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A number of companies have, over the years, forced consumers to agree to arbitration of disputes—it’s that, or don’t do business with them, in some cases not a very practical option.

Agreeing to arbitration puts you, the consumer, at a huge disadvantage. In the first place, when you accept this arrangement, you lose your right to file a suit before a judge and jury, and you also lose your right to be part of any class action suits against the other party, whether or not you have been damaged by that party. And in the second place, the arbitrator is chosen by the parties in the dispute, which generally means that the huge corporation with the bottomless pockets gets to choose an arbitrator whom their lawyers knows will most likely rule in their favor. For you, the consumer, it’s a recipe for loss.

American Express is stuffing its billing envelopes with a mass of fine print that offers customers an opportunity to opt out. The deadline is February 15, 2013. The way you do it is to download and fill out this PDF. Send it by snail-mail to the address printed on the PDF.

Do it now. This is important. It may not put you in the driver’s seat, but at least it will put you back within arm’s reach of the steering wheel.

Several other companies are giving (or have been made to give…) consumers opportunities to opt out of enforced arbitration. Check out these sites:

Paypal escape
Comcast form
eBay opt-out form letter from Public Citizen ***DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 9

If you do business with any of these outfits, you should move quickly to opt of their despotic arbitration clause. Don’t delay.

Yesterday the Arizona Republic, for a short time in the distant past a half-way decent metropolitan paper but, since its purchase by Gannett, a much-weakened affair with sagging circulation and profits, announced that it’s going to start charging a $10/month subscription for peeks at its online incarnation.

Within living memory, Gannett went about “streamlining” the paper. Even before the recession hit, they fired most of the veteran reporters and all of the investigative writers and editors. The recession gave management an excuse to fire still more editorial staff, leaving mostly inexperienced, lower-paid fresh J-school graduates to man the ship.

The baleful result shows: today the paper publishes mostly froth, blood & gore, and local puff pieces, plus almost untouched versions of national and regional wire stories. Content is poorly edited, frequently sporting grammatical and spelling errors and, more seriously, errors in fact. In-depth reporting on state government and city hall are minimal. Often you get better reporting from the eastside paper.

Some years ago, the Republic held such a large market share that it could (and did) crush competing newspapers by telling its own advertisers that if they dared to advertise in another local paper, they would never again be permitted to advertise in the Republic. This may no longer be a credible threat, since so few people subscribe to the aptly nicknamed Repulsive today. Nevertheless, to this day the East Valley Tribune reports mostly on the East Valley, leaving the antics at the Phoenix city hall pretty much untouched.

Thus we have few sources of local news, none of them very good.

Although I have the New York Times delivered, I no longer subscribe to the Republic. The reason I don’t is that it simply doesn’t carry enough news to justify the number of trees that are chopped down to print the thing.

When the paper would appear in the driveway, I would carry it straight to the recycling bin and start throwing out the stacks and stacks and stacks of advertising. Most of it was just that: ads, not coupons. What would be left to read would be two slender sections of play-nooz. It wasn’t even very good reporting—mostly froth and sensationalism. The Sunday paper was the worst of the lot: they’ve shrunk the comic strips so you need a magnifying glass to read the damn things, and after you threw out the chaff, the two or three remaining news sections had just a few pages. Feeling I wasn’t getting my money’s worth, I canceled it.

That was years ago.

Today I get my local news online and from the local PBS station. The online incarnation of the Republic is even weaker than its print edition–difficult to navigate, devoid of an editor’s touch, and often sketchy. The main reason to visit the site is idle entertainment: the obstreperous comment sections far outshine the “reporting.”

The question, then, is “am I going to pay $10 a month for idle entertainment”?

I kind of think not.

Judging from the ninety-four pages of comments that have accrued so far at the Republic‘s announcement of its new policy, a vast majority of the paper’s online readers also think not.

In the absence of decent reporting, there’s really no point in paying to read a newspaper online. There are too many free sources of the things the alleged “paper” delivers:

• Many the Phoenix metropolitan area’s commercial radio and TV stations provide the same quality of news (rather low) online for free.
• One Phoenix-area NPR station provides news reporting, free, that is far superior to the Republic‘s play-nooz.
• The Phoenix New Times puts all its content online, and it occasionally publishes investigative journalism.
• All of the local grocery stores except Safeway (which is engaged in its current scheme to invade its customers’ privacy) publish their weekly food ads online.
• A number of sites publish movie screening times
• TV Guide publishes TV schedules, admittedly in a difficult format; Cox has a much better local site.
• More sites than you can shake a stick at publish restaurant reviews.
• Shopping coupons are abundantly available online, and you don’t need a pair of scissors to get them.
• The funny strips that matter can be read online, free of charge.

So…why on earth would anybody actually pay to peek at the Republic online?

There are some organizations whose online news reportage I might pay for. I might pay for NPR, for example, because of the high quality of its content. I might pay for the Times (I get it free because of the print subscription just now), because it is one of only two national newspapers of record. I would have paid for the Wall Street Journal before Rupert Murdoch got his grimy hands on it. But a half-baked local rag?

Would you pay to subscribe to your local paper’s online incarnation? Where would you draw the line, when it comes to paying for online content?

