Monica

Oh, Credit Karma, who writes your copy (or programs your algorithms)?

Your hard work this year has really paid off, and we want to remind you how far you've come.

(Um, I have? Also, this sure sounds like "you were having trouble and you're better now, attagirl!. I feel patronized.)

About a year ago your TransUnion score was X.

Check in now to see your updated (and uplifted) score, and keep up the awesome work.

"X" sounds about right, actually. Curious, I took a look. Why yes, my score has gone up! It is now X+1.

Uh, thanks?

(Fluctuations of a few points are completely normal. I expect to take a slight ding this month because we paid for something substantial online with the joint credit card. It'll come back next month when we pay that bill. You can't always write a check, but any use of your credit card affects your score at least a little.)

If you use Patreon, a site that connects creators (writers, artists, musicians, cartoonists, anybody) with people who'd like to support their work, then you probably already know that they're about to start charging the patrons (funders) for the credit-card transaction fees. (So you signed up to pay somebody, say, $1/month, and you'll now be charged $1.38.) What you might not have noticed is that they're charging a little more than what the credit-card companies charge them, and they're charging for each individual transaction even though they charge your card once for all the creators you support each month. Uh huh. siderea did some money math on their current practices.

One of the complications in trying to do online financial match-making, whether that's Patreon or PayPal or others, is that actually holding money is messy, legally speaking. So creators who have income and support other creators don't get to pay from their income (which is just bookkeeping); each transaction has to start with a credit card and end with a deposit. Or so it sounds.

Back in 1995 when the web was still young, I went to work for a micro-payment research project at CMU, NetBill. The idea was that consumers used a credit card to load some small amount, like $20, into a NetBill wallet, and merchants could sell digital goods for a nickle or a dime or $1/month or however they wanted to structure things. There was a secure protocol with escrow so nobody got screwed, and nobody was paying transaction fees on ten-cent sales. Since this was a university research project it was never set loose in the wild, so nobody ever had to decide what NetBill's fees would be. What made me think back to that now is that I have no idea how the financial regulatory stuff was supposed to work; we were holding money, after all. What I do know is that the project had Visa and a major bank on-board from the start to make sure it would be legal. Now I wonder how they planned to do that. I assume the rules have changed since then anyway, but I now realize that this was a part of the business model that I had no real insight into.

(I joined the project in part because it sounded interesting and in part because it sounded like something that could launch a start-up and that sounded interesting. Instead, two years after I joined, CyberCash licensed the technology and that was the end of that.)

Making small payments was hard then and it hasn't gotten much easier since. If you want to publish through Amazon Kindle or iTunes you can still make some income that way (and of course the platform takes a large cut), but self-publishing for small amounts is still hard. And supporting people without going through the "make a sellable thing on Amazon or iTunes" is even harder.

Edited to add: Some donation-processing systems give donors the option to pay the transaction fees. For example, Jewcer, the site we used to raise funds for "Days of Awe - Mi Yodeya" a couple years ago, was like that, and most donors tacked on the fees. My congregation asks members to kick in the fees when we make credit-card payments and, again, it's optional. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't -- depends on what the payment is for. But the key is that it's optional. If Patreon had offered patrons the choice instead of imposing the change, this might have gone over better -- but they couldn't do that, because they're using this to overcharge for those fees so people who know that won't go along with it.

Dear Charities¹ That I Already Support,

I sent you a sizable donation this year. Recently, even, because I mostly do that at year-end when I know where the annual finances ended up. You acknowledged receipt.

So stop bombarding me with email asking for donations, will you? If I weren't inclined to support you the repeated appeals would not change that -- in fact they would drive me away, as they've done with some of your predecessors. And even though I am inclined -- I like you and support you, after all -- I'm starting to weary of this. It feels like the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Get your fundraising people in sync with your receipts people, please. I want to support you, but your methods are growing frustrating.

¹ Yes, the use of the plural is correct. I have gotten several email requests this week from each of two organizations I have a long record of supporting with single, annual donations.

I'm interested in answers from all religions/denominations. (Please identify which you're talking about.)

I grew up going to a Roman Catholic church. Collection baskets were passed at Sunday services -- once for the church and, often, a second time for a special purpose (ranging from helping $disaster victims to buying a pipe organ). Members of the congregation were issued envelopes with an identifying number (not name) on the outside, so you could put cash in and still get a tax receipt at the end of the year. Children in religious school were also issued (small) envelopes; they were also numbered and I assume our coins were tallied with our parents' envelopes, but I never asked. Of course, some people (like visitors) just put cash directly into the basket, too.

