To the Local Government Elections Task Force,

I was elected as a park commissioner in November 2008 pursuant to the Cultus Lake Park Act. The purpose of this letter is to express my opinions on the matters that your task force is considering.

Campaign finance – Contribution/Spending Limits

Our current system, mostly unlimited contributions and spending, is adequate. Enacting spending controls would require a whole new bureaucracy of ensuring compliance, which would be prohibitive for local candidates to enter elections.

I spent under $1,000 in the last election campaign, so I am not recommending ’status quo’ with any self-interest. I strongly believe that spending and contribution limits are more “unfair” than unlimited spending, as spending limits promote incumbency protection.

I will recommend that Section 87 of the Local Government Act be amended such that only individuals (not corporations, unions, associations, etc.) be allowed to contribute to the candidate or elector organization as it is relatively easy to create a numbered corporation and funnel money into a campaign without the public having a proper way of knowing where the true source of funds for the campaign is. I also recommend that individual donators/contributors be restricted to being residents in British Columbia.

Note this recommendation means that corporations/unions cannot give “in-kind” or other non-monetary contributions.

Campaign finance – Contribution/Spending disclosure

Disclosure requirements are currently modest, but are generally adequate.

One significant change that I recommend is adding a requirement to disclose within 3 business days the cumulative receipt of a monetary or in-kind contribution greater than $1,000 from any one source. The reason for this is that if somebody is trying to “buy an election”, the information is not useful to an elector after the election is over. If this information is timely disclosed, it will counteract the “unfairness” arguments that spending limit proponents advocate.

While not currently required by legislation (Section 93 of the Act), documents pertaining to the receipt and expenditure of campaign funds should be available electronically for those that request it. The City of Vancouver currently does this on a voluntary basis, but typically for other municipalities you have to walk into City Hall and view the documents in person.

Campaign finance – public financing / tax credits

For compliance cost reasons, tax credits should not be issued to municipal donators. If the committee does recommend some form of tax credit system, I would mirror the provincial political donation tax credit system.

I do not support the concept of “public financing” based on a result of a previous election – this would be a measure of incumbency protection, something that all locally elected officials already have by virtue of their office.

All contributions/donations to a candidates’ campaign should be done through his/her own pocket, or through contributions/donations of other individuals and not be financed by the government.

Enforcement processes and outcomes

I do not believe there has been a single case of prosecution for improper disclosure of the receipt of contributions of the expenditure of funds for elections. The oversight for this function in local elections is lacking. Short of requiring external audits of campaign expenses and contributions, I believe the committee should steer its policy recommendations towards having less rules to comply with, to reduce the burden of monitoring candidates as I do not believe that verification of contributions and expenses will be more diligent in the future.

One easy method of verifying campaign contributions and expenses is to require campaign expenditure reports to attach their bank statements, as every candidate and elector organization is required to open up a bank account for the purpose of managing campaign expenses. This will clearly show cash inflows and outflows and can reconcile with the stated numbers on the donation and expense report.

Election Cycle / Term of Office / By-Elections

Three years is a reasonable term of office. It ensures accountability of elected officials, but not at the expense of long term planning.

The fixed election dates, currently held in November, should be held one month earlier in mid-October. The reason is that campaigning in November is restrictive due to the weather and short daylight hours, especially in jurisdictions in the BC interior.

As a cost-saving measure, I would consider modifying Section 37(3)(a) of the Act to enable an indefinite postponement of a by-election.

Role of the chief electoral officer (B.C.) in local government elections

The Chief Electoral Office should only be involved in instances involving the allegation of improper disclosure of contributions or expenditures, or other issues pertaining to dispute resolution. Municipalities have otherwise tended to do an excellent job of managing their own elections.

Corporate Vote

The present system is adequate – i.e. no voting for corporations. The reason why I would be opposed to this is from a compliance perspective, and potential for abuse. I also do not fundamentally see why my corporation and myself should be able to have double the representation in an election than just an individual. Having a corporate address in a municipality does not imply that my corporation pays any tax money to the municipality.

Other Issues – Methods of voting

I am against the concept of “internet voting”. I am also against the concept of mail-in ballots. These two methods of voting are susceptible to fraud and security concerns. I recommend hard-coding in legislation that voters must be physically present and show two pieces of identification before voting that establish their identity and residency. I do support and recommend the existing system of having advanced voting days.

