Capital One now says it wants to buy Discover. No actual cash will change hands, according to the proposal, but the all-stock transaction will be worth more than $35 billion. Visa, Mastercard, and American Express are the Bigfoot types in the credit card market. But both Capital One and Discover are important enough that their merger will require a lot of regulatory review, and there is a good deal of suspicion that they will never get the necessary sign-offs. Specifically, the Office of the Comptroller will have to approve. So will the Federal Reserve. Even if they both do, the Justice Department could bring an antitrust action to block the merger. The two parties to the contemplated transaction have begun a PR campaign to persuade us that this merger would actually be GOOD for competition. "The three giants have it all locked up. By uniting, us two outsiders will be able to crash their club force down the rates that cardholders pay!" It is a familia...
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I have a Dilbert day-by-day calendar again this year. Saturday and Sunday share a single page, each day of the work week has a page, and a comic, of ots own. I'll quote here the comic for January 9/10. Dilbert is sitting at his desk, the pointy-haired boss is standing behind him. Boss asks, "Do we have any actionable analytics from our Big Data in the cloud?" Dilbert, "Yes, the data shows that my productivity plunges whenever you learn new jargon." Boss, "Maybe in-memory computing will accelerate your applications." Dilbert, "Plunge, plunge, plunge." I also have a month by month wall calendar, aptly titled "Puppies," in which I'll be greeted each month by another cure dog-child. January greets me with a photo of a babe beagle, running about in grass with an orange ball in his mouth. Finally, am the proud possessor of a desk book for appointments. For the first time in several years, I'm NOT using one from A...
I begin this year, as I seem to begin each year, with three calendars. I have a new desktop/appointment calendar from American Express; a month-by-month wall calendar advertising the Boston Red Sox baseball team, and a day-to-day calendar atop my dresser filled with trivia regarding a television program, The Big Bang Theory. The AMEX calendar, as is its year-by-year custom, tells me to travel to various exotic places where I can use my blue card to go into debt. Among the locales highlighted this year: Cancun, Mexico; Oslo, Norway; Cusco, Peru. In connection with the latter, we're told amidst space for mid-September 2015 appointments that visitors to high-altitude Cuzco should keep well hydrated and avoid heavy meals and alcohol. Got it. The Red Sox calendar gives the stats for different players each month, starting in January with Jon Lester, Pitcher, #31. Lester also gets a very dramatic photo portraying him in full stretch, mid-pitch. If you're curious, he was born...
I'm looking again at the annotations of my American Express desktop calendar. This time, I note that the marginalia for the month of June involve the city of Sydney, Australia. Referencing first the "Bondi-to-Bronte coastal walk," one and a half miles between two of Sydney's beaches, with "dramatic sandstone cliffs" along the way. Then the population of the city, about 35% of which was born overseas, "mostly in the UK, China, New Zealand, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, Lebanon, Italy, and South Korea." then the simple fact that Sydney is not the nation's capital (that's Canberra). and ending with a brief description of Sydney Harbour National Park.
The October pages of my Amex appointment book inform me about Austin Texas. Here are two facts we might all want to hug close to our hearts: 1) Austin City Limits is the longest-running concert music program on American television, and 2) With the 2008 opening of its Long Center for the Performing Arts, Austin acquired a world-class forum for its orchestra, opera, and ballet companies. We're also informed of the superb skyline views from the front terrace of that Long Center.