Never having to fear financial disruption due to an opinion does afford one a sense of liberty. No company is going to fire your shares and stop sending dividends.

jon's clever attempt to sway public opinion on a fools tweet lines his pockets with book royalties and speaking fees. He's profiting from a special kind of sinister back door racism. It enriches him financially and psychologically with the praises from the suckers who are being told to all go buy his book.

The very thought of being embarrassed or shamed by profiting from racism in a country built by slaves is truly hilarious. No matter if you stand or take a knee all are paying rent or interest.

Guys, it's the vendors. They pay for that "free" loan and a lot of the benefits. And the credit card companies lobbied it in by making it illegal for a business to charge a different price for cash than plastic. That's recently (last 5 years or so) been overturned. If you've ever had the distinct pleasure of navigating the byzantine and maddening world of credit card clearance fees, you would know that not all cards take as big a bite out of your transaction with the consumer. And it just so happens that the juicier benefits cards cost the vendor even more. That's a minimum of 1.8%, usually 2.5% and as high as 4%. That means the bank floats you the $ for 30 days average at 2.5% = 30% APR. It's quite a racket. There's a reason you get 3 very expensive mailers with fake cards and whatnot a week.

Credit card company revenue comes from a number of sources but interest / fees are a large component.

My point was more, by definition continuous 30-60 days interest free periods (loans) aren't 'free' and there's cross-subsiding going on.

The business model is built on selling a highly overpriced product to consumer A, so you can sell an underpriced one to consumer B.

This is pretty far from the capitalist ideal of companies competing and continuously innovating to offer consumers the best product.

@newtboy

The criticism is more of how it's designed. The only reason we get an interest fee period with credit cards is those paying fees / interest are subsidising those who aren't. Otherwise why would you essentially get free borrowed money?

@newtboy -- I used a credit card (Discover) almost exactly as you described while I was going to college. Get a balance to pay for normal stuff, but pay it ALL off at the end of every month.

But I don't think the credit card companies hate people like us for 2 reasons:

1) For every one of us, there's a buttload who pay the minimum rather than the entire balance.

2) In my case, I think that in 4 years of college I forgot to pay off my balance (simply forgot to send in the check) once or possibly twice. I remembered a bit late and called Discover to see what to do, and they would tell me to pay the balance (or the minimum payment, not that I actually did that) plus a late fee.

I can't remember how much the late fee was. Maybe about $20? Anyway, at the kind of monthly balance I was running (not high), I'd wager that $20 was equivalent to maintaining an actual balance and paying the interest for a month or two or three. Which makes Maher's argument that they are "profiting from people's mistakes" reasonably accurate.


...On the other hand, Discover had "cashback bonus" awards of .5 to 1% or so, from which I stocked up and claimed somewhere in the $50-100 range over the 4 years, definitely enough to keep me in the net positive range in spite of a $20 late fee or two. That tells me that the magnitude of my "mistakes" must have been tiny in comparison to average credit card users.

I don't think Discover is an evil company per se for "preying" on people that don't use the card in the same way that you or I would. Paying a $20 late fee was a fully reasonable thing to charge me with. On the other hand, there's many many examples of predatory type fees that really do take advantage of people for "offenses" that are way less egregious, even things that have previously been considered standard use of the product / service in the past (paying WAY more for an extra inch of legroom, checked bags, food, etc. on airplanes comes to mind). Many of those arguably do cross the line into "evil" territory, I think.

If you don't live beyond your means (I know, easier said than done), you don't have to worry about high interest. I never use my credit cards for anything I can't pay off that month, so I've never paid interest and my cards are no fee cards. I just get free airline miles for paying my bills. VISA must hate me.
For gift cards, only buy them for stores you KNOW the people shop at anyway...not Red Lobster. Sometimes you can get a $25 gift card for $20, that's a great deal all around if they use them.

It's a little sad to me that Bill brings up all these issues, but offers no real solutions.

Oh....that's....really? And here I thought Canadians were reasonable people.

The 'no penis' thing....yeah, that's kinda nuts, but couldn't they get around it by becoming a private club with membership dues rather than spa fees? At least here, private clubs make their own rules the members agree to when they join.....so far.

Public businesses that use public services to operate and serve the public, they have different obligations to society, imo.

I absolutely agree, the dems need to get their head out of their ass, denounce the extremists in their midst, understand that Clinton was a HUGE mistake, and move back to the center some, but I also see that the right has moved so far right that what one might consider 'centrist' today would be extremist right 25 years ago, so they need to be careful to not move past center and go right, or they'll lose for being republican light.