The voter turnout of an election should not be used as a measuring tool to determine how “successful” an election was.

Other Issues – Non-residential property owners

The current system of allowing non-residential property owners to vote is adequate. This is as close to “taxation with representation” without allowing a corporate vote.

Other Issues – Voting system

The existing “at-large” method of electing local representatives is adequate, mainly because it is a system that is easy to understand and produces results that are a reasonable representation of voters’ intentions. I would recommend that whatever system of voting is used that it be applied provincially as if different municipalities had different voting methods, it would lead to widespread confusion.

I also do not support the concept of “wards” in local government elections.

Summary of Recommended Changes

1. Change the fixed election date from mid-November to mid-October.
2. Allow campaign contributions from individuals only.
3. Require disclosure within 3 business days of a contribution greater than $1,000.
4. Enable electronic viewing of campaign contribution/expenditure reports.
5. Require campaign contribution/expense reports to attach campaign bank statements.
6. Explicitly require voters to be present, and show two forms of ID establishing their identity and residency.

Sincerely,
Sacha Peter

A Double Blind post, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Commentary.

Since I anticipate people asking about my credentials, my educational background was in physics, and I am a certified management accountant, and consider myself to be very knowledgeable about issues concerning power generation and the economics behind them.

The Independent Power Producers of BC

Unrelated to the above proclamation, a February 11, 2010 report from the Independent Power Producers of BC claiming:

The study by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) reports that independent power producers could grow BC’s economy by as much as $9 billion by 2020. IPP construction could support 87,000 person-years of employment for British Columbians over the next decade, and more than 9,100 full-time jobs for their operations and maintenance.

By 2020, capital spending in the IPP sector could reach $29 billion. Government revenue – at all three levels of government – from the construction of IPPs could total $1.6 billion, while ongoing direct payments to government could reach approximately half a billion dollars annually.

IPPs are investing significant amounts of capital into BC (Plutonic Power is at roughly $200 million at September 2009 and this will increase) and it is reasonable to conclude that IPPs will have to employ people to construct their generation and transmission assets across the province. The full report is not a bad read, although the analysis in section 4 is a bit sketchy (where they make extrapolations in terms of the economic impact of such investment – including a “Need correct data for this chart” that was not omitted in the final report on page 18!) and the headline number ($9 billion by 2020) is assuming spin-off effects from direct investment ($4.85B direct, $3.95B induced, table 4.3) and is a misleading number.

The point is taken, however, that IPPs will be investing capital in British Columbia, and at a very minimum, the province will be realizing tax benefits from sales taxes and personal tax collections from employment. I do not anticipate corporate income taxes will be a major contributor to this revenue projection, mainly because of liberal capital cost allowances for the type of energy infrastructure and operating losses from the startup phase will be able to offset profits at least during the initial phases of operations. Plutonic, at the end of September 2009, has accumulated a $46 million operating deficit through operations and this will increase until they manage to start producing power. They will need to make these profits (and likely a lot more in losses before they go operational) before they start paying a penny in corporate income taxes.

I have used Plutonic Power as the primary example as they are largest publicly traded company that exclusively does IPP development in British Columbia. The other two companies in this group are Naikun (concentrating on wind power) and Run of River Power. Only Run of River Power has an actual running project (Brandywine) and they are losing money. Naikun and Plutonic are losing money by virtue of the fact that they are still in the build-up phase.

Powerline BC – Another (new) IPP lobby

Through a February 23, 2010 posting on Langley Politics, I started reading a new website written by some public relations people from the energy industry – PowerlineBC. Their job is to extol the virtues of how wonderful Clean/Green energy and in the process procuring a communications contract with companies that want to lobby politicians to change rules to benefit IPPs. Essentially, this is a form of economic rent seeking, which seems to be more prevalent these days that companies generating returns through economic returns.

An article by Mike Chisholm, quoting the BC Citizens for Green Energy (yet another IPP lobby group) states:

In terms of financial potential for BC from all streams, the study believes by tapping into this abundance of green energy, the province could generate $4.3 billion per year in revenues. This includes revenues from various licenses, taxes and fees paid by IPP’s, net income to BC Hydro/Powerex, and income from carbon credits and offsets.

