Number Six Speaks

I’ve put a lot of thought into the ideas of privacy lately as it seems that our ideas about privacy have changed TREMENDOUSLY in the last 20 years. I think that there is a large difference in the views about privacy in those under 45 or so, and those over.  I’ll admit to even being leery about posting this anything personal about myself, and I of course then think to myself that it’s easy enough to find out many things about me with a quick Google search, so what’s the big deal? That being said, I still have some reservations about posting stuff on the Internet.

At some point I think the our society will reach a point where it will be considered strange not to be connected, or always available, and that somehow if you don’t want to be connected/reachable all the time that you’re doing something wrong. It’s already been shown in several studies that people under the age of 25 (at least one study was done on college students) cannot go more than 3 days without their cell phones/crackberries etc.

On one hand I would argue that this breakdown of privacy is good for humanity in that I believe that in order to create societies that enhance our quality of lives we need to surrender some of our privacy. Without getting to know each other and what we each want, it becomes impossible to work towards a greater good for everyone. On the other hand, if we all become so used to tuning out drivel such as “I’m having toast for breakfast”, then we risk ignoring communication that might be important.

I would hope that we would reach some sort of happy medium, where there is a balance between what is kept private, and what is made public.

Well after all that fun with Expedia (see last post), the money has finally been credited (or not taken I guess) from our account – it only took 5 days! I think Expedia owes us a credit!

We made a plan reservation last night around midnight for a plane flight today at 12:30PM using Expedia. It looked like everything went fine, in fact I could see the transaction pending using our banks website within 15 seconds. The next morning my wife gets to the airport, and lo and behold they claim that the ticket was never issued, and that the ticket had not been paid. Yet the money was still tied up by the pending transaction as my wife tried to by another ticket only to have it declined due to the “lack of funds” in the account. At first Expedia tried to claim that the flight had been canceled – a total lie! Our bank told us the only way to have the transaction reversed and the funds freed up was to have a fax sent to them from the Expedia telling them to void the transaction. In the meantime, Expedia kept claiming that the charge should automatically reverse itself since the tickets had not been issued. As of this writing, almost 18 hours after the initial charge the has not been reversed!!

It turns out that the reason the ticket was never issued was that it was “purchased” within 24 hours of the flight time. Expedia NEVER made it clear that there might be an issue with the ticket, and they even sent an email confirmation showing the reservation had been made.

Expedia should have made clear in the “confirmation” that there was a possibility of a problem, and they also NEVER should have charged our account for a ticket that had not really been issued. And when this was brought to our attention they should have IMMEDIATELY issued a credit to our (or voided the transaction, whatever they had to do to alert the bank to return the funds to our account).

The moral of the story? Don’t trust the travel sites, especially when making reservations with less than 24 hours. And when paying for tickets, use a credit card, not debit card.

Many thanks to all of you who attended our screenings of the new Michael Moore film Capitalism: A Love Story! Due to popular demand we ended up having three screenings. The first was screening was Saturday night at 7:30. After the screening we has some discussions about why people where there, the problems that they are concerned about, and what people plan to do.

During the second screening – 6:PM Sunday, it was very exciting as Michael Moore himself called in to talk to the assembled group. I rambled to him about my ideas outlined below (which he liked, and agreed to help publicize!), and he took a couple of questions from the group. Many thanks to Michael for the good fight!

One group that we mentioned as being a great group, that is attempting to bridge the divide in this country, is the Trans Partisan Alliance.  We also mentioned the group Move to Amend, which is working to amend the Constitution to overturn the recent Supreme Court decision around corporate free speech.

Now on to Number Six’s ideas for change:

This first one will require LOTS of people to participate, and all of those who participate will need to be serious about participating, as if the ranks break, it will hurt everyone involved.

Don’t pay credit card debt

On a given date (I’m thinking election day Nov 2), everyone participating informs the credit card companies that they owe money to that they will no longer be making payments until certain demands are met. Among those demands would be the requirement that there be no penalties or interest increases imposed on participants. This will need MASS participation,  I figure at least one million people to start with, and hopefully another 5 million plus, who will agree to participate once they see others doing it.  Some demands I could envision might include a public option for health insurance, freeing all prisoners convicted of only marijuana offenses. The list goes on. Imagine the CEO of Bank of America calling congress to demand action on things that normal people want!

