Tuesday (deep into it now)

Tuesday May 19, 2009

 

. . . . So, 2/3 of the way through May, and the United States is colder than all billy hell. What global climate changes?

. . . .We're 3 weeks away from hurricane season down here where I work. We're in the middle of one of the worst tornado seasons that Texas/Oklahoma and the Southeast have seen, there's floods from Kansas to West Virginia, wildfires running out of control all through the Pacific Coast and Northwest, and we went through 9 straight days of rain up in the Midwest/Great Lakes and are getting ready to enter our own tornado season.

. . . .In terms of personal and family safety, with all those weather events, there's a couple of things I'd like to point out. I said this a couple of weeks ago, learn to text. If you don't know how, ask your teenager. When voice won't go through on cell phones because of a compromised or overloaded system, data like text will. It would be a good thing to be able to stay in touch with your loved ones. We all now live in extended families across the United States, and the options to be able stay in touch and let someone know you're OK, or find out if someone needs help are all available, vast and easy to use.

 - Even if you have an e-mail account with your local service like Comcast, Charter or Cox, even if you have an e-mail account with AOL or Earthlink, get yourself at least 1, if not 3 more accounts. Get an e-mail account with Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail and let your family and loved ones know your address. All 3 services are server based and not resident on your computer or resident on a local server that may be affected by outages or storms, and they make a good option to stay in touch and find out if everyone is OK or in need of something.

- Learn how to SMS text from those accounts to your loved ones phones. It's easy. An SMS text is a service offered by all 3, and accepted by your cell phone service. Normally the "To" address is 123-555-xxxx, the phone number of who you're trying to contact followed by an @ symbol and then either vtext.com, cingularme.com, or sprint.com. All together it would look like 123-555-xxxx@vtext.com, or something like that. 

- Skype is a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) service that will utilize internet service for voice communication even when hard land line phones are down.

- Join a social networking community like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or Twitter. Again, with access to a computer at an internet cafe, a Starbucks, the public library you can use these services to let everyone know you're OK and check on those you want to check on. 

- If you're an independent contractor, or an at home worker that uses your computer, utilize a free service skydrive, like Google Docs, or Windows Live Workspace to back-up all your important documents and files on a remote server. Save your work! Often, it will save grief later. 

- If you have precious photographs that you want to save, use a service like Flickr or Picasa and upload them.

. . . .The Senate today passed sweeping credit card reforms, all of which are good for you, and good for credit card users. So just what do the new credit card rules entail, from the New York Times today, this:

At first glance, the sweeping credit card legislation that passed the Senate on Tuesday looks like a huge victory for consumers. The bill (and similar legislation that has already passed the House) contains relief from penalty fees and instant interest rate spikes. It even limits expiration dates on gift cards.

And certain cardholders who carry a balance may ultimately pay less under the new rules. But for people who pay their bills off each month, and milk the card rewards programs for everything they are worth, there is some cause for concern.

For months now, the card companies have been threatening to cut rewards programs sharply, even for people who never get into trouble with debt and late payments, to make up for revenue lost to the new restrictions.

My guess, however, is that this talk is just so much saber-rattling. Card companies want to make money, and big-spending customers help them do it, even if they do not go into debt.

First, let’s lay out the things we know will change because of the new legislation (you can skip to the end, if you’d like, to read more about what might happen with rewards). The bills are filled with new rules, which will take effect at various points in the year after President Obama signs the final bill.

¶First, and perhaps most important, there are new restrictions on when credit card companies can increase the interest rate on balances that you’ve already run up. The Senate bill says that banks must wait until you’re 60 days late in making the minimum payment before they can apply a penalty interest rate to your existing debt; the House bill mandates a 30-day wait.

It’s not yet clear how legislators will reconcile the variations. The House may end up voting on whether to simply accept the Senate’s stricter bill, or there may be a horse-trading conference of sorts to work out compromises.