The optimistic study also believes that income from renewable energy is so great that, over time, the government could actually eliminate the provincial debt (currently $47.8 billion) and eventually the provincial sales tax (PST).

Optimistic is an understatement. According to the BCCGE report (March 8, 2010), it assumes that carbon offsets will be $2.9 billion of this amount. Even the other $1.3 billion is optimistic compared to the IPPBC report which clearly states that be around $762M provincially on a cumulative (not annual!) basis, using 2009 dollars.

In my opinion, after reading the material on the BC Citizens for Green Energy’s site, I have come to the conclusion that they are not credible. The credibility of people and organizations quoting BCCGE’s work should be viewed with a very critical eye. I do not regard Chisholm’s site, nor the few guest authors he has had on his site, to be credible – they repeat similar talking points, but with critical analysis you can blow more holes than swiss cheese through their arguments with respect to how beneficial Clean/Green power is for BC.

Unfortunately, the media bought the BCCGE’s March 8, 2010 report hook, line and sinker. I am guessing most media (and most politicians) have no idea how the power generation industry works from both an engineering and an economic perspective and thus will accept whatever ridiculous assumptions that are usually embedded in reports that claim some economic miracle will come out of the industry. It will not.

How power generation works

When talking about power production, one must make a distinct between quantity and time. In order for power generation to be useful, it must be produced in a sufficient quantity. Most people understand this concept. Most people are not aware that the power must be generated at the right time.

To fully understand power generation and transmission, one needs to have a basic engineering knowledge of how electricity works – energy storage is very expensive, so power generation must be aligned exactly with power consumption. If you do not produce enough power, you will have brownouts in your electricity grid. Too much power will either blow out whatever is plugged onto the grid (if such devices have no surge protection) or the excess power generated will be dissipated as heat.

Thus, power companies must find ways of aligning supply and demand on an instantaneous basis. A great source for this sort of information is the California ISO which gives their power outlook. A sample chart is as follows:

We can see that the peak energy demand in a March day in California occurs between 6:00pm to 10:00pm, when most people come home from work and turn on all the home appliances. BC’s power consumption curve is similar, but with the difference that in summertime there is less consumption (due to less air conditioning) and in the winter there is more consumption (electric baseboard heating) – heating and cooling are two major consumers of power.

Not coincidentally, power demand at 6:00pm to 10:00pm is what makes power at this time the most expensive to purchase. BC Hydro (via PowerEx) has been making a fortune selling power during these times, and purchasing power during non-peak times. How can they do this?

The answer is because BC Hydro’s main source of power production is hydroelectric dams. This type of power generation can be turned on and off with very short notice – literally seconds. The energy source for this power is stored behind the dams in the reservoirs. Thus, the dams are usually active during peak times, and are dormant during off-peak times.

The big demand for power export is during the summer months, roughly from 4:00pm to 9:00pm. This is when you want to be generating power.

What is wrong with Clean/Green power production?

The problem with Clean/Green power, from an economic standpoint, is that it delivers the power at the wrong time.

Run of river power sources have little capacity to store water, unlike conventional hydroelectric dams (which have huge reservoirs of water to draw upon). As a result, it is a continuous power source and is most active during the spring melt-off. It will produce the least amount of power during the fall and winter months. The amount of power it can produce, however, is predictable in advance depending on snowpack levels and temperatures, so this will be a marginal benefit to the power grid.

Wind power is erratic and you must be able to supplement wind power with hydroelectric sources so you can balance the two sources of power. In British Columbia, there is no way that a strictly wind-only power producer will be able to survive. It must depend on other power producing companies to “smooth” the variable energy output. In effect, wind power is parasitic to the rest of the grid – as a result, it is much more expensive than what a standard price per megawatt hour calculation would suggest. In my opinion, wind power is the worst type of Clean/Green power generation, and it will only be commercially feasible if efficiencies in energy storage technologies improved significantly.

Biomass generation is the best of the group in terms of being able to time your power production as it has properties similar to natural gas turbine power generation – you can turn on and off the turbine within a few minutes, but the big issue with biomass is obtaining fuel supply. In scale, it is difficult to secure supply that is economically feasible.

Solar power may have a future in BC, but capital costs for solar cells are still prohibitive. The power delivered is predictable based on cloud cover and time of day. Due to our northern latitude, places such as Osoyoos will receive significant amounts of sunlight for long hours and this may be economically feasible at a future date if capital costs of solar cells drops.

