When I was in college, I took a throwaway course on ethics and ethical relativism one summer to avoid needing an extra semester for a double major. It actually ended up being my favorite class I took during all of my time in college, even though it was wildly unrelated to my majors. 

The idea that people and cultures draw moral lines in radically different places is relevant to our community, too. There’s quite a gulf of opinions in between “opening a card issued by a Fortune 50 company for a sign up bonus is morally wrong” and “anything the compliance department fails to stop is implicitly permitted.”

Much like another contentious topic in the community, I am not a professional, and I’m not giving you any advice. If you do want advice, just like the aforementioned topic, talk to a professional (in this case, a therapist). But let’s be real, plenty of ink is spilled arguing about these things, so it’s time to add another one to the pile. 

As you all know, there is a think piece every six months or so from a big paper like the WSJ or NYT proclaiming that reward maximizers are being subsidized by people that carry balances and pay interest. It’s true that the US has a fairly “unique” system that both provides outsize value to savvy spenders and harshly penalizes many others. 

I’m nowhere near educated enough on the subject to say if there’s any merit to the argument or not. But even if it doesn’t feel good to say, said financial system is going to carry on – the major banks have too much lobbying power, and it doesn’t feel like Durbin-Marshall has much of a chance. 

On the flip side of it, you can make the opposite rationalization that it’s in everyone’s interest for you to extract as much value as possible from the big banks as a form of protest. I’m by no means a fan of the big banks, but I’ve always thought this was hard to rationalize. You’re not Robin Hood unless you’re donating your MS profits to charity (and not just for a metric ton of AA miles). 

Banks aren’t the only institutions that we’re dealing with. A lot of our favorite platforms and levers are great for us, but maybe not the best for society as a whole. I love gambling as much as y’all do, but what we do is so wildly different compared to how the US at large is using Draftkings and Kalshi. 

I think even the most hardened sweepers amongst us can agree that things are looking bleak when FanDuel is paying an unwitting Bryce Harper to make Cameo videos for somebody in a seven figure hole and George Santos found a way to out-George Santos himself by betting on his own SOTU appearance on Kalshi. 

This isn’t to say not to take advantage of opportunities – I had just as much fun during the Super Bowl as you did. I’ll always take some free VC money. But I think it’s worth acknowledging that some of our profit centers are also companies we wouldn’t choose to support otherwise. It scares me when I’m around IRL friends who should not be gambling talking about how they want to start betting rainfall markets on Polymarket. 

While we’re on the subject of VC money, it’s time to revisit an all-time MEAB article on discerning the cost center on the flip side of your MS profit. While the original post concerned the volume strategy based on who’s paying, it’s also interesting from an ethical perspective. 

I think one thing that everybody reading this can agree on is that taking a collective nibble out of Amex’s mid-ten figure marketing budget or partaking in the VC-backed Pepperdome is taking a piece of the pie that would have just been spent on a bottle of Ace of Spades at a corporate retreat in St. Barths otherwise. 

But what about when it’s the operating budget of a small credit union instead? The original big moral quandary I remember in the hobby was the guy on /r/churning who was gonna report everyone to the CEO of a credit union that he knew because somebody had shared bank bonus info in a thread. Nevermind the fact that the person saying that was, if I remember correctly, an active participant in plenty of other shenanigans. 

How far is too far? That’s probably a question for ethical relativism and every churner you ask will have a different answer. I still chuckle thinking about people that think there is an issue opening a business card for an eBay reselling business. But there are also hypotheticals that make my eye twitch when I realize someone has probably tried them.

Now that we’re back to the people in the community instead of the businesses, let’s tackle one more aspect of ethics in churning. 

In a hobby where blind trust is really all you have to go on, acting in good faith is extremely important. Sometimes people get blinded by the amount of money involved (or the possibility of losing it) and convince themselves that it justifies treating another churner unfairly. As we discussed a couple weeks ago, you can burn your reputation extremely quickly. 

Anyway, the point of this post wasn’t to be a bummer, and my long list of shutdowns can affirm that I’m far from a moral paragon. But I do think that being honest and realistic with yourself about what you’re ok with and what you’re not is useful for setting your own MS strategy and accepting the ones of others. 

You’re not required to take every opportunity you get, and you probably shouldn’t. You’re also entitled to not take it to heart when a columnist is demonizing you for participating in a system. 

Everybody will have a different line in the sand of what’s ok and what’s not in this hobby. It’s important for you to understand your line and be honest about the self-interest behind it. A lot of us wouldn’t consider ourselves gamblers or crypto dudes/dudettes, but our transaction logs beg to differ. 

When I thought about what some of the philosophers I learned about in that class would think about this at a high level, they’d probably hate it. But hey, Kalshi didn’t exist in ancient Greece – who knows what Aristotle would have thought if he could have bet on rainfall.

