Guess who pays for credit card incentive plan?

You do silly.

When credit card companies give you "cash back", or "points" or "air miles", it isn't really a gift. You've already paid in the form of higher prices at the till. Reward programs work when you use your card more frequently. Frequent use of the card forces the retailer to pay more fees to the credit card company. The direct results are higher prices which conceal the credit card fees you are paying indirectly and feeling good about with your piddly "cash back". It feels like a reward but all you are really doing is contributing to consumer price inflation and making credit card companies more money.

If you don't believe me you can believe Target, one of the largest department stores in the US. Target tells the Bloomberg newswire that credit-card interchange fees are the retailer's second-highest expense, exceeded only by payroll. The fees can sometimes exceed 3% of the purchase price.

09:35 PM

Suburbs without cars

Now available in Germany. From the NY Times article:

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.

As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.

Vauban, completed in 2006, is an example of a growing trend in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to separate suburban life from auto use, as a component of a movement called “smart planning.” [...] The town is long and relatively narrow, so that the tram into Freiburg is an easy walk from every home. Stores, restaurants, banks and schools are more interspersed among homes than they are in a typical suburb. Most residents, like Ms. Walter, have carts that they haul behind bicycles for shopping trips or children’s play dates.

For trips to stores like IKEA or the ski slopes, families buy cars together or use communal cars rented out by Vauban’s car-sharing club.

09:21 PM

Hans Rosling on HIV

Hans Rosling unveils new data visuals that untangle the complex risk factors of one of the world's deadliest (and most misunderstood) diseases: HIV. He argues that preventing transmissions -- not drug treatments -- is the key to ending the epidemic.



07:33 PM

Metal Heart

Time-lapse tilt photography film of a monster truck show. Awesome.

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

11:53 PM

Better late than never

Today I came across a press release in the Globe and Mail that I've literally been waiting seven years to read.

I first attended the Detroit Autoshow in 2002 expecting the Big Three to present products to fit a future beset by declining oil supplies, rising temperatures, emergent middle classes in the Far East and ever more congested cities: smart, small, efficient electric cars. Needless to say it was a bitter disappointment to find "Made in Texas" stickers plastered on obscenely huge SUVs and even a mock rocket launcher fixed to the roof of a Jeep Cherokee.

It took seven years and a complete market meltdown to set aside that deeply entrenched delusional macho bravado in favor of reality, which we find embraced below:

The Associated Press May 6, 2009 at 9:04 AM EDT

WAYNE, MICH. — Ford Motor Co. [F-N] says it will spend $550-million (U.S.) to convert its old Michigan Truck Plant into a facility that will build small compact modern cars.

The retooled facility, which once built sport utility vehicles like the Lincoln Navigator, will now build Ford's next-generation Focus, expected to roll off the line next year.

The plant will also build a new battery-electric version of the Focus for the North American market. That vehicle is expected to debut in 2011.

The struggling auto maker says roughly 3,200 jobs will be created in Michigan because of the plant conversion.

10:52 AM