A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. 

-Jack London

Recently I have been engaged in working with a charitable organization… this organization provides a superior education to our children at a very reasonable cost but convincing people to give money has been an arduous task.

I think that many people feel that Charity is giving a few dollars to make themselves feel good, but real charity in my opinion is giving so much that you have to either sacrifice something or you have to worry and hope that more money will come your way in the future.

I’m often skeptical of the word “karma” but sometimes, just sometimes things come back on you two-fold and make you say “whoa”.

In the past 6 months the following events surrounding charity have happened to me:

1. I donated a sizable amount of money to a charity, put in time and served on a few comittees. At the same time I was purchasing a new house. The new house was substantially more expensive and left me carrying two mortgages… two VERY BIG mortgages.Literally the day that we closed on our new home purchase, a random family out of the blue contacted us about our existing house (our existing house was not on the market). They had been looking for a home for over a year, drove by our house, fell in love with it and absolutely “had to have it”.

   We paid no brokers and walked away from what could have been a burdensome financial obligation. An amazingly random turn of events. 3 weeks later we closed on our old home at 10% over what we had paid for it only a year prior. In this market, many people would call that a f**king miracle!
    

2. I agreed to donate $200,000  to the same charity… the following morning an extremely wealthy individual whom I had never met or corresponded with contacted me and offered me $300,000 for something that had cost me only a few dollars (a domain name) several years ago.Not only is the donation tax deductible, but the profits on the name are long term capital gains on intangible property which means we get to take advantage of the 15% tax rate on those profits.

   I am not foolish and have received many offers on this particular domain, so I took it. Truly an unbelievable turn of events.

I’ve learned that money is a lousy way of keeping score. 

-Anonymous

Til later…
-Arlo

Well when the iPhone came around and Apple opened up their developer store, we knew that iCall on the iPhone was a match made in heaven. We put together this video (sorry, there was a baby screaming in the background before we got booted out of starbucks for filming).

iCall VoIP on the Apple iPhone from Arlo & Andy on Vimeo.

So anyways, everybody pretty much flipped out about it, we made the new york times, washington post, tech crunch, gizmodo, engadget, and many others… the blogosphere has been buzzing with the fact that we put something simple together. Our phones have been ringing off the hooks, deal after deal has been just handed to us, and we’ve received more than the normal number of inquiries from investors interested in giving us money.

One thing even more amazing happened though, we started selling iPhones, literally hundreds many thousands of people have contacted us telling us that they have bought an iPhone now, only because the iCall app will give them the ability to ditch their landline for good. Why couldn’t they ditch their landline for good before??? Because AT&T has bad coverage in many areas, so despite the fact that people LOVE their iPhones, they are unable to use them in their primary place of business or home quite often… iCall to the rescue! The bells and whistles are all great, but it turns out that what people really want from us is just the ability to make and receive calls when they are at home.

Interesting how you can invent a product for one reason, expecting certain features to be the hot ones, and then it turns out that other features/reasons are the hit.

In any case, i’m off to watch some cheap tv, but iCall will be on the iPhone soon.. very soon, we’re just polishing up a few items so that our app (like many in the app store) isnt riddled with bugs.

TTYL,

Arlo

This is a 7 hour flight to Vancouver. What is the hurry to get seated? I understand if you have a huge carry-on that you need to get in the overhead, or even if you’re flying first class because you want to chug your first free drink as quickly as possible… but given that coach class is essentially as comfortable as standing in a New York subway during rushhour, why would people possibly want to spend an extra 20 minutes on the aircraft if they don’t absolutely have to?

Herd mentality at it’s best “everybody is in line, I better get in line too, I better hurry!”.

Ok… now they are making final call and me and 3 other smart passengers are walking up to the gate with no line and will spend 20 minutes of our lives doing something more fun like blogging or watching the news.

See you in Canada eh!

So it’s been about 3 months since my last flight. Why is that do you ask? What does the picture on the left have to do with my lack of flying?

Well, basically that is what flying at night is like and about 3 months ago I took my last night flight. It was… how do i say… frightening. Every blinking light looked the same, the night sky made it visually obvious how many planes were around us at all times, and out of these 9 million blinking lights, supposedly one of them was the runway. In addition to the visual difficulties, my ability to judge my altitude was completely thrown for a loop, 200 feet, 20 feet, 5 feet from the runway all felt the same. Basically like trying to fly while taking LSD and covering one eye. Thankfully my instructor knew which one was the runway but until we were about 40 feet away from the runway I still had a very hard time identifying it. I’m not color blind, have good vision, I guess it takes some practice, in the mean time I plan on avoiding night flying like the plague.

