An interesting story about credit card companies

I’ve been trying to decide whether to invest in Capital One for a long time and, you know, looking strictly at the financials, it would have been a nice investment:

They recruited heavily at Stanford, got some very good people, paid exquisitely well (I’m serious, a lot), and have a very analytical process for rolling out [...]

My minimum payment is $22 and that is absurd

I’m paying off my credit card bill online right now, and the amount is $1,473. The minimum payment is only $22.00. In other words, I only have to pay 1.5% of what I owe right now. How sweet of you, Citibank!!
That is so ridiculous. If you only paid the monthly minimum, can you guess how [...]

Jim asks and receives

An email from Jim English, our superstar intern at PBwiki:
So in general, I’ve never considered myself one of those “let me speak to your manager” type of people. However, having read some of your stuff, I’ve started to feel like certain “expenses” are really just going straight to the pockets of big businesses. [...]

April 3 = Call Your Ass Out day

2006 is already 25% over.
Around mid-February, people start to forget their New Year’s resolutions, or they start rationalizing them away: “Well, I’ll go to the gym next week but I’m so busy this week” blah blah blah.
I’m going to issue 2 challenges today: First, don’t forget. Redouble your efforts on whatever resolutions you made. It’s [...]

I went out to dinner this weekend…

It was my friend’s birthday on Saturday, so a bunch of us went out to eat in SF. Apparently a couple people at the other end of the table ordered some wine and nobody was paying attention…

Update: Ok, the backstory: My friend (the guy whose birthday it was) called the restaurant in advance and had [...]