Touched ... In The Wallet

Y’know, I’ve always been a great supporter of Apple. The first computer I ever bought was a Macintosh 512ke (yes … I’m that old) and I’ve bought a bunch of Macs and iPods over the years. Needless to say, the iPhone just blew me away when it came out, and although I waited until version 2 came out, I was all ready to plop down my hard-earned money and snag one this weekend. In the process, I was reminded of an old saying: If you lay down with pigs, you start to smell like them.

As I’m sure almost everyone on the planet knows, Apple entered into an exclusivity agreement with AT&T where the iPhone is concerned. This means that you can’t actually have an iPhone if you don’t do business with AT&T. Not surprisingly, AT&T is using this exclusivity to absolutely shaft iPhone enthusiasts … and their own customers.

Take me for example. I switched to AT&T less than a year ago just to be ready to get an iPhone. I also have my land line, my DSL, and my satellite TV on my AT&T bill. To put it mildly, I give them a lot of money each month. Granted their coverage is pretty good, but I’d expect to get a bit of smooch back for turning all of my communication needs over to them.

Alas, AT&T isn’t very smoochy. In fact, they outright punish you for being a customer. I discovered this when I popped into the local AT&T store this weekend. After signing in and having my name horribly mispronounced by some pimply-faced boomerang kid who’s no doubt still living at home, I got down to brass tacks. What would it cost me to take an iPhone home and bask in its coolness?

A lot. A whole lot. First of all, my reward for already being an AT&T customer is that I can’t get the iPhone for $299 because I haven’t been a customer long enough. But they’d happily let me have one for $499. Still hopeful (although I could feel my blood pressure rising), I asked about the data plan. That would obliged me to shell out an additional $30 per month, along with the mysterious $18 “upgrade fee” that I’d have to pay (at this point, I was assured that the “upgrade fee” was only a one-time charge). HOWEVER …. it turns out that the plan I have now is considered to be a “special promotional plan” … so I’d have to add another $10 a month to the extra $30 a month. And that doesn’t even include text messages!!! Those cost extra too. So … whipping out my calculator, I came up with the following numbers to illustrate what the phone that Apple advertises as being “Twice as fast. Half the price” actually would cost me. It looked like this:

Item           Cost       X24 Months      Total
iPhone         $499          n/a          $499
Data Plan      $30           $720         $720
Plan Upgrade   $10           $240         $240
Upgrade Charge $18           n/a          $18
                                          $1477

Naturally, if the wife wants one, that’s another $1477 (plus tax)!!!!!

Now I ask you, gentle reader …. does that sound like “Half the price”?? What it sounds like to me, to quote the immortal words of George Carlin, is AT&T’s way of saying: “Come over here, bend over, and let us stick this big **** up your ***”. I think they’re banking on P.T. Barnum’s old adage that no one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the general public. And they’re probably right. In an age when monthly payments are more important than overall price -- where deficits are considered normal (especially amongst the government types) -- I have no doubt that lots of people in similar situations will pony up the dough.

But not this cowboy. I picked up an iPod Touch (i.e. the iPhone without the phone) for $299. True, it doesn't do everything that an iPhone does, but since $299 divided by 24 months comes out to whopping $12.45 a month, I think it’s a substantial enough savings to put up with the inconvenience of having two devices with me.

And while it's pretty clear that AT&T are blood-sucking scumbags who take every opportunity to stick it to their customers (what a surprise ... a blood-sucking giant corporation ... whoda thunkit?), there's another guilty party here: Apple. For an allegedly customer-friendly, old-hippie, non-corporate corporation, they hung their customers out to dry by agreeing to an exclusivity agreement with AT&T. You'd think - having dealt with the evil giant that is Microsoft for so many years - that someone at Apple would grasp the danger of giving monopoly control of a product to one company.

Unfortunately, Apple and AT&T will fleece enough suckers to call the strategy a success. Hopefully, somewhere down the road, market forces (i.e. competition between carriers) will bring down the price of both the phone and service to where it's not totally overpriced. Until then, I'll probably wish I had an iPhone from time to time when I touch my iPod Touch, but at least a certain special area of my anatomy won't be bleeding because of the consumer-screwing alliance between Apple and AT&T.

