Archive for May, 2003

I think having cats is a lot like having a ideal boyfriend. They’re they’re there looking wantingly at you when you first get home, they always want more of the bed when your sleeping, and they’re great cuddlers.

Of course, they also need TLC at times when its inconvenient for you, but all in all its a give and take.

With the exceptions of good sex and intelligent conversation they satisfy most of my needs for a boyfriend, at least to a minimally acceptable extent. In addition there is no bullshitting when they’re happy or unhappy… They’re happy and they start purring, they’re angry, and you get clawed to death.

There’s gotta be something more to marriage and a good relationship than just fulfilling needs. If I went around and proposed to marry every person and thing that fulfilled my needs, I’d be convicted of polygamy to several Starbucks, none to many restaurants, and a Krogers or two.

Marriage, and relationships leading to marriage really have to mean something, but I admit, I don’t really know, because I’ve not been there. Society recognizes it, and we’ve got 1049 federal laws to codify our recognition.

Why the hell do people get married in a drive through in Los Vegas? If its something thats so special, shouldn’t it merit more than the same architectural feature than as where you get your Big Mac and French (not Freedom) Fries?

Here is my conundrum.

I’m invited to a wedding of a high school acquaintance, it just happens though that my sister is friends with her. She’s two years younger than me. Plus, the her and the guy she is marrying don’t really get along that well.

The way my sister describes it is all about the show and having a picture perfect wedding for her. I’ve only been to one other wedding and I had really strange hair similar to this, but it was about having a nice wedding for the bride and groom.

My sister and I have already discussed when the divorce between them is going to be, my sister thinks it’ll be in 18 months, I’ll give it 24. Most of the bride’s friends think the same thing, just varying on how many months it will take them to file, but not if they will file.

So I’ve been debating if I should go to the wedding. If they truly loved each other and they would be good for each other I’d go. But as it stands, the whole fucking thing is making a mockery of what a wedding should be about: love, life long commitment, sharing, and support. This wedding only satisfies at best two of these four things.

So should I support this disparagement of an institution I have no ability to partake in myself? The bride is making a mockery of everything I hold dear in a relationship. God dammit she’s only 19 or 20, how can you make a commitment at this point that should last you for 60 years? When I was 20 (not too long ago) I had issues deciding on and committing to my major in school, a trivial matter compared to marriage.

I want to wish her well, but I’ve gotta be honest to her; this isn’t what I can in my heart support. If its the real thing she can wait till she is 22 or 23, its not going away. But if its not the real thing, then she’s saved herself a mistake.

So I’m not going to this wedding. And I’ll stick to my commitment ceremony and civil unions thank you, if marriage is going to be pooped on like this.

Well by now I guess we should expect it. So lets all grab our ankles and bend over really far and take it from the fucking companies who think they don’t get enough money.

In case your missing my non descript point, I’m referring to the Visa and Mastercard settlement. For quickies, Greedy Walmart and a few of their floundering friends got together and said “Hey, we’re getting screwed by these banks who are making a lot of money, lets sue em.” (Okay, a little bit of colloquiums added in, but all in all a pretty accurate rendering.)

For those who didn’t know how the credit and debit cards we are love are paid for, a lesson is in store. In the olden days long, long ago stores used to offer their own credit, so if you defaulted on a loan the store was out of the money, plus they had all the extra hassle of keeping track of the moines they were owed, and arranging to have the appropriate legs broken when the time came. At some point the banks and the merchants got together and came up with an agreement. The banks would shoulder the debt and take care of lots of the processing, in exchange the merchants would give the banks a discount on the merchandise sold to account for processing costs and bad debts.

Here is a disjunct in the bearing of risk that in my belief became a huge problem. Merchants have no restraints on what goods they push, if someone has a large credit line a merchant can push an expensive good without any thought if the ultimate credit extended is going to be repaid. The merchant gets paid irregardless if the bank gets paid. (Lets ignore charge-backs at the moment.) It’s in merchant’s interest to get you to buy something overly expensive, because they got paid. (This probably more than anything else is to account for lots of the spend happy (and economically good) times we’ve had; the US has a negative savings rate, that means as a whole we Americans borrow more money than we save.)