I have no opinion (positive or negative) on geothermal or wave/tidal energy – I have not done any research on either of these sources of power generation.

Since most Clean/Green power planned in BC is produced is from run of river sources, I do not foresee claims of this industry to be “eliminating debt” to be credible. From an investment perspective, it is quite clear that IPPs will not be able to return a reasonable return on equity unless if the province of BC significantly changed rules to favour them, or to force BC Hydro to purchase power at unfavourable rates. The other assumption that is critical to such Clean/Green power generation is that they will be able to sell carbon credits – a market that would be strictly the creation of the government.

It is likely that BC Hydro did not pursue these projects simply because they were not economically feasible, and if they were, they were of such small scale that overhead allocation would render it not profitable with their cost structure. Some good news for the public is that corporations such as Plutonic Power, Naikun and Run of River Power will take on the risk of capital construction and operation, so it will be their shareholders and creditors that will inevitably be paying for their ventures. As recently as November 4, 2009, Plutonic found investors willing to buy about 1/3rd of the company for $70M. These equity investors are unlikely to realize a long-term reward better than the primary investor in Plutonic Power, which is GE Capital.

To conclude, any claims that Clean/Green power can “eliminate the debt”, or even reduce it, are very erroneous. The public will lose, however, if the government significantly changes legislation to artificially benefit the IPP industry, especially with agreements that compel BC Hydro to purchase power from IPPs at greater than market value and the establishment of a cap-and-trade carbon market that will drive costs up for everybody involved.

Limitations of this discussion

I have not discussed any “solutions” to BC’s power generation situation, nor how to make “BC power self-sufficient”. I have also not discussed the environmental trade-offs of Clean/Green vs. “conventional” power generation, except to say that Clean/Green power is significantly more expensive than conventional power sources. I also have not expressed an opinion on whether BC Hydro is correctly structured, or what their future role in developing power sources in BC should be.

Financial documents (latest as of this writing)

Plutonic Power – 3rd quarter 2009
Naikun – 2009 annual report
Run of River Power – 3rd quarter 2009

A Double Blind post, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Filed under category Commentary, Politics.

The budgetary cycle this year from both the federal and provincial government can best be described as “nothing changing, we are staying the course”.

The federal government, in particular, managed to crunch 424 pages of relatively little of political substance in their budget document. A lot of the documentation (as always) discusses the fiscal outlook which is interesting from a macroeconomic standpoint. In terms of government operations, the summary table, as follows, is what one really needs to look at:

Once you remove the effects of the stimulus package, spending continues to increase at a slow rate. This rate is actually a faster rate of spending when you compare it to the equivalent in the 2009 budget (the tables are different sizes in the documents so you will have to click on this image to see the numbers more clearly):

It is obvious that the non-action is highly political – if the government decided to slash and burn spending and government programs, the opposition would likely topple the government and force an election about “providing government programs to Canadians”. In a minority government, the status quo is the safest political approach, to the detriment of the rest of the country. It is only until a clear majority of the public and/or the Liberal opposition starts calling for real spending cuts (compared to the Mickey Mouse “we made tough choices” line given by the Finance Minister) will it be likely that we will see less largess in the present government.

Some commentators have noted that the government is heavily depending on revenue increases to balance the budget in 5 years (which is such a far-off time horizon that nobody will be kept accountable for this plan) – I think the revenue ramp is actually reasonable, not aggressive but not conservative either. It really depends on whether companies will start to hire people, but considering the government sees the big picture with respect to investment capital and corporate tax rates (which, federally, will be dropping from 18% to 16.5% in 2011 and 16.5% to 15% in 2012), this, combined with a reasonable stability in commodity markets, should help the country get back on track economically.

The last note is that interest rates will have a large effect on the bottom line – however, the government has assumed an accounted for a 3-month T-bill rate of 0.7% for 2010 and 2.4% in 2011, both reasonable projections.

“Wait and see” seems to be the message for this budget. It has been the least exciting budget so far in this government’s administration, but this is probably a good decision given the political constraints in the House of Commons. I am not happy with the huge expense ledger, however.

A Double Blind post, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Politics.