E Coli Evolves - But Not Creationists

Y'know, I'm really getting tired of creationists lying for Jesus. This doesn't mean that I'm surprised. After all, when your entire approach to truth is based upon blindly believing a heavily-edited collection of ancient books without any corroborating evidence, you're obviously not thinking too clearly.

There is, however, a critical distinction between making a false claim because you honestly don't know any better, and persisting in making a false claim even after it's been conclusively debunked. The pattern is becoming both familiar and disturbing: whenever creationists are confronted by scientific proof of evolution, they employ one of two very base and disingenuous techniques:
1. Ad hominem attacks against the authors
2. Either pretending that the evidence doesn't exist, or resurrecting long-debunked criticisms of evolution to exploit the scientific ignorance of the general public

And so it went in Dover, when the creationist attempt to inject Intelligent Design creationism into the local science curriculum failed (you can watch a wonderful documentary going through the whole process at the NOVA website). Despite the fact that it was clearly shown in a court of law (before a Bush-appointed judge, no less) that the proponents of ID were being wholly disingenuous about their aims and goals, the IDers continue to repeat the same line about how they're really doing science and that it isn't at all religious.

Then came Expelled, where Ben Stein narrates a film that attempts to link Nazism and Evolutionary theory, ultimately making science responsible for the Holocaust (see the wonderfully produced Expelled Exposed site for voluminous details about this sordid little drama). Not only does the film itself get most everything wrong, but the producers deliberately lied to the scientists they interviewed about the name, purpose and editorial position of the film (both Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers go into the story at length on their respective websites/blogs).

But the latest development in the battle to promote science shows just how far the creationists will go to deny the ... well ... obvious. Enter Richard Lenski, a distinguished professor at Michigan State who has taken 20 years to carefully cultivate, observe, and document the evolution of 40,000 generations of e coli bacteria (two very good descriptions of of this research and its implications can be found here and here). To summarize his research even more briefly: evolution is a fact. Period.

Some of the creationist responses to the research (found on The Loom Blog) are really just too good to be true (my personal favorite is: "If the bacteria changed, it was clearly because God willed it. He does that sometimes, you know. ... You'll go to hell for your blasphemy."). But to get a real feel for the difference between science and scared religion, read the exchanges between Lenski and the editor of the Conservapedia.

I'm beginning to see why playing loose and free with the truth, the facts, what evolutionary theory actually predicts, etc. should be expected from the creationist camp. It actually makes sense that they've adopted a battle plan to win by any means necessary (even if it contradicts traditional Christian notions of fair play, truthfulness, not bearing false witness against your neighbor, etc.). It's because they're fundamentally right (if you'd like to stop now and blurt out "What the hell are you talking about??" go right ahead .... I'll wait ....)

To paraphrase Sam Harris, someone has to be right in the evolution / creation debate. The key difference is this: Science can still exist if it's wrong. After all, science has been wrong many times in the past -- and this is a good thing. Germ theory, plate tectonics theory, evolutionary theory (especially paleontology) -- all have benefited from errors and corrections that made the theories stronger and more accurate. That's what's great about science: the method of inquiry is not damaged by positive or negative conclusions. I don't believe in Darwin or evolution as deities or sacred things. But, based upon the available evidence, these are the best, most consistent explanations I've heard of how we got here. Give me a better explanation that fits the data, and I'll happily accept it.

The creationists are in a totally different boat. They want to interpret their bible literally, and hence their litmus test for truth or falsehood isn't concerned about the evidence: it's concerned about confirming what they already believe. If the world wasn't created in 6 days, if their particular "god" isn't responsible for this creation, if there was no single great flood, if the sun didn't stand still in the sky, if ancient people didn't live over 900 years ... then the whole house of cards collapses. They must be right or else they're wrong.

And because of this they will fight tenaciously to resist any and all evidence for evolution, the big bang, and anything else that contradicts their literal interpretation of their "scripture". If they can't win the argument with facts, they will resort to a time honored tradition: they'll lie for Jesus.