Okay, next thing is the banks came along with the goal of increasing charge card usage. (a term encompassing credit and debit cards) But, they realized to do this they needed to secure extra income to account for increased losses from the idiotic credit happy masses. So they came up with this wonderful debit card, which they bore much less of the risk. (Because it got deducted from actual currency, instead of being promised to be paid by the consumer in the future.) Since the banks had already gotten the merchants to sign onto the honor-all-cards policy, which requires that any Visa or Mastercard card be treated the same, they were a shoe in for the banks. (There even is a bank that built their business on the extra income from debit cards, and they’re not happy with the settlement.)

Of course the merchants caught wind of this and the large greedy ones (namely Walmart, which people need to stop shopping at, because its destroying America.) decided to sue on the matter, claiming they were paying money for the banks to assume risks, for Credit Cards, that the banks weren’t assuming, because the purchases were made with currency on debit cards. The small merchants also jumped on board, not realizing that they’ll need to rent more equipment to process the “cheaper” debit network transatctions.

So who’s to blame here? The banks are greedy, overall they want more money in interest from more credit cards. The merchants are greedy they want to make more money by breaking up the bank’s scheme that they benefited from in the form of higher consumer debt and higher spending.

So the conundrum comes down to this:

Here we’ve gotten back to the all important disjunct. Who assumes the risk? Everyone is supposed to pay a little bit of it, the merchants in the discount rate, the consumer in interest fees, the bank in lost profits. (okay, the last one is flimsy, but go with it.)

The merchants don’t have any incentive to make sure that the consumers they’re targeting can pay, the banks just have to take statistical guesses on things.

So now for a proposal:

The bank takes a straight processing fee of 20-40 cents for each transaction. If somewhere down the line the consumer defaulted on the loan, the bank would eat 25% of the default and then charge say 75% of that back to the merchant, as a penalty for selling to customers who in actuality couldn’t pay. The banks would shoulder part of the responsibility because they extended credit to someone who shouldn’t've had it.

This would likely do two things, rein in crazy merchants who push overly expensive shit on consumers who cannot afford it. It would also move the whole thing from spreading out risk for all the transactions out all over the place, and place them back in actual risk. Yeah, the logistics would be a little tricky, and would probably take a good five years to really get ironed out, but with computer technology today it could be done.

Hopefully, it would also get the banks out of offering way too much credit and causing people to get themselves into problems.

I know this is a pie in the sky dream, and I skipped over my chance to comment on this case. (I was contacted by Visa and Mastercard’s lawyers.) But I’m getting fucking sick of bending over and holding my ankles — and I’m a bottom…

I took the cats to the vet today for the first time. Guess what? They’re boys. Which means by their behavior they’re gay boi’s! Whoo hoo, I get two gay bois to move in and enjoy sleeping on my bed, and they’re felines… just my luck. ;-)

I went to see How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying at my alma-mater. (Well, its not my alma-mater, because I didn’t graduate there, so I guess its my nonma-mater.)

It was a well done show, but I would title it How to Write a Musical without Really Having a Plot; it’s one of those shows that succeeds on performances alone, the plot could’ve already been explained, the music is solid but nothing worthy of buying a CD. It really runs on quirky actors upstaging performances, and only in the end tries to be philosophic, with the message we’re all brothers and sisters but it fails, by utilizing a baseball bat to bludgeon the message into your head.

Hopefully the producers of the CD didn’t lose too much money and WSU didn’t pay too much for the rights, because well they’re playing the poor man again, but at least this time they haven’t resorted to pan handling like they used to do. Instead this summer they’re doing three shows just for the cash.

Of course someone should stop these egotistical maniacs, but President Goldenberg likes it. The real question is why is a college program doing such expensive shows? I tend to believe its because they’re too focused on creating "broadway" that really training their students. I know for a fact that the student run Directing Lab is not really supported by the theatre department. It exists and they’re happy to holding it up as a success, but when it comes to supporting it they put as many hurdles in place as possible.

I must agree with Dr. Taylor‘s assertion that our universities are now glorified career training programs, and unfortunately not places of knowledge and learning. And thats sad.