This always struck me as dicey; how could an organization with regular expenses like heat and salaries and a building manage finances that way, other than by assuming that this year will be like last year? It occurs to me now that there might have also been a pledge system that I, as a child, never saw, but I'm just guessing here.

One of the things I found really refreshing about synagogues is that they have dues. When I found out about this I did a little happy-dance. Yay, no more guesswork! Join the congregation, get a bill, pay it, and everything's good. Right? (Aside: we couldn't pass a basket at Shabbat services even if we wanted to, because doing business and handling money are forbidden on Shabbat.)

Now that I've been part of congregational life for a while, though, I've realized that that's not the end of it by far. There are still special appeals, of course (we help $disaster victims too, after all), but there are also endowment campaigns, special appeals to supplement dues, fancy fund-raising dinners (with ad books, to draw contributions from non-members/businesses), and a myriad of other fund-raising activities. (I know that some congregations have a building fund with its own rules for member payments; we don't, so I don't really know how this works.) There are also fees for certain activities; the biggie here is religious school, which is a separate payment on top of dues.

My congregation -- and I assume this is true pretty much everywhere -- never turns anybody away for lack of ability to pay dues. We'll negotiate a reduced rate, sometimes quite nominal. Some of the other fund-raising is specifically to offset that. A draw from the endowment each year also offsets some expenses. I don't know if the proportion of our expenses paid for by dues is public information so I won't say, but we try to reduce that proportion by building the endowment -- through fund-raising, of course.

All of this makes me wonder when we risk hitting the point of "fund-raising fatigue" for members (I didn't grow up with this as normal so my perspective is unreliable), and what the mix of dues to fund-raising tends to be like elsewhere, and what other (fiscally-responsible) approaches are out there. What do others do? Are synagogues unique in having dues, or do churches have that too (perhaps packaged differently)? If you're a member of a church, does someone sit down with you and say "we expect you to donate $X this year"?

So, readers who belong to congregations of any sort, how do your congregations pay for expenses?

I got a surprisingly-slick call this weekend. The caller said he was from my credit-card company (which he named) and proceeded to offer me a deal intended for people who don't do math. I interrupted him to say no. He kept talking and used the phrase "opt-out", implying that this unrequested service (with accompanying monthly fee) was going to start unless I took steps. That sure didn't sound like my credit-card company, which has treated me well for something over 15 years. I interrupted him again and played along:

Me: Ok, what do I need to do to opt out?
Him: I just need your city of birth.
Me: Whatever for?
Him: To verify that you're the account holder.
Me: You called me; don't you know who you called?
Him: I'm sorry, I need that to continue.
Me: I understand. It's important to protect customers from identity theft. Speaking of which, what's my mother's maiden name?
Him: Oh, I'm not allowed to reveal confidential information to strangers.
Me: You called me, remember?
Him: (babble)
Me: Ok. Topeka.
Him: Thank you. You've been opted out.

(No, I was not born in Topeka, nor have I used that response for any account.)

After I hung up on him I called my credit-card company. They do offer such an insurance plan (through a third party), but I was not scheduled to be called. I said I couldn't remember -- do they use my city of birth for a challenge question? No, they don't. The rep gave me the phone number of the company they use (which doesn't answer the phone on weekends), so tomorrow I will attempt to find out what they know about this. (Either they have an employee who stepped way out of bounds or it wasn't them.) Meanwhile, my company says they have noted that I declined this offer and if anything shows up on my account it will be squashed. Is there any place else I should report this? I don't have caller ID so we can't track the caller, but I'd kind of like to record somewhere that if someone tries to use my name plus a birth city of Topeka to open an account, it's fraud.

By the way, at no point in the conversation with the caller was my credit-card number mentioned. Hmm. (My company offered to change my card number, but that's a big hassle because of automated payments and they advised waiting to see if any suspicious charges show up. I am already in the habit of reading my statement carefully, so we'll catch it.)

I'm a little creeped out by this. It would have been pretty easy to be fooled, I think -- you can't "read back" on phone calls the way you can on suspicious email and the call went on for a while, so it would have been easy, I think, for people not especially fluent in phishing schemes to forget that credentials had not been established. This is not the Nigeria-style scam that plays on the stupidly greedy; this one could easily catch smart people who just aren't up on this stuff, I think.

I used to occasionally have a problem with an overnight power outage killing the alarm clock and causing me to oversleep, but I've more recently realized that having a UPS or three means never having to fear that again. :-) (Fortunately, today's power outage came after we were up, not in the middle of the night, and only lasted about five minutes. I was just about ready to interrupt my morning grooming to shut down computers when the need went away.)

