Foreign Perspectives

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One of the ironies of the explosion of the various money making schemes available on the Internet in recent years is that it’s come at a time when it’s become virtually impossible to get the ideal type of bank account for these activities namely an American one.

However, recently there’s been a slow but growing number of alternative banks starting to fill in the gaps that the 9/11 security crackdown forced normal American banks to create. Thus far these have been quite limited in capability but that’s starting to change.

For example, Gem writes about one upcoming innovation from Payoneer which is basically creating a virtual bank account linked to the prepaid debit card that they issue on behalf of a number of organisations. It’s currently in the “coming soon” category but will permit you to quote a real bank account number to the likes of paypal thereby making it possible to convert your virtual money into the real kind by way of their debit card.

I suspect that there’ll be more such innovations coming over the next year as already paypal themselves are rolling out a similar, albeit more limited, scheme in some countries.

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In big hotels towels and whatnot go “missing” and it’s classed as wastage basically because it would be pretty difficult to identify who’d made off with things as so many different people are involved.

However, in our place which is very much at the smaller end of the scale, there are very few people involved so it’s easy enough to identify the culprits. For example, just this morning a family checked out and made off with four of our towels. Sometimes you wonder why people do that but in this case it’s pretty clear: they had ordered four breakfasts but only ate one. Therefore in lieu of the three breakfasts which we’d charged them for they thought that they’d take two little towels and two big ones.

Net effect? Well, they’ve been charged EUR 40 and received an e-mail letting them know we’ll refund it if we get the towels back next week.

Now, what they’re going to say is that they didn’t do it and obviously it must have been our cleaning person. Well, as it happens I’m the person who both puts the towels into the rooms and takes them out again. I put six in and took two out therefore they took the other four.

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When you’ve collected a few domains and are running a number of websites after a while you start getting what can sometimes become a flood of peculiar offers.

Mainly, for us, it’s the peculiar bookings. Nearly always these are from Dr SomeBodyOrOther who represents some Christian organisation and who wants to send a large number of delegates to us for some conference in the near future.

On the more general front there’s the stream of link exchange offers from some incredibly dodgy websites indeed. On the other hand, I’ve just done a link exchange with A Personal Finance Guide which is close to being the American mirror image of Financial Perspectives.

And then there’s the business offers of various kinds. The latest is effectively a franchised dating site. Some of these look quite interesting eg for the dating site it would appear that the only upfront cash required would be to register a domain so I’m thinking about that one.

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