Have you read McCullough's biography "John Adams"? It's great. His wife, Abigail, is pretty damned impressive, too!Originally Posted by Sturgeon's Lawyer
Have you read McCullough's biography "John Adams"? It's great. His wife, Abigail, is pretty damned impressive, too!
Yep, that's the one that really turned me on to Adams. I haven't seen the TV series based on it though.
Impera littera designata delenda est.
When Mike says "Do it", what do you think he meant? I wonder if had a different outcome in mind since the situation changed but not sure what that could have been.
Carry On My Blood-Ejaculating Son - JKL2000
I was curious, do most of you here still have cable? I dumped mine last year (bought a flat indoor antenna for local channels & a Roku), and don't miss it really.
I have cable. My cable, cell phone, home phone and internet costs $300 a month - a bit expensive. I'd like to get rid of Netflix though - much prefer Amazon Prime.
What can this strange device be? When I touch it, it brings forth a sound (2112)
^^ If I dump cable TV, I still need cable for the internet. Still the only way to get anything resembling "broadband" here in the US. As I said previously, I refuse to board the train of streaming services slowly transitioning broadcast and basic cable channels to premium channels.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
I dumped Cable TV 4 or 5 years ago, but still have it for internet. Time Warner -> Spectrum was bleeding me to the tune of $181/mo, more than my gas & electric combined. Don't miss Cable TV either, but paying $75/mo for internet sucks.
Yeah, I think I'm paying $100. for AT&T wired phone and internet, but at least I'm not paying the $130. for the Suddenlink cable. Sometimes it's hard to think of the best way package all that stuff.
Last edited by hippypants; 05-06-2022 at 04:13 PM.
We still have cable and there's a lot we watch on it. My wife is a news junkie, I have to have my baseball, there's a few series that we use the DVR to capture. Plus, it's from a local coop, not soulless megacorp. I'll miss it whenever we move.
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
I just received my latest cable bill and just about choked. $209. 1 TV. My own equipment. It's highway robbery. They have something called a "Broadcast TV Service" charge of a flat $20 monthly. What the fuck is that? I'm stuck with their internet ($70 for 200mbps) as they are the only game in town. The thieves...I mean, Spectrum also has "tiers." It's no longer basic vs Premium. I like HGTV. I also like the DIY channel. They are in different tiers. All of the Discovery channels are spread out as well. It's disgusting and maddening.
Oh how I miss living in Boston as I was able to pull in roughly 40 pristine HD channels over the air...for free.
With this said, I signed up for Hulu with live cable & local TV today and will test the waters . It's $70 for no commercial interruptions on original Hulu content and includes Disney+, ESPN+, and unlimited DVR access. That move should save me $70 monthly. If this doesn't fit the bill, I will try Youtube-TV. $65 with the same basic options but no premium streaming content.
"That gum you like is going to come back in style."
What about Starlink?
Order now to reserve your Starlink. Starlink expects to expand service in your area in 2023. You will receive a notification once your Starlink is ready to ship.
Hardware
$599.00
Shipping & Handling
$50.00
Est. Tax
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Service
$110.00 /mo
Using advanced satellites in a low orbit, Starlink enables video calls, online gaming, streaming, and other high data rate activities that historically have not been possible with satellite internet. Users can expect to see download speeds between 100 Mb/s and 200 Mb/s and latency as low as 20ms in most locations
https://www.starlink.com/
I've been trying to figure out if we can "cut the cord," but it appears that we can't get the "high speed Internet" that I need for work without getting the biggest package that Xfinity offers.
Bastards.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
Nope. After moving to a town with only one cable company - Time-Warner - their price just kept increasing every year after the switch to Spectrum, so I shit-canned them when I found there was a TV antenna in the attic. That was four and a half years ago, I think. Don't miss it, either. I was sick of paying all that money for less than a dozen channels I regularly watched. And now I rarely watch broadcast or cable TV channels anymore, even though I can now access cable TV through a relative's Xfinity account, which has its own player. And I only ever use that for a couple of sports. Oh, and Resident Alien, of course. In fact, my over all TV viewing decreased by at least 75% since I cut the cable and almost all of that is streaming.
I still enjoy sitcoms but I rarely watch them and I can't even stomach broadcast and cable dramas, anymore. Premium channel dramas, otoh, are a different story.
I believe he's only referring to cable TV. Every cable company I know of lets you subscribe to internet only. I do.
