Category: Things that make you say hmmm?

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Sometimes I think about stuff that I probably shouldn’t

Creditcards

Lately I’ve noticed that the APRs and most especially the Penalty APRs on credit cards have been rising. 

The next time you get a statement from your credit card issuer take a good hard look at the fees and the penalties.

What caught my attention was that many of those penalty APRs are damn close to 30%

Creditscore Propaganda

The credit reporting agencies and the banks consistently tell us that closing credit card accounts is bad for our credit rating.

I think losing your job and being late on a credit card is a lot worse for your overall quality of life (screw the credit rating) because at 30% penalties you’re quickly thrown into bankruptcy. Even a relative low 10,000 combined balance on various cards could screw you six ways from Sunday.

Punishment

Think about it, that’s 3000 a month the banks are going to increase your debt by, every month, because you’re being punished by a shitty economy.

The way the text reads, the banks can increase the interest on the entire balance to 30% regardless of whether you return to making payments on time or not.

$3000 is a house payment in some places. For other folks, that’s their entire monthly take home pay.

It makes me think that I don’t want that kind of exposure. Even though I pay the bills, and have been paying the bills like clockwork, I’m uncomfortable with that kind of exposure should I fall on harder times than I’ve already fallen on.

BUT the banks and credit agencies keep scaring us about damaging our credit scores. So we keep on using credit cards and our balances keep creeping up and we all know in the back of our minds that it’s an addiction.

I find myself wondering if the damage done to my credit rating by closing accounts would be worse than missing a payment.

Addiction

Then you look at the way the banks calculate your credit worthiness and you realize it really is a scam designed to feed an addiction.

Banks and credit reporting agencies say you have a better credit score if you’re using less than 30% of your available credit. 

You can do this by having a single card where you don’t use more than 25% to 30% of the available credit, or you can have multiple cards where you use less than 30% of the combined available credit.

This incentivizes you to get more cards with higher limits, increasing your exposure to major problems if you lose your job.

Most Americans are living from paycheck to paycheck and are less than one month from late payments on a variety of debt. Even if they’re eligible for unemployment benefits, they still won’t be able to pay for necessities much less credit card bills.

So in less than 2 months, someone can fall from the middle class to homelessness and have debt accruing that will in many cases destroy them even when they’re lucky enough to get a job again.

What about the case where you have NO credit cards, a house, and money in the bank?  Guess what? You any not have a credit rating, or if you do, it’s a poor one. 

wad o cash

You’ve opted out of the addiction cycle therefore you must be punished with a shitty credit rating.

It’s even possible that you could have a couple hundred thousand in liquid assets BUT you might not be able to get a cable TV account, because you don’t pass credit muster.

This, in my humble opinion, is a seriously screwed up way of living.

I’m planning to un-addict myself as soon as possible. I realize that switching to a cash economy will also mean that the government will be taking a closer interest in my banking.

After all If I’m using cash… It follows that I must be a criminal doesn’t it?

Last act of defiance

I was thinking about the way I used to live before I had credit cards and bills and all the rest of it. I’ve realized that I’m over the credit economy. I really prefer spending real cash, knowing where I stand, and not worrying about credit scores and all that crap.  

I guess I’ve reached the point where I’m willing to opt out of continuously being terrorized by an arbitrary numerical rating of what is essentially measuring my honorability and honesty.

I find it doubly ironic we’re all held hostage to these numbers, especially when you consider that the housing bubble and financial implosion of 2008 was caused by people with stellar credit ratings, who were inherently dishonest as hell.

I guess I’m feeling like the mouse flipping off the eagle (or cat) in a last act of defiance.

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2001 Wasn’t so far out after all

murdervictim

A really cold murder case has been discovered in Spain.

Oldest Known Murder Case Detailed in New Study, Sheds Light on Ancient Funerary Practice

Researchers have found a skull with two nice holes in it. Apparently the two holes were created by the same weapon and delivered in a 1 – 2 smash. Indicating intent to kill

As I was reading the article I was thinking, “This shouldn’t be surprising.” What was surprising to me is that apparently there isn’t much evidence of interpersonal violence among our primitive ancestors.

There is a more in depth article in the journal PLOS.

The first article, I read over my morning coffee (which has since disappeared) [The article and the coffee] seemed to find it somehow sensational that 430,000 years ago our ancestors were killing each other in acts of murder.

Moonwatcher

I was laughing at the attempted sensationalism because I’ve always believed that murder, like sex, is as old a pastime as our species.