Support  Not A Number, Inc for office

As we’ve stated before,  Not A Number, Inc. is going to run for office, most likely Seattle City Council. Support our us in showing how ridiculous it is to allow corporations to run for office.

Help us work out corporate rankings

We all know that corporations have reduced us to numbers, one of those being our credit score. It has an impact on each of us, yet do any of us know how it is derived? I say it is time to turn that on the corporations. What if there was an number given to corporations that indicated their “social responsiblity” status? Do we tell the corporations how this number is derived? No! That information is proprietary, but might include things like how much more the CEO is paid than a line worker, and how much the corporation gives to local charities.

Just informed by a friend that she is selling her boat. If anyone is a nice liveaboard with moorage down at Westlake, grandfathered in at just $318/mont including electric.

1978 Fiberform, recently surveyed to be worth $12,500.

Original purchase price (1 1/2 years ago) $13,000, w/another $17,000 in improvements. She’s asking $12,000. Contact me, if you’re interested. [email protected]

Here’s some facts for any of you who wonder how some of the credit card processing business works. Be aware that this is from the perspective of a small business owner, and thus is very biased and limited in how the credit cards and the banking industry works.

For the record I am VERY PISSED OFF at how the banks took BILLIONS of dollars in our tax dollars in  order to stay in business, yet they still insist on charging up to 30%+ in interest, and outrageous late and overlimit fees. At one time this would have been called loan-sharking; however since our government decided to make this legal (how much money did that cost the banks?), it technically isn’t loan-sharking or usury.

Now on to how the credit cards work – I’m going to put in actual numbers that reflect close  what we (and other small merchants we know) pay. This number will of course be smaller for the larger corporations, who can negotiate better rates based on volume.

When processing a Credit/Debit card it breaks down like this:

If it’s a debit transaction, where you enter your PIN number, the merchant pays a flat fee for the transaction, typically between 35-50 cents.

If it’s a credit transaction, a merchant pays a percentage of the transaction, (for us 1.66%), plus a transaction fee (for us 12 cents). Now that is not all, if the card is a rewards card there is another 2-3% that is charged to the merchant. So for all of you who use your cards to get reward miles/points etc., be aware that the merchant is paying for those, and that the extra costs to the merchant may be reflected in the retail price of the item. I know 2-3% may not sound like much, but consider this, your local restaurant operates on 4-5% margin, so 2-3% can be HUGE to a merchant.

Also be aware that your local merchant may pay a monthly minimum and other miscellaneous fees such as fees for paper reports.

Using our current processor (with the numbers above), we’ve calculated that for us, it is less expensive to process transactions less than $21.00 as credit, and above $21.00 as debit. However, since our average sale is only around $14.00, we simply process everything as credit.

As you can see from the above, the banks want you to use your plastic as a credit card not a debit card, and the larger the transaction, the more they want this. I urge all of you to be aware of this, and if the merchant offers it, process your larger transactions as a debit NOT a credit.

Your debit/credit is a way for the banks to get a cut of every transaction, please use your plastic sparingly, let the banks know that their predatory practices are not appreciated and will not be tolerated. Of course the best way to show this would be to use cash and checks (of course they will get a cut of this too, as many banks now charge extra for cash deposits above a certain amount in a month).

Thanks for supporting your local merchant! Buy things you don’t need with money you don’t have, support the local economy.

Finally, the transition to our new servers seems to be complete.  As part of that transition The Head Cheese and I are each get our own WordPress blog. Previous posts for me can be found here.

What a pain it is to switch hosts! Our new host has a lot of features at a great price (justhost.com); however it’s no fun realizing that our current website will most likely be down for a period of time.  When switching I didn’t realize that for some things to be installed and tested you have to have the domain already switched over. Thus there will be a period where our store website may be unreachable during the transition. Please bear with us.

The other thing I’m annoyed about losing is the catchall email addresses that we had. We had some email forwards set up to catch all the emails we set up such as UnitedAir@, FedEx@.  Most places no longer allow a blanket email forward, thus we will have to set up each one of these explicitly. This is all part of an attempt to cut down on spam – DAM YOU spammers!

This is the new location for the views of Number Six from Not A Number Cards & Gifts. Past posts can be  at NotANumberGifts.