If I ever get stuck up in the air at night, my solution is just to circumnavigate the globe until I reach a country with sunlight.

Seriously though, I’ve gone through my usual personal cycle of becoming completely immersed in work for a few months and at the end of these cycle’s I usually start looking for things to buy and things to do…. So I’m really looking forward to getting back to flying but I’m having an instructor with me at all times until I get over my jitters and get comfortable with landings again.

Time went by and games got more complicated, by the time I was 25 I felt like an old man trying to learn modern video games, 12 buttons, combinations involved lots of different combinations of buttons and joysticks and gamepads… it was overwhelming and I generally thought “if this is gonna be so much work, why don’t I do something that will actually pay off, like meeting girls?”

Then a few weeks ago, my colleague Andy showed me this video game system that you can buy at x-gaming, it’s a full sized video game (the kind you stand in front of with a friend) and it came with none other than Street Fighter II. I bought it immediately.

It arrived, the delivery guys unpacked it, and in 10 minutes I was playing. What a blast I’ve had down in the basement reliving my younger days, eating pizza and drinking beer… it feels so decadent. In any case, if you’ve been trying to find me on icq or aim but I’ve been unavailable…that’s what I’ve been doing with my free time for the past 3 days!

The sub-prime meltdown inspired confidence in the greed of banks and their willingness to hedge their shareholder’s money with high risk investments. Tech companies for the most part have been real losers (except iCall of course )… we see companies like Ford dropping sales by 25%+ in a single month, the dollar is week to the point that just by being an american and keeping your money in cash you are essentially losing money every month. 

All I can do is really just sigh about it, take care of my family, keep my own businesses in order and wonder what the long term outcome of this entire mess will be.. or is that all I can do?

Never one to find a lack of opportunity in the chaos I have plugged money into United States Oil Fund and Fidelity Select Energy Service. I’m not claiming to be a prophet here, but my returns in the past 2 years on money that I have directly invested have been upwards of 40%… and I always make it by investing in (what seem to me) to be obvious winners. At 60 AAPL was a steal.. at 80 people talked about it being overvalued.. they all *knew* there was an iPhone coming, they *knew* what it would do, but they failed to see the forest through the trees and now AAPL is trading at what, 180? 190? I don’t know, I sold at 140.

Before I explain my reason for investing in oil directly through USO, let me explain why I am in FSESX. FSESX is a simple mutual fund, it holds about 50 companies in the energy sector, but it’s real key is that it holds drilling companies, refining companies and the like. These companies are pretty much agnostic when it comes to the price of oil, they still refine, they still drill, they still distribute, they still make money. If oil prices increase demand doesn’t go down in the same economic vacuum that many items do… they stay busy regardless, if oil goes down the demand increases and they see more business… and if new drilling opportunities present themselves (which they must… there are known huge reserves that are not legally drillable right now), the FSESX portfolio overall should see some nice returns. Call it hedging my bets. Currently about 25% of my energy investing is in fidelity fsesx.

So Oil… USO.. why will it continue to climb? Why is this current $143 per barrel “cheap”?

1. Relative to the adjusted dollar, the price of oil and a gallon of unleaded gasoline is about the same now as it was in the 70’s gas crisis. This means that it is one of the few non discretionary purchases that has actually stayed even with inflation. 
2. It’s non-discretionary… what are you going to do? Quit your job? Sell your S.U.V. and start driving an electric car? Build wind turbines on top of your house? Buy carbon credits? No. You’re going to take your medicine whether you like it or not, fill up your car and pay your electric bill. If you’re rich, the gas pump doesn’t affect your wallet, if you’re not rich you can’t afford to quit your job and you likely can’t afford to just buy another car unless you sell your existing one… guess what, dealer’s dont want S.U.V.’s now… you’ll get half of what you paid for it a year ago on something like a Hummer or a Suburban.
3. Worldwide demand is growing. China among others wants their fair share of the western lifestyle which includes lots of gadgets, lots of meat and lots of cars.. this all requires petroleum, china’s economy is strong, and the Yuan is outpacing the dollar by huge margins.
4. This is a LIMITED resource, in philosophy they say that in order to prove a hypothesis as valid, the philosophy has to be taken to it’s end… so if oil is limited, we know that *eventually* all oil will run out.

• The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
• The fifth would pay $1.
• The sixth would pay $3.
• The seventh would pay $7.
• The eighth would pay $12.
• The ninth would pay $18.
• The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beers by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.’

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected.

They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

• The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
• The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
• The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
• The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
• The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
• The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% saving s).

Each of the six was better off than before and the first four continued to drink for free, but once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. “I only got a dollar out of the $20,” declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, “but he got $10!” “Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got TEN times more than I!”

