*nergil*

Policy forces *no one* to be an ass hat; it's a choice, clear and simple

DirecTV Caves to Social Media Pressure and Eventually Helps Stroke Victim

by Paul Knight
from http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2010/02/directv_contract_problems.php

​Update: Robert Mercer, director of public relations for DirecTV, told Hair Balls, via e-mail, "This was obviously a terrible mistake, it should never have happened and of course we apologize to the customer and his family. This is clearly a case where common sense and reason should have trumped rules."

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The Leeder family recently found out how DirecTV does business: The company will not, under any circumstances, break a contract or waive cancellation fees, even if you've had a stroke and will never need the service again, unless you complain on Facebook and Twitter.

That's pretty much the way it went down after Robert Leeder, an 87-year-old World War II veteran who lives outside of Conroe, suffered a stroke that paralyzed half his body. Leeder moved to a nursing home, using his Veterans Affairs Benefits, Social Security and a small pension, according to his son Andre.

"It's something that you just don't think of until it hits the fan," Andre Leeder tells Hair Balls. "If we don't get some of this paperwork nailed down, it could be not good. This could cost people their houses, everything they've got."

The family had to handle a million details while moving Leeder out of his house, and one that seemed tiny at the time was canceling his DirecTV service. Andre called the satellite company to do so, asking for a final bill. The DirecTV representative told Andre that it wasn't a problem.

The trouble started when the family got a bill for $426, including a $400 fee for terminating the contract.
An e-mail exchange between Andre Leeder and DirecTV ensued. From Andre's e-mail:

Robert Leeder is my 87-year-old father. He has had stroke that paralyzed one half of his body. This has put him in a nursing home from which he will not return and no one will be living in this location. When I canceled the service I was not informed that he was under contract.

Under these circumstances, we would like to request for your company to credit the $400 cancellation charge to this account. I can provide Doctor's Certifications, if necessary.

And DirecTV's response:

I'm sorry to hear about your father's current health condition. I understand your concern with regard to the early cancellation fee...Since he canceled his service or did not maintain the minimum programming requirements, his account was charged with an early cancellation fee of $400. We feel this fee is valid and we are unable to waive it.

"I'm not surprised. It kind of seems like the norm these days," Andre says. "If you've got an insurance claim, they do the best to duck it. Nothing goes easy."

So, on Tuesday, Andre's wife Robin posted about her family's trouble on her Facebook page and Twitter account, basically saying that DirecTV would not allow Leeder to cancel his service, without paying the fee, even after he had a stroke.

"It set off a firestorm," Andre Leeder says. "There were hundreds of responses, and I'm talking within minutes."

Last night, Andre sent Hair Balls an update on the situation, via e-mail:

I spoke with Robin and she told me about her most recent conversation with DirecTV. Apparently, the intervention from DirecTV came from a district manager who saw her entry on Facebook. His commitment was to credit the account for $400...

DirecTV must have personnel dedicated to monitoring social media or no phone call would have been forthcoming. They obviously care about this ground swell phenomenon. I can see how once the cat is out of the bag, the dam will break and everyone with a beef will be up their collective corporate butts...

We haven't heard back from a DirecTV representative, but we'll be sure to update as soon as we do.

For Herfie

Let them eat cake

may your day be filled with orange blossoms, Hello Kitty!

Hrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnh!

buon compleanno to my sweet guy.

The banana don't fall far from the tree

jak wrote:

Anna's imaginary friend Imaginary Friend has been hanging out with us a lot lately and doing several sleepovers. I've been considering limiting Anna's phone use as they are talking a ton. The other day I was trying to get the kids out of the house and into the car. Anna was chatting with Imaginary Friend and I was asking her to please hurry up. She covered the phone and said to me, "Mommy, if you don't interrupt me I'll be finished much sooner. Just a moment, please." And then turned back to her conversation on the old phone. It was so hard not to bust a gut laughing.

All-beef

did you know that the Colbert Nation is the official sponsor for the U.S. men's ice racing team? neither did i.

One reason to see "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"

JONAH HILL: i have a question for you real quick. what did you think of my demo tape? did you get it? did you GET it?

ALDOUS SNOW: oh! um, yeah. i was gonna to listen to that, but then, um, i just carried on living my life.