A breathtaking time-lapse video by Steve Moraco, a Colorado Springs artist, records five days of the Waldo Canyon fire. Click on the full-screen mode. Takes a while to watch it…but once you start, you can’t turn away from it.

Moraco shot the video by setting up a camera on the deck of his home and then worked it into this incredible footage. Check out his website and also his page on Vimeo.

M’hijito went to school in Colorado Springs. The area where the fire started is near a popular picnic hangout for college kids and locals. Impossible to even imagine what the people who live there are feeling, much less to put it into words. Steve’s video says it all.

So about two hours after I’d called and canceled all my credit cards, the wallet resurfaced. {sigh}

Well, I was glad to get the driver’s license back, anyway. The hassle of canceling a credit card and moving all the automatic payments over to a new card number pales in comparison to the hassle of visiting an Arizona Department of Transportation office.

Even more so, I suspect, because ADOT thinks I never renewed my license.

Couple months ago, I got online to kipe a spare copy (I like to carry a spare in the car, so as to avoid lugging a purse EVERYwhere I go). Entered all the data, charged it up on a card, hit “SEND,” and got an error message: this license was never renewed.

So they think I’m driving around on an expired license, even though the current license with an expiration date some years in the future is sitting in my wallet.

I’ve been meaning to go in person to wrestle with the bureaucrats over this, but haven’t gotten around to it. And boy! Was I glad to see that thing come back! The last thing I wanted to do was go in and claim I had renewed a license that I no longer had in hand. Ugh.

Anyway, for the nonce none of my cards work, and it’ll be tomorrow or Wednesday before a functioning credit card reappears in these precincts.

It is amazing how dependent we get on our little habits. In my case, “little habits” includes using plastic for every transaction. I don’t carry cash at all. And the idea of writing a check in every store across the city just doesn’t compute.

Needed to buy gas before any of the new credit cards gets here. I had a meeting at the campus this morning; tomorrow I have a lunch meeting in Scottsdale, then to class way to heck & gone up at Union Hills; then Thursday another meeting in Scottsdale. So I went into Costco and bought a $50 cash card. Bought $20 worth of gasoline, which filled the tank a little over halfway. That should get me to campus once and Scottsdale twice. I hope. By Thursday the cards should be here and life can go on.

It’s funny how you forget. I find it hard to believe that I used to write a check for every. single. transaction, no matter how small or how large. Now it just seems like such a pain in the tuchus.

Interestingly, too, knowing that only XX number of dollars was on the cash card made me feel more cautious about spending money. Instead of filling the tank, I bought just enough gas to get by, figuring I’d use the remaining 30 bucks in Costco. But then decided not to go in…all I needed was bread, some maple syrup, and maybe a bottle of wine.

Why?

I can make my own bread, thank you. There’s no urgency to buy maple syrup. And as for the wine…the less of it in the house, the less of it I’ll drink.

Maybe there’s something to the idea that buying with cash helps you behave more frugally.

Think so?

While the cat’s away, the mice will play! 101 Centavos invited me to write a guest post to fill space in his blog while he and the family are gallivanting around Italy. Ended up writing about what it’s like to live overseas with children. Check it out, and join the conversation: “would giving your children awesome experiences be a key consideration if thinking about moving overseas? Would you move overseas?”

What is it about three-day weekends that causes infrastructure to collapse? How is it that whenever tradesmen are trying to take a couple of days off (and intend to charge you accordingly), things go radically, spectacularly WRONG? And why does it never, not once, ever fail?

In addition to working on the pool (routine stuff) and running the laundry, I wanted to clean out the moldy refrigerator and a couple of cabinets. The fridge, in particular, was pretty desperate; indeed…frightening.

So I’m madly throwing things out. One jar, though, I must save—the glass part, that is, not the mildewed peppers inside. Very pretty jar, so reusable. So, naturally, I throw the peppers down the garbage disposal, which is madly running. It keeps on running and running and water is…not running. Not running down the drain at-tall.

Matter of fact, instead of going down the drain, it’s backing up into the other sink.

Damn. Turn off the disposal.

Get the plunger. Plunge and plunge and plunge and plunge and…not one drop of water goes down the sink.

Turn the garbage disposal back on. More water backs up into the other sink.

Call the plumber. Wonder how much time & a half is going to cost.

Plumber answers on about the 10th ring. He ain’t workin’ today. For cryin’ out loud, it’s Sunday on Memorial Day weekend! What?

He’ll come by tomorrow. Meanwhile, don’t use the sink and don’t use the dishwasher. ’Bye!

{sigh}

The dishwasher contains about three days of dirty dishes, some of which I need and all of which will be stinking by tomorrow. Luckily, there’s a work sink in the garage.

Shovel off the washer and dryer. Clean the tops of the washer and dryer, which have become somewhat littered and soiled during an encounter with Charley the Golden Retriever that involved confiscating a pile of half-eaten plastic and silk plants.

Set up the garage so as to wash dishes. Haul three days’ worth of dirty dishes into the garage. Wash. Rinse. Drain.

Reflect, while enjoying this task, that some time back I saw a blog post whose writer was holding forth on how to wash dishes by hand. Think of that.

A whole generation, maybe two, have never had to wash dishes by hand as a routine matter. How many Americans don’t know that there’s a special pattern to washing dishes? So, let us consider, ↓↓↓↓↓↓