This arrived a week ago:
You cannot imagine my excitement when the actual survey arrived, complete with a crisp $5 bill:
These folks are cheapskates; Nielsen paid better, although I haven’t gotten anything further from them.
It didn’t take long to fill out; my fat Sharpie slashed through the NO columns at a pretty good clip. I did attach a note saying we didn’t have a TV and regarded all TV programs as crap, just in case they didn’t get the message.
Now they know.
FWIW, I did not fill out the form that would enter us in a drawing for one of five $500 prizes, because that would let them associate my name with my response without fattening my wallet. The survey itself probably encodes my identity, even though it didn’t have any obvious bar codes or other ID; they could simply print the questions in a unique order in each survey.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Hah, and likewise here. We do in fact have TVs (2) still but only plumb the internet through them. I have never been a fan of the major networks and the majority of “cable” networks are crap too. I have been anticipating the idiocracy for years, but now I know it’s here for real. Daily life and casual observations made it pretty clear just about anywhere.
The thing that absolutely lights my butt is the price for plain old Internet. Verizon offers routine FiOS triple-play discount deals for $70/month, but bare Internet is … $70/month. Plus all the required rentals, surcharges, title / taxes / tips that crowd into the bill after you think you know what they’re selling.
Gives me the impression they don’t really want my business, except the Optimum alternative seems even worse.
We’ve experience similar pricing here as well with similar feeling about it all. I guess it was more of a principle thing for us and it was some savings each month. They pretty much know how much they can extract from all of us and not much we can do about it. Other than banding together as neighbors to share (I’m betting that is likely illegal) but also not practical for a multitude of reason. I not only don’t really want to be responsible for but also don’t want to be the sysop for something like that either.
Similar here, but weirder. Internet alone is $72/month, but internet+TV is $68/month. I do occasionally watch TV over meals, but Quality Shop Time beats TV any day of the week.
Absolutely! And has for about the last 20 years for the most part.
They left our cable connected and there some channels that do not require decoding still work. I only check it once in a while just to see if it is still there. We *never * actually watch any of it but instead just use the Amazon Firestick and associated apps.
[Ed: I un-nested the block comment. Dunno how that happens.]
Little yellow dots are probably easier than question-reordering to automate:
http://seeingyellow.com/
Seems reasonable to assume they’re more devious than we folks out here can imagine. FWIW: if we actually watched TV, I’d be much more reluctant to expose my preferences.
We filled out a massive survey a year or so ago and, after pondering the possible outcomes, we’ll never do that again. Having received relatively few surveys prior to that, they now arrive with disturbing frequency: perhaps surveys are more common, but I fear our “returns surveys” bit is now
True.I kept getting calls from a survey organization in Portland. They finally called when I was near the phone, and told them “not talking”. (This was prior to the election.) Looked up the organization and they’re a very leftist group that does push polls. No idea why they’d call the flyover section of Oregon.
Given the way polls work, I’d say they crafted the questions to elicit the answers they needed. Which is why I’ve stopped doing political polls: my opinions always fall between the prefabricated answers.
Thanks and sorry Ed. I believe it is my habit of adding a double “>” to previous quotes before responding if it hasn’t been added automatically. WordPress must be interpreting this and then not terminating for me.
AFAICT, there’s absolutely no way to predict what the WP comment editor will do to anything other than the simplest ASCII characters. Fixing the results seems easier than (trying to) pre-distort what you want to say to match their, mmmm, features: don’t worry about it!