Credit card companies love people who buy the best for birds they don’t own. S and C/Flickr

 

On today’s Planet Money:

Credit card companies have decided to become your friend, before it’s too late. If they chat you up instead of sounding threatening when you call, they figure, you might pay them back first. That’s the message from New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, who just published What Does Your Credit Card Company Know About You?

In this excellent edition of Planet Money we hear about two very crafty tricks used by credit card companies to squeeze more money out of you. Luckily they are easy to avoid with these simple and entertaining hacks.

Trick 1: The bank offers you the option to upload a picture of your kids or your dog to be printed on your card. They hope that you will put your card to the front of your wallet so you can see the picture more easily and more importantly use it in preference to your other cards. Not only that but every time you increase your balance, the action is associated with positive feelings rather than all that pesky guilt.

Hack 1: When applying for the card, upload a disturbing or offensive picture that makes you feel sick or want to cry – such as a nazi feasting on a unicorn carcass or a kitten drowning in a sewage processing plant.

Trick 2: Card companies track every purchase to determine how risky you are. Charles Duhigg found data to show that over 40% of people making card purchases at Sharx Pool Hall in Montreal left their bill unpaid for four months or more, whereas purchasers of premium bird food were extremely likely to pay in full every month.

Hack 2: Confuse the card companies’ data by making payments and purchases essentially at random. Always over or underpay your bill by a few tens of dollars on a random schedule that varies by up to two months. Make outrageous wagers on pool games at biker bars using premium bird seed as collateral.

There’s a popular story on Digg right now about a 104-year-old British woman who uses Twitter. It’s an obvious headline: “World’s oldest Tweeter talks cuppas and casserole.” It’s Digg bait. But what’s worse is that if you examine the story closely, it looks like the UK press may have gotten the poor old lady to sign up for Twitter just for their story!

The story is about how Ivy Bean uses the hot social network to post mundane updates about her 104-year-old life. But take a look at the picture in the story. On the screen next to Bean, you’ll see her Twitter page with a whopping two updates. These two tweets were sent out at the same time, the day before the story ran in a number of UK publications. In other words, Bean signed up and sent her first two tweets at the time all these guys were writing their stories. Or, to put it more clearly, this whole story was staged.

I’m sure the Telegraph are using the MP’s expenses story to point out how crucial it is to have print journalists around to do investigative pieces. Rightly so, I’m having trouble imagining a citizen journalist putting in the hours of research required to break a story like that.

It’s important to remember however that UK newspapers are still rubbish. Look at this, the picture is so obvious and a follow up check of Twitter so easy to do. They really must think their readers are stupid.

The problem isn’t so much corruption in Chicago as no one paying attention in Illinois. This is my personal theory. I concede it’s idiosyncratic. I’ll go so far as to argue that on a day to day basis Chicago is less corrupt than it used to be. Years now can go by without my being solicited for a bribe, or even having it intimated that a timely consideration of some kind would simplify my existence. Perhaps my aura of incorruptibility deters the lowlifes, but it seems to me we have objective evidence that the tide of graft has receded. In the same burst of industry that enabled him to compute the aldermanic conviction rate, Little Ed scoured the newspaper databases looking for reports of official crime. In the 1970s and 80s these were abundant, with scores of inspectors, judges, aldermen, police officers, park district workers and so on indicted in the course of Operation This-or-that. In the 90s the arraignment rate began to diminish, and the cases became more isolated, in contrast to the previous practice of (say) arresting the sewer inspectors en masse. In the past decade or so… well, here’s a telling statistic, in my opinion. Prior to 1999 aldermen were being sent up at the rate of roughly one per year; since then the feds have nailed just one, Arenda Troutman. OK, ex-aldermen Laski and Vrdolyak were convicted too, although for acts committed after leaving office, and yes, you still have aldermanic elections with multiple felons on the ballot. All I’m saying is the previously breakneck pace of criminal activity has slowed to a more dignified rate.

So explain Blagojevich, you say. I’m getting to that. The ex-governor isn’t a Chicago politician; he’s an Illinois politician. This may strike you as a fine distinction. Rod is a Democrat; he lives (and to the extent that he worked, worked) in Chicago; his father-in-law is a Chicago alderman. More broadly, metropolitan Chicago, populationwise, constitutes two-thirds of the state of which he was boss. Nonetheless, he was a state official, and as any Chicagoan can tell you, Illinois is a thing apart. We know it’s out there; we know they grow a lot of corn. As children we’re packed into school buses and made to tour the state capital in Springfield, where we rub the nose on Lincoln’s bust. But on the whole we don’t pay the non-Chicago parts of Illinois much mind — or state government either. Why should we? Chicago mayors commonly have bold plans; Illinois governors, with occasional exceptions (James Thompson come to mind), don’t. Where statewide office is concerned, we enter the voting booth thinking there’s nothing very grave at stake, and the governor is a glorified county clerk.

This attitude has bred considerable mischief. Of the last nine individuals who have served as governor of Illinois, not counting the incumbent, five have been charged with felonies and three have been convicted (thus far). Dan Walker, it should be said, went to jail for crimes committed after leaving office, and William Stratton, accused of tax evasion, was acquitted. Still, to have an incarceration rate more than double that of Chicago aldermen … achievements don’t get much more dubious than that. 

I love The Straight Dope. Read the full article for discussion of some other theories, as well as a fairly convincing claim that things aren’t nearly as bad as they used to be.