News and notes from around the interweb:
- Peeling back the onion on manufactured spending secret societies. Fascinating read.
- 50% off IHG Rewards redemptions in Mexico and the Caribbean for September and October stays. Book by September 6.
- Over 500 TSA screeners have been fired for stealing from passenger luggage. And it ain’t easy to actually get fired from the TSA. This has been a problem since they beginning, but a crackdown started only 2 years ago. And the TSA thinks they get blamed when it’s really others doing more of the stealing.
- Atlantic City is going bust if it can’t break the gambling habit. Instead the city just gets worse and worse.
- Behind the scenes of inflight entertainment censorship. (HT: The Forward Cabin)
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I just got back to the country after a month in Sri Lanka and Thailand, so I missed the whole kerfluffle referred to in the manufactured spend article in which a blogger discovered and outed an MS method and then withdrew the post.
Since the article mentioned the method is already gone, does anyone mind sharing the details?
Was that the Miles Professor?
Great link……….shhhhhhhh……..don’t tell anybody anything………ever or you are in BIG trouble!
Larry
Certain malls offer gift cards with low fees. That’s about it. And the MP wasn’t the first to talk about this.
The malls in this case were Simon Malls, which I have written about. There was some specificity to it that folks pushed back on, she’s friends with that crew and I think took the criticism super-personally.
@Steve yes
When I sign up for a credit card, I usually use some blogger’s link, perhaps one whose contributions I’ve found especially useful to me lately. You walk a fine line between sharing material and earning broader readership and patronage, and hiding material for fear of getting the secret society folks angry at you, but at the same time coming across as simply a credit card pitchperson.
I’m not doing MS myself, but if readers in general get the feeling that a blogger is holding back a lot of material to placate a selfish in-group, and his or her public persona is pretty much that of an agent for credit card advertising, that’s not going to contribute to credibility beyond that in-group.
Gary has actually shared more on this topic than most bloggers (and taken a ton of heat for it, too).
He was the first person to talk about cash advancing MyVanilla Debit cards I think, at least the monster Flyertalk.com thread on the subject starts out with a link to my blog for instance.
He’s talked about liquidating gift cards via evolve money, buying money orders with the suntrust debit card, lots of things that people do with bluebird. He’s talked about the JH Preferred Card. I’ve learned a whole lot from his post and gotten much actionable advice. He’s also talked about Simon Mall gift cards, the very thing that got Miles Professor to take down her post in response to the pitch forks that went after her.
Gary’s written about Amazon Payments. And Kiva. And that’s not even really his primary focus area for the blog. I for one appreciate it!!!!!
I concur with Janet……I think the amount of MS on this blog is perfect although as I struggled with understanding VR I didn’t always feel that way…….Ultimately, you can’t talk about credit card signups without talking about MS at some point……they are forever linked if you want to keep the spigot at full blast………