16 December 2014
Jeb Bush announces exploratory committee with a typo
Today, Jeb Bush announced on Facebook that he was setting up an exploratory committee to run for president.
Over the past few weeks, his advisors (or perhaps the candidate himself) were telling reporters on background that they are going to run a savvy, digital-heavy campaign. Per the Washington Post:
Their thinking is that Bush, who was last on a ballot in 2002, would need to be aggressive and digitally savvy, challenging any impressions that he is an establishment moderate with sclerotic campaign skills.
Nothing says "digitally savvy" like having a typo in the third paragraph of your presidential announcement.
Yup. A whole lotof football.
That typo was up there for about 30 minutes. To their credit, they edited it within 5 minutes of me tweeting about it.
I'm no pedant; it's just a typo. But if you're running for president as a "digitally savvy" executive who is more competent than Obama, then you avoid typos in the 3rd paragraph of your announcement.
Posted by Evan @ 12/16/14 03:00 PM | Comments (0)        
01 December 2014
Jose Menendez brings the stupid
WOIA:
A measure introduced in the Texas Legislature would affect the transactions you make with retailers, demanding that a business owner check a photo i.d. before accepting a debit or a credit card, Newsradio 1200 WOAI reports.
"Some stores already do this," State Rep Jose Menendez (D-San Antonio), the sponsor of the proposal, told Newsradio 1200 WOAI. "I think it would great, I don't think it would take that much longer, and I appreciate it when a store asks me for an i.d."
It is impressive how pro-regulation legislators manage to come up with inane regulations that would waste time while helping no one. Clearly Menendez knows absolutely nothing about credit card fraud, but he has no problem filing a bill to regulate it.
Unlike Menendez, I actually do know something about credit card fraud, having worked professionally at preventing it. Menendez's bill would do nothing to make anyone's finances or financial information more secure. (Hint: the consumer is not liable if someone steals a card and commits fraud.) And of course, it wouldn't help businesses with a POS terminal -- they already have the option to do it, and they already have a financial incentive to cut down on fraud.
The most pernicious credit card fraud these days is being done using skimmers or hacking the POS terminal. Since those would be exempted from Menendez's bill, if every state adopted Menendez's idea, we'd have even more places for fraudster to put skimmers. So fraud would likely go up.
Ideas have consequences.
Posted by Evan @ 12/01/14 11:20 PM | Comments (0)