Promising!

baked pears with wine and a scrumptious walnut cream

from Jamie Oliver at http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/fruit-recipes/baked-pears-with-wine-and-walnut-cream

dessert recipes | serves 4

When I worked in France I would visit a lovely little bakery once a week to buy a tart filled with a really amazing walnut cream, with poached glazed pears on top. It was such a joy to eat that I wanted to give you a recipe based on these flavours – the combination is fantastic. At Christmas time it’s nice to use chestnuts instead of walnuts, or you could even bash up or grate some good-quality chocolate to sprinkle over the pears as well.

ingredients
• 1 vanilla pod
• 4 good-quality seasonal pears, peeled
• 125g/4½oz dark muscovado sugar, plus a little extra
• 2 large wineglasses of red or white wine
• 2 oranges
• 200g/7oz peeled walnuts
• 255g/9oz mascarpone

preparation
Preheat the oven to 220ºC/425ºF/gas 7. Score down the length of the vanilla pod and remove the seeds by scraping a knife down the inside of each half. Put the pears into a tight-fitting ovenproof pot or pan, add the 125g of sugar, wine, vanilla pod and seeds, and the peel and juice of 1 orange and bring to the boil. Sprinkle over half the walnuts and then put in the oven to bake. Every so often, baste the pears with the syrup they are cooking in, as this will give them a nice glaze. Cook for around 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the ripeness, until the pears are tender but still holding their shape, then remove from the oven and allow to cool while you roast the remaining walnuts on a baking tray in the oven for 5 minutes – make sure you keep an eye on them as they can quickly go from golden to black and you don’t want burnt walnuts!

Remove the vanilla pod from the syrup. When the walnuts are done, either whizz them in a food processor or bash them up with a pestle and mortar until you have a paste. Whip up the mascarpone with the walnut paste, the zest and juice of the other orange and enough sugar to sweeten, and serve this cream with the baked pears, the nuts, some orange peel and some of the cooking syrup.

You're welcome

"Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries."

i was stunned when my husband came home from the mechanic the other day to tell me that a woman sitting in the waiting area with him had said, "well, i guess this weather disproves global warming, doesn't it?" i was so surprised because i had thought it common knowledge that climate-change theory acknowledges increased severity in all sorts of storm activity. at the time, after sputtering for a few seconds to my husband about ignorance, i let it go, thinking this wacko was one-off. then i saw that numerous right-wing pundits were drawing the same faulty conclusions.

people, increased precipitation is internally consistent with the theory of global warming, whether you think global warming is gospel or wackadoo. get informed.

The Nor'easter of February, 11, 2010, in a infrared satellite image taken at 9:40 p.m., EST. Image credit: NASA GOES project.

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http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/264085/february-10-2010/we-re-off-to-see-the-blizzard

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Another Blizzard: What happened to global warming?

by Bryan Walsh
from http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1962294,00.html

As the blizzard-bound residents of the mid-Atlantic region get ready to dig themselves out of the third major storm of the season, they may stop to wonder two things: Why haven't we bothered to invest in a snow blower, and what happened to climate change? After all, it stands to reason that if the world is getting warmer — and the past decade was the hottest on record — major snowstorms should become a thing of the past, like PalmPilots and majority rule in the Senate. Certainly that's what the Virginia state Republican Party thinks: the GOP aired an ad last weekend that attacked two Democratic members of Congress for supporting the 2009 carbon-cap-and-trade bill, using the recent storms to cast doubt on global warming.

Brace yourselves now — this may be a case of politicians twisting the facts. There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm. As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.

But there have been hints that it was coming. The 2009 U.S. Climate Impacts Report found that large-scale cold-weather storm systems have gradually tracked to the north in the U.S. over the past 50 years. While the frequency of storms in the middle latitudes has decreased as the climate has warmed, the intensity of those storms has increased. That's in part because of global warming — hotter air can hold more moisture, so when a storm gathers it can unleash massive amounts of snow. Colder air, by contrast, is drier; if we were in a truly vicious cold snap, like the one that occurred over much of the East Coast during parts of January, we would be unlikely to see heavy snowfall. (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)

Climate models also suggest that while global warming may not make hurricanes more common, it could well intensify the storms that do occur and make them more destructive.