¶The Senate bill requires card companies to, in effect, lower interest rates for cardholders who have exhibited good behavior and paid on time for six consecutive months. Some cards, like Citi’s new Forward card, already offer a similar feature. The House bill has no such provision.
¶Both bills require card companies to give 45 days’ notice before raising the interest rate. The Senate bill, for good measure, requires such notice for any significant change to the card. That may mean that card companies can no longer spring huge alterations in reward programs, effective immediately, on customers who are just short of a reward that they’ve saved for for years.
¶Banks must send your bill out no later than 21 days before the due date. They cannot send it with, say, 14 days to go, hoping that you won’t get a check back in time to avoid a late fee.
¶If the card company gets your payment by 5 p.m. on the due date, it’s on time, according to the new rules. No more of this early-morning deadline nonsense that some card companies were engaged in, aimed at hitting you with a late fee if your payment arrived with the afternoon mail. Also, no more late fees if the due date is a Sunday or holiday and your payment doesn’t arrive until a day later.
¶Let’s say you’re paying many different interest rates on the debt on a single card, one for a cash advance, another for a balance transfer and a third for a new purchase. Now, when you make a payment over the minimum balance, banks will have to apply it to the highest-interest debt first. I bet you can guess how many banks used to handle this sort of situation.
¶At long last, banks must now ask you to opt in before granting you the “privilege” of spending more than your credit limit and paying a fat $39 fee for the privilege. If you want to pay that fee, you’ll have to ask them first.
¶If you’re a student, it will get harder to get a credit card. In the House version of the bill, no one under 18 can apply for a card unless a parent or legal guardian is along for the ride as a primary cardholder.
The Senate, hopping onto the helicopter parenting movement, wants the minimum age to be 21. The senators note that a spouse can co-sign as well, and students with independent income sources can submit proof and ask for an exception. It is not clear how this will work. Will students working as summer camp counselors need to send in a credit card permission slip from their camp director?
And both houses require written permission from a parent, guardian or spousal co-signer for any increase in a card’s credit line.
¶The House throws in what ought to be called “The Fine Print Rule.” Card companies must print their account applications and disclosures in 12-point type or greater. A supervisory board will also probably declare certain hard-on-the-eyes fonts off limits. The Senate is silent on typeface but imposes many other communication requirements. Read all about it through links to the House bill, the Senate bill (and government summaries of the House and Senate bills from the version of this story at nytimes.com/yourmoney.

¶Hate gift cards? Me, too. There will be some helpful new rules regarding those absurd dormancy fees, which punish people who let the cards sit around before using them.
Under the Senate’s rule, retailers and others that issue Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover gift cards or certificates will have to print explicit dormancy fee information on the card. Sellers of the cards will also have to inform the buyer of the fee. That’s a smart twist, since the gift giver can then become aware of the noxious nature of the fee — and elect to give cash or some other gift.
The bill also bans expiration dates on gift cards and certificates any sooner than five years after the card’s original issue date. And the retailer or card issuer will have to print the terms of any expiration date in capital letters in at least 10-point type. Call it the fine print rule.
It will be fascinating to see which retailer or card issuer has the nerve, after having free use of your money for five years, to tell you it will lose the money altogether if you don’t use up their gift card. I dare them to try.
So will credit card companies kill reward programs or drastically scale most of them back? Of course not.
“If you strip away the reward component of a credit card, it’s essentially a commodity,” said Rick Ferguson, editorial director at the loyalty marketing company LoyaltyOne. “The reward is what gives it its personality. It works from a branding perspective as well as a mechanism to influence customer behavior and consolidate spending on a particular card.”
That last part is crucial. People who spend a ton generate fees galore from merchants, and that money helps the card company stay in business. So you may soon see card companies giving away more goodies or lowering annual fees for people who hit certain spending thresholds each year. American Express already does this on a number of cards.
Also, keep in mind that you may have more control over what the card companies do to you than you may think.
If you don’t like the new fees and other things that banks will soon be testing as they grapple with their new economic reality, then make some noise. Send a note to me at rlieber@nytimes.com, so I can write about the latest foolishness — or consumer-friendly twist. At the very least, all of our complaints to the higher-ups at the banks may help persuade the companies to head in another direction.
“Work your way up the chain,” said Dennis C. Moroney, research director for bank cards at TowerGroup, a MasterCard-owned financial services consultant. After all, it may cost less to appease you than it would to replace you.