“That’s true!!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something very important….they didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works.

The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia

In January 2007, I purchased four round trip first class tickets for my family on Spirit airlines to the Grand Cayman’s for a vacation from February 9th thru February 17th. I purchased the scam trip insurance from Travel Guard (accidentally).

Due to weather we were unable to get to the airport for our departure. We tried to call, along with many other unfortunate Spirit customers. After several hours and many attempts to call and receiving the usual “we’re sorry, all customer service reps are busy with other customers”. At this point I decided that getting my family there was more important than getting them there on Spirit so I chartered a private jet.

Great vacation, good times.

The morning of our return home I go online to do online checkin with Spirit, but spirit says our tickets have been cancelled. Drats, ok well they must have cancelled them because we maissed the first leg. Lesson learned. Their web site indicates however that we have a credit with them that we can use (because we paid 6k for tickets that we didnt use). 

Their web site keeps having server errors while i’m trying to redeem these vouchers… no luck. Eventually I try calling Spirit customer service and *suprise* I get an hour of “we’re sorry, all customer service reps are too busy to help you”… so once again I get to choose between taking Spirit airlines to get home or getting home.

I bought tickets on American to get us home and we survived the trip.

I begin my weekly ritual of trying to call Spirit customer service to get a refund or at least get functioning credits with them for a future flight… and for about 3 months we continue to be unable to get in touch with a human being.

At my wits end I decide to call American Express, after all I am one of those lucky people with the card that everybody talks about (weee lucky me)… I figure that I am an important person so they will help me… and they try.

Spirit tells them they will call me… so Amex closes the dispute. Spirit never calls.
I re-initiate the dispute… Spirit says they will take care of the issue…. so Amex closes the dispute.
I re-initiate the dispute… Spirit says they tried calling me and will try again… so Amex closes the dispute.
I re-initiate the dispute… Spirit asks for me to send them a formal letter explaining the issue, I do… Amex closes the dispute.
Spirit claims they never got the letter.
This goes on a few more times. Frustrated but kind Amex reps continually spend hours trying to reach human beings in the customer service department at Spirit… they realize how hard it is.

During this entire time I have continued my weekly ritual of trying to reach a human at Spirit.. never once since the day I placed my order online did I reach a human being from Spirit… until today.

Spirit customer service rep Niurka Paulino (who can be reached at 954-447-7965 x 1711) she goes by the name “Nikki” (and seems ready to “rumble” from her loving demeanor) finds my account, puts me on hold to “talk to her manager” and advises me that these non-refundable tickets cant be refunded and that spirit wont issue me a voucher for use on a future Spirit flight… 

SCRREEEECCCH… wait, did you just tell me that you are going to take my $6000 and you’re not going to even let me reschedule the flights for a different time? Yep, sure did. I guess this is how they stay profitable, taking the money and not providing any services in exchange for the money.

She was however kind enough to remind me that I had been suckered into paying $20 dollars (or something like that) for “Travel Insurance” through Travel Guard and gave me their number. Travel gaurd of course advised me that there was nothing they could do because it was my fault that I had missed the flight. The fact that Spirit couldnt actually be contacted seems to be beyond everybody’s care.

Perhaps Google in all their infinite wisdom will pick up this blog entry and link to it.

But don’t worry my dear readers, I’m not done, now I’m just going to find another way to get my money back from them.. many people have won claims against spirit for this type of practice.

I pretty much plan on doing the following:
1) Filing a complaint with the BBB
2) Filing a complaint with the Connecticut consumer affairs department (they are actually really helpful).
2) Making friends and family aware that they should avoid Spirit Airlines.
3) Blogging about it (here) so that the occassional stranger will know to avoid them.
4) Keeping a really really close eye on the skies with my binoculars in the tri-state area and making sure to report any altitude violations I see to the FAA.
5) I may file a series of small claims against them which will force them to spend some time and money defending this rip-off practice, I’m not sure.
6) I may just waste 50k suing them for fraud. I have lots of good lawyers who are always happy to to get new work.

If anything happens I will update you!

As always,
-Arlo Gilbert

There isn’t a lot to say about it. It was fun, I was safe, I landed well, I took off well, I used my checklists and I talked to myself as though my instructors were in the plane.

This it the one fun thing… and perhaps I wish it had been explained better to me in the beginning… but the fact is that the goal of flight training is to drill procedures into your head and this is done by constant repetition.

Of course with my luck even though I was flying solo, my instructor “Greg” happened to be in the air also and jumped in and helped me out with a confused tower/approach controller.

Thanks “Greg”!