Anyway, here are some pictures:

Taking a crash course in parenting has been quite an adventure. It reminds me of the Battlestar Galactica episode titled “33″ where the Cylons come and try to attack the fleet every 33 minutes, getting the crew all tired because they can’t rest. This time it’s the baby that starts yelping out every hour or so for something (diaper, feeding, just wants attention…). So my half-hour window of opportunity is spent washing dishes, eating, showering/hygene, and a five minute slice was spent compiling a few pictures and posting it here.

One commitment made before the birth was seeing if we (separately) can get to the gym three times a week for an hour of exercise – so far I did half an hour of running on Thursday which was the first time in a week that I was on the treadmill – it actually went quite well, I thought I could do the whole 10km right there.

See you in a few weeks…

A Double Blind post, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Filed under category Commentary.

I completely agree with the analysis of the author, but even if Ubisoft is successful with their endeavours, it will be a Pyrrhic victory for the game developers. The reason is because PC gaming, at least in the traditional “box” format (not web-based), is dead. Console markets will continue to dominate this for the foreseeable future.

I wrote an article back in December 31, 2004 stating why PC gaming is dead. Specifically, I nailed the following prediction made over five years ago:

Since games were the only real reason why there was such demand for high-end hardware, it seems likely in the future that new technologies will be not be exclusively devoted to increasing the number-crunching capacity of processors. Since the consumer sees no discrenable difference between a 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4 vs. a 3.6 GHz chip, it seems very likely that newer high-end chips will be prohibitively expensive (thousands of dollars) as they will only be used for CPU-intense applications. The good news, however, is that laptops (or the equivalents thereof) 10 years from now should be just as expensive as X-Boxes plus the price of a display unit.

Right now, a high-end workstation has a processor such as a quad core Xeon. Looking at Dell’s website, you can purchase such a workstation with a CPU upgrade that costs upwards of $5,000. Compare this to a more consumer desktop system, with a CPU that, at most, will cost around $500.

An X-Box 360 at Future Shop, costs about $200. A respectable notebook these days will cost you around $550 for a 15.6″ display, or around $700 for a 17″ display. In five years, I will suspect that the latter part of my prediction will ring true as it is clear there is price convergence between gaming consoles and notebooks.

Even if Ubisoft is successful, they will likely not make money on the PC side – World of Warcraft (owned by Vivendi) is really the only profit-maker in the industry. For some strange reason, it has turned into a winner-take-all marketplace, and the contest is over for the traditional non-subscription software route (they lost). The power of the internet has fragmented the PC game market into respective and much more smaller niches. However, because such games are not platform-reliant, it is unlikely that the PC gaming market will ever retain any of its past glories – of which the glory years were the 1990’s.

I stopped playing games on my PC around 2001 – the last game I ended up playing was Counter-Strike, but quit that when cheating got to be too rampant and it became a skill of who was the best hacker instead of having the fastest reaction time.

A Double Blind post, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Commentary.

It must be awful to be that lady that caused the disqualification (i.e. she must feel bad for letting down her team) – although the South Koreans are very aggressive speedskaters, I doubt it was intentional. But these types of offenses are strict liability offenses in law, so intention is not a consideration. If it wasn’t for this, they would have had a smashingly huge world record.

Korean fans did get a huge consolation prize with Kim Yu-Na winning gold by a mile over everybody else in women’s figure skating – she absolutely crushed the competition with an astonishing short and long program.

A Double Blind post, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Commentary.

This Monday I attempted to start off what was the week 9 of the Learn to Run 10k schedule, but it was horrible – after the first 10 minutes, my left muscle in my left foot started to feel very tense, borderline painful. One of the few things I remember from physical education in school was that if anything hurt – absolutely stop. Ideally, stop before it begins hurting – which I did. I exercised the better discretion of valor and decided to stop my training session and instead just play around with the weights.

I don’t know what was happening that day, whether I got off the wrong side of the bed or didn’t eat well, but I also felt cardiovascularily tired as well, so it was just one of those days.

I rested for a couple days and Wednesday afternoon, I resumed training – and took a longer than normal warmup time, consisting of stretching the various leg muscles. After getting on the treadmill, I felt quite good and did 50 minutes of running (10 minutes running, 1 minute walk, repeated 5 times). There was no pain or tenseness in the leg muscle, so I was quite happy that there doesn’t appear to be any injury.

