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News and notes from around the interweb:
- Uber class action settlement. You’ll probably get $1. In Uber credit. Next year.
- Chase Sapphire Reserve cardmembers can get 10,000 points per person they refer who gets the card up to 50,000 points per year.
Bear in mind that Chase now limits approvals to folks who haven’t gotten a signup bonus for any Sapphire product in the past 24 months and the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card signup bonus is actually better because in addition to 50,000 points after $4000 spend within 3 months. And of course Sapphire Preferred has just a $0 annual fee then $95.
- Even people who think civil liberties are ‘crazy’ (ironic in a country founded on same) seem to think the TSA’s violation of those liberties are crazier still.
I’m not a crazy ACLU-type. I’ve had no problem with body-scanners or previous TSA pat-downs. In 2009, a terrorist famously smuggled a bomb in his underwear aboard a U.S. flight. But an agent of the state should probably only touch a citizen’s genitals seven or eight times if the agent has reasonable suspicion, and not because a machine is malfunctioning or calibrated, intentionally or unintentionally, to detect explosives on everyone who is tested.
- Last month I wrote about aviation at a standstill in South Africa and Zimbabwe after Zimbabwe’s first lady found her sons in a tryst with a topless model. A very strange story.
Now it seems that Air Zimbabwe can’t take possession of some Boeing 777s for the not entirely surprising reason that they’ve been unable to source the foreign currency.
Air Zimbabwe Boeing 767, by Dmitriy Pichugin via Wikimedia Commons - United is launching 4 new transatlantic routes: Newark – Porto and Keflavik, Washington Dulles – Edinburgh, and San Francisco – Zurich.
- Tourists not welcome in the Florida Keys until further notice
- Olive Garden’s Neverending Pasta Pass returns on Thursday at 2pm Eastern. It’s a great deal, you’ll have to act fast, but the major downside of course is that to take advantage of it you’ll have to eat at Olive Garden. (HT: Khalil D.)
I got the email about Uber on Monday. With the ID number from there, it took only a minute (literally) to fill out the form to get Paypal instead of Uber credit. Uber credits, especially small ones, can be worse than no credit at all, since you don’t get to choose when to use them. You might have a $15 referral credit and take a $17 ride, but Uber may apply the $1 lawsuit credit instead…
The fares on the TAP EWR-Porto flights are sky high. This could help.
Great news. I love all of garden. Bone app the teeth.