Matching Tracksuits

Month: May 2006

New Car, New Savings, New Pictures

Tuesday 30 May 2006

We recently bought a Jetta turbo diesel, with the eventual aim of going bio-diesel. Until we get the filtration system set up, we’re just using regular diesel.

On our trip to the Outer Banks (pics coming soon), we averaged 41.09 MPG, with a high of 47.48 MPG. In other words, to travel 248.8 miles, we consumed 5.24 gallons of gas. At the price we paid (2.89, if memory serves), that’s $0.06 per mile!

Okay — I’m getting nerdy with all the numbers.

We filled up before leaving the Outer Banks and still have a quarter of a tank left…

Traveling Not-So-Light

Wednesday 24 May 2006

There was a time when Kinga and I regularly packed all the belongings we thought we’d need for an entire week or more into bike panniers and still be convinced we’d taken too much. For the trip to Budapest, we even took (I’m embarrassed to admit it) three cameras. Oh, and a tripod.

For this weekend’s trip to the Outer Banks, we’ve almost filled our new car’s trunk — Jetta turbo diesel (40 mpg average!) — and we haven’t even finished packing yet!

Pressing Flesh For Effect

Tuesday 23 May 2006

This Monday I participated in an education flesh fair: an education career fair. Hundreds of us unemployed teachers (or at least not employed teaching in one’s subject area) were queuing in front of tables where representatives from various school districts sat, taking resumes and asking assorted questions.

I’d checked all the websites of districts I knew to be participating and found very few jobs listed there. “Perhaps they’re just not listing them on the site, opting instead to wait until after the career fair to see what jobs remain open.” Wrong.

There were very few school systems looking for English teachers, and a couple of them that had posted vacancies just about two weeks ago had already filled the positions. That’s fast – two weeks to get resumes, conduct interviews, make the first selection, call back those who made the cut, interview a second time, make a decision, make an offer, and have the offer accepted. At some point in that process one would think that the district would update its vacancy page to reflect the filled position, but that’s a bit naive I guess. Two of them are still there.

At any rate, I went from table to table (county to county essentially), flashed a smile, answered questions, and generally schmoozed. The outcome: one interview set for mid-June, with two more schools expressing interest. “We’ll call you,” they said.

I’d interviewed at this same school near the beginning of the school year when an unanticipated vacancy appeared literally days before the school year began. My first interview in years. It obviously didn’t go so well. It also didn’t go so badly, it seems, for the director of personnel remembered me and was willing – interested, might I even say? – in having me “come by to talk again.” The downside: the school is forty miles away.

Not So Loose Change

Wednesday 17 May 2006

Loose Change has been steadily moving up “Google Video’s Ranking. It’s up to the number one position, after sitting at two for a couple of days.

Well, at least part of it appears to be proven wrong: Flight 77 not a hoax

Of course, they still haven’t released the video from the service station or the hotel, so Dylan and the boys still have part of their film intact.

Higher Standards?

Wednesday 10 May 2006

What do you make of a bank that offers auto loans only through an automated online process? What do you make of a bank that provides no customer support regarding auto loans? What do you make of a bank that denies you a loan of less than what you currently have in a savings account of that very bank when you have a credit rating in the top 10 percentile?

My answer: not much — at least, not much that’s not heavily laced with profanity.

The bank in question is Bank of America, which is currently the institution that provides us with our banking “services.” After yesterday’s experience, we will have absolutely nothing to do with Bank of America and their “higher standards”

The story: Kinga and I have decided to go bio-diesel, and the first step in that process is, obviously enough, buying a diesel car. We found a 2000 Jetta diesel sedan for a good price and made an accepted offer.

I called my local branch office of BOA (Bank of America) to ask what documents I would need to bring to apply for an auto loan. The young man who answered the phone politely asked me to hold on while he checked with a banker. He returned to the line and told me that I would need two forms if ID — exactly what I’d suspected. I arrived at the location to be told that actually to apply for the loan I would have to use Bank of America’s online services. Essentially I’d driven all the way there to be told not that I could do it at home, but that I must do it at home. Why I wasn’t told this over the phone is a complete mystery that can only be explained as incompetence.

I returned home, filled in the necessary online forms, and almost immediate was told,

We are unable to approve your auto loan application at this time. […] You’ll receive a letter in the mail within 30 days. This letter will include more information about your decision.

Given the balance in our bank account and my credit rating, what could be the cause? Simple: I do not make enough money as a teacher’s aid to get such a loan on my own (which says as much about the nation’s education system as it does about the bank), and Kinga, as a Pole, has no credit history.

Now, I could understand this if we were applying at another bank, but at my own bank? An institution that has immediate access to my account and can confirm a steady, consistent stream of deposits and a large savings account?

To top it all off, I was not even asked for how much the loan would be. It would have been, in fact, around 70% of what we’ve already deposited in savings!

