Ross • 1st Mar 2010 • Uncategorized • air miles, airmiles, arbitrage, california, economics, finance, hacks, money, pudding, reward, saving, usa
Why the museum of arbitrage? Well, because if arbitrage existed now, I would be doing it rather than writing this.
In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself.
Recognizing a good thing, Phillips bought 12,150 servings of pudding for $3,140, claiming he was stocking up for Y2K. Then he enlisted the Salvation Army to help him peel off the UPC codes, in exchange for donating the pudding.
He mailed his submission to Healthy Choice, and to their credit they awarded him 1.25 million frequent-flyer miles, enough for 31 round trips to Europe, 42 to Hawaii, 21 to Australia, or 50 anywhere in the United States.
There’s no downside. Phillips also got Aadvantage Gold status for life with American Airlines, which brings a special reservations number, priority boarding, upgrades, and bonus miles. And he got an $815 tax writeoff for donating the pudding.
Lifted wholesale from Futility Closet.
Ross • 14th Feb 2010 • Living • holidays, life, skiing, vacation
I have just returned from Kitzbuhel in Austria, this year’s venue for our annual family ski trip. If I have not been in contact so much for the past week, this is why – apologies. In Kitz I recommend:
- Schloss Lebenberg, a hotel with first rate fitness facilities (including a roof-top pool and sauna overlooking the town and mountain)
- The Londoner for rowdy apres-ski, especially when the Short and Curlies are playing
- Making the link with Westendorf and checking out the neighbouring SkiWelt ski zone. The lifts and views are better than in Kitz, although it can be busier on the pistes, and you’ll need a different lift pass.
The photo above is the Wilder Kaiser mountain range, visible from the resort’s two main ski peaks. More photos here.
Ross • 5th Feb 2010 • Living • economy, house prices, investment, london, property
From the Wall Street Journal via Paul Kedrosky:
London real estate has actually bounced off the bottom in the last nine months. Prices are now down a mere 9% or so from their 2007 peaks, according to data tracked by mortgage giant Nationwide Building Society. The average home in London, including all those dreary outskirts that go on and on and on, is $436,000. That’s even higher than it was as recently as 2006, when the bubble was in its late stages.
As a homeowner in those ‘dreary outskirts’ I like the phenomenon if not the description.
(Incidentally, if a UK paper was reporting the US market, it would give the foreign-denominated price first, then the local equivalent in brackets. Is it standard US practise to show only dollar amounts? If so, that annoys me more than it should.)
Ross • 4th Feb 2010 • Living • climate change, global warming, media, radio, talk radio
Congressman Donald Schwerbitz, who represented South Dakota back in the 1960s and 70s… recognized that carbon emissions are caused primarily by breathing, and he proposed to cut those emissions in half by requiring every American to wear a device that plugs up one nostril. Congressman Schwerbitz… an irrepressible prankster… managed to get himself invited onto a talk radio program to explain how the nostril plugs would work. (The host was in on the joke.) Because talk radio audiences are dominated by libertarians and reactionaries, the response was not positive. Callers clamored for civil disobedience; one threatened that if he ever saw anyone wearing one of these devices, he’d “punch him in his other nose”. Others worried that our clean air might drift over to Cuba, where the communists could use it. A few, though, were enthusiastic. One woman wanted to know if the devices could be adapted to fit animals. Warthogs, she observed, have very big nostrils.
Although the Steven Landsburg piece from which I have stolen this extract isn’t supposed to be a comment on talk radio, I think this sums up the concerns of most talk radio callers well – at least from what I have heard when travelling in a taxi, or getting my hair cut.
Ross • 1st Feb 2010 • Living • america, automotive, cars, heuristics, opinions, transmissions, trust, usa
When I spot somebody who appears never to have left the USA…
Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they’re more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics.
…I discount their opinions appropriately.
Ross • 1st Feb 2010 • Thinking • economics, government debt, politics, public finances, spending, Thinking, usa
Sometimes you read something that makes you challenge your opinions, in a positive way. Steve Landsburg’s piece on government spending vs government debt did that for me today. His argument: it’s not government debt that is problematic, but government spending.
Ross • 31st Jan 2010 • Thinking • computers, computing, development, dharavi, economy, slums, technology, work
I am interested in the potential of boosting wages in slums by setting up IT centres so that locals can work via Mechanical Turk, and similar services. Although these jobs pay below UK minimum wage, it would be multiples of a typical slum-dweller’s income. It appears that this is not a new idea. Some firms have gone a stage further and distributed this work by mobile phone, broadening reach. However the benefit of a single location is that you don’t rely on the worker having a phone, and that you could combine work with education and IT literacy classes.
Ross • 19th Dec 2009 • Living • coffee, london, retail, shopping, stations
In London Victoria station one of the convenience stores, Whistlestop, appears to have opened an Upper Crust coffee stand inside itself. Both brands appear to be owned by the convenience retail company SSP, but it sure looks weird.
Ross • 7th Dec 2009 • Learning, Living, Thinking • bargaining, negotiation, taxi, travel
Via Tim Harford’s Twitter feed, I came across this interesting piece from Chris Blattman on national variation in bargaining strategies, a.k.a. how to negotiate your taxi fees. A good example of a thread where the comments add as much value as the post.
My top overseas taxi tip: When you arrive at an airport, go by foot from the Arrivals concourse to the Departures concourse. Collect a taxi there to save yourself roughly 50% of the price of a waiting taxi. (Plus you know they are a real taxi, you just saw their last Westerner fare arrive unmolested.)
Ross • 11th Nov 2009 • Living • banking, boats, finance, Friends, sailing, yacht
No doubt there are more pressing problems in the world, but the other night some friends and I were grappling with what a hedge-fund manager of mutual acquaintance should call his new yacht, currently on order from Princess.
I suggested various epithets, from the funny to the lame (Bailout, Liquidity, Too Big to Sail, Floating Charge) but the winner was a banking friend, with the inspired Quantative Ease.