Εβίβα!

Pictured: the cover of seminal vaporwave album Flower Shoppe by Macintosh Plus, and perhaps how the artwork’s subject, Helios, would feel about being able to bet on high temperatures in Rhodes that day. 

Friday means it’s time for something more fun than rants about getting shutdown. It’s been around six months since I made some puzzles, so why not do some today?

The Wordle is fairly easy, the crossword is fairly easy, and the Connections is fairly diabolical. On the bright side, there are unlimited attempts unlike the real thing, so don’t worry about getting a lot of “one aways”.

• Wordle
• Crossword
• Connections

Good luck on the puzzles, and have a great weekend!

B´a´n!

We spend a lot of time talking about loops in this hobby. Moving your money in a circle with some (hopefully) profitable intermediaries is basically…the whole thing. I think we sometimes manage to make some loops unnecessarily complicated while leaving too much risk hanging off others.

Let’s do a little thought exercise.

Example #1 – closed loop “free” miles vs separate miles + cash

Let’s say you had the ability to put oodles and oodles of spend on a co-branded airline card to earn miles and status. You had a cost associated with that spend, but you had profitable ways to loop the money back into paying the card, and actually came out a handful of basis points ahead of your cost of spend. That’s awesome, free miles, right? Technically, yes. 

But what if you had the ability to run the loops that made the overall play profitable independent of paying a cost to load? Sometimes, there’s synergy in running loops together. Other times, you’re better off running them separately. 

If you can load the first loop with a low (or no) cost method and get your card balance up a different way (even if that is break even or at a minor cost) and run them independently of each other, you’ll likely be able to walk away with a mixture of miles + cashback that is more valuable. 

In the end, the miles in the closed loop aren’t free at all – you’re paying for them in opportunity cost by not taking a step back and considering the other possibilities. 

Time is money, and the best loop is the one you’ll actually run. But it’s always smart to think about alternative ways to reach the same goal if you have the time. MS is one of those things where we’re always thinking about scaling our spend up, but sometimes the best way forward is a focus on lowering costs. 

Example #2 – multiple loops for multiple profits vs “closed” loop for safety

Like I just said, the common focus in MS is more spend, more margin, more earnings. Many people, myself included, frequently advocate for taking every option available to you as long as it meets your personal sense of CPH.

Sometimes, the opportunity cost of doing that is increasing your risk on another platform, especially on platforms that have a limited number of viable levers to pull. 

For example, let’s imagine you have a fintech product per week that lets you load $10k per week. The usual suspects aren’t available, but you have one particular method that will earn you a modest but meaningful profit, especially in two player mode. 

But you have the option of another use for this fintech – offramping funds from a different loop that does accept the usual suspects and therefore pays out higher. This offramping activity doesn’t earn anything on its own, but it makes the account behavior look a lot more normal.

You could double dip and take both profits – I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t before. But you could make the choice to (somewhat) avoid looking like a very odd customer and leave money on the table to attempt to keep your more valuable avenue alive longer. 

Of course, nothing lasts forever in MS, and the examples described above won’t either. There’s always a valid argument behind going as hard as possible. But it’s worth at least considering the risk being added to your profile at a more valuable target. 

“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered” is a common refrain in the hobby, and I like to think it’s comically fitting for the all you can eat buffets of the last few years. This situation is admittedly on a smaller scale, and a more fitting idiom is “have your cake and eat it too.” 

Staying curious and thinking about ways to improve existing plays is always a smart move in the long run – platforms come and go, BINs come and go, MCCs and coding quirks come and go. Experimenting with existing things can often be just as valuable as finding something new. 

චියර්ස්!

Pictured: a pure hit of nostalgia for millennials, and where you used to be able to find many MSers right before Golden Hour

Ever since I had a discussion with James on the Churn and Burn podcast on the subject, I’ve been meaning to flesh my thoughts on this topic into a full blog post.

I’ll preface this with the context that I’m probably in the minority in the community with my thoughts on AI in general, so take this with a grain of salt.

I know how helpful it is for those of you in technical fields, and I begrudgingly use it at work and my MS admin tasks. Maybe I’d be more into it if living in an AI technocracy wasn’t so damn boring. 

Those of you that are on top of your 19th century English history already knew this, but the term luddite means something outside of a reference to Ted Kaczynski (I’ll be honest, I didn’t know this until I opened Wikipedia this morning). 

The Luddites were members of a movement of textile workers who were protesting how automated machinery affected their pay, working conditions, and apparently, child labor. Sound somewhat familiar? Now, it’s just a vaguely derogatory way to call someone slow to adopt  tech.

I’m not a (modern usage) Luddite – I’m writing this on a laptop and can see at least 5 loop-running devices in my FoV. But I think anyone that is wary of AI’s integration into the hobby has valid reason for concern. 

