I feel like that user is typically the sort who enjoys telling anyone who will listen about how they managed to get great rewards from their card. With all that free marketing, the credit card issuer is probably happy to have them as a customer, even if they lose a little bit of money on them.
It is a curious, curious belief in the engineering community that we are better at trivial math than banks are. That is not a bet I would encourage people to make.
> The entire fintech sector rules because it’s tech ppl looking at a 500 year old sector that accounts for 10% of the economy and employs some of the smartest and most ruthless people in the world and saying “You know what, I bet these guys are leaving a lot of money on the table” [0]
[0] https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1447705628521152517
The first stage was: these anti-vaxxers don't have a degree in immunology, what makes them qualified to even attempt to interpret scientific papers on the subject?
The second stage was: wait, I don't have a degree in immunology either, why am I pretending to be "following the science" when I don't have even the vocabulary or the context to properly grasp immunology papers?
Accepting that I am a functional ignoramus with regards to Covid, viruses, immunology, vaccine development etc. is very freeing. I'm basically knowledgeable on very few things, and am not an authority on (vaccines|economics|law|history|basically everything). Being good at software engineering doesn't make me an expert at everything I read two articles on.
"I bet they do it for free marketing" doesn't mean "I bet they didn't do the math". It means "I bet their marketing department measures everything and is good at math too."
Or, for example, why do so many banks give several-hundred-dollar "direct deposit" bonuses to people who just do a normal ACH transfer to themselves, despite explicitly claiming that they only allow employment income. Surely that's unintentional rather than being some kind of customer acquisition reverse-psychology tactic?
[1] https://www.doctorofcredit.com/paypal-key-will-stop-allowing...
[2] https://www.doctorofcredit.com/paypal-key-no-longer-working-...
[3] https://www.doctorofcredit.com/rumor-plastiq-to-stop-allowin...
Although sometimes people are right on that bet, disrupts an entire industry and becomes billionaires. Entire industries can turn a blind eye to problems that are obvious to some, and later it turns out the industry experts were wrong.
So I wont stop making simple back of the envelope calculations and discuss and judge industries based on that. In most cases you are wrong when you do it (which you'll realize when you dig down a bit further), but sometimes the industry is wrong and you really don't want to miss those cases.
I imagine all the other banks were not impressed, and ever since then, you can get a few hundred dollars here and there but nothing like the initial Sapphire Reserve promotion came out since.
