UPDATE as of 2/8/2013: The old Cit 5% link stopped working, but I found a new one.
A whole bunch of follow-ups today, plus $15,000 you actually have a chance of winning, so let’s get started!
CITIBANK 5% FOLLOW-UP: Remember that Citibank card that gives 5% on gas, groceries, and drugstores for a year? Well, the link that used to work and then stopped giving 5% is now giving 5% again. So go ahead and get in while the getting’s good–this is an excellent card offer which Citi hasn’t offered in several months and there’s no telling when it could come back again. Thanks, as always, to FWF for bringing this to our attention.
SCREWED UP STATE FINANCES FOLLOW-UP: Over the weekend we touched on state finances. Today we learn from Bloomberg (H/T: TBP) that there is a California Highway Patrol division chief who made $483,581 last year. Something which we found interesting which nobody has remarked upon: if you read the article, look how skewed the salary distribution is for California on the graph at the top of the page (we’d include it here, but Bloomberg won’t let us copy it). The California graph compared to the other states has a long, thick right tail. This can mean a few things:
- California State Trooper management is top-heavy
- California State Trooper management allows employees to game the system via ridiculous overtime privileges and other financial chicanery.
- Some combination of (1) and (2).
GENETICS FOLLOW-UP: We wrote about 23andme last week and just wanted to bring two graphs to your attention. Most of you are probably familiar with Moore’s Law, which says that computer processing speed doubles every two years. You may not realize it, but something similar is occurring in genetics. MIT Technology Review has the full coverage, but take a look at this:
This graph shows how drastically the cost of sequencing (i.e. reading) your genes has fallen. Little more than a decade ago the cost of sequencing a human genome (i.e. a full set of genes) was close to $100 million, where as now a $1,000 genome sequencing is in sight.
Which brings us to our second graph:
With all this cheap technology, you bet we’re sequencing a lot more genomes! The human body is a machine, and we are making great strides toward understanding what’s happening at the molecular level. We will have better medicines, better health care, better quality of life, better everything, and if you don’t think that’s exciting, we don’t know what to say to you. (HT: Information Processing)
CHEAP PHONE SERVICE FOLLOW-UP: He touched on this a while back, but My Money Blog has a great post on how to get unlimited phone calls and data on your smart phone for $30 per month–with no contract! T-Mobile offers unlimited data for $30 a month via Wal-Mart but that plan only has 100 minutes. However, MMB shows you how to get around that using VOIP. Your calls will go through as data and thus you can enjoy unlimited talk minutes.
$15K IN PRIZES, DECENT ODDS (WE THINK): Speaking of My Money Blog, half dozen personal finance bloggers including him have apparently come into possession of some LUCRATIVE CORPORATE SUBSIDIES, as they are each giving away $2,500 to one lucky winner. All you have to do to enter is take a financial services survey and sign up for each of the bloggers’ email lists. We think the odds are pretty decent because, relative to the money, there can’t be that many people entering, can there? Plus the bloggers are actually pretty good, so hopefully you’ll pick up some useful info from them. Here are the six bloggers:
Good luck!
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