Tag Archives: southern-prison

The CARD Act Has Saved Us $12 Billion Per Year

by celemaiieftinebileteavion Posted on January 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Who do credit card companies make the most money from? Answer: the poor, by far, because they rack up the highest fees and the highest interest expense. Card issuers also make some money on the rich, because they buy a lot of stuff. This generates interchange fees (usually 2-3 percent of the amount charged) that exceed the cost the reward points they dole out to attract these customers.

It’s the customers in the middle who cost them. They don’t buy enough stuff to generate lots interchange fees, but they aren’t poor enough to get themselves stuck with lots of late fees and interest charges. The chart below shows this. Folks with FICO scores between 660 and 730 (representing about a third of all customers) are net losses for credit card companies.

This comes from a paper written last year about the effect of the CARD Act, a law passed in 2009 that modestly regulated the credit card industry. The authors’ conclusion: “The CARD Act successfully reduced borrowing costs, in particular for borrowers with the lowest FICO scores. We find no evidence for offsetting increases in other costs or a decline in credit volume.” All in all, the CARD Act saved consumers—mostly lower-income consumers—about $12 billion per year. For much more, see today’s Harold Pollack interview with one of the authors here.

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The CARD Act Has Saved Us $12 Billion Per Year

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Hip Hip Hooray For They!

by MonikaKerr Posted on January 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post reports some terrific news:

Singular “they,” the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening.

….The Post’s style guide ratified this usage last month, which caused some grammar pedants to shriek. But as Post copy editor Bill Walsh explained, the singular they is “the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun.”

OK, so we can now say:

I talked to Pat, and they said the sofa was on its way.
Pat said their sofa had been promised for tomorrow.
Pat came over, and I talked to them about when the sofa would arrive.

Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it? But I’m all for it. I will celebrate the day when gendered pronouns are gone for good.

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Hip Hip Hooray For They!

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How to Spend Less So You Can Afford to Save More

by JacklynHume Posted on January 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Thanks to Harold Pollack, personal finance index cards are all the rage. Today, the New York Times even has an index of popular index cards. Many of them share the same suggestions: pay off your credit cards, max out your 401(k), invest in low-load index funds, etc.

This is excellent advice. But how do you do it? Where do you get the money for this? For that, you need Kevin’s pre-index card. Not everything here works for everyone, but most of them will comfortably reduce daily expenses for most people without too much angst. And you can add your own ideas in comments. Enjoy!

See original article here: 

How to Spend Less So You Can Afford to Save More

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Big Banks Get Their New Marching Orders From the Fed

by Latarsha14 Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Seven years after the great banking meltdown of 2008, and five years after the passage of Dodd-Frank, the Fed has finally announced new capital requirements for large, systemically important banks that could devastate the financial system if they failed. These new requirements can be met only with common equity, the safest form of capital, and are in addition to the 7 percent common equity level already required of all banks:

J.P. Morgan would face a capital “surcharge” of 4.5% of its risk-weighted assets under the final rule. The other seven firms must maintain an additional capital buffer of between 1% and 3.5%….The size of each bank’s additional capital requirement is tailored to the firm’s relative riskiness, as measured by a formula created by international regulators and the Fed. A bank’s surcharge can grow or shrink depending on changes such as size, complexity and entanglements with other big firms.

….“A key purpose of the capital surcharge is to require the firms themselves to bear the costs that their failure would impose on others,” Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said in a written statement prepared for this afternoon’s open meeting. “They must either hold substantially more capital, reducing the likelihood that they will fail, or else they must shrink their systemic footprint, reducing the harm that their failure would do to our financial system.”

Leverage, leverage, leverage. That’s the big lesson we should have learned from the Great Meltdown. And the cleanest and easiest way to reduce leverage is to increase capital requirements. This is a good move in the right direction, though it probably doesn’t go far enough.

It also applies only to ordinary banks, not to the shadow banking sector—which, in retrospect, appears to have been at least as big a contributor to the financial collapse as conventional banks. But that’s a tougher nut to crack. It will probably be a while before we see how the Fed plans to handle that.

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Big Banks Get Their New Marching Orders From the Fed

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More Pluto! Troughs, Hills, and Pitted Surfaces!

by cazarehotel Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest from Pluto, a hi-res image of the Sputnik Plain, which should be enough to get Republicans seething. From NASA:

In the latest data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, a new close-up image of Pluto reveals a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains, in the center-left of the heart feature, informally named “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.

….Scientists have two working theories as to how these segments were formed. The irregular shapes may be the result of the contraction of surface materials, similar to what happens when mud dries. Alternatively, they may be a product of convection, similar to wax rising in a lava lamp. On Pluto, convection would occur within a surface layer of frozen carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen, driven by the scant warmth of Pluto’s interior.

So, um, mud drying or lava lamps. Take your pick. Cool picture, though.

See the original article here – 

More Pluto! Troughs, Hills, and Pitted Surfaces!

