Via McArdle, this ad on Craigslist:

One very attractive male is offering his bedroom to an attractive female for the summer. No pressure or anything creepy. We can meet for drinks to discuss and make sure there’s mutual attraction.

I am fit, attractive, and under 30. Contact me for details, serious offer here.

No pressure, but mutual attraction required. Ooookay.

I think what’s particularly disconcerting – creepy – about this is not that he’s asking for sex in exchange for housing. Prostitution is nothing new, for sure. Rather, it’s the sort of passive-aggressive appeal. I mean passive-aggressive in the sense that it is passive and aggressive and not so much because it’s passive-aggressive in the snippy sort of way we think of the word. I mean, if he just came out and said what he was after, that would be one thing. Instead, he sort of wants to passively force it to happen. Of course, that’s one way to avoid going to jail for solicitation, I suppose. Whatever the utilitarian reasons for the tone of his appeal, it sort of feels like the guy that can’t quite ask the girl out and so keeps making “joking” comments to do so as indirectly as absolutely possible. Except that instead of avoiding the cops he would be trying to avoid rejection. Meanwhile, everyone in the room cringes every time he speaks.

I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion my frustration with AT&T’s new policy requiring smartphone users to have data plans. Though I am perfectly happy with my data plan and don’t look to downgrade anytime soon, I very much like the flexibility to do so and mostly just resent not having a choice in the matter.

Following up on a lead that I got a while back, I actually discovered a loophole. I can, in fact, use a smartphone without a data plan under certain circumstances. I tested it with my existing AT&T SIM card and it worked perfectly. No data plan was added.

AT&T adds the data plan when it registers a smartphone on its network. If it doesn’t register the smartphone, it can’t add a data plan. All of this made sense when a few Nokia smartphone users said that they were not affected by the policy change. AT&T does not offer Nokia smartphones (or, if it does, offers a very limited selection). So the thought occurred to me that perhaps if I got a Motorola Milestone (the GSM Droid) perhaps a data plan would not be added. The question is how extensive AT&T’s database is and how many kinds of phones it keeps track of.

As luck would have it, my new Verizon phone is a worldphone, which means that it is CDMA like all of Verizon’s phones, but it also has a SIM card slot. So I unlocked the phone, popped in my AT&T SIM card, and… no data plan added. It did not recognize the phone at all! This is despite the fact that it is the Verizon variant of a model that AT&T definitely offers. The difference between my Touch Pro 2 and AT&T’s Tilt 2 is one extra button and CDMA capability. That’s it. But that’s enough. All indications are that AT&T’s database is really quite limited.

The only question is whether or not I can add an appropriate data plan to it. Different phones have different options based on capability and it assumes that my phone is a dumb phone. However, it gives you the option to identify your phone. So theoretically, if I want to add a data plan I can simply tell the system it’s a Tilt 2. I suspect that if you tried to tell it a Tilt 2 was a dumb phone that it would figure out that you’re full of it. But I don’t think the reverse is true. And then, if I want to cancel my plan, I can go back and tell it that it’s a basement Motorola model or something. Maybe.

I haven’t figured everything out. It’s possible that my phone is an exception because of my specific account, but I don’t think so. It can’t add the data plan if it doesn’t recognize the phone. The second thing I am unsure of is if I ever identify it as a Tilt 2 whether or not I can then identify it as something else. I don’t see why not. As long as the phone itself isn’t correcting me, I think that AT&T is going to give me latitude.

All of this is something of a moot point since (a) I love my data plan, (b) AT&T is revising their data plan structure to allow for a cheaper low-bandwidth option, and (c) I’m with Verizon anyway. However, it’s something I am definitely going to keep in mind when/if AT&T makes its way to Callie. One of the reasons I got the phone I did was that I could take it back to AT&T (or Frontier Wireless) if I ever decided that I wanted to.

