I love the convenience of a credit card, and I hate giving away my own cash to banks and other owners of ATM machines, and I feel safer not walking around with $500 in my wallet all the time, so I was pleased when I heard two incorrect statements regarding credit cards:
1) California state law prohibits cash discounts.
2) California state law prohibits minimum purchase amounts for credit cards.
Again, these two statements are wrong.

Now, I admit that I have made the claim above in the few cases where I have been charged a higher price for using my credit card or asked to add additional items to get my purchase price to some minimum limit, usually $10. I was surprised one day when I made my haughty claim that requiring a minimum charge was against the law when the merchant stated with complete confidence that it was definitely not against the law to require a minimum purchase.

Within a month when I went to order the services of a resume writer, I was told there was an additional charge for using my credit card. This time I wasn't so confident, so I held my peace and decided to do some research.

What is the truth?
1) California law does not prohibit requiring customers to make a minimum purchase to use a credit card. I should note that Visa and MasterCard agreements with merchants do forbid minimum purchase amounts. A merchant is violating this agreement when they refuse to take your card for a small purchase.
2) California law does prohibit charging extra to use a credit card. In other words, charging a surcharge to use a credit card is illegal.
3) The right to provide a cash discount is specifically protected by California law provided that the discount is made available to everyone. Additionally, the law states that any agreement between the credit card companies and the merchants to not provide cash discounts is void.

Merchants can offer a cash discount, but merchants can't lure you to the register with a low price only to tell you that they will tack on an extra charge if you want to pay by credit card. The difference is subtle.

Merchants take credit cards as a means to maximize profit. They know that more people will buy when they take credit cards, and people will spend more when they use credit cards. If the cost of taking credit cards is built into their prices then they will make an extra profit every time someone pays cash. If a merchant has stiff price competition then it may make sense to offer cash discounts as a means to attract customers away from the competition.

Regardless, every merchant should know that customers are annoyed and sometimes more than annoyed when they are told that there is a minimum purchase amount to use a credit card. And, charging extra is against the law, at least in California.

Magobrillo

Reference:

CALIFORNIA CODES
CIVIL CODE
SECTION 1747-1748.95

Three Years Later

It's been three years since I posted to this blog. My uncle and his wife created a beautiful blog covering their boat cruising adventure in South America and Mexico. This inspired me to to share my thoughts once again in this blog. To start, I thought it would be worth a few lines to update the subjects I wrote about three years ago:

iPod's and MP3 players in general are much more main stream. It is quite unusual to see anyone carting around a portable CD player. New cars come with input jacks so you can plug your iPod into your car stereo system. It's only a matter of time before the connection will be wireless. One positive change is Apple allowing other sources for MP3 songs other than iTunes. Amazon even has a downloader that automatically updates the iTunes library to recognize the music downloaded from Amazon.

Since I wrote the post on immigration and Social Security, I've heard only a couple of people mention the possibility of using immigration as a means to fix Social Security. One person stated that it wouldn't work but didn't offer any justification for that position. It's been three years and there has been no movement at all to fix Social Security. We're now in a severe recession, which will likely put Social Security into an even worse condition. I predict that it's only a matter of time before immigration restrictions are lifted allowing more young professionals to enter the US to work and pay into the Social Security system.

Congress has allowed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to Expire. My son is now in Middle School, and is home school is not a NCLB. My wife still wanted him to go to a different school, one with slightly better test scores. We entered the lottery and won two years in a row without the NCLB advantage. What's interesting is that there is an NCLB middle school in our town, and you would think that a large number of parents would take advantage of NCLB to get their children into a better school. Apparently this didn't happen in large numbers; otherwise, there would not have been a spot for my son. My daughter has three more years of elementary school. We originally took advantage of NCLB to get her into a better school. Her school has indicated that we no longer need to enter the lottery to get her a spot, so hopefully we won't be hampered by the expiration of NCLB. In three years, we'll have to address the middle school preference. Whether or not Congress renews NCLB, NCLB won't help us get her into our preferred middle school.

HDTV is also main stream. All the TV stations but one have shut down their old analog transmitters. What's interesting is that most of the cable channels are still transmitted in low resolution. What's also interesting is that the raw cable signal appears to have all the local HDTV transmission, but they don't make many of them available if you use a cable box. To take advantage of all the stations available on Time Warner Cable in our town you need to use a splitter to provide one signal to your cable box and one signal to your TV's antenna input. Here, I'm assuming you use HDMI or other video source from your cable box to your TV so that you don't need to hook up the cable box's RF output to your TV. In any event, I won't be happy until all the cable channels are high definition, just as all the free stations are now.

