I, by happenstance, bought some double-edged Persona platinum Plus blades yesterday, ten for a buck, in the clearance aisles at Wal-Mart. I got them home and discovered I already had another ten pack from Persona I’d bought earlier. When I was ten and younger, I found the whole history of gillette razors and blades in a great closet my grandfather had, filled with old shaving soap, early blades, before the blue blade, some of them gold. A friend shoplifted a Schick double-edged razor in College which he gave to me. I’m 65 now and still use it. I recently discovered from another friend that one can shave without shaving cream in the shower, without even looking at a mirror. You could feel whether the beard was still there or not. After a month of so of that, I stopped. I wanted to return to using cheap shaving cream and the mirror model.

I’m fascinated by the cheap cell phone expensive service revolution that is supposedly going on. I never had a cell phone until 2010. I bought a cheap nokia 1208 with 10 cent a minute T-mobile service prepaid, that I now keep as a backup. I have since bought a Straight Talk prepaid that self pays $30 each month through a credit card for 1,000 Verizon minutes voice, 1,000 text messages and 30 megs of internet I never use. I nearly used that many voice minutes last month while travelling. But at home I use a free wet loop included with centurylink dsl at $46 a month, with google voice attached to make POTS-like ‘free’ phone calls at home. I read all the sturm and drang about smartphones, but ignore the so-called smart phone revolution. I believe the real revolution is the melting down of the high phone tariff model cell phone industry. Google’s Android just undercut Apple’s I-Phone in the last quarter, selling a phone for what it cost, without a supposed subsidy wherein the gouging tariff more than pays off the expense of the phone subsidy with an enormous profit for carrier and phone manufacturer alike. Yesterday, a friend who is a house painter told me he heard about a free phone spoofing caller ID App available with Google android. I explored phone spoofing with a credit card the least expensive way of doing it two years ago. Not cheap enough for me. I would like to have that Google Droid app on my Straight Talk. But you see, I believe I will have that app, and free, on the Straight Talk or some variation of it, eventually. And I will also have the free app that allows an I-Phone user to watch the DVDs one has on a hard drive at home on a laptop, in the air while circling, say, over Moscow. I have five computers but no printer because my system is paperless. When I want something printed, which is rarely, I have a friendly office with a printer, print it out for me. I don’t need a printed out airline tickets anymore. I can get one at the airport. My uncle, who uses printing and fax
equipment at home, recently sent me a paper copy of an Esquire article about Newt Gingrich. Wanting to send it to friends, I googled the article and sent it as email.

Somehow, this era reminds one of the early 1900s when the progressives started to whittle down the excesses of the robber barons. The Press which has reaped enormous revenues from Apple’s ad campaigns for the I-Pod, I-Phone and now the I-Pad, have been suppressing dissent about all these products and the I-Tunes associated with it. I wrote scathing letters to both the Times and the Post about this. The Times replied with a pile of I-Phone complaints a few days after one of the Google founders dropped off the board at Apple over the Google Voice App squabble. But both the Times and the Post are mostly maintaining radio silence as editorial policy in Apple stories. Fed by extraordinarily high ad revenues, the smart phone revolution is being kept aloft by a big print media and television-manufactured hype. The real revolution is in far cheaper prepaid cell phones, which are melting down the revenue per phone averages of all carriers, while manufacturers scramble to adapt to the temporary success of smartphones and the rise of cheaper prepaids.

In Texas I discovered a motel manager who has no cellphone nor a POTS phone at home. What he has instead is a jail broken generation 3 I-phone that he uses both at home and at work to make ALL of his phone calls over wifi networks. He paid $200 to a friend for it. I learned a few days later that Apple is filing for a copyright to get around the government agency that allowed jail broken I-Phone use. Apple wants to shut down those jail broken I-Phones, supposedly to prevent misuse of left behind data on the phones. But really to keep the comfy little empire Apple, AT&T and others run around the world, intact. This should have been enormous news in the part of the press dealing with new tech issues. It was not. The news was suppressed with other ‘news’ that threatens the interests of the big Ad Budgets at Apple and other players including Verizon, the latter trying to offset declining cell carrier revenues that are a byproduct of the prepaid phone revolution.

The Government has been slow to take up the cause of the discarded cellphone owner who has upgraded to get a ‘new’ phone, making the old one worthless, but still working fine if one wants to keep it. I expect this issue to rise to the fore in the next two years. I haven’t heard anything about it on Techdirt either, but I haven’t read every issue.

Last, I need to tell you a collusion story that happened in my area of the country and may have been replicated in other parts of the country. Verizon had no presence except roaming in the La Crosse region in Wisconsin where I live. Last August, months after it had bought Alltel, a prepaid carrier that operated in my region, Verizon began marketing in this area. But in October, Verizon rolled out its trac phone alliance with Wal-Mart, using samsung phones. The Straight Talk phones immediately started to undermine Verizon’s market push in the area. A startled Verizon persuaded Wal-Mart to stop selling the Straight Talks in its stores in this area. You could still buy them in, say, Winona, Minnesota, where I bought mine in January or February, 2010. But you couldn’t find them in Sparta, Tomah, Onalaska or South La Crosse stores. You could find them in Black River. Wal Mart electronics managers were disappointed. One of them in Sparta started going around the blockade, ordering them in blocks of two dozen or so at a time, but usually available in only a single model when ordered that way. He was successful, other Wal-Mart managers in the area found out about it, and started making small orders too. By now the blockade is over, and Straight Talks are available in all the stores. I don’t know in how many areas of the country this Verizon-Wal-Mart collusion went on, but I suspect there were many.

I have about 25 of those platinum plus era doubled edged blades now. I suspect I won’t have to buy anymore, ever!