In the "interesting if true, and interesting anyway" department: earlier this week I learned that the folks who handle disposal of sensitive documents for my company are blind. (Well, not the truck driver.) If I understand correctly, the local blind association arranges this, as sort of an extra guarantee or something. Who'd'a thought?

Signal boost: it looks like someone's testing stolen credit-card numbers on a large scale. Check your statement for microtransactions; they're testing the cards with ~20-cent transactions to verify that they're good before hammering them. Link from jducoeur.

A few days ago my copy of I Remember the Future by mabfan arrived. Yay! I'll have some nice reading for Shabbat.

Oldest LOLcat? Link from siderea.

My doctor confirmed that I should be taking calcium supplements now to (with luck) fend off problems later. Where can I find calcium tablets that are sized for, y'know, normal people and not horses? Most bottles in stores don't even include pictures on the label, so it's hit or miss. The oblong ones I have are scored for cutting widthwise, but I need them to be narrower, not necessarily shorter, and my attempts to do that have all ended badly. What do other women of a certain age do?

The bookshop that has all the books in the world -- except one is a lovely 8-page graphic short story (link from shewhomust).

Joel on Software and Coding Horror (I hadn't heard of the latter before but looks interesting) have launched Stack Overflow, which looks like it could be a good resource for answering technical questions. (I hope that by logging in with my LJ OpenID from home and saying "always accept", I'll be able to answer questions with that ID from work where LJ is blocked.)

Programmers as carpenters (short).

Harold Feld's analysis of the Palin camp's attack on Oprah (part one). This story fizzled soon after hitting CNN on Monday; I hope that's the last we hear of it, but it seems plausible that it could come back on a slower news day. Sheesh. Usually it's folks from the left who assert that freedom of the press means you're entitled to someone else's press.

A few on the economy, some serious and some light (because sometimes you have to laugh to avoid crying too hard):

• We've all seen that ABC graph comparing the Obama and McCain tax plans (sorted by bracket). Here's a version that's closer to scale (link from anastasiav).
• Scott Adams surveyed economists to try to find out what the experts think about the candidates. A surprising (to me) number said it doesn't matter which candidate wins (on this set of issues).
• An article on the current troubles by one of the Nobel laureates in economics. Interesting on first reading; I haven't dug deeper yet. And, as demonstrated most recently in the previous bullet, economists don't tend to agree on much.
• This picture turned out to be sadly ironic.
• Didn't anyone consider this angle on the looming economic disaster? (Onion video from rjlippincott).

This Shabbat we had a guest, Ruth Messinger from American World Jewish Service. She spoke Friday night about global communities and led a study session Shabbat morning on the theme of "to whom am I responsible?". We talked about communities and how they overlap and how this can influence our degrees of connection, and we talked in passing about how we make decisions about tzedakah (charitable contributions, though that's not a precise translation).

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Ruth told us about an interesting family tradition she'd heard somewhere: when each kid in the extended family reaches a certain age (I think she said 9 in this case), a family member with the means sits that kid down for a talk that goes something like this: "Here is a check for $100. It's made out to your parents 'cause they have the checking account, but at any time during the coming year, you can direct them to write a check to any charity you like until this money is gone. If you come back in a year and tell me how you spent it, you'll get more to distribute next year." There is no request up front to justify the decisions but, she said, it comes out in the followup conversation. I think this is a neat idea; think of it as a teeny tiny foundation that gets people thinking about decisions and decision-making from an early age.

Words that are often misused #1: "periodic". To be meaningful, this word needs to be accompanied by some indication of the period. "Daily" is "periodic", but probably not what is meant in a recipe's direction to "stir periodically". :-)

Two facts that seem to be at odds with each other: (1) a lot of medieval Islamic recipes call for vinegar; and (2) Islam forbids the consumption of wine.

Our baron (who lives in a castle) shared one way to get your castle past the zoning board. I wonder how that's going to work out for the owners in the end, now that the neighbors have noticed. (Who would have thought you could build a castle on the sly in a populated area?)

Two interesting posts that showed up on my reading list within a few hours of each other, serendipitously: whom do you friend? (from cahwyguy) and who owns the conversation? (from jducoeur). Both have lots of comments that I haven't yet digested.

Words that are often misused #2: "rebate". A rebate is a refund of monies paid. If you give money to someone who didn't pay any (or as much as is being given out), the correct word is "gift" (or "grant", if you want to be more governmental about it). Just sayin'.