Look for future articles on GPS, Wikipedia, HD Camcorders and backing up all those old 8 mm camcorder tapes (because your 8 mm camcorder will fail soon and you might not be able to get a replacement).

Magobrillo

Thank You, You're Welcome: Have you ever noticed that folks being interviewed by reporters never, and I mean never say "you're welcome" in response to a "thank you" by the interviewer. The person almost always responds by thanking the reporter in kind. Well, a "thank you" is better than no response, but why doesn't anyone say "you're welcome?"

I suspect that in many cases, the person being interviewed sought the interview. They feel obligated to thank the reporter for granting the interview. What do they get in return, publicity, recognition as an "expert" in whatever subject is being discussed? They often get a free advertisement for their book, blog, website or the company/organization to which they belong. Even the reporters advertise each others books when they interview themselves, which is a pet peeve I've already written about.

Just once, I'd like to hear someone answer "you're welcome" when thanked by a reporter so I can have the perception that the interviewer's responses are genuine even if they are in fact trying to get some sort of publicity.

Magobrillo

No Child Left Behind (NCLB): The elementary school across the street is a NCLB school. It doesn't meet the academic standards required by the NCLB Act. The school is mostly populated by immigrant children whose parents don't speak English or at least don't speak English as their primary language. Because the school is a NCLB school, my children get to move to the beginning of the waiting list at other schools in the district -- schools we choose, which have good academic records.

The irony is that our home school is half surrounded by three new town home complexes and a single family home community filled with middle class and upper middle class families. If all the kids from these communities went to the school across the street, the school would not be a NCLB school.

An NCLB school is not always and probably is not usually the fault of the staff of the schools. There's a big difference between kids whose parents can't help them with homework and kids of parents who can. NCLB schools need more resources to compensate for the help the children cannot get at home.

Middle and upper middle class families need to be encouraged to keep their kids in their local schools. These families could be enticed to stay by offering free, quality tutoring and special educational opportunities that might not be available to the schools across town that are in the top 85% of the state's schools. All children would benefit, and the struggling kids would rise up closer to the performance of their middle class peers.

Most of all, a few bright stars from the children on the opposite side of the school may have the opportunity to rise up and meet their true potential. It is the sharp, motivated students who don't have the family support needed to develop their children that define the term NCLB. These children are the ones who do get left behind when the upper and middle families pull their children out of the local school.

Magobrillo

Magobrillo

Immigration a Solution for Social Security? Once again, immigration reform is making headlines. I have a special interest in immigration because my wife is a naturalized US citizen. From Mexico, my wife was one of the lucky ones. Her father was born in the US, but his parents immigrated to Mexico when he was a teenager. As a dual citizen, he was able to get green cards for any of his kids that wanted them.

When my wife first came to the US, she worked in a hospital as a housekeeper. She learned English and managed to get a job as a respiratory technician. Her job was to clean and set up respiratory equipment, a job with a certain amount of responsibility.

After several years, she decided to go to college to become a Respiratory Therapist. Now, many of the folks she worked with at the hospital reacted angrily; how dare she become one of them. She continued to work at the hospital right up until just before her graduation. They laid her off from her job as a respiratory technician, the final message that she was not welcome to work there as one of them.

My wife finished school, studied for the state test and passed it on the first try. She landed her first job as a respiratory therapist and has been a successful therapist for over last ten years.

My wife has never been on welfare, food stamps or Medicare. She pays her bills, and together we've pursued the American dream.

Out there in our beautiful country, there are thousands of immigrants like my wife, some illegal, some working in the fields, some working in restaurants, some riding garbage trucks, many with the capability to take on advance professions that many Americans are unable to obtain or unwilling to make the sacrifices needed. These immigrants form a part of the foundation for a strong, prosperous America in the future.

One might even argue that such immigrants hold the key to the solvency of Social Security. Social Security is in trouble because the baby boomers are aging and there are not enough young Americans to take their place in the workforce and pay into the Social Security system.

Open our arms to immigrants like my wife and the problems plaguing Social Security may be much more manageable. And who knows, you may find yourself in a hospital with an immigrant making your dinner, another cleaning your bed pan, and another keeping you alive as a respiratory therapist.

Magobrillo

Public Radio:
I remember the first time I heard the news on public radio. I was shocked. I was accustomed to AM news radio stations with their 30 second sound bite news stories. On public radio, the news stories were in-depth and covered many different regions of the world and a diverse set of topics.

