Savvy Saving Bytes

Are all the spammers on vacation? Taking sabbaticals? Maybe spamming new territories? This morning I checked the comment section on my blog, prepared to do the usual nuking of spam comments and… Wowie — there wasn’t a single spam message there. Amazing! Even on the first day my blog went live, spammers somehow climbed out of the virgin woodwork and paid me a visit. So what happened? Where have all those link lugs with their tortured syntax and indecipherable English gone?

Actually for months now, my blog spam has been shrinking. I’ve been receiving less and less, sometimes only 5 to 10 spam comments a day.

This spam slowdown appears to be mirroring a gigantic reduction in email spam, thanks to recent takedowns of notorious spam kingpins and botnets. In 2010, a banner year for anti-spam attacks, authorities shut down Spamit.com after its creator Igor Gusey, the world’s number one spammer, went into hiding. Also clobbered were the troublesome botnets of Pushdo,  Mega-D and Bredolab. Last year another major spambot, Coreflood, also received a mortal blow along with Rustock, a botnet responsible for sending 40% of all email spam. June 2010 saw the peak of junkmail spam when a blistering 225 billion spam messages blasted across the Internet every day. According to some estimates, the volume decreased an impressive 90% the following year. As of November 2011, Symantec reported that Internet spam levels hovered between a mere 25 and 50 billion messages a day.

According to Microsoft, the top dog in the junk email biz is pharmacy spam, claiming 28% of the market. Next come product ads at 17.2%. The always resourceful and inventive Nigerian scams gobble up 13.2% of the market, leaving 8.9% for financial services, 6.1% for gambling and a meager 3.1 percent for sexual pharma spam.  (This last figure doesn’t jibe with my own email spam that appears to be chronically concerned with the sexual shortcomings of males.)

I just checked my blog comments again and — oh yes, thank you — not a single piece of spam has appeared all day. May the dream live on…

Are you too receiving way less spam these days?

Computer related:

• My Mac Undergoes a Stress Test
• No, I won’t Answer ANOTHER Survey
• Apple Stores: Balancing Acts Between the Old and the New

Along with all the Valentine’s Day chocolates, amorous greeting cards and bouquets of red roses, here are some quotes on love and money:

“Money is like love; it kills slowly and painfully the one who withholds it, and enlivens the other who turns it on his fellow man.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

“Money will buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag its tail.” ~ Richard Friedman

“Money isn’t everything but it sure keeps you in touch with your children.” ~ J. Paul Getty

“Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt.” ~ Henrik Ibsen

“Money is a needful and precious thing, and when well used, a noble thing, but I never want you to think it is the first or only prize to strive for. I’d rather see you poor men’s wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace.” ~ Louisa May Alcott

“A woman’s mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband”  ~ Mignon McLaughlin

“Money and women.  They’re two of the strongest things in the world.  The things you do for a woman you wouldn’t do for anything else.  Same with money.”  ~ Satchel Paige

“Don’t marry for money. You can borrow it cheaper.” ~ Scotts Proverb

“No matter how hard you hug your money, it never hugs back”  ~  H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“Work like you don’t need the money, love like your heart has never been broken, and dance like no one is watching.” ~  Aurora Greenway

More Valentine Connections:

• Happy Valentine’s Day New York
• Luscious, Light, Lickety Split Chocolate Desserts

Once upon a time I used made-in-America soap exclusively. For the simple reason it was the only soap sold in the stores I shopped in.
Then one-day America’s big soap makers had a big pow-wow and said, “Hey, people need soap every day. We can charge a whole lot more for the stuff. Let’s double the price. Triple it even. Or how’s about QUADRUPLING it! Who’s to complain? What are consumers gonna do? Go all grimy and stop buying it?”

Well, let me tell you what this consumer did. She waltzed into a discount store and among the cheaper American brands, she spotted an unfamiliar brand from Turkey that costs a big 99 cents for THREE bars of soap –less than the price she’d been paying for one bar. Along with being inexpensively priced, the soap was appealingly packaged.