Query: can anyone reading this point me to a neutral high-level discussion of economics, that I can consume in an hour, that explains how merely pushing small amounts of money into the economy helps fend off a recession? What does the mere act of one-time spending accomplish, and does it matter whether it's splurge-buying or spending you would have done anyway? My knowledge of macro-economics is, as you can tell, a little on the spotty side. I don't care enough to read a tome, but I'd like to read something shorter, particularly if it doesn't come with an agenda. And yes, I realize that the rhetoric and the real reasons behind the stimulus package probably differ; I'm exploring the stated reason here.

Yesterday I got a statement from my credit-card company. It was a transaction summary for 2005; I've never seen this sort of thing before. The front page informed me that last year I spent $X on food, $Y on entertainment, $Z on professional services, and so on for about 15 broad categories. That's the sort of thing that could be useful if you don't think about it -- but I'm the kind of person who thinks about it.

I'm not sure which possibility is more disturbing: that they are making inferences based on who the payee is (Giant Eagle sounds like groceries, etc), or that the merchants are providing the credit-card companies with categories for the transactions.

My record-keeping is not thorough enough for me to figure out which is more likely on my own. Perhaps I will ask them.

When I use a credit card I fully expect that the particulars of the transaction -- date, amount, and merchant -- are not private and might be mined. If it's really important to me, I pay cash. But I do not expect a description, even a high-level one, of the goods or services purchased to be part of that record.

Last night's episode of 24 really triggered the "if I were the evil overlord and my enemy had delivered himself into my hands I'd just shoot him" reflex. I'm just saying.

Last night's D&D game marked the temporary end of a major arc. We succeeded in killing the evil vampires, but the big nasty one did not in fact crumble to dust when exposed to sunlight, or running water, or both, and a stake through the heart seems distressingly temporary. Whee. So we still have to worry about him. The fight was exciting and we managed to get out alive (though injured in not-entirely-recoverable ways). I expect some good character journal entries from the last several game sessions; I hope to get them written soon.

Thursday night Dani and I head to Silver Spring where we will, with several friends, celebrate a victory over a different evil overlord by consuming vast quantities of food and drink. Someone once said that most Jewish holidays can be reduced to "they tried to kill us; we won; let's eat", and with Purim that's really true. :-)

HP sent me a rebate check for $50. The problem is that they owed me a rebate check for $150 according to CompUSA, and CompUSA itself still owes me $100. The CompUSA folks aren't overlords, but they might well be evil. Time will tell.

Automated alternatives to humans in the service industry have been around for a while. ATMs were probably the first widespread case of this. The real value of ATMs was the ability to interact with your bank at times when the bank wouldn't otherwise be available. I think ATMs are a real win for that reason, and the only time I visit humans in my bank is when I want to make a deposit.

More recently, I've interacted with automation that is designed to specifically replace humans rather than broadening service. The automated check-out at grocery stores is the big example here. Instead of one cashier per line, stores now need one employee per 4 or so lines. This isn't making things more convenient for customers; unlike ATMs, the scanners are only available when the store is open anyway.

There are practical reasons I tend to avoid the automated checkouts, mostly related to speed. The line for the human has to be about three times as long as the line for the machine before the machine looks like a time-saver. People may get more proficient at scanning and packing over time, of course.

But I find that even absent that consideration, I'm reluctant to use the machine. Doing so helps to eliminate a low-end job that might be the only job the job-holder is capable of doing. Most of the cashiers I see at the grocery store aren't college-age kids looking for spending money; they're middle-aged and sometimes visibly handicapped.

This is not wholly a compassion-based argument; it's also one of expedience. I think we as a society are better off if almost everyone has a productive job. And some people are only capable of the lower-end jobs that are most in danger of being automated away. (Aside: for this reason, requirements for high minimum wages are also a bad idea -- don't make it cost-ineffective to hire people at prices they're willing to work for!)

We cannot avoid automation, of course, and in many cases it's a good thing. I'm no Luddite (she says, typing on her computer :-) ). But I kind of wish that we could focus it a little differently sometimes.

And yes, sometimes the humans are annoying to deal with. Last night I lost close to ten minutes to an inept cashier, and there is one (mentally challenged) bagger who I will never again allow to touch my groceries because he seems utterly bewildered by ideas like "the bread goes on top" (multiple failures). People who aren't capable of doing the job shouldn't hold the job anyway just out of pity. (Giant Eagle was right to fire the guy who was partially eating food and then putting the package back on the shelf, and I don't care that he didn't understand that this was wrong.) But y'know, the machines aren't painless either -- just try to get a scanning error fixed. And for the most part, the people holding these jobs are quite capable and willing to work, and I find I'm rooting for the people over the machines.