Not all, of course, but a study of Ivy League colleges and universities shows that around 15 percent of the white kids in attendance did not meet the academic entrance requirements. Instead they were admitted because their parents made large contributions to the school or had a lot of pull with the alumni association. Is this a form of affirmative action for dumb rich white kids?
Category: Commentary (Page 26 of 27)
Commentary on most any topic.
Back in the good old days before so-called “overdraft protection”, if a large check arrived that would overdraw your checking account, it was simply returned NSF (Non-Sufficient Funds) and a fee of $10 or $15 was deducted from your balance. But the rest of your funds in the account remained there, able to cover smaller checks or charges that arrived. Nowadays with “overdraft protection” if a large check arrives, it gets paid, a $35 fee is charged, and your account gets driven negative, and now, every single additional check or charge that arrives is guaranteed to “overdraw” and trigger another $35 fee. Each little three dollar charge get’s hit with another $35.
But I still haven’t gotten to the nasty scam part. Back in the old-days, checks and charges were handled during nightly processing in the order in which they arrived or in random order. But now, with the “overdraft protection” scheme in place, the order in which checks and charges are processed suddenly matters a lot. A new “game” is possible for the bank. So banks these days keep a temporary ledger in their computers that records transactions as they occur during the day. This temporary ledger is what you see when you do online banking. But then during the night when the computers reconcile all the accounts, the temporary ledger is ignored and all of your transactions for the day are re-executed in the real ledger. The transactions are not handled in the order they occurred during that day, instead they are sorted by dollar amount and the largest transaction is entered first, then the next largest, and so on. This is done in to maximize the number of overdraft fees that might occur.
For example, let’s say on the morning of a particular day I have a balance of $150. During the day I use a debit card to buy a snack for $5, gas for $30, lunch for $10. During the day, if I checked my balance with online banking, my balance would have gone from 150 to 145, to 115, to 105. When I get home that afternoon I know that the three debit card transactions for the snack, gas, and lunch are done, safe, paid, right? Wrong!
Let’s say that during this same day two checks also arrive at the bank to be paid, one for $12 and one for $140. Uh oh, the $140 check is going to bounce, right? Wrong. The checks will get processed at midnight but so will all your previous transactions that day. All five transactions will be re-processed into the main ledger at midnight and not in the order of occurrence but in order of decreasing dollar amount. First comes the check for $140, which clears fine because your balance was still $150, driving the balance to $10, then the $30 debit card transaction, driving the account to $-20, plus the $35 overdraft fee to $-55. Then the 12, the 10, and the 5, each of which invokes another $35 fee. The next day my $150 positive account balance has become overdrawn by $187. Congratulations, you’ve just been hit with the bank scam.
Back in 2004 this happened to me with Suntrust Bank in Florida. A $40 check I had overlooked triggered a chain reaction resulting in $175 in bank fees. I called customer service and asked them to remove the so-called “overdraft protection” and simply bounce any future checks that would overdraw. Nope, can’t do it. The “overdraft protection” feature, which they tout as a great favor to their customers, is mandatory and cannot be disabled.
And if you think my story is bad, read some of these experiences with Citizen’s Bank:
http://asdfhj.com/citizens-bank-overdraft-fee-scam/86
This is a big gravy train the banks have going here. No wonder they show record profits. But in my opinion it meets the definition of fraud: “A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.” Even worse, this practice harms the poorest members of society the most since they are the most likely to overdraw their accounts.
I promised my daughter and some friends to write about what I have learned about bisphenyl A (BPA) and I will keep it as brief as I can and still include everything I know. I learned this via Dr. Jane Adams who is a neurotoxicologist at the National Institutes of Health, (NIH).
Back in the mid-90’s, Dr. Adams noticed that it seemed like a lot of urine samples coming into NIH were contaminated with bisphenyl A. So they did a quick study and found that 97 percent of the urine samples coming in, from all ages of people, were contaminated with what were, to her, alarming concentrations of BPA. What is BPA? The chemical bisphenyl A was first synthesized by a German scientist in the 1890s. No use was found for it until the 1930s when it was discovered that BPA made a dandy artificial estrogen. It was used for that for a few years until they discovered DES (diethylstilbestrol) in the late 1930s and BPA was no longer used for estrogen replacement.
Most of you are probably too young to remember what happened with DES. I remember DES and I also remember when the thalidomide nightmare hit. I remember as a 10 year old, reading through LIFE magazine and being totally creeped out by the teratogenic effects of thalidomide. (Teratogenic means “monster making”). Women who were given DES and women who were given thalidomide started giving birth to monsters instead of babies. LIFE Magazine had big black and white photos that I will never forget.
Okay, so when DES was developed in the late 1930s they stopped using BPA for estrogen replacement. Then during WW II and at the dawn of the modern age of plastics and polymers, it was discovered that BPA makes a terrific polymer material. And it truly is terrific, having really no equal still today. You know this plastic as polycarbonate and its trade name Lexan. Polycarbonate is best known as the “bulletproof plastic”, and it is exactly that. It’s not perfectly transparent or even as clear as acrylic but it is clear enough to see through okay if made well, and yes, this is the stuff you may have seen in the TV ads in the 70’s where a guy stands there and empties a .357 magnum at a window made of Lexan. When he shoots at an angle the bullets just bounce off. When he shoots straight on, the bullet gets stuck in the plastic but does not penetrate. Well that demonstration is real, not a trick. Years ago I had a go at a little demonstration at a security show where they had a window made of 1/8th thick Lexan and you were given a 3 pound ball-peen hammer to do your best to break it. People were swinging on that thing all day for three days and nothing happened. The hammer was provided with a wrist strap that they insisted be used because the hammer would bounce back with as much force as you applied! Not expecting this, people would often lose the hammer and they didn’t want a hammer flying across the convention floor.
