Archive for December, 2007

Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing points out that the RIAA’s ludicrous stance on copying CDs for personal use is actually even more ludicrous in light of what they were saying just months ago:
The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it’s been on their Website for some time now, that it’s perfectly [...]

In its efforts to bring about the overthrow of copyright protection by adopting arguments more ridiculous than the Bush Administration’s attempts to exclude Dick Cheney from the executive branch, the RIAA is now arguing that it is illegal for you to transfer music from a CD you purchase to your computer for your own, personal [...]

I just ran across Kelly Klein’s “Renting and the Law” column at the Star Tribune.
Klein does a good job of sitting on the fence and offering a fairly neutral evaluation of landlord-tenant issues.
In her December 13th column, Klein discussed the importance of communication and written agreements (and side agreements). In her December 21st column, she [...]

From the “sky is falling” department at the AP, a holiday story about the rising credit card delinquency rates nationwide. Says Cliff Tan of Stanford University, “Debt eventually leaks into other areas, whether it starts with the mortgage and goes to the credit card or vice versa.” Increases in delinquencies of 30 days or more [...]

This is not remotely on topic, but it is one of the coolest things I have seen on the Internet this year. And now, George W. Bush covering R.E.M.:

In today’s StarTribune there is an opinion piece by Steve Chapman in which he complains that many of the solutions coming out for the subprime mess are misguided because “they punish lenders for the failings of borrowers. Why should someone who has kept the terms of a contract be penalized for the benefit of [...]

I haven’t had a chance to read through the changes the Federal Reserve Board is recommending for Reg Z. (The regulations for the Truth In Lending Act and Home Owner Equity Protection Act) but from the press release there are some good things. Lowering the HOEPA threshold for instance. But the real issue is not [...]

The headline says it all “ A low, low interest rate of 396 percent” According to this article at CNN a large number of people in foreclosure counseling in Ohio, land of many a payday lender) also have payday loans. If that isn’t a recipe for disaster, what is?
Of note also is that a Republican [...]

I meant to note this article the high cost of eating healthy in the NYT a while back but got busy. It reminded me of when we took the Food Stamp Challenge. It wasn’t impossible, but it took some planning and cooking. If we had tried it during a more hectic time it might of [...]

Part of being a smart consumer is also being careful about what you buy. Well we need to also start paying attention to the amount of waste we produce. We as Americans are really bad about this for no real reason other than we are too lazy, too busy doing crap, or perhaps too ignorant [...]

The New York Times has a good piece on the total lack of interest on the part of Washington to listen to the many voices of reason who were warning about the subprime crisis. I think overall though it lets the Feds off too easy, especially Alan Greenspan. The discussion with Greenspan has some interesting [...]

In a new staff study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Donald Morgan and Michael Strain take another look at whether payday loans are predatory or, in Morgan’s terms, welfare enhancing. This time around, Morgan takes a look at the “afermath” when Georgia and North Carolina banned payday lending.
(Dr. Morgan has commented on [...]

The ACC representative in these calls says things like “I’ll go to any length I have to in order to embarrass you” and “the verification of your debt is that you paid it for two years.” Count the FDCPA violations, if you can!
Related:

Caveat Emptor playlist on YouTube

Although regulatory bodies in the United States do not seem to have much ability or incentive to do much to help consumers, a well-placed complaint may nevertheless help change public policy in the long run. If nobody complains, nobody knows. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Bureau of Consumer Protection is charged with enforcing consumer protection [...]

CenterPoint energy estimates that about 5,200 homes are disconnected, and about 3,400 of those are occupied. That means that during the past three extremely cold weeks, 3,400 households have had no heat, or only what heat they can generate from space heaters (until Xcel shuts off their electricity, I would assume). CenterPoint says most were [...]

A colleague who recently purchased a home passed along the following:

When I purchased my home this summer, I contacted my mortgage consultant about one month in advance and told her that I wanted to see all my loan documents prior to closing so that I could read them over. [ . . . S]he told [...]

The Massachussetts House of Representatives is considering a bill that would require debt buyers to notify consumers when the debt buyer purchases the consumer’s debt. The bill would require the notice to contain

the dollar amount of the debt;
the original creditor;
the date on which the debt purchaser bought the debt; and
the interest rate and penalty charges [...]

“The truth is, our middle-class families are not going to be secure so long as they can’t get out of debt,” Obama said Monday, sharpening the populist rhetoric of his presidential campaign. “If we’re serious about stopping Americans from falling deeper in debt, we’ve got to crack down on predatory credit card companies that are [...]

From PC World Canada, 10 terrible trends in consumer technology:

10. Closed source technology
9. Over-promising and under-delivering
8. Fanboys
7. Region encoding
6. Licensing Fees
5. Format wars
4. Proprietary File Formats
3. Annoying web ads
2. High cost of wireless data plans
1. DRM

From UserFriendly.org:

More on the Canadian version of the DMCA.
[via BoingBoing]