I've wondered about it myself. I was told some years ago that it's a fee charged by local stations that is then passed on to the consumer. However, according to a couple of websites, it's literally nothing:
Broadcast TV Fee: What is it anyway?
The short answer? Nothing.
The long answer is that broadcast TV fees are a way for cable companies to extract a little bit more profit from you, without it looking like a price hike. They aren’t a required government tax and they haven’t always existed. They’re a clever billing trick.
Supposedly, DirectTV and Verizon Fios don't charge that fee. All the others do, tho.
I first moved to this town right before TW changed to Spectrum (I had TW previously). After the change, they had one speed and one price, at first: $70 for 100 Mbps. Luckily for me, I was grandfathered in and pay $60/mo, but I don't get the full 100 Mbps either, not that I need it.
Now they have three plans: $75 for 200, $95 for 400, and $115 for 1 Gig.
As I tell people all the time, 200 Mbps is way more than most everyone needs. It's simple math.
Netflix says that for an HD program (which I believe is full 1080p), you need a speed of around 5 Mbps (when I used a PS3 to stream stuff, I could monitor the speed and that's pretty accurate; and it was the same for Prime). Gaming is roughly the same. 200 divided by 5 is 40.
Who has 40 people living in their house?????
Here's the biggest difference between 200 Meg and 1 Gig: a website takes about a half a second to load at 200 Meg. At 1 Gig, it would take a tenth of a second. Who the fuck is that impatient that they can't wait another four-tenths of a second????
It's really nothing more than a gimmick to swindle people.
And here's what's really bullshit about it all: if they can throttle my speed down, why can't they offer 100 Mbps for $55 or, for lower income households, 50 Mbps for only $30?
They actually offer 30 Mbps for needy families for $15/mo. But, here's the caveat: Only "new Spectrum customers with at least one recipient of certain public assistance programs in the household" qualify.
So, if you're a lower income family or a current customer whose household income has dropped, but don't meet certain guidelines to qualify for any kind of assistance (e.g. Snap), fuck you. And an even bigger fuck you is that only people who live in certain zip codes can qualify. If you live in a different zip code a ¼ mile down the road, tough shit.
Oh, and if you're a DirectTV or U-verse customer, my condolences. You could have been their customer for 10 years but if you want to cancel before the end of your contract, you get hit with an early termination fee of $20/mo for each month remaining on your service contract. And even if you cancel at the end of your contract, they still slap you with a $15 cancellation fee.
No one can convince me that cable company's business practices are not the brainchild of Satan.
If I won the Power Ball, I'd invest my money to start up a new cable/internet company and charge such low prices I'd barely make a profit, just so I could put Comcast, Spectrum, and all the others out of business. That's how much I fucking hate them.
“The red zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the white zone."
I have never had cable - I just object to paying for something that was initially sold as ad-free tv but is now just 500 channels of ads and infomercials. Now that DABL is on Pluto, I have no need for regular antenna powered tv. I probably watch 50% YouTube, 40% Pluto TV and the rest split between Tubi, XUMO, Plex and dodgy sites showing soccer. I have been paying for Netflix, but in the last year have watched about 4-5 shows. This latest increase is gonna be the last one I get hit with.
Basically me.
I still have cable and am fine with it. Cable suits my needs more generally. Is it expensive? I suppose, but atm its not too bad. I suppose that can change at any moment, but same deal with streaming services. And I have a friend that subscribes to most of the major streaming services and he pays more than I do for cable. So I'm not seeing the advantage.
Please don't ask questions, just use google.
Never let good music get in the way of making a profit.
I'm only here to reglaze my bathtub.
It took me a couple of years to convince my wife that we should dump DirecTV for streaming. But when the monthly charge exceeded $200, and with some "political" factors added in, she finally agreed. Now we are paying around $130/mo for what we actually watch instead of nearly double for dozens and dozens of channels we never watched. Fubo for locals and live programming, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Apple+, Discovery+, HBO Max, ESPN+ and we're covered.
People interested in OTA antenna reception including progress towards ATSC 3.0 4K UHD broadcast should check this guy. This episode covers wireless stream of an antenna’s output to multiple TVs in the home without running coax.