I'd give the show half a chance if it wasn't for needing yet another new subscription service... Sorry CBS, but there's not enough in your catalog to make me pay yet another monthly fee... and still have commercials... $6 for regular commercials... $9 for limited commercials... no thank you. Were it all on Netflix as it will be elsewhere...

Rude, pig headed and lacking personal skills only in a political sense. Business man sense - shrewd- All those hard line positions are only starting negotiating positions. Time will tell If he can pull it off.

Paris accord- A joke and a money pit for America-let alone a false narrative. Trump did the right thing pulling out of it.

Asking European countries to step up and pay their NATO fees was a right think to do. American are sick of cheep ass lazy NATO partners who wont pay their bills.

I gather you are talking about Paul Manafort, A lobbyist and insider for decades who worked for anyone any government for a fee. Two faced Trump saying drain the swamp and have Manafort ( and Roger Stone) on his team- sure. But that still does not mean there were collusion with Russia.

If I were an non politician it would be prudent to employ some heavy hitters who know who is who and what is what and how to win would be a good thing. Doesn't go with the whole draining the swamp message.

Time and investigations will tell.

Once again a fact was stated.
No white male police officer has ever been convicted of murdering a black male in america's entire history.

No claim was made. A claim by definition leaves the possibility for the statement to be false.

The statement is true and if you are demanding evidence there are many accredited places of higher education that for a nominal fee will educate you. With that education you can become your own expert and conclude for yourself the statements validity.

Is JD Power's business entirely based on selling awards to car companies to use in their advertising? 'Cause I have never heard of JD Power in any context other than car commercials and every car from every manufacturer has always won the best car of the year award. That's a pretty brilliant business plan. Print a 15 page magazine once or twice a year that nobody actually subscribes to with very expensive advertising fees and suspiciously specific award categories.

Sorry in advance, I just had to rant about ads while they were on my mind.

I don't mind ads, if it's a good ad. Keep it simple and short, like: This is our product, this is what it does, here are some uses you could have for it, thank you for your time. I hate ads that try to be catchy, clever, or seem targeted at idiots. They basically follow the opposite formula for what I consider a good ad above. They start off by telling you that you have a problem, why you have the problem (your an idiot) and then tell you that have to buy their product to fix your problem, and usually go on way too long.

There are too few good ads, so I just don't watch ads anymore, anywhere. Advertisers have brought this on themselves. I don't watch much TV anymore, but for the few things I do still watch, I record on my DVR and skip ads. I use an ad blocker on my browser, but I will white list sites that I regularly visit if the ads are reasonable.

I don't mind paying a reasonable fee for ad-free content. I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon video (but fucking Amazon is now putting ads in for their own shit). I have a one-disk subscription with my Netflix account, but I'm only watching about one movie a month. I used to watch the trailers once so I could see if there are any up-coming movies I might want to see, but movie trailers are becoming too damn long now. And fuck you if you make your ads unskipable on the disk, I won't watch them out of principle. I've gotten to the point now where I just put the disk in 10 minutes or so before I'm ready to watch it, leave the sound muted and when I come back with my popcorn and beer the movie is ready to watch.

Well, Steve was an odd duck. He was a huge asshole, but when it came to people coming up with new and innovative ideas, he would support you into either success or failure (god help you if it was failure though). Once he died, there was a noticeable shift in direction towards conformity and the bottom line.

As an example, one of the managers I worked with had a team that was breaking customer satisfaction records because he had them actually caring about the customer. Unfortunately, it also meant they weren't pulling in the same amount of profit because they weren't trying to ram Applecare contracts down customer's throats, they were also supporting some customers that were just outside their free support, and finally they were using the internal program put in place under Steve that allowed escalation reps to go beyond the norm. Like helping a smaller school set up a mac mini server network without forcing them to go to server support and paying 300 bucks for a one time call. Yeah, bottom line wise, Apple lost a 300 dollar support call fee. But they later sold quite a few macbooks to the students who were used to hearing how good Apple was.

Anyway, after some of the other groups started complaining, that manager was quietly removed and put over a non support team. This pattern continued to grow worse right up until the time I left, whatever brought in the most money was king and thinking outside the box was verboten. It certainly influenced my decision to retire early, as it did others who went on to other jobs.

Except Trump will be long gone by the time the thing is done, it'll be the president after next who'll be looking at a giant rotting concrete mess with a monthly multi-billion upkeep fee..