On Thursday, I did some swimming, the first time I hit the water in quite some time. I am ridiculously bad at swimming, but floundered up and down the swimming pool enough times to get my other leg muscles exercised. I will be taking Friday’s running session lightly before attempting to (once again) resuming the regular schedule next week.

A Double Blind post, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Commentary.

1. The Canada Line operated very well at peak time. Trying to pick out the people in the train that were locals and those that were tourists was an interesting exercise. Of amusement was one girl (guessing a teenager) that was texting on one phone, and swapped phones and was texting with another. Maybe one phone was reserved for her girlfriends, and one phone was reserved for her boyfriends? Who knows. Almost nobody on the train was talking on their phone – for those using their phones, it was mostly texting.

2. Yaletown (by this time, Canada had started playing Germany in the hockey game – a game highly anticipated to be won by Canada, otherwise a national emergency would have been declared) had all their restaurants packed with people.

3. I’d estimate 1 out of every 5 people (including myself) was NOT wearing a shade of red or had some sort of Olympic Canada swag. I kind of felt out of place, but the psychological effect of having people united was quite inspiring, and is probably a great justification for national sport – as an organizational unifier, rather than for it being intrinsically “useful” for something. This is probably why sport, historically, has evolved the way it has.

4. The new Olympic torch is quite nice to look at, but up in the viewer’s platform, all I could think of is “I wish I could have a really long stick and roast some marshmallows on that thing” – although the flames were hot enough that they’d probably incinerate too quickly. Still, a professional marshmallow cooker like myself can make good quality marshmallows with any heat source! Friends that camp with me can attest to my marshmallow abilities (both preparation and consumption).

5. Olympic torch suggestion – on the last couple of days, just get rid of the chain-linked fence. Leave the concrete barriers up but just keep a heavy security presence. Even if the vandals and protesters get to it, it won’t matter – ever since the rioters that smashed windows at Georgia and Seymour, any protesters will just end up looking more and more silly as time goes on. They have long since overplayed their hands, to the point where they have absolutely discredited their organizations in an attempt to gain media attention.

6. Urban planners and the social engineers at many municipalities will be studying this event for years to come – how to make cities feel “alive” is a challenge. Downtown itself was full of people, and felt more “alive” for a rainy winter day (which felt like a typical Vancouver winter day – slightly windy, cold air, drizzle) than I can ever remember it for what was otherwise a routine mid-February day in town. This “alive” statement is coming from somebody that doesn’t really subscribe to “downtown living”, but if downtown Vancouver was more like this, I could see why people would want to live there.

7. The crowd, in terms of age, felt like an “under 40’s” demographic. I wonder what older people think of the city when they walk through it.

A Double Blind post, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Filed under category Commentary.

(2:57 in) “It’s alright. It’s only a qualifying game.”

If whoever did this cleared up the spelling errors, it would be brilliant. It’s still funny to watch.

A Double Blind post, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Commentary.

Just the following day after I post about how I am going to give Ally Bank a shot, I received a call from a 1-866-247-2559 number on my cell phone. I didn’t recognize the phone number, but 99 times out of 100, such calls are usually garbage. I was walking on the sidewalk at the moment and had a couple minutes of disposable walking time and was bracing for some spam about how I won a cruise to the Bahamas or something, but instead it was none other than Ally bank that called. They asked if Sacha Peter is there, and I responded in the affirmative.

They then explained they were calling from Ally bank, and if they can ask me three questions, presumably for identity verification purposes. I said no. They then said “Thank you, please contact us at 1-866-247-2559″, and then I said bye, and hung up on them. I didn’t bother calling them back.

I do genuinely believe it was them (as I checked later and the number does correspond to their toll-free number prominently advertised on their website), but caller ID can be easily forged.

This is a terrible method of authentication – it should not be necessary for customers on an inbound phone call to authenticate themselves, since the bank is calling the phone number directly given to them by the applicant! It makes me regret sending them a $10 cheque in the mail to fund my own account – if they can’t even get their security act together when it comes to authenticating their customers, what makes me think that my own information is secure on their own servers?

I am guessing they called to say “You opened an account with us, did you have trouble mailing a cheque to us?” and information of this sort should not be privileged to require explicit authentication. If the information was important, send me a letter in the mail.

A Double Blind post, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Commentary.