According to once source, Mormons have higher-than-average IQs (and this remains true even if you’re looking only at non-Hispanic whites). Considerably higher, as far as averages go. Of course, the even juicier part for me is that Episcopalians are even higher. Higher than smug agnostics and atheists, even. So now I have a response next time some atheist talks about atheist IQ’s. And I myself can be smug against those people that are spiritual-but-not-religious, who are a few pegs further down than Episcopalians or Atheists. The Jewish are, of course, higher than everybody else.

It’s interesting to contemplate what makes some religions do better than others on these sorts of tests. That’s in large part because there are two ways that religions gain followers. They are born or they are made. So for instance, it could be true that Baptists have lower IQs in the aggregate because it is a theology that is most attractive to people with lower IQs. Or it could be that they have lower IQs because of the population of people born into the faith. The possibility, involving the other two, is that smart Baptists leave the faith. My impression of Baptists is that a disproportionate number of them are made and not born. On the other hand, I know comparatively few former Baptists, so it’s less like say the Church of Christ (The ICC, not the Congregationalists) which by virtue of its inflexibility seems to hemorrhage people that can’t buy into it full freight. While Baptists are often known for being liberal, liberals like my former roommate can still find a place within the church and still be Baptist. The numbers don’t reflect any distinction between the conservative Southern Baptists and the mainline American Baptists. Because of this and its non-centralized leadership, it’s less either-or than say the LDS or Catholic churches. So my former roommate Hubert can still be a Baptist while still being a socially liberal Democrat.

My own Episcopal Church definitely falls into the category of one you are born into. The only converts we really get are disaffected liberal Catholics and they can be really hard to pry loose from that church even if it’s driving them crazy. Meanwhile, Episcopalians are constantly leaving the church for either Catholicism or conservative protestantism depending on whether they are High Church or Low Church sorts of folks. So when it comes to Episcopalians, it comes down to who is left. Apparently it’s a disproportionate number of the smart people that end up hanging around. My guess is that, despite the fact I’m not myself a very good Episcopalian, I am representative of a fair selection of its membership. TEC is liberal enough that it’s almost not worth leaving whatever our theological uncertainties. A lot of those that leave for more conservative protestant churches are often those whose minds cannot handle infirm theology and want to go somewhere where they are simply told how it is. The same is probably true, to a lesser extent, of those that leave for Catholicism. Meanwhile, those that stay behind are disproportionately likely to have the intelligence to contemplate the vagueries of the church and can handle the contradictory views within the church. And given Episcopalianism’s and Anglicanism’s well-heeled history, they were probably starting from a relatively high set-point anyway.

Catholicism, which is relatively middling, is another interesting case. It’s definitely something that most adherents are born into. Those born into the faith include a lot of Italians and Irish who are not known for being particularly intelligent (in the non-Hispanic white population) and those that came here back in the day were not (as far as I know) likely to come from the higher classes out there. I don’t think that former Catholics are as likely to be disproportionately from the more intelligent or less intelligent sectors of the rank and file. They do seem to be getting a lot of high-profile conversions among intelligent conservatives that want religion but don’t want low-brow protestantism, though I do not know how significant it is to the population at large. I know at least one protestant-raised guy that converted to Catholicism and he’s pretty smart. I know a number of Catholic-raised folks that left the church and they’re pretty smart, too. Then again, I think it’s safe to say that I know a disproportionate number of smart people.

I’ve got no good reason for the Mormons to do as well as they do. They don’t have an especially well-heeled history. Theirs is a church that’s hard to leave but also hard for someone with any serious theological doubts to stay into. The former Mormons I know are disproportionately really intelligent. Maybe it goes back to the polygamy wherein men of limited intelligence were simply excluded from breeding. The church I suppose is large enough that inbreeding was not as big an issue as I would expect in the FLDS. Then again, is the LDS church of old that much bigger than the FLDS church of today?

