Am I in danger of becoming obsessed with plastic cards? It’s possible. But there is one type of card I have somehow managed to avoid discussing in 21 months of blogging.
That type is gift cards, the anonymous chits that are as good as money in one particular store. In their current form they are a relatively recent innovation. When I was your age (20+ years ago) stores sometimes sold paper gift certificates for specified amounts, but they were a one-use item. If you bought a $50 sweater with a $100 gift certificate you generally got $50 in actual cash as change.
It wasn’t until we entered the digital age that modern gift cards, each a miniature debit account, were born. Spend $50 with a $100 gift card and your “change” is the same old card, only now it is worth just $50.
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What is the total cost of airline delays in the US? Funny you should ask. A recent 82 page paper from The National Center of Excellence for Aviation Operations Research (miraculously acronymed as NEXTOR) estimated a total cost of $32.9B for 2007.
It is a wonderful paper. That it uses 2007 data tells you that it was a multi-year effort. It has ten primary authors and employed the “assistance” of six others mentioned on the title page. And they included in their calculation everything from the cost to the airlines of paying flight crew to wait around to the added cost to passengers who take earlier flights than they really need to account for the possibility of delays. I look forward to reading it through someday.
The $32.9B NEXTOR laboriously comes up with sounds pretty big, but in context it’s not quite as alarming as I think they mean it to be. It is about $109 per American per year, or about $39.40 per air passenger-flight. Now, of course, that’s not zero. If there was something easy we could do to eliminate that “waste” we would be better off.
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The latest manufactured outrage to fill the media and blogosphere is that Social Security will not have a cost of living adjustment in 2011. This is only the second time this has happened in the 35 years that cost of living adjustments (COLAs) have been in place. The other time was in 2010.
The AP led off its reporting on this tragedy with:
More than 58 million retirees and disabled Americans will have to go another year without an increase in their Social Security benefits, the government is expected to announce this week.
The blog WalletPop, always a little more colorful, started its post thusly:
The prediction from scholars that the Social Security Administration will announce zero cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, to Social Security recipients in 2011 is a blow that many older and disabled Americans can ill-afford.
I think that they meant that the lack of a COLA, not the prediction of one, is an ill-affordable blow. But apparently, it is an even wider problem.
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The other day The Wall Street Journal introduced me to a new word. From German, it is fremdschämen, meaning “a feeling of cringing embarrassment for the actions of others.” If only to discuss reality TV shows, English really needs 
to adopt this one. We can spell it without the umlauts. It is pronounced something like FREM-shame-in.
I bring this up because there is a minor scandal brewing that has just inspired fremdschamen in me. The Consumerist has taken to calling it the Foreclosure Fracas. Wednesday’s update on it in The New York Times began:
The uproar over bad conduct by mortgage lenders intensified Tuesday, as lawmakers in Washington requested a federal investigation and the attorney general in Texas joined a chorus of state law enforcement figures calling for freezes on all foreclosures.
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Time to follow up on a few topics I have written about in the past and mention a few more tidbits not worthy of entire posts.
Bad Books
On Friday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled another half million electrical DIY books to add to the million or so recalled from the same publisher in January. Some of the books were originally published in the 1950s. No explanation of why this batch was overlooked nine months ago. Also still no word on what, exactly, is wrong with them.
I had some fun with this in January, but darker thoughts are now creeping into my head. Is it just me, or is anybody else uncomfortable with the idea of a government agency recalling “dangerous” books?
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That type is gift cards, the anonymous chits that are as good as money in one particular store. In their current form they are a relatively recent innovation. When I was your age (20+ years ago) stores sometimes sold paper gift certificates for specified amounts, but they were a one-use item. If you bought a $50 sweater with a $100 gift certificate you generally got $50 in actual cash as change.
Credit Cards, Government | Frank Curmudgeon | 
October 27, 2010 1:59 pm | 
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