The windows of the president’s car, some bank teller windows, the Popemobile windows, and all fighter plane canopies are made of Lexan. It takes a steel cored armor piercing bullet to get through Lexan. It’s still the toughest transparent plastic around. You also find it in industrial filter housings, vandal proof light fixtures in schools and prisons, and lots of other places. It’s really cool stuff. And in your daily life you encounter it in those 5 gallon water bottles you set on top of the water cooler, some baby bottles are made from it, and BPA is used to coat the inside of food cans. Polycarbonate (BPA) is a bit on the expensive side so it’s not used unless you really need it. Refillable water bottles and baby bottles are two examples where it’s a good choice. However, you also find bisphenyl A used as a plasticizer in certain uses of cheaper plastics like PVC. Mixed in with PVC, small quantities of BPA improves the feel and quality and makes PVC much “nicer”. So BPA is not everywhere but it is more common than just water bottles, baby bottles, and food cans. And, just because a plastic bottle or other object is marked PVC (in the little recycling triangle on the bottom) does not mean that it contains no BPA. It might contain BPA as a plasticizer and it might not.
That’s all fine and dandy except for one thing. Bisphenyl A leaches / dissolves into the water or food in small amounts and we consume it. This is the source of the BPA that Dr. Adams discovered in urine samples ranging from babies to the elderly. But is it dangerous? Well this is where it gets interesting and a little complicated so read carefully. The teratogenic effects of DES were discovered in rats long before the problem appeared in humans but it was argued that rats and humans are very different, and you cannot make direct comparisons. This is true, more or less. It turned out that to create monsters in humans, the concentration of DES had to be 1,000 times higher than the concentration that causes problems in rats.
DES and BPA both mimic estrogen in the human body and are capable of creating all sorts of problems besides monstrous babies including obesity, heart disease, cancer, mental problems, neural problems and who knows what else. Bisphenyl A creates problems in rats at a concentration even lower than DES. The concentrations of BPA found in humans today is over 1,000 times higher than the concentration of BPA needed to cause problems in rats. Does this mean anything? I don’t know. Nobody else knows either. No proven link to a problem has been found yet in humans but Dr. Adams is concerned because the parallels with DES are striking, to say the least, and the amount of BPA found in humans increases every year. We don’t know all the problems that can occur. It is possible that the epidemic of childhood obesity and unexplained precocious puberty is caused by BPA. It’s possible that BPA is causing mental problems that we have not tracked down to BPA yet. She argues that these chemicals that mimic estrogen are very dangerous things to play with and this one is in general distribution to the public. It’s even found in baby bottles and we really don’t know much about what it might be causing. NIH is just now assembling people to begin to study it, but for the moment it’s up to you to decide whether to be concerned or not. Nothing much is known except the above. The parallels with DES are creepy. You must make your own judgment.
Now if you couldn’t follow the point I’m making above, let me compress it down to a short story:
Around 1930 we developed a chemical which I’ll call Chemical A. Chemical A functions as a synthetic estrogen, an important hormone in humans . Chemical A is found to cause horrible birth defects in rats. Later, we discover the hard way that at a concentration 1,000 times higher it also causes horrible birth defects in humans. Chemical A is banned. Around 1930 we also develop Chemical B. Chemical B is very similar to Chemical A and also serves as a synthetic estrogen. Chemical B also causes horrible birth defects in rats. It turns out that a very useful plastic can be made with Chemical B. Chemical B is thus found all around us in our daily lives. We can’t avoid getting it into our bodies. The concentration of Chemical B in our bodies has now grown to about 1,000 times the concentration that causes birth defects in rats. Harmful effects in humans have not yet been shown. Should we be worried about Chemical B?
Edit: More info has come out that I wrote about in this blog post:
shuttersparks
Did you know that today’s average American gets half of his or her calories every day from sugar? It’s true. The average American today consumes 160 pounds of sugar per year. A hundred years ago, this figure was 10 pounds per year. This is great for the sugar companies but must be partly to blame for the explosion in obesity in the U.S.A.
Americans have become sugar addicts. Besides Coke and soda pop that’s loaded with sugar (Coke contains something like 10 teaspoons of sugar per can) read the labels in the fruit juice aisle at the market. Nearly all of them are labeled as “fruit drink” or “fruit cocktail” and are loaded with corn syrup. It’s hard to find a bottle that contains just plain fruit juice. Look at the calories on these fruit “juices”. It’s shocking.
Three years ago I was living in a warm climate and took to drinking lots of “fruit juice”. I thought I was doing myself a favor. After all, it said Vitamin C right on the label. But I noticed that I began to gain weight rapidly. I discussed it with a friend and she asked me to do a complete diet inventory, so I did. I discovered that I was consuming 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day, every day, just in “fruit juice”. I stopped that cold and switched to water. For the next two days, my vision was not quite right. A lifelong diabetic friend explained that this was normal because I stopped the huge constant sugar intake so suddenly. He explained that it would take a couple days for my pancreas to adjust to the new sugar levels. He was right. Since then I have limited my fruit juice intake to only real juices, not spiked with sugar or corn syrup, and about a glass per day. Lots of water and iced tea make up the rest of my fluid intake.
I was a prime example of the statistic I mentioned above. By quitting the “fruit flavored juice” I dropped nearly 20 pounds, back to my normal weight.
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