Banks Are Going To Try To Charge You More Fees
Posted on 29. Jun, 2009 by Cameron in banksters
According to this story in the Washington Post, the banksters are going to try to create sneakier ways to make you spend too much money and find yourself being hit with newly created fees in order to prop up their revenues. Expect the same thing to happen in Australia.
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Posted on 29. Jun, 2009 by Cameron in General
Free Will Is An Illusion (like God) – by Susan Blackmore
Posted on 28. Jun, 2009 by Cameron in free will
Excerpt:
So why do we feel as though we are having a single stream of conscious experiences? Perhaps it was useful for our past survival to have a false model of ourselves, to attribute our body’s actions to an inner self, and to see the world in terms of spiritual forces and non-physical agents, when there are no such things. Perhaps it is possible to give up these illusions by practising watching the mind.
Susan was a guest on G’Day World talking about free will back in May 2008.
Read the rest of her recent article in The Guardian here.
Your Bank Hates You (by Scott Adams)
Posted on 28. Jun, 2009 by Cameron in banksters
I’ve been talking about why we hate banks. It might be because they hate us!
Some insight into the way banks work from Dilbert creator Scott Adams (who says he was working at a bank when Dilbert was born):
Banks and credit card companies make a lot of money from late fees. They have a naked interest in keeping their service as inconvenient as possible.
Makes sense, right? Except that it’s another example of good profits vs bad profits (as Jen Storey explained on my last banking podcast). This rational might increase bank profits in the short term, but in the long term it pisses us off. That doesn’t matter too much to the existing bank executives, as their bonuses are based on THIS year’s profits and not the long term future of the bank. They are incented to have a short term outlook. The bank execs also know that we don’t have much choice. Except that we DO. That’s why I set up an account with a credit union last week (CUA). I’ll be shutting down my bank accounts over the next month and moving everything over to CUA – a credit union is owned by its MEMBERS and not SHARE HOLDERS, so it has an incentive to provide good service, not to maximize profits at the expense of service.