I never pay any attention to the candidate’s spouses, but apparently, maybe I should. Rachel Lucas takes on some stupid things that were said by Michelle Obama, and does it quite well.

I’m going to stand up with Rachel and say that I, too, have debt, and not a single penny of my debt has anything to do with health care. Every bit of my debt has to do with my being financially irresponsible in the past, and I do not believe that I am unusual in this regard.

Rachel quotes this tidbit from Michelle Obama, too:

We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another — that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

I believe we do have an obligation to one another, but I believe our obligation should be moral, not legal, and having this sort of thing in a campaign speech (even the campaign speech of a potential First Lady) is disturbing, because I suspect she is saying that her husband wants to turn our moral obligation into a legal one.

Also, I don’t believe we measure our society’s greatness by the least of our citizens. I believe that we measure our society by how we treat those individuals. Simply throwing money at these people is (with rare exceptions) the worst way to help them^[a], because it gives them absolutely no motivation to do anything to improve their own lot in life, and can slowly erode their sense of self-worth. Giving money to people whose problem is that they cannot force themselves to live within their means is nothing more than enabling them, and even if done with the best of intentions, it is not the right thing to do. Giving them government money, as I’m quite certain Barack and Michelle Obama would advocate^[b], is even worse, because you’re enabling them with other people’s money!

1. You might say I’m being a hypocrite here, because, as I admitted above, I have been bad about not living within my means in the past, particularly when I was in college, but to a lesser extent since then as well. The difference is that I am working to change my ways (though I can’t deny that I still feel the temptation to overspend), and that I readily admit that whatever financial stresses I have are 100 percent my own fault. [↩]
2. She may be using spiritual terms, but I am quite certain she’s thinking in legal ones [↩]

My local bank, City National Bank of West Virginia, has been pretty good to me over the last few years, but I’m a little frustrated over their internet banking.

I’ve always had some problems with it. For example, the search transactions feature is pretty wonky. When I needed to see all of the checks that had come out for the last six months for exactly the amount of my rent (I thought I had a rent check out floating in the ether, but my landlord said I was paid up, so there was a possibility I had a few hundred extra bucks in my account), the search turned up a lot of random debit card purchases that were NOTHING like the amount of my rent. I thought maybe it had pulled just the time frame I was looking at, but it wasn’t showing everything; the purchases that it displayed appeared to be random.

Over the last weekend, they made some major upgrades. The site came back up on Monday, and while I was able to get logged in, I noticed that the usual disclaimers and terms of service weren’t displaying properly. I didn’t think much of that until today, when the disclaimers were back… but the buttons to allow me to log in were gone. 20 seconds of investigation revealed that they had opened a <TEXTAREA> tag and not closed it. All the HTML for the buttons was displaying as text in the textarea. I looked for a link to an e-mail address where I could report this issue, but there isn’t one.

There was a phone number displayed, but it’s the 24 hour automated account access number. Still, I thought I could probably get a live person through that, so I called. Sure enough, there’s an option that says, “Press zero for a customer service representative.” I pressed zero. “To talk to a customer service representative, please contact your local branch.”

ARGH! From past experience, I knew that the only way to handle lockouts and dormant accounts on the City National “Future Banker” system was to go into the branch and talk to a teller, but my experience with that was not pleasant. The tellers themselves, while always very nice, don’t handle the unlocking themselves. They just put the customer’s information in a queue and tell you that your password will be reset to a standard password (SSN or birthdate or something; I’ve forgotten by now) at some point in the next 48 hours. Because none of the tellers I was dealing with seemed to know that a dormant account (I hadn’t been on their internet banking system for quite some time) can’t be unlocked, it took three trips into the branch to get a password reset.

Sure enough, I walked over to the branch nearest me and attempted to explain the problem.

Me: “Your internet banking system is not accessible. There’s a prob-”
Teller: “Yes, sir. It has been down since Thursday for an upgrade.”
Me: “Um, no… it was down Thursday through Sunday for the upgrade, and came back up yesterday. Now, it’s unavailable again, because the HTML is invalid.”
Teller: [blank look]
Me: “The text area where the terms of use and such are displayed isn’t closed properly. The code for the log in buttons…”
Teller: [blanker look]
Me: “I’m sorry. Everything on the website and automated phone service says to report issues to the tellers at the local branch, so here I am, because there’s not an e-mail address available for anyone in the entire corporation. I assume there’s someone you would pass this stuff along to. Could you just let them know that users can’t log into the website, and that the problem is invalid HTML?”
Teller: “Um… yes… I can… see what they can do.”

I’m not blaming the teller by any means, and I will admit that a customer walking into the branch office to tell them that their website has invalid HTML is not something that most bank tellers expect to face^[a]. This sort of thing could be easily avoided, though, if customers were simply given a method for reporting these sorts of problems — an e-mail address or a phone number that actually connects us to someone who can actually help with technical issues would be wonderful.

[Update: They've since fixed the error I describe here, but the lack of contact information is still a problem.]

1. Heck, I’ll even admit that my walking to the branch office to try to explain this was a bit over the top, especially since I wanted to explain that the problem was very simple to fix. [↩]

I was reading the Charleston Daily Mail online today when I came across this article. The headline was very grabbing and written to gain readers attention. (I applaud you, Justin D. Anderson) After reading a little bit of the article however, the headline seemed a little bit misleading. Even the opening statements of the article were making statements that were not altogether dishonest, but were said in a way to make the reading think a certain way. For instance:

“Statewide, blacks were stopped 1.5 times more often than whites, according to the survey. Hispanics were stopped 1.2 times more often.”

To me, this statement would mean if there were 100 white people stopped their would have been 150 black people stopped. At first this was shocking because black people make up such a small part of the overall population. I thought, there must be something wrong with our police force if they pulled over more black people than white, when black people make up 3% of the overall population. (See: my applause for Justin D. Anderson) But when you look at the real numbers layed out in the end of the article:

“White motorists represented the majority of the stops: 99,924. Blacks were stopped 4,355 times and Hispanics were stopped 888 times.”

Oh, really? Well that makes a little more sense. So after reading the entire article, I will sum it up for you. A study is done about racial profiling where no conclusion can be formed from the results. A writer, not wanting to waste an entirely good survey, creates a sensational headline. The headline, while partially true, can be construed to mean racial profiling does exist. And wow what a job he did, it got me to read it and even make my first post on this website about it. (More applause for Justin D. Notevenworthalastname)