Right. It's easy to subscribe but tougher to unsubscribe or it was for me. Not so much in the decision, but in getting them to do it. I was with Suddenlink as far as I could tell, I never found anything on their site how to go about unsubbing them. So I took my equipment down to their office here (it was packed with people), and a guy approached me, and asked me what I wanted, and told him. He said give me the equipment and he'd credit me for it, then told me to go home and call the office 800 number and cancel, which I did.
When I called their office the guy handling the job was really a jerk, but at least he did what I told him to do. They still billed me for the full month, but also charged me a bill for the equipment. I called them and told them I should have been credited for that as I took it by first thing. They asked me if I had gotten an invoice, which I had not, but the guy gave me at least his card, so I had that. At any rate, I finally got it straightened out, but it was a hassle for such a simple procedure.
I got tired of having all those channel, but nothing was really on that I was interested in, except for a few, which I still get without them over the antenna.
Yeah yeah it sucks, back to the shows...
Just finished Ozark. Great series! I was pretty disappointed with the pace and ending of the final episode at first, but came to appreciate it with more thought. I'm still a bit unsatisfied, but ok with it.
Outer Range...still interesting, but still confusing. I feel like it's ramping up now though. Gonna hit episode 8 tonight
"Who would have thought a whale would be so heavy?" - Moe Sizlak
Yeah, I think I hate Spectrum more than any other corporation.
In Europe and Asia, a half or full Gig of internet is only around $10 a month. The difference is there competition is required by law. Here monopolies are allowed to persist, permitting them to charge whatever the hell they want. It's pretty bad when $50 a month for 5G home internet sounds like a bargain.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
We still have cable for both our TV, Internet and Phone.
Here are three advantages: much better shows, shit tons of movies, and no commercials. A fourth advantage is that if there's a show you want to watch that airs every week, wait until they've all aired, subscribe for a month to watch them, and then cancel. Depending on the service, the cost is anywhere from $5/mo (Apple) to $15.50 (Netflix).
And you can share your login. Apple allows up to six people on one account and Amazon Prime allows four. Disney allows four simultaneous streams while HBO Max and ESPN allow three. So for people on a tighter budget, they can split the cost with family members and/or friends. Say, for instance, three family members split up the subscriptions to Amazon Prime, Apple, Disney, ESPN, HBO, Hulu, Netflix Premium, and Showtime. The total cost would be $94; each person, however, only pays less than $32/mo. Amazon Prime, btw, allows you to order stuff online and it's shipped free, usually getting it one or two days later. If you don't care about that and just want the streaming service, the price would be less than $30/mo/person.
Here's another thing people can do to save money: DirectTV, Spectrum, and Xfinity all have streaming apps, so the cost could be split. DirectTV and Xfinity allow three streams away from home and Spectrum allows two. In the home, Direct allows two (), Xfinity allows five, and Spectrum is unlimited.
Yep. The high cost for literally hundreds of channels you never watch is the biggest gripe people have with cable.
You know, if they just simply went to à la carte, I'd wager they'd still have millions of customers.
Yep. When I first started hearing what people in Europe pay for cable, it made me even angrier than I already was.
I've told this story before but I'll tell it again for those who may have missed it. Warning: it may be infuriating.
A community outside of Chattanooga couldn't get the local cable company to run coax out to their area. The other problem for them was satellite reception is spotty due to the topography. So they banded together to start a co-op type community owned cable company. When the cable company learned of this, they got state legislators to pass a law prohibiting it.
Here's another story that's more of a head scratcher than infuriating.
My ex bro-in-law moved to a new, small subdivision just outside of the town he used to live in. There wasn't cable laid. The people in the subdivision asked the cable co (Time-Warner, iirc) if they'd run cable to their homes because they didn't want satellite. The cable co said "no." The people of the subdivision got together and talked. They then told the cable co they'd pay for them to run the cable. The cable co said "no." I asked him how far away they'd have to run the cable. He said from the main road, where it was already installed. I thought he was talking about the state route that was about six or seven miles away. He pointed and said, "no! That one!" The distance from the road where the cable was already installed to their homes: less than a quarter mile.
“The red zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the white zone."
Lately, I've kinda gotten hooked on Eureka on Prime. I wouldn't say it's great but it's pretty good; kinda like comfort food. And I really enjoy the theme song, so much so that I don't skip the opening credits. .
One day, after the show was over, I let the credits roll to listen to more of the song, which also plays at the end. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the composer's name: Mark Mothersbaugh!
But it reminded me of something else: was there ever a worse song than the Three's Company's theme song?
“The red zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the white zone."
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