There’s the obvious one – banks using it to be more agile in averse action. But there’s some less obvious factors that will, in my opinion, cause further degradation of the hobby. 

Bank usage

Most of the chatter around the effects of AI on churning center on this, for good reason. Banks are notoriously slow moving and the ability to “turn raw data into actionable insights” allows the doers to convince the higher ups to make changes quicker. 

As I said in the podcast, I’m a little skeptical that this is really that large of a change. While LLMs have allowed computers to go beyond just providing you with data to interpret yourself, did the banks really need AI to identify the behavior that resulted in some of the shutdowns we’ve seen lately? 

Last I checked, SQL has been around for over 50 years. A simple database query for “show me all cardholders who are spending a small country’s GDP each month on dining out between 6pm and 6am every weekend” would return the same information. 

That being said, I still have concerns. The first is that big banks have always had the resources necessary to sniff out unprofitable behavior, but small banks and credit unions may not. When one team is wearing a lot of hats and overworked, having the ability to have Claude do it while they handle something else is worrisome. 

The second is that as all of us who work at a megacorp can attest, nothing gets the C-Suite weak in the knees quite like AI adoption. The red tape that stops smart analysts from curtailing our fun no longer exists if you say Copilot told you to do it. 

Scraping

Another concern, especially in private groups, is using AI to scrape the entire conversation into a searchable database. I understand why this is appealing, because there’s so much to keep up with. Acronyms, everchanging data points, and particularly busy news days make for a lot to sift through. 

But there’s an inherent trust, especially in those smaller groups, that what you’re sharing in there is only for the community. The paranoia that everything is being scraped into a LLM (because in many cases, it is) has killed off a lot of novel sharing. 

I don’t really have an answer to this one since there isn’t a way to stop it – the closest surrogate feels like building a shared understanding that it’s to the detriment of everyone to do this kind of scraping. 

And all of that is before you consider that there is so much nuance to a lot of the things shared in private groups. When I use ChatGPT to make sure that I’m not ever too explicit about something in a public blog post, it often gets things comically incorrect. It’s scary to think about how a well-intentioned beginner could get into a really tough spot because AI incorrectly interpreted some high-stakes data points. 

Probing

I’m probably going to come across as an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn with this one, apologies in advance. But does anyone else feel like using Deep Research for set and forget probing kind of killed the fun of it?

Figuring out the lay of the land across Flyertalk, /r/churning and private groups used to be how you built up the institutional knowledge to navigate the inevitable pitfalls of the game. Nowadays, you can just enter a prompt to get a bulleted list of exactly how to run any loop that has managed to enter the public lexicon.

AI has really supercharged the ongoing public vs. private conversation in the community because blogs and podcasts are public material for LLMs to learn from. It doesn’t matter how small your reach is if it ends up somewhere that it can easily be queried. 

Before I became so jaded towards AI, I was using it quite a bit for probing. But I felt like I ended up on a fruitless wild goose chase way too often. Sometimes, you gotta roll up your sleeves and open up ‘ol reliable to track down your next play.

Redemptions

This last one isn’t as consequential as the others, but still feels like it’s worth calling out. I think we all know we’ve jumped the shark on award travel entering the public eye. Everybody knows about the Platinum and CSR and wants to talk to you about how to get a family of 8 to Italy in J in July on 2 month’s notice. 

I don’t think AI is going to change that situation all that much because there’s a litany of tools out there making award travel more accessible than ever that were developed the old fashioned way. I’m not throwing shade, I use them too, it’s more of an acknowledgement that the days of slogging through Expert Flyer to find availability are long gone.

Where I do think AI will have an effect is the more random side of redemptions. Every blog on the face of the earth talks about booking ANA J – there’s no secret to be kept. But very few talk about things like using Wyndham points to go see Phish at the Garden or Hilton to watch F1 in Monza’s Paddock Club. 

In the past, there was very little incentive for developers in the points space to spend bandwidth creating tools for more niche things like that when they could be improving their flight and hotel search tools instead. 

But when everybody is a developer, it will never be too long until Claude’s favorite color palette is skinned over API calls to every possible redemption program you can think of. Again, I understand why, and everything doesn’t exist to be gatekept. But this does mean that the bargains are going to be harder to come by. 

All in all, I’m probably not beating the luddite accusations based off of this post. But in my opinion, there’s so many inherently human elements to this game. Outsourcing it all to AI is going to both lead you to inaccurate answers and leave you extremely bored. Use it a little less to find a credit union, and a little more to build a nice vibe coded tracking app. That’s what it’s for, right?

Pictured: the kind of bargain that is now surfaced thanks to AI – who wants to double the bid to a whopping 2 Avios to go belt Bring me to Life and My Immortal like it’s 2003 again?

ಚೀರ್ಸ್!