I was also intrigued by the soap’s fragrances, which were slightly different – a bit spicier – than American soaps.  I’d never heard of the manufacturer – Dalan – nor had I ever bought any product made in Turkey. But I decided to give it a whirl. The verdict? Like all soap winners, it cleansed and perfumed me nicely and didn’t dry my skin. Plus, years later, its’ reasonable cost helped keep me out of the poorhouse.

Their large bottle of liquid hand soap at 99 cents for 13 ounces is also an excellent buy compared to much pricier national brands. And they’ve just updated their containers with a sleeker, more graphic look.

Of course to REALLY save dough on liquid hand soap I could brew up a big batch of the stuff myself. But having neither a blender nor the desire to devote the necessary preparation time, I’ll leave that project for those possessing both those attributes.

Do you also feel soap prices for both personal and home cleaning use have taken a giant leap over other consumer prices?

More on Savings and Suds:

• Straw Basket Storage in the Bathroom
• Red Beetles Strike Again – in My Face Cream
• You Get What You Pay for – Baloney!
• Hold the Mustard (on body lotion)
• 10 Reasons I’m Glad I’m Not Rich

I’m halfway into the first paragraph when IT slides across the screen aiming straight for the spot where I’m reading. Then zip – it’s there! Another freaking online survey covering up and obliterating the article I’m trying to read.  NO, for the millionth time! I will NOT take a “few minutes” to answer a “few brief” questions. Yeah, yeah, my feedback is “valuable” to you, a great help to “improve” your services. But guess what — I consider my time to be a mite more valuable than this trillionth survey asking questions ultimately designed to boost your bottom line.

This survey barrage is happening everywhere. Surveys arrive by mail too. From the hospital after an X-ray: “How many minutes did you wait for your X-ray?” the survey inquires. Like I keep track of that kind of stuff?

Visits to customer support also elicit instant email surveys inquiring about my level of satisfaction with the support employee. And of course any company I’m doing business with also gets in the act emailing me THEIR survey inquiring how they can improve their product or service and enhance my online experience.

Online surveys are dirt-cheap and cost zero employee-time — ducky for companies.  Instead of paying for high quality customer support and professional research involving humans to get a fix on what customers REALLY are thinking, companies seem to be sending out ever more surveys to  consumers so THEY can submit information and do all the work.

Surveys have morphed into another task companies have assigned to their customers. Remember when bills came with return stamped envelopes? Those stamps are long gone. Return envelopes too may be on their way out. Verizon has already eliminated the cellophane over the address field, making it easier for the post office to mangle envelopes in transit. And it’s not enough that customers must now buy stamps. The cable, electric and phone companies also demand that I play clerk and write my check amount on my return bill PLUS transcribe my account number on my check.  Sorry gang, I’m not in the clerk business.

And bigger than that is the subject of my time. It’s mine. It’s valuable. And dime a dozen surveys can’t have any of it.

More from the workplace:

• Is Your Employer Underpaying You?
  
• Sorry, CVS, I don’t Do Cashier Work for Free
• Dealing with Difficult Salespeople
• My Mac Undergoes a Stress Test
• 20 Most Profitable Small Business in USA

Is there anything more dreamily delicious than a gorgeous chocolate dessert? For me, no! It would also be nice if my chocolate treat didn’t have enough calories to sink a tanker and I could whip it together one-two-three. With that in mind I did some research and voila — here are a few chocolate dessert collections that will gratify your deepest chocolate longings with a minimum of calories and cooking time.

