Financial & Travel Musings

Sometimes it seems like there’s a new diet pill out pretty much every week and, of course, every one claims to be better than everything that came before.

This week it’s the turn of Anoretix which is basically a combination of a fat burner and appetite suppressant that sounds just the ticket but then so do they all of course. One big plus is that this one is caffeine free. Caffeine tends to be the one common denominator to these things so it’s good to see that at least some of the pills arriving on the market don’t have it.

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If you’ve not had a credit card machine before in your business sometimes it’s not so obvious how the things actually work so I’m going to have a go at explaining it here in nice simple terms.

First off there’s the administrative business of how one actually acquires credit card machines in the first place which is often one of the least obvious aspects of the process. The means varies but basically requires you to have a business, then you open a business bank account and finally get one of the machines from your bank. That’s the process which most people go through but in fact you don’t need to get the machine from your bank nor do you need to get the “merchant account” from them either as both these processes can be handled by non-bank companies at, usually, much lower cost.

Once you’ve got the machine it needs to be plugged into your phone line although some new models have a built-in phone and on the larger scale you can get machine connected via your own computer network. Whichever way it is, this is the connection from your machine to the bank or rather the financial outfit dealing with the credit card processing for you.

If your contract is directly with your bank the money from credit card charges appears directly in your account, often by the next day. If it’s with another company then it generally takes a few days to make the transfer to your own bank account. Strangely refunds that you process take much longer to reach your customers account for no reason that I’ve yet discovered.

The business of swiping the card varies quite a bit but usually you enter the amount, swipe/insert the customers card, let them enter their PIN if required, and finally press the green button to process the transaction and once more to print a duplicate slip for them.

Simple, eh?

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Wendy has been talking quite a lot about the Baby P trial over on Cultured Views during the course of the last lot of months, using as her sources the various newspaper and TV websites reporting on the case.

This afternoon, we received a phone call from the Metropolitan police telling us that we were in contempt of court and that if we did not immediately remove all information about the case from the website they would seek an injunction to have the site taken down. Whilst Wendy was in the course of removing this material they took it upon themselves to have all of our websites on that host taken down. That’s despite the only one that had anything about that case being Cultured Views and that Wendy had already complied with their request.

However, all of the websites which she used as her sources for the posts remain. Much as we might like to imagine that Cultured Views was the leading authority on the case concerned, in reality the authorities lie among the traditional news organisations such as the BBC, the Mirror, the Sun and, of course, the more new-media sources of wikipedia and answers.com. A number of these go so far as to list the real name of the baby concerned along with a heap of other information which, in the interests of a free society, would be best left unknown. And, yes, in a free society we do need to keep the identity of even the most “obviously” guilty party a secret until they are convicted.

The problem, of course, is that the courts continue to work on the basis that the jurors hearing the case are ignorant of the facts of the case except for those which are put across to them during the trial. In the Internet age that seems unlikely to be a realistic stance in the case of high profile cases. After all, even “deleting” the information doesn’t work when google et al cache so many websites and, honestly, could you really select jurors who knew nothing about this particular case? Surely, it’s better to assume that jurors will know at least some details of the case in advance and allow for that in the trial?

It is good though to see that censorship doesn’t work these days and you still can read the articles in the caches despite the site itself being down.

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