To tell or not to tell

At 5 this morning I received a message from my son saying he was sick.  He had been spending the night at a friend’s house because my wife had to leave very early this morning for a business trip, and I’ve been away for the weekend for frequent flyer fun.  The plan was for my son to go with his friend to school, but now we’re on to plan B.  I jumped on an early flight to go get him.  So, now I’m typing this with my laptop crammed on my lap while the passenger in front of me reclines peacefully.

On Saturday I posted a teaser claiming I had found a perfect Perpetual Point Machine (PPM).  I didn’t post details at that time partly because I’m evil, but mostly because my weekend was full with activities which were virtually non stop until now.  When I get home I plan to take a nap and then, if my son is doing OK, I’ll write up the first in a series of posts about the new discovery.  As a habit I write most posts the day before publication.  I schedule them to publish at 6:15 a.m. EST, but the automated feeds, tweets, etc. often don’t go out until about 7.

If you haven’t already seen them, I recommend you take a look at the comments from my teaser post.  The dialog ranges from exasperation to excitement, and proceeds to a debate about whether or not I should tell at all.  The whole thing is a lot more interesting than anything I’ve ever written, so thank you all for adding great content to this site!

Lowering Expectations

Tomorrow’s post won’t be described as a Perpetual Point Machine.  Instead, I will be highlighting a great way to maximize point earnings.  Instead of a radical new discovery, I’ll describe an important, but incremental improvement over ideas I’ve published before.  I’ll follow up later in the week with a discussion of how to turn the new approach into a PPM.  We can then happily debate whether or not it meets the definition of “perfect”.  Honestly, I think we’ll land somewhere closer to “really good”, but we’ll see.

Should I tell?

I discovered this a couple of weeks ago and have been struggling since then with the question of whether to tell.  The fear is that when people get too greedy, the deal will be killed.  After testing things out to make sure it all works, I then consulted with a number of people with more experience than me.  The general consensus has been that I should tell all.  Here’s why:

• The deal leverages publicly available offers.  There is not a single piece of this scheme that is anything like a mistake fare.
• The deal is based on a new product that will be advertised more and more going forward.  This isn’t rocket science.  Everyone playing our game will know about this sooner or later.
• There are built-in limits to the deal.  While the average person can probably squeeze out about 20K points per month, it would be extremely difficult to do more than that.  And, if you try to do more, it is likely that you will get shut down, but the deal will go on for others.
• Finally, yes, of course I hope to draw in new readers.  If this deal eventually dies, more will follow in the future.  While some discoveries come from the Frequent Miler Laboratory, most come from reader tips.  With more readers, I expect to see more tips and the game will go on.

I want to thank everyone I confided in to help me reach this decision.  I spent many sleepless nights agonizing over this question, but I finally slept well on Saturday night after reaching a decision.  For those of you agonizing over the wait, please accept my apologies.  As I said early, I am most certainly evil and so will milk this for all it’s worth .

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