Well, the God I believe in isn't short of cash, mister.
This is a response to an article in the Saturday August 23 2003 edition of the AJC by syndicated columnist Randy Cohen of the New York Times who writes a column called “Everyday Ethics”. (Read the article)
I read your article with interest answering a person’s question about whether they should visit the Galapagos Islands or not. You should have done more research into the Galapagos before giving a generic answer like the one you gave.
I thought I’d try Netflix for a couple of months and catch up on watching movies and then cancel. So far I’m impressed: I joined Sunday and got two movies in the mail on Tuesday. I sent one back Wednesday and got the next on Friday. I did the free trial a while back and they were shipping everything from California. Now they have a center in Duluth (but I couldn’t get another free trial).
It’s $20 a month to have 3 movies out a time which probably means you could watch a movie every other day if you watch them the day you get them and mail them back the next. They pay the postage both ways. They have options where you can pay more and have more movies out or pay less and have 2 movies out a time (but that plan is limited to 4 movies per month).
You keep a backlog of things you want and whenever they get a movie back from you they send the next on the list. So you don’t have to keep going back to the website to pick movies. They just come automatically as long as you have movies in your queue.
It’s a very neat idea and seems like it should be very efficient using bar codes and automatically generating e-mails.
Read the follow-up posted in December.
This is a review I wrote on Amazon:
I heard some of Michael Hewett’s music on NPR’s Hearts of Space one night. So I did some research and wound up buying the CD. Much of the disc is very pleasant new age type acoustic guitar picking with kind of a southwest flair.
I was talking with a guy at work who had just refinanced after buying a house a year ago. The rate he got was only 1% less than his previous but the lender paid all the closing costs. I said I was happy with my 6% rate, but he pointed out that it costs nothing to save $100 a month. Would you turn someone down who wanted to give you $100 a month.
So I’m refinancing. It will cost me nothing and my payment would be less. My broker even said that if I was worried about stretching the payoff date out 15 years again that I could just pay the 13-year amount every month and still be paying less than now and pay it off the same month in 2016.
Saw an interesting thing Friday as I was leaving work. I walked from my office to the state office buildings (twin towers, aka Sloppy Floyd Building) which takes me right through the smokers’ hangout. I see a couple of people (white but leathery tan) and they’re opening up the smoker station ashtrays mounted to the columns of the walkway. The woman looked up at me and looked kind of guilty so I wondered if they were up to something but it looked like they were just looking for cigarette butts. Once I was in the building I asked the security guard if they were getting cigarette butts. He said Yes, they do it every day.
Wow.