I was poking around that money thing my bank manager suggested, earlier today, and discovered to my annoyance that there is a fee. I have a knee-jerk hatred of banking fees - if a bank account requires a minimum balance for the monthly service fee to be waived, I consider that minimum balance to be 'zero', the amount of money I must not spend beyond. That Mr Bank Manager didn't mention that there was a monthly fee on that sort of account irks me quite a bit.
But here's the weird and broken thing - if I had $3000 to put in an interest-bearing account, I would rather get a 3% interest rate and not pay a monthly fee ($7.50 interest a month) than a 4% interest rate with a $2 monthly fee ($10.00 interest a month, so $8.00 overall), even though that actually would mean I get 50 cents less per month (not to mention the interest on the interest which means this gap widens as time passes). The knee-jerk anti-fee reaction is that strong.
Part of the reason for this is carried over a dislike of checking account fees because there were none when I was younger, so their introduction was about as welcome as a reasonless tax increase. The other part of the reason is something more visceral - if they're just paying me less interest then they're not touching my money, but if they're paying me more interest and then taking a fee then they're sticking their grubby little fists into my imaginary box of money, and then they're pulling out a handful and throwing it in the air and laughing about it. And they're doing this with everyone's money, and making a big Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of it, and probably weeing in the shallow end.
My goodness, this post wasn't a movie review. Or is it? High Risk, which turned out to not be the synonym of Gorgeous that it was supposed to be, but instead a synonym of Meltdown which I also already had, is really very good. It's essentially Die Hard, but much much better. As is the way of Hong Kong movies, it swiftly gets bored being just action, and starts being silly. A lot. It makes fun of Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, it has lots of groin-straining fun, and there are explosions and snakes. There's a stupidly convoluted plot on the part of the bad-guys, just like Die Hard. And the good guy fails to disarm a bomb, which makes a nice change. Well worth seeing if you like modern-type Jet Li movies, or if you like either of Die Hard or Rush Hour.
[20:12]
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