IHG Rewards Card Finishes 5 Years

Recently my Chase IHG Rewards Select credit card passed another anniversary. I've owned this card now for five years— way longer than I originally expected I'd keep it. Let's check the score to see if it has been worth it.

For me to keep a card 5 years, when most cards I churn at 2 years— and some after just 12 months!— you'd expect it's special. You'd expect I use it regularly. Well, you'd be half right.

I charged zero on this card in the past 12 months; not a single purchase. That wouldn't seem to bode well for getting value from a card. Especially from a card that charges a $49 annual fee. What did I get in exchange for paying $49 for a card I never used?

The Power of Zero

The cool thing about this card is I don't even have to use it to get value from it! While I charged $0 over the course of the past 12 months I still earned almost 17,000 IHG Rewards points from it. Those came in the form of a 10% rebate on rewards points redeemed for free nights. I have a lot of IHG Rewards points, the result of... well, mostly credit card sign-up bonuses from cards such as this in years past. 😂 At a valuation of $0.007 apiece those points are worth $119.

The rebate on redemptions isn't the only valuable fringe benefit of this card. It provides a free night certificate every year. Lately I've been making those worth easily $150, sometimes more. The last cert from this card I redeemed in Waikiki, Hawaii.

Then there's the value of the platinum elite status the card grants me. As I stay in mostly limited-service IHG hotels like Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express that's not worth a heck of a lot. This past year I did catch a few upgrades I might have chosen to pay a bit extra for if they were offered at a fair price. Let's say those are conservatively worth $25.

So, the card's benefits are $119 + $150 + $25 = $294, and its costs are $49, yielding a net value of $245 this year. That's slightly better than last year's score with this card and is phenomenal for an off-year card I didn't even use.

They Don't Make 'em Like This Anymore

I mentioned above that I didn't expect to keep this card for 5 years. I had intended to churn it after 2 years. But then Chase stopped offering it. They replaced it with a card charging a higher fee that didn't offer better benefits. I instead of churning this one I supplemented it with another Chase IHG card. I canceled that card a year ago (after two good years with it) to pursue other opportunities. Meanwhile I've kept chugging along with this card because making $200+ per year without really even using it is pretty awesome. Now I'll go for another year and try to do it again.

GoT S7E6: Let's Ignore Time & Space!

Game of Thrones S7E6, "Beyond the Wall" involves a climactic battle: "The Battle of the Frozen Lake", as people call it. While the battle is narratively powerful, the writers took a lazy shortcut the writers took broke my suspension of disbelief. A heroic rescue that's shown arriving in 12-16 hours really should have taken more than two weeks to arrive, if time, distance, and the reality of traveling speed mean anything.

This is not the first instance of the TV series's showrunners playing fast-and-loose with time. As they've condensed carefully plotted but overly long storylines from the books, sometimes the timelines don't match up. For example, did a character ride 500 miles through a war zone in 2 days? Did an army seemingly sail or march halfway around the continent in a week? Until now these plausibly could be hand-waved away. A few weeks could pass between episodes or even between scenes in one episode. The endangered heroes' predicament is clearly urgent: they're surrounded by an enemy horde in sub-zero weather with no food or shelter. They have hours to survive. Yet somehow, in that time, a raven flies 1,000 miles with a written plea for help strapped to its leg, and help comes.

You might ask why unrealistic flight speed for a common bird is what suspension of disbelief falls apart on in a story where we've accepted that there are dragons and hordes of undead animated by dark magic.

There's a bedrock principle in the genre of fantasy and science fiction that a writer only gets a small number of "freebies" in setting up their story. Small being, like, one or two. In fantasy, that's typically the presence of magic and fantastical creatures. In scifi it's often faster-than-light travel and certain other bits of fantastical technology like hoverbikes, matter replicators, or instantaneous communication.

Beyond the basic existence of these 1 or 2 freebies everything else must be earned. And to be earned it must follow rules that are internally consistent. In this story it's an unforgivable shortcut to say, "Surprise! After 65 episodes, we're just now revealing that ordinary birds actually fly at the speed of light."

I am, of course, not the only fan to criticize this aspect of S7E6. Nor am I even the first. I mean, I watched this episodes five years after it dropped. Lots of critics are 5 years ahead of me.

It's interesting to see how the showrunners responded to this criticism. Director Alan Taylor sneered in an interview with The New York Times, "I've only looked at one review online, and it was very much concerned with the speed of the ravens. I thought, that's funny — you don't seem troubled by the lizard as big as a 747, but you’re really concerned about the speed of a raven."

