Do ya want fries with that?

Dear Readers:

THIS ......., more than just about anything else I can imagine, shows us the basic difference between Canadians and Americans!

(They once did a show about the NY mafia where they described how one crime family became rich by distributing drugs through a string of pizza parlous around the city! A medium with everything included a bag of meth!)

Well, get a load of THIS, kids!

Police temporarily shut down an Edmonton pizzeria after officers discovered the shop was delivering more than just pop and pizza.
Officers allege store employees hid cans of beer and bottles of hard liquor inside cardboard pizza boxes and paper bags, and delivered the booze afterhours.
In a raid of the property, police say they confiscated 240 beer cans and 100 liquor bottles, amounting to thousands of dollars' worth of alcohol.

"We did a quick approximation, it's about $1,800 to $1,900 worth of booze," Edmonton Police Services Sgt. Curtis Hoople told CTV Edmonton.
But sold illegally, Hoople said that amount of alcohol could fetch much more.
"We estimated about $4,000 of street value for this booze," he said. "So they're more than doubling profits on illegal sales of alcohol."
Police are not naming the business involved in the case, but say the store was shut down for a day and four employees are facing fines.
It's now up to the courts to decide whether to press for additional penalties, which could include revoking the store's business license.
With files from CTV Edmonton

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If you want to know what credit card companies think of you, look at your mail.

Are you “pre-screened” for lots of mileage-reward cards? Banks think you’re rich and educated.

Do you mostly see offers for low-APR teaser rates? Banks think you’re poor and uneducated — and, perhaps, vulnerable to financial traps.

To get ahead in a highly competitive industry, credit card companies have become increasingly sophisticated — and specific — about soliciting new customers. They have also learned to be savvy about wringing profits from their cardholders, even if that means taking advantage of people’s behavioral weaknesses.
The game happens before our very eyes. Recently, MIT economists Hong Ru and Antoinette Schoar analyzed over a million credit card mailings collected by Mintel, a company that pays people to read their junk mail. The economists scanned the terms of these offers, and noted the income and education levels of recipients.
Their preliminary findings, based on data from 1999-2011, span a seismic shift in the credit card industry. The CARD Act of 2009 curtailed many industry practices that legislators deemed most abusive — in particular, the law caps late fees, curbs sudden interest rate increases, and makes it harder to penalize people if they go over their credit limit. So the practices that might have been widespread a decade ago would be much less today.
Still, companies target their cards to maximize profits off different kinds of customers, and Ru and Hong's data offer a unique window into the heyday of that practice not long ago, when banks had perhaps the greatest freedom to take advantage of people's bad habits.

These were the broad patterns the economists discovered: Richer people were more likely to get cash-back, point-reward, or mileage offers. Poor people were more likely to get offers that advertise a low introductory APR.

(Since this blog gets about 10,000 readers a month, your humble reporter is subjected to mostly political and religious junk mail ....., plus a whole whack of get-rich-quick schemes!)


 http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/19/how-your-junk-mail-shows-if-youre-rich-or-poor/

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 Hot on the heels of Google's self driving car, industry insiders now claim they are working on a self-driving motorcycle!!!!!

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AND FINALLY: As if it wasn't bad enough with all those problems in the Middle-East, those crazy Arabs are now on the lose here in North America!

The speed-freak Qatari sheikh who fled the U.S. after running into trouble with cops—for allegedly staging a private Grand Prix in Beverly Hills—was living the high life in California, renting a palatial abode for $55,000 a month, The Daily Beast has learned.
Cops suspect that Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad al-Thani was behind the wheel of an unregistered Giallo Modena yellow Ferrari LaFerrari that drag-raced another driver (in a Porsche GT3) for over 30 minutes on Sept. 12, and “almost killed someone” as throngs of neighborhood kids gawked on the sidewalks.
Meanwhile, a source who had been shadowing al-Thani said that his brother arrived in L.A. also sporting multi-million-dollar wheels—a satin white LaFerrari—and that his car magically “had a California plate on it within a day of arrival.”



At the time of the drag-racing incident, the sheikh and his family were holed up in a Malibu pad, as well as a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and a $10 million palace on Walden Drive that the royals were renting for a cool $55,000 for the month of September.
The mansion was bought last December by an industrialist from Iran and Azerbaijan named Ahadpur Khangah, according to property records. The owner accumulated a great deal of wealth taking Isuzu truck assembly lines to the former Soviet state while also racking up dairy contracts with the U.S. Army and farming sturgeon for caviar.
Khangah was discussed in a WikiLeaks cable back in 2010 for partnering with the heirs to a wealthy Azerbaijan family on a pair of Gulfstream private jets worth $20 million apiece. Under the snarky subheadline “His Boys and Their Toys,” the cable points to the polo enthusiast Khangah as “not previously known to the Embassy”  before the Gulfstream buy, but noted that he “appears to be a citizen of both Iran and Azerbaijan (unclear if he also holds other passports).”
Khangah’s California mansion was rented through Elite Luxury Homes, listed as a “Beverly Hills Architectural” and fetching either $2,250 a night or $55,000 a month. The “masterwork” is a 5-bedroom “rare find” that stands three stories tall with a backyard pool and wine room.
Chad Waterhouse, said his company does “everything by the book” and noted that “this homeowner did one month (31 days) with [the sheikh] and they paid cash and they signed all the leases and disclosures.” (Beverly Hills sets strict guidelines to ward off opportunistic homeowners from turning their pads into an Airbnb. The law states “a single housekeeping unit... may, up to twice per calendar year… allow stays of less than six months.”)
“Anybody would have rented to them,” Waterhouse added. “As far as the cars are concerned, nobody [was] prepared for that.”

 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/19/drag-racing-arab-playboys-tear-up-l-a.html