Consumption Rules

• A woman who says she lost more $1 million gambling in Atlantic City sues some casinos for $20 million, claiming they should’ve stopped her compulsive gambling.

• People who bought houses they couldn’t afford with loans they didn’t understand want their lenders to change the terms.
• Congress authorizes a war and then tries everything it can think of to get out of it.
• Our country gets addicted to oil and then blames OPEC when it doesn’t like the price.

  See Glenn Beck for the answer.

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Don’t want to pay to find out your FICO score? Find out your estimated score using bankrate and myfico’s Credit Score Calculator.

It’ll be fairly accurate (as accurate as your answers to their questions are honest), but you get what you pay for.

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The poor:

So right after the Bear Stearns funds blew up, I had a thought: This is what happens when you lend money to poor people.

Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing personally against the poor. To my knowledge, I have nothing personally to do with the poor at all. It’s not personal when a guy cuts your grass: that’s business. He does what you say, you pay him. But you don’t pay him in advance: That would be finance. And finance is one thing you should never engage in with the poor. (By poor, I mean anyone who the SEC wouldn’t allow to invest in my hedge fund.)

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As if gift cards weren’t backhanded enough. Here’s news from CNN:

As more retailers file for bankruptcy or go out of business, more than $75 million in gift cards are at risk of becoming worthless pieces of plastic this year.

“If I knew this was going to happen, I would have used them right away,” said Jon Tapper, a public relations executive from Boston who received two Sharper Image cards as business gifts just a few weeks ago. Their total face value is $50.

“I love gift cards, but now this makes me think twice.”

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Here is a 48-page economic policy summary From Barack Obama. It’s fairly impressive. I think, as does The Economist, that he understands economics a lot better than he sometimes lets on. They gave him a fairly decent review, actually, and pointed to his economic policies as being surprisingly substantive.

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