Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Paying a bill could endanger your liberty
Via the The Chimp, we learn from Scripps Howard that:
Walter Soehnge is a retired Texas schoolteacher who traveled north with his wife, Deana, saw summer change to fall in Rhode Island and decided this was a place to stay for a while.So the Soehnges live in Scituate now and Walter sometimes has breakfast at the Gentleman Farmer in Scituate Village, where he has passed the test and become a regular despite an accent that is definitely not local.And it was there, at his usual table last week, that he told me that he was "madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail."
Cutting to the chase, he and his wife paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522. And an alarm went off. ... They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn't changed....They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.
This is why datamining is widely known to be total garbage.
And the Administration's blind reliance on datamining and other from-50,000-feet DeathStar-like activities rather than talking to people and finding out what is going on is why Osama is still walking around grinning.
More blogs about politics.
