Kind-of-Lost

What is a tradeline?

Ever wondered what that account on your credit report is? It is the history of your credit. When you apply for a loan, the lender checks your credit history to ensure you can make payments if approved. Well, to cut it short, that’s a tradeline! This can include any bill you pay, credit card accounts, loans, mortgages, auto loans, and more. These tradelines will all show up on your credit report.

Becoming an authorized user on someone else’s credit card can be a great way to get your credit rating started. And, it may sound risky, but many people with poor credit are happy to buy other people’s tradelines. That is, people pay others to be added as authorized users on their credit cards. And not to use the card, just for the other person’s reputed card to show up in their own credit report.

Whether you are new to this and have no clue what a tradeline is or someone who wants to gain better insights about tradelines, you have landed at the right place. Let’s begin!

The seven mastery levels of credit card usage

There are many ways to use a credit card, probably as many ways as there are people using credit cards. And, just as there are no two people created equal, there are no two equal ways to use a card. We can’t really talk about each of those in detail so I just created this super-clever 7-level classification in the progressive mastery of credit card usage.

I ordered the seven levels by their increasing level of mastery, but not in the order people would go through them. Obviously, everyone will start at the “average” level (the third level in my arbitrary system). In a way, everyone has a shot at using credit cards in a clever way. From there, one would either go down to one of the first two levels (the “bad” ones) or up to one of the top four levels (the “good” ones).

So here are the seven levels:

How to open a credit card

They say there are two kinds of people: those who pay interest and those who earn interest…. and there are those who know to open a credit card and those who don’t.

The above was just a general reminder not to forget as one thinks about opening a new line of credit. Below I will lay out the steps I follow when I open a new credit card.

Alternative transfer functions for a competitive neural network to rank sport teams

Perhaps the defining factor in a competitive neural network is its transfer function. In the case of networks used to rank sports teams, at the very least, the transfer function will be driven by the results between the pairs of teams. However, the use of the result in the function can take many forms. I will explore them.

Modeling the electoral college as a knapsack problem

In my previous and first post about the electoral college, I tried to show how it is possible to get the necessary 270 votes to win the election in the college and do it winning the popular election in a minority of the states. Now we model the electoral college as a knapsack problem.

My approach was a bit simplistic (heuristic) and now I will show how to model the electoral college as an example of a very well-known problem in mathematical programming: the knapsack problem. In the knapsack problem, you want to fill the knapsack with a few items. Each item has a weight and some value to you, and you want to pack the knapsack with as much value as possible within the weight the knapsack (and your own back!) can hold.

transfer functions neural network — Kind of funny because the Democrats carry a big handicap in the electoral college