Or maybe the numbers are just goofy and flawed. They’re taken from something called the NLY97 test. It’s possible that for Catholics, for instance, a disproportionate number of test-takers came from superior Catholic schools and so they ended up higher than they should have. Ditto for Episcopalians. So these numbers could all be useless. But what fun would posting on that be?

This was written a few weeks ago, though never sent. Mostly, I guess, I needed to blow off steam. Since then, I signed a two-year contract with Verizon making my doing business with AT&T in the future considerably less likely.

—-

Dear AT&T,

I have been a customer of AT&T Wireless and its predecessors for twelve years or so. I got a phone with a company called ColCall that became part of Cingular and when I was living in Deseret I was with Skyline Mobile, which was part of the AT&T network.

I have temporarily relocated to Callie, Arapaho, where you don’t yet provide coverage though you will soon be taking over the local Galaxy Mobile. When you had to cut off my data plan, I understood because it wasn’t fair to you to have to pay for the local towers while I get situated. So satisfied have I been with AT&T that I was going to bide my time with a local provider and switch to AT&T as soon as you arrived. Until recently, you have always done right by me.

However, late last year you enacted a policy requiring that smartphone users get a data plan. Until I got a data plan last year, I had always used my smartphone the same way that I used my PDA before it except with a phone attached so I have one less thing to remember before I head out the door. I did enjoy having the data plan while I had it, but I always appreciated the fact that if I needed to save money I could always go back to doing what I did before.

Though I guess I am currently grandfathered in, from what I understand I can never upgrade or replace my phone without signing up for a data plan that I am not sure I will need. This is a slap in the face from a company that I had come to expect more from and a company that I have defended and proselytized for in the face of some recent bad publicity. One of the things I have always appreciated about AT&T is that (unless I am under contract) my phone was my business. When Verizon told me that I could not have a data phone without a data plan regardless of contract, I told them I would just wait for AT&T (or until I relocated back into AT&T’s coverage area) because they would not do that.

You’ve made me eat those words and have made me question a lot of what I thought was the freedom of doing business with AT&T. My options in Callie while I am here are limited, so I’ll be honest and say that you may well retain my business. However, you have lost my loyalty.

Sincerely,

Will Truman
Callie, AO

A little while ago, the author of another blog (I can’t remember which one) commented on the irony that the company that initialized its name to get rid of the word “Fried” would be offering something like the Double Down. That left me scratching my head because I had thought that KFC had shortened its name not because of the word “Fried” but because of the word “Kentucky.” They were worried about it being considered too regionalized (which I considered silly, but there you go). Turns out that we were both right and we were both wrong.

He was right that the official reason they gave was the ford “Fried”. I was right because the real problem was indeed the word “Kentucky”. However, it wasn’t regionalization as I had though. Rather, it’s that the Commonwealth of Kentucky wanted a cut:

In 1990, the Commonwealth of Kentucky, mired in debt, took the unusual step of trademarking their name. Henceforth, anyone using the word “Kentucky” for business reasons – inside or outside the state – would have to obtain permission and pay a licening fee to the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

The result was that Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC and more:

Kentucky Fried Chicken were not the only ones who bravely refused to knuckle under. The name of the most famous horse race in North America, held every year at Churchill Downs, was changed from the “Kentucky Derby” to “The Run for the Roses” for similar reasons; many seed and nursery outfits that had previously offered Kentucky Bluegrass switched to a product known as “Shenendoah Bluegrass” instead; and Neil Diamond’s song “Kentucky Woman” was dropped from the radio playlists at his request, as the licensing fees he was obligated to pay the Commonwealth of Kentucky exceeded the performance royalties he was receiving for the airplay.

I’ve often wondered if states were allowed to do this. I was actually thinking less of the state’s name and more the state’s flag. I figured that they could because state-run universities trademark their name and logo. I began to wonder if the current copyright mentality had been in place at the founding it the use of the stars and stripes would require paying a royalty to the government.