Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

It’s hard to get a handle on all the ways that a private currency operator can profit from his franchise. But one of my favorites is having the loose change slip between the sofa cushions never to be seen again. The accounting rules for these things must be a mess. One of the reasons why the folks that issue gift cards like for them to expire is somewhat like the reason why firms like to make your vacation time expire; otherwise they have to do something to keep it on their books.

So today Home Depot announced it was going to claim 50+ Million Dollars that it’s pretty sure it’s customers have lost in the sofa since they bought them.

The article also reports that $55 Billion dollars moves into the private currency systems call gift cards every year; it doesn’t estimate how much manages to get back out v.s. slip into the sofa. I find that number a bit bewildering; there are 100 million households in the US; or so that’s $550 per household. I presume that the distribution over households is skew’d (since that’s my default presumption for distributions involving exchanges). I can imagine that there are people who build entire houses via gift cards; but still! Most of the gift cards are capped to hold only a maximum of $500; so it must get pretty weird for the high volume gift card users.

But wait. The article then goes on to find an source that thinks that if you take the bank issued gift cards, i.e. Visa/Mastercard gift cards, the annual amount might be up around $100 Billion; at which point we are talking a thousand per household. The bank cards are more fungible so I suspect some of those get shipped over seas; then possible some of the regular gift cards do too?

“spokesman for … Best Buy. ‘We really believe gift cards are all about convenience.’” What he means is, of course, they is very very convienient for Best Buy.

I find this extremely obnoxious. Link-in is sending marketing to it’s customers and using my name in the subject lines. Obviously they are doing this to increase the chance people will read, rather than just discard the junk mail. Social network hosts should be very careful about this kind of thing. I wonder what the hell their product management was thinking. Presumably this indicates that Link-in’s days are numbered.

From: LinkedIn Updates
Date: March 30, 2006 1:06:05 PM EST
To: …
Subject: Find the people that you and Ben Hyde know in common

LinkedIn Updates
Dear …

Thank you for using LinkedIn! Did you know that you may not be connected to people you know and trust? We would like to help you connect with your trusted contacts and get more value from LinkedIn.

It’s easy to find people that you and your trusted connections like Ben Hyde both know. See someone you recognize? Just click on that person’s name to view the profile. From there, click “Invite to connect” to send an invitation.

Check to see who is in Ben Hyde’s network.

…

Of course the joke is on them. Any of my aquantances immediately hit the delete upon seeing my name!

In one of my mailing lists somebody brought this one liner to our attention: “We want patriots, not mercenaries.”

The topic was outsource your firm’s IT operations. That really helped me crystalize something. IT is so central to productivity and positioning in the modern firm that there is something quite odd about letting control of it slip into the hands of vendors.

One of the reasons open source can work is because it substitutes an alienated cash/contractual relationship for a richer collaborative one. This enhances the chances you don’t loose control of such a key component of the modern firm.

That, by the way, was the royal we so common inPR personality puff peices.

I have this old wound which while it handicaps me it has the useful side effect that I can predict the weather. Whenever this wound begins to act up I can sense storms just over the horizon. This article suggests some particularly bad weather ahead. Consistent with current climate trends though.

If you give your child lunch money only later to discover they are buying candy with it you may discover your yearning for a special less fungible lunch currency. Not surprisingly there are micro-currency solutions for this problem in micro-managing your subordinates. If you give money to the local youth center earmarking your donation for youth basket ball and later find out it was spent to repair the roof the situation is less clear. When the green grapes appear at your grocer in January you can thank free trade and Chile; when there happens to be a black widow spider in the grapes you might question the wisdom of the making produce so fungible.

I used the word fungiblity a lot when I was working on Internet Identity. One of the many players in that standards making process are the firms that have huge amounts of account data about their trading partners. A strong identy system would allow them to make that data more fungible. If they could puzzle out a way to get permission to exchange that data with other parties they could convert static data in their vaults into dynamic data - a source of profit.

So I’m gobsmacked that I didn’t see this coming. The tax prep industry is seeking a rule change from the IRS that would allow them to resell the tax return data of their clients. Man is that evil! I paarticularly admire how this is framed as a clarification of tax payer privacy rights - indeed it is. Notice also how the industry is using it to protect themselves from foriegn competition. I guess this kind of thing happens almost automatically when the middlemen - in this case the tax prep industry - becomes sufficently concentrated.

Meanwhile, back on the lunch money problem. You could send you child to school with lunch already made. This would teach them valuable negotiation skills as they barter their lunch for better options. A wise parent might just send them to school with some highly fungible trade goods - cookies for example.