But as far as winter storms go, shouldn't climate change make it too warm for snow to fall? Eventually that is likely to happen — but probably not for a while. In the meantime, warmer air could be supercharged with moisture and, as long as the temperature remains below 32°F, it will result in blizzards rather than drenching winter rainstorms. And while the mid-Atlantic has borne the brunt of the snowfall so far this winter, areas near lakes may get hit even worse. As global temperatures have risen, the winter ice cover over the Great Lakes has shrunk, which has led to even more moisture in the atmosphere and more snow in the already hard-hit Great Lakes region, according to a 2003 study in the Journal of Climate.

Ultimately, however, it's a mistake to use any one storm — or even a season's worth of storms — to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin this week, to global warming). Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries. And while our ability to predict the former has become reasonably reliable, scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate. Of course, that doesn't help you much when you're trying to locate your car under a foot of powder.

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from http://climateprogress.org/2009/12/20/global-warming-copenhagen-snow-storm-blizzard-extreme-weather/

In 2004, the Journal of Hydrometeorology published an analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center that found “Over the contiguous United States, precipitation, temperature, streamflow, and heavy and very heavy precipitation have increased during the twentieth century.”

They found (here) that over the course of the 20th century, the “Cold season (October through April),” saw a 16% increase in “heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 2 inches [when it comes as rain] in one day), and a 25% increase in “very heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 4 inches in one day)– and a 36% rise in “extreme” precipitation events (those in the 99.9% percentile — 1 in 1000 events). This rise in extreme precipitation is precisely what ispredicted by global warming models in the scientific literature.

In fact, the last few decades have seen rising extreme precipitation over the United States in the historical record, according to NCDC’s Climate Extremes Index (CEI):

An increasing trend in the area experiencing much above-normal proportion of heavy daily precipitation is observed from about 1950 to the present.

Here is a plot of the percentage of this country (times two) with much greater than normal proportion of precipitation derived from extreme 1-day precipitation events (where extreme equals the highest tenth percentile of deluges, click to enlarge):



Didn’t know that our government kept a Climate Extremes Index? Why would you? The media never writes about it.

The U.S. Climate Extremes Index was explicitly created to take a complicated subject ("multivariate and multidimensional climate changes in the United States") and make it more easily understood by American citizens and policy makers. As far back as 1995, analysis by the National Climatic Data Center showed that over the course of the 20th century, the United States had suffered a statistically significant increase in a variety of extreme-weather events, the very ones you would expect from global warming, such as more — and more intense — precipitation. That analysis concluded the chances were only “5 to 10 percent” this increase was due to factors other than global warming, such as “natural climate variability.” And since 1995, the climate has gotten much more extreme.

Even the Bush Administration in its must-read U.S. Climate Change Science Program report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate, acknowledged:

Many extremes and their associated impacts are now changing…. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense….

It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases.… The increase in heavy precipitation events is associated with an increase in water vapor, and the latter has been attributed to human-induced warming.

And yes, this applies to snow. A 2005 study, coauthored by NCDC, “Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States,” found:

The temporal distribution of snowstorms exhibited wide fluctuations during 1901–2000, with downward 100-yr trends in the lower Midwest, South, and West Coast. Upward trends occurred in the upper Midwest, East, and Northeast, and the national trend for 1901–2000 was upward, corresponding to trends in strong cyclonic activity.

Finally, we have the 2009 government report on U.S. climate impacts, which concluded:

– “Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent.”
– “In winter and spring, northern areas are expected to receive significantly more precipitation than they do now, because the interaction of warm and moist air coming from the south with colder air from the north is projected to occur farther north than it did on average in the last century. The more northward incursions of warmer and moister air masses are expected to be particularly noticeable in northern regions that will change from very cold and dry atmospheric conditions to warmer but moister conditions. Alaska, the Great Plains, the upper Midwest, and the Northeast are beginning to experience such changes for at least part of the year, with the likelihood of these changes increasing over time.”
– “There is also evidence of an increase in the intensity of storms in both the mid- and high- latitude areas of the Northern Hemisphere, with greater confidence in the increases occurring in high latitudes. The northward shift is projected to continue, and strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent, with greater wind speeds and more extreme wave heights.”

So it is inane for anyone in the media to cite this massive DC snowstorm as somehow counterintuitive or ironic against the backdrop of Obama’s Copenhagen deal.

Shelley rocks it on the job

Shelley's casual cool

Shelley owns business casual