Comments on: Weekly Financial Review #14

By: victoria

victoria — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 01:51:25 +0000

I’m a Red Sox Fan living in Northern California too!! :)
Can’t wait until they come out here to play the A’s.

By: Adam

Adam — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 13:50:13 +0000

Hey I’m a Sox fan too from the Portsmouth, N.H. area. I live in Texas now though. Hopefully DiceK works out for us. If you’re a real sox fan you have to love the website bostondirtdogs.com

have a good one buddy,
Adam

By: Shadox

Shadox — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 08:24:06 +0000

OK. My take on the mastercard commercial is twofold: (i) who gives a damn if someone takes your card and uses it. You are protected from liability by federal law; (ii) Lazy Man, you need to get yourself a TiVO so you can skip the commercials… :-)

By: Tricia

Tricia — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 01:37:50 +0000

Haha…I saw that Mastercard commercial and thought the same darn thing. Very poor commercial. I give them props for the MacGyver one, though. I loved that show!

By: Lazy Man

Lazy Man — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:46:06 +0000

I still feel that my signature provides protection. It’s not useful at the point of sale, but if there’s a problem down the line, I should be able to dispute it pretty easily – emphasis on the “should.” How do I dispute a “swipe” as not being mine?

I’m glad you included the link to John Hargrove’s stuff at Zug. He’s a funny guy that I knew personally from way back in the Computer Stew days. Hilarious stuff, it looks like they are archived at http://readdy.com/computerstew/episodes/. It was way before it’s time.

By: ct

ct — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 15:13:43 +0000

About the Master Card commercial: When’s the last time someone actually checked your signature against the one on your card? I know people who have never signed any of their cards to begin with. Plus, think about all the ways you can use a credit card without signing anything at all (at a gas pump, on the internet, etc.). So in theory the signature is giving you some protection but really its just a hassle.

On a related note, there was a really funny article from a guy who tried to see how crazy he could make his credit card signatures at http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/

By: Dong

Dong — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 14:45:38 +0000

I would think DiceK generates at least 14M for the Red Sox. Let’s see, the Sox play 82 home games of which DiceK will pitch 16 or so. On the 66 games he doesn’t pitch, let’s say the Red Sox average 1000 DiceK shirt sales at about $20 a pop that’s about 1.32 million, and then on the days he pitches they sell 4000 shirts for another 1.28 million. That’s over 2.5 million just on shirt sales. Given the other branding and stuff that the Red Sox have going on, I can see them easily generating about 14M in revenue.

On the credit card security, I think signatures are pretty much worthless anyhow. Most cashiers don’t even bother to check and when they do it’s not like they would question if the signature was slightly off…. I think a pin system is much better.