Yes! We are bothered by that! We accept that huge dragons exist but not that ordinary ravens can fly 500 mph (nor even that said dragons can fly that fast) because of that bedrock principle of the genre I explained above. The director's response isn't an explanation at all but a Twitter-quality retort making fun of the critics instead of addressing their actual, valid point. The director either is a complete idiot about the $10-million-an-episode genre he was hired to direct, or he thinks his audience are complete idiots.

The Problems with Propositions

Election Day is this coming Tuesday, November 8. I know how I'm voting for most of the statewide offices, Congress, and state legislature. As I noted a few weeks ago, those choices are pretty easy; nearly every race pits a credible Democrat against an anti-government, election denying Republican. But one part of the ballot I need to do more research on is ballot propositions.

Ballot propositions take more effort to research before voting on because they can be tricky. It's already tricky because there are different types of propositions, as I outlined recently. But even more than that, propositions can be problematic in a number of ways. Here are 5 common problems:

1) They're written by amateurs, and contain illegal, impractical, or contradictory language. It's both a strength and a weakness of the initiative process that anyone can write one and, if they pay for signature-gatherers to get enough people to sign the petition, get it on the ballot sent to California's 22 million registered voters. The good is that it's a mechanism for citizens to bypass a legislature that is unresponsive to the majority of the electorate. The bad is that the props go through minimal review, and there's no deliberative process to improve them. Whatever is submitted is what's on the ballot, and we voters can only make an up-or-down choice.

2) A laudable goal with a deeply flawed implementation. The implementation of an otherwise worthy goal doesn't have to be illegal or infeasible to be a problem. Sometimes it's just plain bad. For example, years ago I supported the goal of funding stem cell research in California. But the initiatives to encourage it funded 10 years of research grants with 30 year bonds. Things like research grants should be funded out of current-year accounts. Leave long-term bonds for genuinely long-term things like building schools, roads, and bridges. Part of the problem with initiatives like this is that an up-or-down vote doesn't send a clear message. If I want to support stem cell research, do I vote Yes despite the problems? Or do I vote No knowing that if the measure fails many politicians will take it as, "Californians have spoken, and they've don't like stem cell research"?

3) Spending requirements tie the hands of the legislature. Many of the initiatives over the years have been of the form, "At least X% or $Y of the budget must go to this worthy goal." In addition to the problem of how up-or-down votes could be interpreted (see previous point) this also has the problem that, when successful, these measures put more and more constraints on managing the state budget. In years when tax revenues are tight the state government finds that 90% of its spending is locked in by law. This means that other popular programs must be cut because there just isn't enough fungible budget to go around.

4) Special interests disguise the initiative's impact. Given that anyone can write an initiative and there's no deliberative review, when moneyed special interests write them they generally try to conceal the true intent or impact of the measure. A prop could talk about "consumer choice" when really it's about removing important health regulations, or levy a "sin tax" on something like smoking or gambling people broadly want to see more regulated— but the tax proceeds go to help some other big business (i.e., the one that wrote the measure). At least once in the past 20+ years I've been fooled by a sneakily written ballot prop that I didn't spend more than a few minutes researching, and I voted wrong.

5) Complex, granular issues that are beyond the ability of 99% of voters to properly evaluate. Props can be big or small, simple or complex. Some of them are very complex, or have very wide-reaching consequences, which the vast majority of voters are unable to sort through properly. Many props I look at and I'm like, "I really wish this could go through the legislature." The legislature has not only a deliberative process to improve bills but numerous professional policy experts and lawyers involved in said process to understand its impact and feasibility.

After reading this list of problems with propositions it's tempting to take the stance, "Vote No on all!" Or at least, "If in doubt, vote No." But this is a problem, too!

The problem is not all ballot props are the same. While some are voter-written measures subject to any or all of the problems I've described so far, there are other types of props. In particular, referendum props— which are voter veto measures on legislation passed by the state assembly— really should be a case of "If you're not sure, vote yes." And bond measures proposed by the assembly go on the ballot because they have to. The legislature's not trying to hoodwink you by putting funding for schools, roads, and bridges there— though political opponents routinely claim they are, BTW. They're doing it because the state constitution requires it.

Bottom line, California's initiative process brings the good with the bad. Conscientious voters must read all ballot measure carefully to understand what they're voting for— or failing to vote for.