. . . .You can read the full bill here at Open Congress on S.414

. . . .Continuing the series on upgrading the national electrical grid, here's Part 9, Could Energy Innovation Create A 'Green Bubble' from the NPR series:

One argument for a major overhaul of the U.S. electricity grid is to encourage the development of more renewable sources of energy, such as wind and solar. President Obama certainly has gotten behind green energy, and his administration is part of a concerted effort to help the industry grow.
In the wake of the housing bubble, that has some asking whether the country is headed for a renewable energy bubble.
Eric Janszen founded the financial advisory company iTulip in the midst of the Internet stock bubble. Janszen, whose company was named for the Dutch tulip bulb bubble in the 1630s, has made a career out of studying financial bubbles.
He says bubbles start with a kernel of something good — say, homeownership or the development of the Internet or, in this case, energy that causes less pollution. But then, he says, outside forces come in and create a sort of mania.
"You'll know that we're at some stage of an energy bubble when you start to hear about how you can get rich quick in the energy market," Janszen says. But first, he says, a few things have to happen. There must be significant government involvement designed to focus energy and capital on the specific industry — and clearly that's already happening.
"To really make these things go, you need a new source of credit," he says. In the housing bubble, it was mortgage-backed securities. Janszen says this element is important because you need a lot of capital gushing in to inflate stock and other asset prices.
Developing Plans, Finding Funding
But credit is a problem right now for renewable energy developers. Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens was forced to delay construction of a 1,000-megawatt wind project in Texas, and worries about an impending renewable energy bubble aren't keeping him up at night.
"I wake up in the night wondering 'Where am I going to get the money to build this project, because I've already got $150 million in it'," Pickens says. He says part of the problem is that natural gas prices have dropped by more than half since last summer, and it's difficult to justify using wind to generate electricity when gas is so much cheaper. Add to that one of the other challenges of wind: It's going to rely heavily on an upgraded electricity grid that isn't built yet to get power from wind corridors to population centers.
Pickens says another issue may stand in the way of a renewable energy bubble: While the Obama administration is promoting the industry, the specifics of the government's plans aren't completely clear.
"But I think once you get through this year, it's going to be pretty clear how they expect [to] cause the industry to kick off and go," Pickens says.
Congress is working on legislation that would limit greenhouse gas emissions and then turn them into a commodity that can be traded. Such a cap-and-trade system might be the seed for creating the credit necessary to get a renewable energy bubble going, Janszen says.
"Some think the investment banks will get into the cap-and-trade business and figure out a way to use that market to create securities that can then be the foundation for an asset price inflation," Janszen says.
So, while a few people out there still see the potential for a renewable energy bubble, more pieces have to fall in place first, not the least of which is major upgrades to the country's electricity grid.
Planning for that is under way. The Electric Power Research Institute was given $1.3 million in federal stimulus money recently to develop a framework for grid developers to follow. The group expects to complete that work by early summer.

. . . . Let's see, other news of the day - President Obama announces new mileage and CAFE standards - Michael Steele reinvented the Republican Party & the Republican Party found a unique way to support climate change legislation; tee off on big business, light the sack of crap on the doorstep and blame the Democrats.

. . . .Jesse Ventura, who is a true Libertarian, and by the way, a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces went one-on-one with Sean Hannity. Guess who won?

. . . .My two favorite political nutjobs, Michelle Bachmann and Barney Frank went toe-to-toe over funding. Enlightening and intelligent? No. But worth watching for the entertainment value.

.  . . .The extreme Right wing media is beginning to eat itself. Michael Savage tore Rush Limbaugh apart as a phony.

. . . .Paul Krugman, one of the 3 economists that we need to be listening to, along with Noriel Roubinni and Mark Zandi, spoke at conference in Seoul, South Korea yesterday:

The United States may emerge from recession as early as this summer, though further job losses mean a "depressed economy" could last as long as five years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said Tuesday.
"I think it's quite possible that industrial production in the United States and perhaps in the world as a whole will bottom out sometime in the next few months, that GDP growth in the United States will be positive in the second half of the year and maybe a little bit later than that in Europe," Krugman told a global financial conference in Seoul.
Krugman said that he would not be surprised if the U.S. recession, which began in December 2007, ended in August or September this year. But job losses were likely to continue into 2011, meaning "the period of a depressed economy" could last until 2013 or 2014, he said.

. . . .Outta here. Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they slip through your hands. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one gets out alive, and we don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances on how the ticket gets punched. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's about right fuckin' here and now, this ain't no dress rehearsal. Take a stand for something, change your own life, and in so doing change the world around you.
Love y'all, got your back out there in the night.
Remember that this weekend is Memorial Day, but our men and women in uniform who have sacrificed for us need to be remembered and thanked every day, not just that one.

The Desolation Angel
[where: Hell, Michigan 48137]