffice to say that if you think Tios is a good Mexican restaurant, you might appreciate CiCi’s. If on the other hand you prefer your Mexican food prepared by people who originated south of the Rio Grande then avoid CiCi’s at all costs.

Our experience at CiCi’s brought another thought to mind. I don’t often carry much cash with me these days. When possible I prefer to use a debit card. I believe that this is a pretty common practice these days. One thing I never, ever do is withdraw cash from ATM’s that don’t belong to my bank. A few years ago banking regulations were changed to allow banks to charge non-customers for using their ATM’s and charge customers for using some other banks machine. That means that if you use the ATM at bank where you don’t have an account you get charged twice, once by the owner of the ATM and once by your own bank. This can often cost you as much $4, $2 per bank. I make a point of trying to avoid these egregious charges.

Now back to my story. When you walk into CiCi’s there is cash register where you pay in advance before proceeding to the “gourmet” all you can eat pizza buffet. Mull that concept in your mind for a moment! Prominently displayed adjacent to the counter is an ATM. As I place the order and hand the cashier my debit card I am informed that they don’t take cards at the moment, only cash or check. I was also informed that I could use the ATM behind me. I declined to pay the extra fees that would go along with using an ATM that didn’t belong to my bank. So we ran over to Jules’ bank which was right nearby and got some cash. When we returned Jules noticed the little notice on the machine about the fees, and it stated that the machine was owned by the pizza company. All this got me thinking about all the ATM’s you see in gas stations, convenience stores and every other business. It occurs to me that since all these machines collect a transaction fee, these businesses are almost certainly getting a cut of the action. I wonder how much of that dollar or two they are getting? So it seems highly probable that CiCi’s is getting a cut of every time they tell someone they can’t use their debit card, and they turn around to grab some cash. This is ridiculous. Jules told me that New York Pizza Depot which used to take credit/debit cards has informed her the last couple of times that she was there that their card machine was broken. They also happen to have a conveniently located ATM.

It seems that more and more business are taking part in the hidden fee economy. That includes all the assorted regulatory recovery charges you find at the bottom your phone bill under that low advertised service price. There are more and more of these bogus fees popping up everywhere. Companies get your business by advertising really attractive prices and then end up nickel and diming you with all kinds of little fees that add up to a pretty significant percentage of your total cost. I will simply decline to patronize businesses that insist on applying these hidden costs.