• Starting out with the probably the healthiest and fastest recipe, My Healthy Eating Secrets dashes together the impossible — a chocolate mousse so nourishing and light on fat it can be eaten anytime as a snack. Really. Four simple ingredients, including Raw Cacao an unprocessed, unrefined chocolate that’s considered a  “super-food.” and Raw Agave, a natural unrefined sweetener, are tossed into a blender and poof — a few minutes later they’re transformed into airy, densely flavored chocolate mousse.
• Also featured are recipes for guilt-free Chocolate Banana Ice cream and Chocolate Mousse Parfait.
• All of Delish’s 16 chocolate dessert recipes contain a lovely 100 calories or less.  Another plus is their use of powdered cocoa to deliver heart-healthy antioxidants.
• Boot Tracks, one of their super-simple recipes, is easily mixed in a bowl by hand if you don’t have a mixer like me. Then instead of ending up in a stove, the chocolate batter is spooned into a waffle iron, an entertaining procedure kids are sure to appreciate and enjoy.
• Cooking Light calls their chocolate recipes “lightened, but still decadent.” An aficionado of velvety chocolate pudding, I cast my “Yes!” vote for their yummy sounding Creamiest Chocolate Pudding that comes in at a respectable 194 calories per serving.  But it’s their Hot Chocolate Fudge Cakes that REALLY get my chocolate motor going. I have vivid childhood memories of savoring hot fudge ice cream sundaes, the one and ONLY  thing I ever ordered in ice cream parlors.  Those hot fudge days are long gone, but not my memories of them. Memories that are apparently also shared by readers who tried out that recipe, and deliberately gave it less than the called for cooking time to insure the interior hot fudge retained its silky, runny texture.
• For all the vegans out there who seem to be multiplying like rabbits lately, I also came across a recipe for tofu chocolate pudding. Judging from the numerous compliments the recipe received from readers, Its creator clearly knows his way around tofu.

Valentine’s Day is on the horizon, a perfect time to score a gold star with one of these luscious, light chocolate desserts, don’t you think?

More on Eating Light and Valentines Day:

• Rich, Ridiculously Cheap Diet Veggie Soup
• Salad Nicoise – Thrifty Jewel of a Summer Meal
• How I lost 10 pounds and Saved Lettuce Doing it
• 20 Low Cost Slimming Snacks
• Happy Valentine’s Day New York

While working on staff at two different companies, I was startled when documents listing employee’s salaries somehow suddenly crossed my desk. Wow! Here I’d been wondering how much money coworkers were making and shazam – there were the numbers in crisp black and white. Twice!

Both financial documents were enlightening, but the larger company’s payroll turned out to be even more instructive.

The biggest surprise was the whopping salaries paid to the big cheeses. I knew of course they were paid a lot — way more than the peasants below them, but the disparity was just enormous. The gigantic salary of my own department head made me glad I had stuck to my guns and not accepted the lower compensation he had first offered me. Even though we immediately clicked and I sensed working with him would be enjoyable, something had made me hold out for bigger bucks than his initial offers. Indeed, If I had swallowed his lamentations of limited budgets and resources along with that lesser salary I would now have been ticked off in spades.

The next big surprise was the pitifully low salaries paid to employees at the lowest end of the totem pole. Yes, many had probably started close to minimum wage, but even workers who had been around for ten years plus had barely risen above that level. Which suggested they had not been receiving timely cost of living raises. Loyal and hard working, they certainly deserved those same increases that higher level employees were receiving. Yet not having received these raises, those employees had apparently not stepped forward and requested them either.

I was also unsettled by the much lower salary paid to some older, highly experienced employees versus young new hires with limited experience. Here again, a lack of raises seemed to be a factor. And in fact an older bookkeeper that was being replaced by a young “financial officer” at a much higher salary woefully lamented that her employer “knew all along” her position was worth a lot more than her low salary. True, but if the bookkeeper did not speak up for herself and point out her own value, management had apparently felt no obligation to reward her silent modesty.

Prior to glancing at this financial info, I had never given any thought to monetary wage differences between creative and sales departments. This difference turned out to be considerable. The higher ups in sales were being paid way more than higher up creatives. In the creative department myself, I felt no envy. In a way I felt it was almost a just distribution. The creatives got all the exhilaration and fun of conceiving and producing company products. All sales got for their efforts in selling that product was mere money.

And then we came to the same old inequity: male employees were being paid more (sometimes much more) than their female counterparts. It appeared too that men heavy in the chutzpah department were also ending up with more change in their pockets.  Nothing surprising there. But the important question was — when was the inequality going to end? When were men and women finally going to receive equal pay for equal work?

To find out how your salary stacks up to the national average in your field, check out Salary.com.

More Career Tales:

• When does an Internship Become a Slave Ship?
• A flub, a Flare-up and a Firing!
• An Illegal Mexican makes it Big in the Wine World
• Fired! Again!
• Does Beauty Boost a Resumé to top of the Pile?
• Hey Mom, Guess What — I Got a Press Card!