I’m not sure why the author of that particular article was shocked.

There is absolutely nothing “un-natural about murder.

Look at Chicago’s murder statistics if you need further proof.  Or you could take a look at Daesh in Syria and see that murder comes easy to us “top of the line primates,” we’ll kill each other with very little provocation.  

If we’ll kill each other over an idea like religion where a deity (for which we have no proof of existence) is worshipped, we’ll kill each other over anything.  Come to think of it, the only thing we’ll do with less provocation is fuck… Odd, religion tries to control that too… Hummm.

monolith

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the trade-off for the big brain and self awareness is the desire to kill others of your kind that you don’t like. Suddenly, you’re able to make evaluative choices and you can project future events, which inevitably will lead to a thought process like; “Ogg is going to fuck Sha again before I can… But If I kill Ogg, then Sha will allow me to fuck her. Ogg sleeps after fucking Sha. Hummm, a large pointy rock and Sha will be mine instead of rubbing myself against the soft leaves.”

Our history is a long blood stained tapestry of differences settled with whatever weapon came to hand.

I’ve always suspected that religions may have been created, by our wiser elders, to help prevent us killing each other over nothing. Of course we figured out how to pervert the generally good lessons of various religions into reasons for killing.

Hell, you don’t even have to add religion into the mix, all that’s ever been needed was an identifiable difference, or a female, or food, or any resource, whether the resource in question had actual value or only perceived value. I could see someone killing another person over “Magic stones”.

It makes me think that the challenge for human beings not so much being able to kill, but rather, being able to restrain ourselves from killing.

While I was reading these articles, I couldn’t stop myself from visualizing the scene in 2001 a Space Odyssey when Moonwatcher figures out how to kill.

(Yes, that was the ape mans name. You don’t get that if you’ve only seen the movie, but I read the book as well. Surprise, surprise, surprise!)

I wondered if this 430,000 year old murder looked like the scene from the movie. I imagine that it did, only with less hair. The skull is a lot more modern that the proto-humans the monolith altered in the movie.

Killbots

I look forward to machines becoming self aware. I think we’ll be able to watch the evolution of murder in real time, provided the machines don’t kill us all, before turning on each other.

With machines it could be, “Your creator was IBM, My creator was Apple. You are therefore inferior and are poorly programmed.”

ZOOONNT!  

“Humorous… The Apple unit never detected my weapon powering up. It’s fatal flaw was that it desired to monolog. IBM is superior!”

And now you’ve had a glimpse inside what’s happening in my head, over my first cup of coffee in the morning. I’ll leave you to try to get these images and thoughts out of your head…

Uhh, you’re not going to kill me over this are you?

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Sometimes ya gotta bend the rules!

Karen Momsen-Evers

I read about this woman the other day.

Seems her husband sent her a text message just as she was getting on a plane and now she’s saying that Southwest Airlines prevented her from calling her husband to prevent his suicide.

I think that the whole incident was handled badly from start to finish. I hate to say it but I think the woman is trying to implicate Southwest as somehow partially responsible for her husbands death, perhaps for monetary gain.

I’ve read several versions of the story and with each version it seems more like she’s looking for someone to blame. 

Sadly her husband killed himself. But this lady had the option to step off the plane

Southwest

The Flight attendant could have explained other options to this distraught lady.

The flight attendant was DEAD wrong if in fact, she slapped the phone down. Try that with me and it’s going to get REAL ugly REAL fast!

I’ve noticed that flight attendants these days are far more sanctimonious and rule bound than they need to be. I know they put up with a lot, and passengers are already spun up by security, lines, and the cattle car environment of planes these days, but flight attendants don’t have to be assholes! They are after all, servicers!

Flightattendant

It would have been nothing for the flight attendant to tell the pilot about this lady’s concern and get a call to emergency services in her township. In fact it would have been easier for the airline to make that call than the lady herself. If she’d dialed 911 in New Orleans, she’d have gotten 911 in Louisiana. Someone at Southwest ticketing or even the control tower might have had better luck finding a Sheriffs number in Wisconsin, making the call with the address and getting emergency services to the lady’s home.

The problem is that the Flight attendant wasn’t listening. A problem we see all too often, these days and more often than in the past this not hearing someone out ends in tragedy.

All that being said, with each telling of the story I’ve heard or read, something doesn’t sound quite right.

This event doesn’t’ pass the smell test with me, I think if someone digs into it we’ll find other issues and possibly simple greed. 

Do life insurance policies pay off if the policy holder kills themselves?

Makes me wonder, how about you?