Michael Talks, bullshit walks…

I received an email this morning and while many will be upset or have their businesses drastically impacted all I can say is a big thumbs up to Amazon.com. Will this new policy affect me? Yes it will. Will it impact me financially? Yes it will. Taking a look at the bigger picture this kind of bold and decisive action is clearly the only way to put a stop to the maniacs running our country. Big business and other powerful forces (i.e. power in numbers) need to send a strong and clear message to the politicians who seem so absolutely clueless about the wishes of the people whom they supposedly represent. While the people in power continue to abuse the American people and their trust there seems to be no way to stop this beast we call government. Well, Amazon.com’s actions are a great first step. Who will show this kind of courage next…?

I repeat again the maniacs running our country need to be stopped!

Now we need to start throwing the garbage out of Washington and our local governments and get some solid stand up citizens installed for a change. Now wouldn’t that be refreshing?

Email below:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation’s effective date.

Please be assured that all qualifying referral fees earned prior to June 26, 2009 will be processed and paid in full in accordance with our regular referral fee schedule. Based on your account closure date of June 26, 2009, any final payments will be paid by September 1, 2009.

In the event that North Carolina repeals this tax collection scheme, we would certainly be happy to re-open our Associates program to North Carolina residents.

The North Carolina General Assembly’s website is http://www.ncleg.net/, and additional information may be obtained from the Performance Marketing Alliance at http://www.performancemarketingalliance.com/.

We have enjoyed working with you and other North Carolina-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

So we made the switch… Enticed by the great ‘new customer’ deal I was able to convince my wife that this was the way to go. She went through her Oprahs, America’s Top Model, Real Housewives series and John & Kate Plus 8 dvr’d shows. I did the same with my recordings as we would be getting new equipment and thus the shows would be gone with the old equipment.

Well, like anything else new we spent the last 2 weeks getting acclimated with the Directv system. We setup up new recording timers and had our slew of shows building up for evening and weekend tv catch up time.

This morning while setting my son up with ‘Clifford The Big Red Dog’ I was greeted with a friendly message that indicated a software upgrade(0×312 applied at 3:20am) had been downloaded. ‘Great’ I thought to myself and continued to go through our playlist to look for ‘Clifford’. I was surprised to find that our entire list of recorded shows was wiped out. To say the least this was a huge disappointment and unacceptable. These companies spend so much time and money trying to woo new customers and when they get us to sign up and enter into contracts you find out that they are serving up shit.

Hey idiots, how about spending some more effort and energy making sure you deliver what you promise. Two weeks in and this is happening already? You better believe I will be making the jump back to Dish Network. Thank you Directv for wasting 4 hours of my time during install, putting more holes in my roof for your dish and ruining 2 weeks of saved programming. I can’t wait to hear the scripted response I get when I try to explain what happened to the Directv phone rep. How much do you want to bet the first response is ’sir this is the first I’ve ever heard of that happening’ or ‘are you sure you really recorded all of your shows properly’.

Fucking pathetic.