3 Links I Love: Credit Card Fraud, Failed Self-Help Guru, Murals in the Snow

We bring you two fascinating articles dealing with credit card fraud and confessions of a self-help guru along with amazing snow murals works of art.

 

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TBB’s 3 Links I Love always features more than three links. What can I say, I like to innovate 🙂

 

Why Is the U.S. Determined to Have the Least-Secure Credit Cards in the World? – Must read article that is very relevant to our weird hobby and inherent birth right to travel for free and/or have luxurious experiences for next to nothing!  All you needed to know about EMV, Chip-and-PIN, Chip-and-signature and fraud and stuff like that. Some info that stood out:

• But microchips are expensive—so expensive, in fact, that for years banks found it more convenient to pay for fraud than to pay to put microchips in all of their customers’ cards, a cost that the consulting firm Javelin Strategy & Research estimated to be $1.4 billion.
• Replacing the 15 million payment terminals in the United States would cost roughly $6.75 billion
• The U.S. still has a ways to go before it’s ready to accept chips, with or without PINs.
• …as it becomes more difficult for criminals to counterfeit cards, due to EMV technology, there has also been a rise in the number of criminals who apply for new cards under stolen identities, instead of trying to counterfeit existing accounts.

 

Confessions of a Failed Self-Help Guru – Fascinating post. “I traveled around the country telling strangers how to balance their workloads and better their lives—until I learned the hard way that the people offering to solve your problems are often the ones who need help the most.” Oh boy, I can think of a few bloggers this probably applies to…My incendiary comments in brackets 🙂

I discovered there were two types of us: people who lived to write, and self-appointed experts hoping to get rich and famous.  [Talking about you Titan bloggers?]

The key was to monetize my expertise, as though every person I’d ever encountered was loose change waiting to be salvaged from the couch. To do so, I needed to pepper my website with authoritative photos of myself — arms crossed, face confidently arranged into a tell-me-something-I-don’t-know expression. I needed an e-newsletter promoting products my many acolytes could buy, like webinars, e-books, and $499 coaching packages. I also needed to invest $10,000 in a media trainer who could teach me to hold my own with Terry Gross and Anderson Cooper. [Or you could just sell credit cards like The Points Guy?]

Publicly I was the poster child for the well-balanced, successful freelancer. Privately I was unraveling.   [Reach out and touch one!]

 

Simon Beck Takes Over 40,000 Steps to Draw Huge Murals in the Snow. The work of this artist is one of a kind. I have featured his amazing works of art here before. This time you can get blown away when you see it from a drone. You are welcome!

TBB appreciates good humor. And following The Darwin Awards on Twitter @AwardsDarwin is a way to laugh every day. Laughter is medicine. Enjoy!

And I leave you with this…

 

Please help bloggers you appreciate & make a positive difference in your life by spreading the word about their blogs, emailing and commenting and using their few $ links, thank you!

TBB
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