I saw an interview with Andrew Yang about the Noble Mobile efforts. Was this interview part of paid advertising on TYT? I don’t recall what the screen said. He made some sense to me. As I consider whether or not I want to buy his product, I want to try to use this area to discuss a few broader TYT-relevant consumer and political issues.
Some budget-minded consumers in the US markets at this time are of a mind to stay away from too many subscriptions, and to review those subscriptions where they are not getting good value for their money. Yang’s value proposition for Noble Mobile doesn’t go all the way and just allow for pay-as-you-go, but it does go a good way toward allowing for refunding of up to 40% of one’s monthly obligation ($20) if the service is not used enough.
We see some of these same issues (of consumers taking the option, when it is finally offered, of getting out of over-priced subscriptions) in many other industries. One example is that many of us have managed to ditch our cable TV subscriptions altogether now that we have access to streaming devices and services that allow us to have much more pinpoint control over what we are paying for and what we are using. Another example is that some of us have ditched our landlines and either committed completely to our cell phones and/or pay for a less-expensive VOIP service.
I don’t follow TYT broadcasts closely enough to know which on-air journalist(s) focus on consumer issues and the nexus points with political issues (such as health insurance, and cfpb dismantling, to name two issues) but perhaps there is room here to expand on the coverage.
With respect to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I wish that it was expanded to many more protections than just financial, and I am a fan of those in the press who shine a light on Republican scurrilous efforts to dismantle this agency.
The CFPB
We’re the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a U.S. government agency dedicated to >making sure you are treated fairly by banks, lenders, and other financial institutions.
This isn’t a socialist institution, as I suspect some Republicans would have us believe. It is vitally important that our US federal government serve to protect us from corporations which would take advantage of consumer difficulty in keeping track of “the small print”. Corporations should be required to honor all contracts with consumers, and those contracts should not contain impossible-to-understand nuances that are designed to deny consumers what they think they are paying for.
I don’t know if the specific interview was part of paid advertising, but unless there was another interview between Cenk and Andrew Yang that I didn’t see, I know they mentioned that Noble Mobile is a paid sponsor of TYT. Cenk and the other hosts go out of their way anytime it comes up to make it very clear in my opinion. If they didn’t, I would be the first to complain because I hate when companies and orgs do covert advertising. For the interview, if you didn’t catch the beginning or end of it, maybe they didn’t repeat it in the part you saw, but I am completely sure they mentioned it.
I agree with you about consumers needing to be mindful of subscriptions, that’s something I’m trying to deal with right now with my relatively frugal small family of three, so I imagine it’s even worse for a lot of people. The show has covered the CFPB in a favorable light, and criticized the Trump admin gutting it, a number of times before.
They don’t have specific “beats” they cover, although some hosts tend to gravitate towards certain topics (John Iadarola with environmental news, Ana Kasparian with the housing crisis, etc.).
I’m just a viewer and can’t speak for the company and I would (and have before) called out things I didn’t like, but I think they make their sponsorships and partnerships really clear.
I have switched to Noble Mobile. There was a snag brought on by my existing carrier, but I got it worked out with the help of the customer service. I’ll try to mention here in this forum if the service goes well, or doesn’t, though I think it will be a few weeks or months before I know (I don’t use the phone very much due to poor reception at my house on the T-Mobile network…. but I won’t switch to ATT or Verizon towers or MVNOs due to some old reasons.)
One thing about my path on this:
Around 2020 I switched from ATT, or a carrier that used ATT, to T-Mobile. I realized that ATT had helped to fund one of the sleaziest right-wing networks.
A Reuters Special Report
How AT&T helped build far-right One America News
By JOHN SHIFFMAN in San Diego
Filed Oct. 6, 2021, 11 a.m. GMT
First of two stories
One America News, the far-right network whose fortunes and viewership rose amid the triumph and tumult of the Trump administration, has flourished with support from a surprising source: AT&T Inc, the world’s largest communications company.
That is all old news, but my point today is that if Andrew Yang and the Noble Mobile Team had chosen ATT as their underlying network, I would not have changed over. If they had chosen the other one of the big 3 networks (Verizon), then I’m not 100% certain, but the last time I checked their financing of things that I personally think are politically bad, it was enough to contribute to my being negative on them.
I think it would be a good idea for operation hope to develop more robust conversation and research around consumer issues and solutions. Maybe this is already done, but you and I both have been focusing on this in our personal lives, and I think part of what resonated for me in hearing Cenk interview Yang, (even if it was kind of a somewhat surreal interview because normally we’d expect that sort of interview to be just about politics, but here it was more about a cell phone deal),…. part of what resonated for me was that I liked hearing reasonably to-the-point discussion of real measures that I can take as a consumer, and I like that TYT is staking out some interest in this.
Part of consumer issues discussions is that we each have some relatively common ground of things that we deal with, and then there are some challenges that each of us faces in a less common way. In any case, my latest focuses would include:
get rid of landline and get less expensive internet phone instead (I have done this)
reduce monthly cell phone bill (I was not hating T-Mobile, they were better than previous providers on price and no-contract terms, if not call quality, but they still were getting a lot of money from me every month for doing very little.
address monthly cost of home alarm system (in process…. I just discovered yesterday that some of the less-prominently-discussed no-contract monitoring services that charge $15-$35 per month…. those services can in theory use some of the equipment I already have, or I can revert to paying nothing and just go back to self-monitoring my fire alarms.
high cost of groceries - I have no good solution to this.
high cost of gasoline - I got rid of gasoline years ago by getting an electric car. It has its own costs that have been a problem for me, but they were largely up-front and the monthly insurance costs of having to drive a newer more expensive car (hopefully with each passing year the cost to insure the used EVs will go down), and on balance I don’t miss having to stop at gas stations.
costs of paying for some web and email hosting and related. Not sure how I can address this.
donotcall.gov does not seem to work that well for some of us on some of our lines. My landline has been half-unusable for nearly a decade (or more) due to all the robocalls and other sales calls I get. I hear virtually nothing about this from the political powers that be.
etc. - many others that we can all name.
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I’m going to maybe make a post in the ideas area for Operation Hope, but I also want to add that overall this group is arguably not robust enough for some of us that have been putting in the time to contribute to it. I am not sure if I will switch to using the discord group. When I have tried it for some reason I found it disorienting, but I may give it another try.
I’m glad you ended up looking into it and switching to Noble Mobile. I thought you were coming from the point of viewing of criticizing but it sounds like you were looking for more information. Sorry about that, and glad it ended up working out for you. If we weren’t still paying off our current phones with AT&T we might consider it. I guess we’ll see in a year or so.
I agree with you that Operation Hope could be and do a lot more. There’s a core group of us who attend most or almost all meetings and we are working on different projects ( there’s a meeting tonight actually if you’re interested at 8:30pm Eastern — https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83435322904 ). Currently working on taking stock on what races there are in different states in the midterms and which ones it would be good to focus on. I know they’re still looking for ideas so Operation Hope: Ideas - TYT.com might be a good place to check what’s already been proposed and post new ones there if you want.
I tend to co-mingle industry discussion and personal political views. (I was a corporate researcher and an economics researcher of a sort for a living). So, I can see how you got confused about where I was coming from, but no, I was not trying to criticize noble mobile or imply an undisclosed conflict of interest (or some such), I just wanted to be straight as to what was happening in front of me, particularly because Yang had been a Presidential candidate.