These observations were from quite a few years ago. Today, the topics don't seem as diverse or in-depth as they did when I first started listening. It still represents a big improvement over the AM commercial news stations.

Public radio does have a snobbish sound to it. Radio being radio, there are some very interesting voices and behind those voices a set of diverse opinions that are refreshing to hear. However, I can do without the aristocratic snobbish voice of many of the commentators. Unlike Plankton in the Sponge Bob Movie, I did get it when Squidward said in a snobbish, arrogant voice, "I listen to public radio."

My number one pet peeve is their tendency to interview each other about news events. This is obviously a lot easier than going out and interviewing people involved in the story, and I don't mind them sharing their own opinions ("analysis") on the stories of the day. What I do resent is the portrayal of the interview as if it is from someone personally involved in the story.

All in all, public radio is an excellent alternative to commercial AM news stations. They do have their faults, but their in-depth coverage and diverse commentaries make up for their few faults.

Magobrillo

iPod

I love music and I am a frequent traveler so for years carried around a portable CD player along with a fair supply of CDs and a set of headphones. I always found it a challenge to pack my backpack with CD player, CDs, headphones, a book, a dictionary (Spanish) along with my computer and all its parts. Needless to say, I looked in awe every time someone pulled out their iPod.

Once a year or so while rushing off a late flight to catch the last connection home on a Friday night, I would leave my CDs in the seat back losing them forever. Each event resulted in the loss of $150 to $250 in CDs. As a result, I started looking into MP3 players. Being an engineer, I had to have the best value player with high fidelity sound. I wanted FM and the ability to listen to about 6 hours of music. A player with 512 MB to 1GB of RAM would have worked fine. My wife put an end to all that when she bought me an iPod for our anniversary.

My new iPod had a color display and 20 MB of hard drive space. It was easy to load up my CDs and operating the iPod itself was easy to learn with its intuitive controls. I had no complaints about the sound quality as long as I used my own headphones.

I did try out iTunes and was pleasantly surprised that I could burn a regular CD for use in my car. I could not tell any difference in the sound quality of the CDs from iTunes and store bought CDs. My only complaint is that the selection at iTunes seems limited. I also do not like the partial albums they offer. I want the whole album if I'm going to buy the album.

The limitations of iTunes is minor in comparison to the convenience when while traveling. I now have plenty of room for my books, computer equipment and audio equipment. And best of all, there are no CDs to lose.

Magobrillo

HDTV

My wife and I finally broke down and bought an HDTV, a 42 Inch Dell Plasma. My plan was get a cable box with HDTV service so I could watch a few HDTV shows that happened to be on cable. I drove down to the cable company office to pick up the device only to find the office closed. Being excited and impatient, I decided to try out the TV by connecting an old UHF/VHF antenna in the attic to the digital antenna input.

Wow! I was surprised. Not only did the channels come in crystal clear, there were far more channels available over the free air waves than I ever imagined, and imagine is all I could do since I hadn't heard of but a handful of stations being available in HD. Needless to say, I passed on the rental of the cable box.

Lesson 1: No special antenna is needed. An old fashioned UHF/VHF antenna works great. There is no amplifier in my system. (Orange, CA)

Lesson 2: For each channel, there are subchannels. For example, channels are labeled 4-0, 4-1, 4-2, 4-3, 4-4, 4-5. One channel might be the non-HD version of channel 4 on regular TV. 4-1 might be the HD version of channel 4, and channel 4-2 might carry the weather. Sometimes, the subchannels are completely independent stations or at least appear to be independent.

Some of the public TV stations offer sub-channels with cartoons for the kids. These are a terrific alternative to the violent cartoons of the cable cartoon channels like Cartoon Network.

Lesson 3: Advertisers love HDTV. Products look great on HDTV. You can see every little detail. This can be a problem too as sometimes you see a little too much detail in the face of the person on TV. HDTV will be a boon to the cosmetic artists preparing all the television hosts for their shows.

There are two or three problems I noticed with HDTV. In low light conditions, the picture can take on a snowy condition similar to a personal video camera in low light. This probably occurs with regular TV too. It's just not as noticeable. It could also be an issue with plasma screens. If anyone knows, please post a comment.

The second problem I've noticed is that there seems to be difficulty synchronizing the voice and the picture. Again, I'm not sure whether this an issue of the TV or the programming. I suspect it's the programming because it seems to vary from day to day.

All in all, I am very pleased with HDTV free over the air waves. One day, we may go ahead and pickup an HDTV cable box, but we'll put it in the office with our LCD HD-Ready TV so we can get HDTV in there too.

Magobrillo