News and notes from around the interweb:
- “More than a dozen Donald Trump businesses have received luxury hospitality awards from a company run by one of Trump’s longtime associates, an ex-convict nicknamed Joey No Socks.”
- Delta flight intercepted by Greek F-16s. Rationalize all you want but F16s don’t scramble so their pilot can peer inside the windows of the commercial aircraft.
- TSA complains about not enough money. So Congress gives them more. And they say it’s not enough, expect long lines anyway. TSA attrition is up, the length of time they take to onboard screeners is up, and they’re slow-walking the screening process.
- “Now that the supposedly tech-friendly Austin has banned Uber, what comes next?”
And as [City Council member] Ellen Troxclair has noted, Austin is entirely unprepared to even enforce its new regulations. “Uber and Lyft left Austin because they were unable to comply with the city’s new fingerprinting rules,” wrote Troxclair.
“Meanwhile, the city is bending over backwards to encourage customers to use Get Me and Wingz, who not only are not fingerprinting their drivers, but may not even run any kind of background checks before passengers get in the car.”
- Tarantulas on a plane: During a flight from the Dominican Republic to Canada, a tarantula – perhaps brought on by a passenger hoping to take it home – crawled up a passengers leg. “Even the flight attendants were terrified and did not want to come near the spiders.”
- Banks are pushing to grow their credit card portfolios, one of the few bright spots in their businesses (Wall Street Journal)
Capital One, the nation’s fourth-largest credit-card issuer, said credit-card sales jumped 14% in the first quarter from a year earlier. The company’s strategy to boost card usage by raising spending limits and giving out more cards is also paying off: Capital One customers spent 20% more on their cards during the first three months of the year than they did a year ago.
At Citigroup Inc., average credit-card balances in the first quarter posted the first year-over-year increase since 2008. Such balances also grew at Discover Financial Services Inc. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest lender.
…Overall, lenders gave out more than 104 million general-purpose and store credit cards in 2015, up 6.5% from a year earlier and up 47% from the bottom in 2010, according to Equifax.
The CC balances took a healthy bump from all of us MSers 🙂
Delta is a brand of ice cream in Greece so perhaps the pilots were looking for some frozen treats…
Credit card balances are close to one trillion again.
The fed has brought us back to where we were before the crisis in terms of indebtedness and insecurities in life. All of this money spent and everyone asks why is the recovery so anemic.
Gary, that was a charter flight…guess who regularly charters flights between German(y military bases) and the Middle East? Woulda been bad if anything happened.
I saw an insert in one of my credit card bills this week that said if you don’t make the minimum payment, you pay a “penalty” interest rate of 29%. Otherwise, it’s only 16%.
This is, of course, how we get all the lucrative credit card sign up bonuses. On the backs of stupid people. It’s pretty outrageous. But I’m taking the money until the gov’t stops it.
It’s the TSA. It’s a government agency. It gets bigger. It’s about the only thing governments actually do well.
My understanding was Uber pulled out of Austin after the city, under a voter-approved referendum, required certain background checks for its drivers. So, the city didn’t “ban Uber.” I realize it’s easy to generalize and blame people, Gary, but the distinction is important and writing in an exacting prose is important to your readers.
+1 Daniel.