On the lottery, the infamous tax on the poor, a £49m jackpot

I saw a TV commercial for the next Euromillion lottery draw. There is a £49,000,000 estimated jackpot. That would come handy, wouldn’t it? You could even buy a couple of banks these days.

It is commonly said that lottery is a tax on the poor. Let’s see why:
The theory:
A k-combination is a subset with k [...]

On the Reticular Activating System and how stupid we are when shopping

You just purchased a flashing new item, and all of a sudden all you can see is other people wearing, driving, eating or carrying that very thing you cherished so much a short while ago.
At some point or another I am pretty sure it has happened to you. A few years ago my girlfriend notoriously [...]

On the root of financial problems according to Shel Silverstein

I was just reading Nudge by Richard Thuler and Cass Sunstein (interesting but a bit too academic) and I run into this little poem by Shel Silverstein.
Smart
My dad gave me one dollar bill
‘Cause I’m his smartest son,
And I swapped it for two shiny quarters
‘Cause two is more than one!
And then I took the quarters
And traded [...]

On human nature and making firewood from the fallen tree, the funny side of the credit crunch

I am going to try to put together the few funny bits I’ve come across with during this global human misery that we all now call credit crunch:

On pooh, Lord Vernment and the lessons to be learnt from Credit-upon-Sink. A medieval story

Once upon a time, there was a small hamlet named Credit-upon-Sink where the Lord Vernment ensured safety and security from strangers. Live was kind, and the banks of the river Sink, fertile.
Lord Govvy, as he was known in the valley, would collect taxes from villagers based on the number of seeds planted every season by [...]

On the British People’s Bank of Halifax hiking credit card rates

I have a mortgage and a credit card I pay religiously every month to the British People’s Bank of Halifax and to my surprise I received today an ugly piece of marketing literature. It didn’t even come in an envelope, so I almost discarded it, but close inspection made me realise that the content of [...]

On how not to run a bank, don’t trust Barclays online banking to work every day

There was a time when if your competition made a fool of themselves, you would storm in and get their customers. Market mistakes translated into a drop in market share.
But that was in the old days, my friend. We have reached such a level of mediocrity, that not only businesses don’t learn from their own [...]

On banks paying interest to people with mortgages or how NOT to run a banking operation: The answer

So it finally happened. This morning I received the letter from Birmingham Midshires answering the million dollar question: What happens when the Bank of England takes the base interest rate down to 0.5% or below and you are paying them 0.5% or higher below BoE base rate?
Well, since the bank’s decision back in March 5, [...]

On saying NO to paperless banking, don’t fall in the guilt trap

As a principle, I refuse to change to paper-free statements, not only because the banks themselves don’t accept online statement print-outs as proof of address (ironic!) but because again, I don’t get anything out of it other than feeling less guilty for saving a piece of a tree. But let’s remember, it is the banks [...]

On how not to run a bank, don’t trust HSBC online banking to work every day

Hobbes, I think I have already mention it before, but it beggars believe the sub-standard online service that HSBC offers.
I cannot handle banking staff at any branch of any bank (someone told once that Barclays trains their staff not to make decisions, not to think, I cannot say it is true, but surely is very [...]