#190 Don’t Worry, Pay Interest

So I get this news item. It’s about one of those payday loan companies charging more than the allowed amount of interest because they let borrowers roll over loans and charged them an extra fee to do so. All well and good. We all know that these places charge a lot but they also bill themselves as being cheaper than bouncing a check. Then the article goes on to show the legal amount such a place can charge—15% of the first 500 and 10% of any balance after that. Again on the face of it, not that much, except that works out to about 391% APR. This is the legal amount. For some reason the word cornhole comes to mind. So this one guy had literally thousands of dollars of interest/fees on one little revolving loan amount.
Couple with this is a commercial I heard the other night from a major bankcard company. It said, if you can’t make your minimum payment this month then it will be waived if you make a further purchase. Now there’s an encouragement to fiscal responsibility. Can’t pay what you owe? Charge more. We all know there are some people who just ain’t too good with money. And these are usually the people who are paying the minimum and charging the max anyhow. Do they really need any additional prodding to charge more and pay less? And why the sudden generosity on the part of the bankcard companies? Simple, the new anti-bankruptcy bill passed by congress forbids including bankcard debt in your bankruptcy, when and if you do declare. So the banks, certain that they’ll get the money somehow, sometime, are only too happy to open the door to any additional interest they can flay off your financial hide.
I’m sure I screwed up some of the facts somewhere, but to me the point is a larger one. Is our apparently healthy economy once again being sustained on borrowing? What’s going to happen when people can payday no more? Too bad they don’t have a fiscal example to emulate, like the feds. The federal deficit is huge, and that means as interest rates creep up the budget of the United States is going to have to devote a bigger and bigger share of monies to simply paying interest on the government debt. And like a payday loan denizen the feds are going to have to keep rolling the principal over and hope that somehow they’ll catch up on the next go around.
Of course they never will. Until their economy, personal and federal, collapses. Maybe bartering will come back. Hey buddy, I’ll trade you this latte for a pothole-free road. Senator Lloyd Bentsen said something to that effect many years ago. “I could give the appearance of prosperity too if I could borrow a trillion dollars a year.”
The two horns of the political dilemma: tax and spend, or don’t tax—and spend anyhow.
America, ya gotta love it.

#219 Nfc-hawks

Certainly there’s been more than enough hyperbole galore about this but what the heck, it’s not every day a regional football team wins a slot in the Superbowl. So let me just say first, Go C-Hawks. You’re A-Hawks to me. Or let’s just shorten the whole uncomfortably long phrase NFC Champion C-hawks to NFC-Hawks. Of course the jokes are flying in. What was most important in the NFC championship game, the full back or the running back? The answer, of course, was the hassle-back. And hassle the Carolina panthers Matt did. Or, that the reason our defense was so strong is because we had a big Lofa on it. Did you see that shot he took though? The other guy was sent out of the game with a concussion, or as one cruel wag put it Goings Goings gone. But Lofa Tatupu played on, even though it turns out he was concussed as well. Forget the con, he kept the other team cussing for the rest of the game, I’ll tell you that.
Weird though, one of the national commentators, apparently without irony, said at one point in the blowout: “The national media hasn’t been giving the Seahawks the respect they deserve.” Duh! Especially when it was the guy who was squeezing out this pithy remark that was being pithy the previous week about those same Seahawks. He was the one who wasn’t giving them respect and said Carolina ought to have field day cause Seattle never do well against a good quarterback and Delhomme was as good as they come. Well apparently he’s as good as they go too. As in, Go home Delhomme.
Shaun Alexander ran his way into vindication as well. The national commentators had said how he didn’t step up in playoff games. Given that the previous week—and only playoff game so far this season—was a week that he got a concussion early in the first quarter and that with the bye the week before that and the layoff the week before that in a game the Seahawks didn’t need to win, he’d had like a month off, it was only natural it would take him a couple of plays to work the kinks out. But out they worked and in classic strategy style the threat of Shaun was as effective as a runner on first in splitting the attention of the defense. Why don’t football players get removed from the game after a foul—or five—by the way?
Ultimately the outcome of the game depended less on Hasselbeck and the Seahawks than on the power of feng shui and color. Tattoo Blue versus Feeble Teal. How could we lose? Teal is not a color for football. Teal is a color for lawn bowling, or croquet. The smartest move the Seahawks made on the road to the payoffs was to change their colors. That and stick with the guy that’s making my home grin.
America, ya gotta love it.

#187 Home Texting

Perhaps children are getting more sophisticated in this generation. I watch them adapt almost instantly to a new technology like, say, text messaging, while us oldsters are still trying to figure out how to work the scroll wheel on our mouse. Perhaps there is some hardwiring window in our brains, like language learning, where if you don’t so it by a certain age tits a heck of a lot harder to learn after. Like two year olds immersed in a foreign language, all those cheat codes and joystick twitchings they learned in early video games are standing them in good stead today. Meanwhile, old folks like me who actually used to laboriously dial a single number around a phone at a time can’t quite pick up one button representing numerous letters numbers and syllables.
You know you’re getting old when a new tech company puts out an intuitive interface and you have no intuition at all about what you’re interfacing with. Intuitive, hell, you haven’t a clue. Intuition has to have a reference base. If I have a feeling that the guy coming down the street is a danger, it’s because my subconscious has assembled numerous clues—posture, stance, smell, expression—into a acute fear package. It’s not like the intuition is a direct message—text or otherwise—from a god. So when they say intuitive, I always ask, intuitive to whom? Fuddy-duddy me, or the cybergeneration?
I’m not convinced corporate America really gets youth a lot of the time anyhow, or I’m completely out of touch with the young. I heard a commercial for a new pizza from one of the home-bake chains. It’s funny isn’t it, how in our rush-rush work-work society the idea of home cooking is so idealized. Even if you’re cooking someone else’s raw stuff at your home.
So anyhow this pizza place is talking about a new pizza and it has roasted onions—apparently they can cook one part of it—and various meats and vegetables on it. In the ad, they announce it to kids and they all shout out in pleasure. Have kids changed that much? When I was in the pizza business, there were three kid choices: pepperoni, Canadian bacon and pineapple, and plain cheese. That’s it. No onions, roasted or otherwise, no green peppers, and no mushrooms or exotic fungus of any kind. Perhaps children are getting more sophisticated in everything, including their collective palate. But somehow I don’t think so. It’s like I used to tell my own Dad when he tried to dress hip in the 70s. It’s Murphy’s Law, Papa, just when you think you got it right is when you go the most wrong. Maybe one of you kids should text in a complaint.
America, ya gotta love it.