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Quote of the Day: Mike Huckabee Wants American Wars to Last Ten Days Max

by Steven Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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From noted national security expert Mike Huckabee:

Here is what we have to do: America has to have the most formidable, fierce, military in the history of mankind. So when we have a threat, whether it is ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranians, whatever it is, we make it very clear that we plan to push back and destroy that threat to us. And we won’t take 10 years doing it, we hopefully won’t even take 10 months, it will be like a 10 day exercise, because the fierceness of our forces would mean that we can absolutely guarantee the outcome of this film. That’s how America needs to operate in the world of foreign affairs, and foreign policy.

Damn! If only we’d known this before. If we had taken this stuff a little more seriously, we could have wiped out all these guys in a short series of ten-day bloodbaths. No more Al-Qaeda. No more ISIS. No more Hamas or Hezbollah. Even the entire country of Iran would apparently have fallen to our fierceness in ten days or so. Booyah!

Generally, speaking, I try not to obsess over each and every Idiocy of the Day™, since they fly fast and furious during campaign season. But I have to assume that Huckabee is being more than astonishingly ignorant here. He’s also channeling the beliefs of a lot of base conservatives, who figure if we stopped pussyfooting around and spending all our time worrying about PC crap like gay soldiers and whatnot, we could unleash the full might of America and destroy our enemies in a matter of days or weeks. And that would be that.

I wonder how many people are out there who believe this? More than we think, probably. Maybe someone should take a poll.

See original article here – 

Quote of the Day: Mike Huckabee Wants American Wars to Last Ten Days Max

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Friday Cat Blogging – 5 June 2015

by LelandFountain Posted on June 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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I suppose I could write a post about the Rubio family’s many traffic tickets, but I dunno. Seems to me that 23 mph in a school zone is pretty safe driving. Florida sure does have some strict rules about that, I guess.

In any case, it’s far more pleasant to round out the week with some catblogging. Here is Hopper blissfully stretched out while her brother grooms her chin. So sweet. At least, it was until Hilbert got tired of licking and decided to clamp his jaws around Hopper’s neck. I pushed him away, but this is sadly typical behavior from our own Dr. Hilbert and Mr. Hyde.

At the moment, Hilbert is resting right next to me. He exhausted himself running from window to window to watch our local squirrel hopping along the fence. At one point his tail was flapping so vigorously he was knocking stuff off my desk. But now the squirrel is gone and it’s snoozing time.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 5 June 2015

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Here’s Why Libertarians Are Mostly Men

by ConsuelWaylen Posted on June 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jeet Heer investigates a burning question today: why are most libertarians men? He offers several plausible explanations, but I think he misses the real one, perhaps because it’s pretty unflattering to libertarians.

So here’s the quick answer: hard core libertarianism is a fantasy. It’s a fantasy where the strongest and most self-reliant folks end up at the top of the heap, and a fair number of men share the fantasy that they are these folks. They believe they’ve been held back by rules and regulations designed to help the weak, and in a libertarian culture their talents would be obvious and they’d naturally rise to positions of power and influence.

Most of them are wrong, of course. In a truly libertarian culture, nearly all of them would be squashed like ants—mostly by the same people who are squashing them now. But the fantasy lives on regardless.

Few women share this fantasy. I don’t know why, and I don’t really want to play amateur sociologist and guess. Perhaps it’s something as simple as the plain observation that in the more libertarian past, women were subjugated to men almost completely. Why would that seem like an appealing fantasy?

Anyway, this is obviously simplistic and unflattering, and libertarians are going to be offended by it. Sorry. But feel free to take some guesses in comments about why women don’t take to libertarianism as strongly as men.

Continued here:

Here’s Why Libertarians Are Mostly Men

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Friday Cat Blogging – 21 February 2014

by Oliab719z Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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The weather is still great around here, and that means we get another outdoor pic of Domino this week. Today, she’s posing as Queen of the Garden. If you look closely, you’ll see that she’s plonked herself on top of a sprinkler head, and since these are on a timer I always figure she’s going to regret that someday. But not yet. So far, a sprinkler has never gone off while she’s sleeping on it. Nine lives indeed.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 21 February 2014

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Today We Bring You a Nerd’s Eye View of the Olympics

by Aaron Darek Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago I whined about the annoyingly widespread humanization of Olympic athletes. Enough! We all know that what’s really important about sporting events is statistics, and the more obscure the better. So here are my candidates for nerdiest Olympic coverage so far. First up is Ryan Wallerson’s look at the best athletes of the Sochi games. Not by measuring scores or times or anything normal like that, but by measuring which athlete scored the most standard deviations from the mean in their event. The winner is Poland’s Kamil Stoch in ski jumping:

Next up is a look at which countries have done the best. Not by crudely counting medals or per capita medals or any of that nonsense. This chart looks how countries have done so far compared to how many medals they were predicted to win. The big winner, at 183 percent, is the Netherlands, thanks to their kick-ass performance in speed skating. The most dismal performance so far is from South Korea, at 31 percent. But there are still two days left!

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Today We Bring You a Nerd’s Eye View of the Olympics

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