Reaping the Rewards of Chase Rapid Rewards

As part of my What's in your wallet? series, aka the credit card churning game, I check the score on each of my credit cards when their anniversaries come around. Recently I hit my first anniversary with the Southwest Rapid Rewards Priority card from Chase.

The Card & The Offer

Chase offers a whopping five different credit cards affiliated with Southwest Airlines' Rapid Rewards frequent flyer program. Southwest is the airline I fly most frequently so it makes sense that I'd own at least one of them— though occasionally I've had two at once! But which one?

Just within the category of personal cards (vs. business cards) there are 3 choices: Plus, Premier, and Priority. This time around I picked the Priority card, the most premium of the 3 options.

As the most premium of the options this card came with the biggest signup bonus, 50,000 points after $2,000 spent in the first 3 months, plus an extra 50,000 points after a total of $12,000 spent in 12 months.

As the most premium of the options this card also came with the biggest annual fee, $149. And there was no waiver for the first year. That charge of $149 was the first thing on my card... and it did not count toward that huge $12k spending target.

Points, Perks, and Fees

Let's run the numbers.

I had no difficulty meeting that $12k spending target. In 12 months I actually charged almost $26,000 on this card. I earned about 138,000 Southwest Rapid Rewards points (including the 50k+50k bonus). I value RR points at 2 cents apiece (long story) so the value of that points haul is a whopping $2,760.

Cha-fucking-ching!, amiright?

Not so fast. There's the annual fee of $149 to subtract. Then there's the opportunity cost of $520 I could've earned by placing the same charges on one of my no-fee, 2% cashback cards. Subtracting these costs reduces the value of the card to a less lofty though still impressive $2,091.

But wait, there's more! As the most premium card in the lineup this one's got some premium perks. The annual fee is partly offset by a $75 annual credit for purchases made with Southwest. I cinched that pretty quickly. Then there were $24 of misc credits I snagged. Then there was an early-boarding perk I made use of once. It's difficult to put a value on that, but let's call it $10. That's how much I would've gladly paid to upgrade my seat to the one I got. Bonuses from the card also gave me a small boost toward renewing top-tier A-List Preferred status this year. That's really hard to put a specific value on, but I'm going to go with $30 for the little bit of lift the card gave me. Altogether these perks juice the card's net value to $2,230.

$2,230. Is that good? Let me put it this way: $1,000 is a good score for a first-year card. Earning a net of over 2 grand is 💥awesome💥.

Flying for Another Year

The flip side of that high score is that next year will not be so sweet. The monster sign-up bonus is gone while the $149 annual fee remains. Still, I figure I can more than offset that fee between points and perks and eke out a positive net win of $150. I'll check back in 12 months to report the score.

GoT S5E8: Insurance = Betting On Your Own Death

In Game of Thrones S5E8 one of the POV characters sees a man selling insurance. You wouldn't know it at first, though, because it's described literally as gambling. Furthermore it's characterized as macabre.

The character narration goes something like this (paraphrased):

"The man is a gambler. Ship captains bet with him on whether they will return from their voyages. The man bets they will, the captains bet on their own death."

This is called defamiliarization. It's a narrative technique of making an otherwise familiar concept (virtually all adults in the US use insurance) seem strange by using purposefully abstruse terminology to describe it.

It's not wrong, though. I've described insurance as legitimized gambling myself. And I've pointed out the irony that unlike typical forms of gambling, with insurance you're effectively betting against yourself.

While the scene starts by implying that the practice is somehow sinister it does at least clarify that what's evil about this insurance salesman is that he's cheating. He's taking the bets (i.e., selling insurance) but not paying out (paying compensation to the widows) when he loses.

Some GoT viewers/readers wonder if including insurance sales in a story setting based on the European Middle Ages is an anachronism. Actually it's not. While life insurance only started to become common in the 19th century there are documents of it dating back a few hundred years before that. And maritime insurance, the kind of insurance being bought and sold in this episode, has written history dating back over 2,000 years in multiple civilizations. Source: Wikipedia insurance page. So, yeah, ship captains have been betting on their own deaths for thousands of years.

GoT S5E8: Going Beyond the Books

Game of Thrones S5E8, "Hardhome", goes beyond what's been published in the books so far. It does that in two ways. First, it takes an event that happened off-camera in the books, the battle at Hardhome, and puts a major character there to make it a significant on-camera event (thus the title of the episode) that shapes the narrative of the series.

Second, the episode goes completely beyond what's been published by advancing a major plot arc involving Daenerys and Tyrion. At the end of the fifth novel, A Dance with Dragons, the two characters have not met, so everything about this part of the TV series is new ground broken by the showrunners.

The Battle at Hardhome

In the books Jon Snow sends a delegate to treat with the Wildling tribes gathered at Hardhome. With no POV character there the events are only described later, as a retelling, when someone reports them back to Jon. In the TV series Jon leads the mission himself. I think that actually makes more sense in the story given how controversial the mission is.

In the TV series ( Details about what happens at Hardhome (click to expand) )

This scene is hardly the first time the TV series has taken liberties with what's in the books, foregrounding something that was originally written in the background or changing up which characters do what. It's notable, though, in how powerful it is. The vivid battle at Hardhome makes it plain that almost all the politicking in the rest of the world is people rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Tyrion in Meereen

At the end of book 5 Tyrion has glimpsed Daenerys in Meereen but not met her yet. In the TV series that moment happens at the end of S5E7. In S5E8 the two major characters share significant dialog. Author George R.R. Martin confirms this will happen in forthcoming book 6... but the showrunners are not working from an advanced copy of the book. Even 7 years after the 2015 production of this episode book 6 is still not out and and no publication date has set. (Don't ask GRRM when it'll be out— he quips that every time someone pesters him about that he kills another Stark! 😱)

They are writing their own story at this point. That said, they're staying true to the characters... and writing some darn good TV. The dialog between Tyrion and Daenerys is very snappy, as you'd expect from two of the series' most intelligent characters, and they start developing a relationship that embodies the inherent contradictions (trust and distrust) involved in diplomacy.