Needless to say, I was more than furious. I was even more enraged to learn that there is actually no human being I can talk to about a car loan from Bank of America. Everything refers me to BOA’s online “services.” This means that my loan application was processed entirely and rejected by a computer.

On the recommendation of a friend, I called the local SunTrust branch, talked to a human being, and was still receiving phone calls and help from her after business hours at seven in the evening!

As an aside, the kind woman at SunTrust told me that I was the third person that day to contact her looking for a better banking experience than what they’d received at Bank of America.

SunTrust has won our trust and business, whereas Bank of America has lost it permanently.

What is most infuriating is the fact that my credit rating is now lower because of BOA’s unwillingness to pay people to talk to those of us wanting a small loan. The online bio of the president of BOA, Kenneth Lewis, web site bio brags that he runs “one of the world’s largest financial institutions, the fifth most profitable company in the world and the ninth most highly valued company in the world by market capitalization.” Reuter’s reports that BOA “posted a $4.99 billion profit last quarter” (Reuters), so they’re pretty good making money, not fairly dismal at helping people.

But there are more compelling reasons for changing institutions. According to Reuter’s,

In February 2005, Bank of America said it lost track of computer tapes containing account data for about 1.2 million federal government employees, including some U.S. senators.

Three months later, New Jersey authorities charged several people over the compromising of accounts at several banks, including some 60,000 Bank of America accounts.

Bank of America was also one of many credit card issuers affected by a breach affecting some 40 million cards and traced to CardSystems Solutions Inc., a third-party processor. (Reuters)

So they’re have significant security vulnerabilities and they’re worried only about their bottom line.

Cosa Loro

Really the only difference between a bank and a mafia loan shark is the amortization frequency and the penalty for default.

Both the mafia and the banking industry make it even more difficult for you to get a reasonable loan (i.e., one that you can repay in your lifetime) by putting unreasonable stipulations on the loan. If you’re a risk to a bank — in other words, if you have a bad credit rating — the bank offers you a loan at a higher interest rate, thereby making it more difficult to repay it.

“We don’t think you’ll be able to pay this back,” bankers say, “So we’re going to make it more difficult for you to pay it back.”

Where’s the logic in that? It doesn’t even make sense from a banker’s point of view. If a bank has to foreclose on a house financed with a high-interest loan, they’ll up auctioning it off for a substantial loss.

Still, they get their money no matter what. It’s a good gig, this money-lending scheme the banks have…

Exodus

Saturday 6 May 2006

From The Observer:

So many young Poles are leaving to find jobs and a better life in Britain that bosses back home are desperate for them to return to keep the wheels of Polish industry turning, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Wroclaw. […]

More than half a million Poles have moved to Britain to find jobs since Poland joined the European Union two years ago. They have fled a country with 18 per cent unemployment, the highest figure in the 25-nation bloc. But now the drain of talent has speeded up to such an extent that Poland is complaining of a drastically reduced population and the lack of a suitable workforce to help the country develop. (Source)

But why would an educated twenty-something want to return to this:

Poland is still anchored in its anti-Semitic past, says Gabriele Lasser in Berlin’s die tageszietung Consider the output of Radio Maryja, one of Poland’s main radio stations and virtual house organ of the governing Law and Justice Party. (Between the hymns and prayers, ministers use it to announce policy.) This Catholic station, which spews out right-wing propaganda for the benefit of its 3 million listeners, surpassed itself last month with an anti-Semitic diatribe from the pundit Stanislaw Michalkiewicz. Polish “kikes,” he bellowed, have manufactured a “Holocaust industry,” in order to “extort” compensation from the taxpayer for property expropriated during World War II. Poland’s telecom watchdog, which recently imposed a heavy fine on another radio station for satirizing Radio Maryja and “damaging the journalistic ethic,” didn’t utter a peep of protest. But the comments incensed Pope Benedict, and the Vatican fired off a furious letter to Poland’s bishops, demanding they stop turning a blind eye to this extremist claptrap. Benedict is due on an official visit next month. If the bishops want to avoid a spanking from the pope in person, they had better do something, and soon, about Radio’s Maryja’s hateful programming. (From The Week news magazine).

And now Andrzej Lepper is Agriculture Minister and Roman Giertych is Education Minister. There’s already talk about “cleaning” homosexuals out of the education field…

“It could be worse,” Kinga and I said when PiS (Law and Justice Party) got elected in Poland last year.

It is worse…

Sign Language

Tuesday 2 May 2006

I find it interesting that so many of the signs in yesterday’s anti-immigration-reform protest explicitly gave “proof” of the validity of the opposition’s argument. In other words, the cries, “They don’t assimilate! They don’t even learn the language!” were born out in so many of the signs that protesters carried.

Now, I’m not an advocate of creating legislation that makes English the official language of America, but one would think that this time, of all times, would be when immigrants use English. And I’m not even suggesting that it should be even close to correct English.

And that’s why I love the sign at right so much.

(Pictures swiped from NYT. Click on them for larger versions.)