According to this article several of the largest credit card issuers are getting ready to raise their minimum payments from 2% of the balance to 4% of the balance (not including interest).
The article says that the government has been pushing the credit card companies to raise their minimums to help people get out of debt. Huh? What about tightening up credit issuing standards in the first place? Even better, how about reducing the interest rates so that they don’t qualify as usury any more?
In somewhat related news (article here) some of the same banks’ stocks were hammered by investors yesterday because of disappointing earnings. These horrible numbers? Let’s see:
Apparently the companies disappointed their investors because they didn’t manage their bond investments well. On the bright side, here’s what they did well:
"Bank of America
signed up more debit- and credit-card customers and squeezed costs out
of FleetBoston Financial Corp. by combining the banks’ online accounts,
cutting marketing expenses and jobs.Kenneth Lewis, the
chief executive, is trying to to parlay momentum in credit cards to
increase earnings. Bank of America announced plans last month to buy
MBNA Corp. for $35 billion."
I guess the expected cash flow from those doubled minimums should help quite nicely.
Anyone with kids can tell you what a challenge it is to teach your kids how to discern "truth" from "advertising." My kids went through a phase where every product they’d seen a commercial for was the "best" or the "coolest." It got really annoying when they would suggest a solution for a problem based on an ad that they’d seen.
"Dad, you should use Exxon for gas because it puts a tiger in your tank," my oldest said when he was about seven or eight as we hurtled down the road with fumes spewing from under my hood thanks to an oil leak. I haven’t liked Exxon since.
The problem has moved beyond advertising since the kids started doing projects for school. The first stop for any research is the web, and take it from me you don’t want to know what passes for historical information these days.
As an adult whose done a fair amount of research in my day it is relatively easy for me to separate legitimate info sources from the crackpots, but to a child operating without the same points of reference the job is imminently more difficult. I can look at a web page and within moments know that it’s a mainstream or "quality" source. But my kids don’t know Merriam Webster from a hole in the wall so they will give "Joe’s Dictionary Blog" the same weight as the venerable Webster.
Amazingly my kids’ frame of reference has grown exponentially in a very short time. I think my wife and I have succeeded in giving them an appropriately jaundiced view of the world (i.e. all advertisements are lies, and any product that appears on Nickelodeon the Cartoon Channel or any other kid station most likely causes cancer).
But the kids aren’t the only ones who sometimes struggle with the "truth vs. BS" question these days. With the kudzu-like spread of information sources beyond traditional media outlets we adults are also learning that we need to re-calibrate our own BS meters. That means we need to hone our critical thinking skills, and an article I read today called "Media/Political Bias" (Rhetorica) provides a great starting point.
I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:
"There is no such thing as an objective point of view.
No matter how much we may try to ignore it, human communication always takes place in a context,
through a medium, and among individuals and groups who are situated
historically, politically, economically, and socially. This state of affairs is
neither bad nor good. It simply is…Critical questions for detecting bias
- What is the author’s / speaker’s socio-political position? With what
social, political, or professional groups is the speaker identified?- Does the speaker have anything to gain personally from delivering the
message?- Who is paying for the message? Where does the message appear? What is the
bias of the medium? Who stands to gain?- What sources does the speaker use, and how credible are they? Does the
speaker cite statistics? If so, how were the data gathered, who gathered the
data, and are the data being presented fully?- How does the speaker present arguments? Is the message one-sided, or does
it include alternative points of view? Does the speaker fairly present
alternative arguments? Does the speaker ignore obviously conflicting
arguments?- If the message includes alternative points of view, how are those views
characterized? Does the speaker use positive words and images to describe
his/her point of view and negative words and images to describe other points
of view? Does the speaker ascribe positive motivations to his/her point of
view and negative motivations to alternative points of view?"
The author goes on to dig more specifically into the current debate on bias in the media, and makes a very strong argument for the fact that there is both liberal and conservative bias in the media (it depends on who you talk to), but that the stronger biases in media are commercial bias, temporal bias, visual bias, bad news bias, etc.
Anyway you might want to keep these questions in mind as you try to parse through the white noise that is modern info-communication and wonder whatever happened to Walter Cronkite and the certainty of "That’s the way it was…"
The following quote is from Jay Rosen’s "Rollback" piece at Press Think:
A PressThink reader pointed me to this testimony
at a public hearing organized by Senate Democrats on the Valerie Plame
disclosures and the effect of outing an agent (Oct. 24, 2003). (Also
discussed by Talk Left.) The speaker is Vince Cannistraro, former Chief of Operations and Analysis, CIA Counterterrorism
Center, and now a terrorism consultant. His is one of the better
descriptions I have found of that strange feature of the Bush governing
style Suskind called “a retreat from empiricism.”CANNISTRARO: …There was a pattern
of pressure placed on the analysts to provide supporting data for
objectives which were already articulated. It’s the inverse of the
intelligence ethic. Intelligence is supposed to describe the world as
it is and as best you can find it, and then policymakers are supposed
to use that to formulate their own policies. In this case, we had
policies that were already adopted and people were looking for the
selective pieces of intelligence that would support those policy
objectives.
This describes exactly why the Downing Street memo story was so important. Bush and his honchos let it be known that they were going to war, wanted Blair and his cadre to come along for the ride, and they knew they needed "justification" to sell the whole idea to the "people."
It also ties in with something that Steven Leavitt, one of the authors of Freakonomics, says: (I’m paraphrasing) that morality is how we’d like the world to work, whereas economics can represent how it actually does work.
I know many liberals who would argue that Bush and company are anything but moral, but I tend to believe that the President truly believes in the Kool-Aid he’s trying to peddle to the rest of us (not so sure about his honchos). What makes it scary is that because this is a moral issue for him (freedom, good vs. evil, etc.) he cannot acknowledge that he may have been, or continues to be wrong in any way.
This is the first in what I hope is a daily, but more likely every-couple-of-days, feature that tracks what I’m reading on any given day. I’m not going to include any print stuff unless there’s a link to it so some newspaper and magazine pieces might not make it. The list format is Title (Source), and if you see ** after the source then that means I found it one of the more important or thought provoking things I read. Here goes:
Was reading Joe Write (a good blogger from Winston-Salem and frequent commenter on this site) and found a reference to this site:
http://www.housingmaps.com/
They took the real estate listings from craigslist, combined it with Google Maps and out came this very cool little app.
By the way, Google Maps is fast becoming my default site for all geo-related stuff.
According to this article on CNN’s health site, about 1/3 of all scientific studies are either contradicted by subsequent research or the original results are weaker than originally reported.
It’s time for a steak dinner with a couple of beers, followed by a nice hunk of cheesecake for dessert, and then while I’m at it I might reconsider the whole smoking thing.
"The term "paddy wagon" is considered insulting by some Irish-Americans. Crazy micks" – Where else but from Fark.com
Befuddled 