And now for something completely trivial

Taking a break from the profound issues of God, death, time, and sociology that we usually deal with here, let me relate a tale: my phone bill this month had a mysterious unexplained charge of $7.39 from "ILD Teleservices". Calling their number revealed, after a 10 minute phone tree and wait, that this charge was from a single 411 call, which apparently gets farmed out from the local carrier to an assortment of unscrupulous company. They agreed to drop the charge after I yelled a bit.

Turns out these people have a history. And the scam is common enough to have its own name, "cramming". Apparently the complex multi-company billing infrastructure of the phone industry is being hijacked to allow all manner of bottom-feeders add any charge they feel like to your bill. Welcome to the world of the future. I imagine there is some sort of differntial pricing going on here, and they try to keep the charges low enough so you won't take the time to complain and try to get the charge dropped, or go to the FCC.

Any ecology (or economy) has its parasites. Networks make new forms of parasitism possible but thankfully they also strengthen the immune system, like that consumer watchdog site linked to above.