If you have a charge on your credit card that you disagree with, try to resolve it with the merchant first, and go to the credit card company last. Failure to do so could get you blacklisted.

Experian is getting hit with a class action on the novel theory that false advertising in a domain name is false advertising. My heart bleeds.

Much political hay has been made of late over the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which is commonly but wrongly dubbed the “antitrust exemption” for insurers. Past efforts have been made to repeal McCarran-Ferguson entirely (Patrick Leahy is big on this), but the latest incarnation, H.R. 3596, would make piecemeal changes to the Act for health and medical malpractice insurance only. Decent arguments can be made pro and con, but for reasons that don’t lend themselves to sound bites, few of them are.

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What he said.

Anyone tried it? I had VOIP with Packet8 and SunRocket in Cali, then had no choice but to revert to POTS in Virginia since neither cable nor DSL was available in the Land of Gooches at the time. I didn’t bother going back to VOIP upon moving to NC, as I got a pretty good deal on POTS, but $0 a month sounds like a better deal still. Any catch?

IKEA has an annoying habit of being too lazy to write instruction manuals for their furniture, relying instead on a bunch of cutesy drawings that are supposed to tell you what you need to do. Recently I purchased a bookshelf (Expedit) and learned this lesson the hard way. For future reference, this:

means “on the off chance you are not clairvoyant enough to figure out from these cryptic drawings everything you could possibly need to know, but are clairvoyant enough to recognize that there’s something you don’t get from the pictures, and are also clairvoyant enough to know Ikea’s phone number off the top of your head, but are too stupid to know that it’s Ikea you should be calling for assistance, here’s what to do.

Also note that this:

means “Don’t even think of putting this bookshelf in an upright position until it is fully assembled or the damned thing will collapse under its own weight.”

Betcha didn’t know that.

UPDATE: To their credit, they took it back without incident. Heading home now with a new one, and one more opportunity to find my same butt with my same two hands and the same flashlight, but a slightly more detailed butt-map.

FINAL UPDATE: The butt-map makes all the difference. Once I knew what should have been in the instruction manual but wasn’t, assembling the next one, and the rest of Mrs. X’s new set, was easy.

Picked up my rental car in Vegas yesterday, and learned that the car rental industry has found a third way to screw over customers. It used to be that only customers who forgot to refuel the car got screwed over by an unreasonably high per-gallon refueling charge. Then they started screwing over a second class of customers, those who try too hard to avoid getting screwed over by an unreasonably high per-gallon refueling charge, and opt to get screwed instead by a “buy a whole tank of gas whether you need it or not” charge upfront. Apparently, too few customers consented to that form of overscrewing, either, so now Budget has come up with a third: screwing over customers who don’t prepay a tank of gas they don’t need, but do come back with a tank full of gas, but didn’t keep a receipt to prove that the gas wasn’t … er … stolen?

Note that they didn’t say how much gas you have to buy. I’m tempted to fill up in two stages, first buying 20 cents worth of gas, then filling up in a separate transaction, and only provide the 20 cent receipt when I turn in the car.

Apparently, many of those cool apps for the iPhone have more unlawful than lawful uses.

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on title insurance, which some regard as a bit of a scam – enough so that one state, Iowa, prohibits it outright. OK, so maybe prohibit is the wrong word. Let’s just say they prohibit title insurance like most states that have lotteries prohibit gambling. Or given that their own title certificates are reinsured by the same eeeeeevil title insurers they forbid to issue policies in the state, maybe the better analogy would be to a hypothetical state that forbid gambling while maintaining a lottery and subcontracting that lottery out to Harrah’s. Something like that, I dunno.

The thing about title insurance is that it’s an odd bird that by all right really shouldn’t’ be called insurance. If I spent $20,000 on a new car, with $1,000 going to the manufacturing cost of the vehicle itself and the other $19,000 on its warranty, it might make sense to call my car an insurance policy, since after all, that’s where most of the price goes. But we don’t call cars insurance policies just because they carry warranties; we recognize that they are products that are primarily about doing something other than risk allocation. The element of the warranty is merely ancillary to that. Ditto for title insurance, where upwards of 80%, often more like 90%, is retained by the agent as commission that the insurer never sees. That’s because far more blood, sweat and tears is spent scouring public records for potential title defects, fixing such defects, etc. than in insuring against the relatively remote risk that the abstracter missed something. So calling the composite product “insurance” is a bit like calling a dog a tail.

That said, if you do think you’re paying too much for title insurance – the insurance part, not the abstracting – then it would seem that the most obvious solution would be to abolish the monoline laws in many states^* that forbid title insurers to write other lines of insurance and vice-versa. If every property and casualty insurer could compete with your title insurer, the market wouldn’t be so damned concentrated, and the famous invisible hand would drive prices down, no?

Full disclosure: When I lived in Virginia I worked for what at the time was the fourth largest title insurer in the country. There’s no love lost between me and that particular title insurer, however, and I can’t say I shed a tear when they declared bankruptcy last year. Schadenfreude ist die schönste Freude.

^*With ramifications for all states, since several of those monoline laws cover insurance written in other states, as well.

I spent the past weekend in Connecticut, courtesy^* of Delta Airlines, which thinks Atlanta is on the way from everything to everything else. On Friday I flew from Greensboro (GSO) to Atlanta (ATL), and from ATL to New York LaGuardia (LGA). On Sunday, I returned from New York JFK to ATL, and from ATL back to GSO. Today I received credit for my frequent flyer miles from Continental, which is still partnering with Delta but not for long. Credit was as follows:

Note that Flights 5099 (GSO-ATL) and 6474 (ATL-GSO) both have the same number of miles: 306. That kinda makes sense since you’d figure that Greensboro is the same distance from Atlanta as Atlanta is from Greensboro. Now compare the mileage credit for Flight 18 (ATL-LGA) vs. 1499 (JFK-ATL). Possible explanations:

1. JFK is 381 miles from LGA.
2. The pilot on Flight 18 took a really circuitous route to NY, but the pilot on Flight 1499 took a more sensible one.
3. The business class section of the plane travels 381 miles farther than coach.
4. ???

^*As compensation for last year’s disaster, this flight would have been free if I hadn’t originally booked it for this coming weekend and then had to re-book. As it was, it was very cheap, and I was allowed to check a bag for free since I had technically “bought” the ticket a year ago. And taking the free flight got me just enough miles on Continental to qualify for another free flight. Cool, eh?