I love my credit card. It gives me discounts, it protects me from fraud, and it frees me from having to carry cash around. My credit card is like a flower-filled meadow on a sunny day, but that’s because I don’t use the credit part of the credit card. I pay it all off every single month so I use it as a convenience, not a source of money. However, the option to NOT pay off the balance is always lurking, at which point the double digit juice starts running and the bankers uncork the champagne.

I’ll put out a thought for you: Consumer Credit ought to be illegal!

Good ol' Tim's (Tim Horton's) seems a little aggressive to it's employees. There are two fairly public cases in recent history. The older happened nine years ago when a worker named Charlene Walsh was caught on a security camera stealing two dollars from the cash register. She was fired.

However, the camera did not catch her stealing. It apparently only caught her removing two dollars from the till. The two dollars was a tip. Think 8 customers give 25 cents so you change them for $2, or a single customer gives a fiver for a three dollar order.

Found this while looking through Google Finance this weekend. Pretty funny discourse. For those who don't know Berkshire Hathaway is the company of Warren Buffett, the world's richest person and most famous investor. One share of Berkshire Hathaway is currently worth $133,600, and in 1962 a share was worth $7.60.

Today, the Globe and Mail carries Dead ducks a boon for oil-sands opponents. The story is the ongoing coverage about 500 Mallard ducks that landed in a Syncrude tailings pond where over 99% of them died. This is top news; Google counts 325 articles today!

To me, insurance is about reducing risk. It's about a bunch of people getting together and agreeing to share the risk so that no individual has to face a catastrophic loss. For example, if you drive a car then sometimes the car gets damaged. Accidents happen no matter how careful you are. Suppose you have a 5% chance of incurring a $1000 cost. This means that the expected cost is $50 per year per person, but anyone who has the accident would have to pay the $1000. Insurance lets everyone pay an even $50 per year and then helps the unlucky person with their huge bill.

Westjet came out with a news release today.  They put a different exciting spin on it, but here is the summary:

You can buy a regular seat, with the leather and the TV and movies on demand, etc for the normal price.  Or ... you can elect to curl up in the overhead luggage compartment for only $12 more.  Now, I understand that it's April 1st so I'm 95% sure that it's an April Fool's joke.  Here's the link:

www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=838470