The most profitable source of income for banks? Overdraft fees

How does writing it down make any difference, unless there was a corroborating witness during the conversation? It seems like it would still be he said she said. Is it just a case of writing it down being more unlikely for the memory of the words to be distorted by time passing?

Could happen from anything. I've also been poor, and one thing that sent me over the edge was a check that someone waited months to cash. Thought I had $200 in my account, and made a payment with debit card, only to go under $0. What's worse, I wasn't notified, and made a couple more charges, all at exorbitant rates, until I realized what had happen.

As always, it's best to interpret others' comments in the most generous way possible, rather than jumping to the conclusion that the poor person must have been spending too much money to pull himself up by his bootstraps.

Challenge accepted. I am going to regulate this problem away. New proposed regulation:

1. Banks must make rejection of a charge, rather than overdrafting, the default.

2. When overdrafting is enabled, cap the fees at some amount (say, $5), and also cap the amount the account can be overdrafted at, say, $50.

Looks like a pretty disgusting scheme to me. /sarcasm

Online banks like Capital One 360 don't charge overdraft fees and have fast check settlement. I can't comment on transaction ordering or anything - also, it might be hard to find an ATM that will do cash deposits.

And not only is there no account fee, but the checking account pays a pitiable amount of interest.

By the original philosophical definition, I'd probably qualify, though my affinity for the ideas is marginal. I'm not really convinced that our "advances" have improved the human condition. A few have, many others have not, and on the whole I think our species is in worse shape than it was 300 years ago. I'd like to think that an increase in our empirical knowledge would lead to an improved human condition, but empirically that doesn't seem to be happening. It might end up being one of those theories that lends itself to proof by elegance, but when tested just plain doesn't hold up. The string theory of its day, perhaps.

Unfortunately, Progressivism in 21st-century America bears little resemblance to Enlightenment thinking. It is a toxic brew of extremely hardcore Communism (Marx would have been appalled), beyond-stifling political correctness, defeatism, and a vicious temporal smugness that glorifies both ignorance and denigration of anything at all involving the past. Because of course we're so much better than they were. Not just more knowledgeable about the Universe, not just given the benefit of more experience, but better. Anyone who says otherwise is "speaking from privilege" and must be ignored, shouted down, or ideally punished or removed entirely from society (so that it can make more progress, naturally). Better men than I have commented on the astonishing narrowness of the range of ideas and narratives acceptable to these ideologues who demand inclusiveness. This philosophy wouldn't even be worthy of comment were it not occupying the entirety of the Overton Window.

To bring this to bear on the topic at hand, since Progressivists hold that everything that exists today is superior to whatever version of it existed in the past, it must be true that our gigantic bureaucratic regulatory regime is in every way superior to what it replaced (small government, laissez-faire market capitalism, individualism, etc.), we can make further progress by doing more of that. Since our system of laws has become so large and unwieldy that it's essentially impossible to comply with it, we may well make further progress by simply penalizing anything that smacks of success (undeserved, of course). Since our taxes are so much higher than in the past, we can naturally improve our lot in life by raising them further. Since we're better people than previous generations, we know better than they did and may safely ignore the lessons they learned in these matters (the Soviet Union, the 1950s-1970s tax regime, etc). When it comes to government, more is better, always and without exception. Anyone who has money, regardless of how obtained, is to be punished -- not for stealing it, but simply for having it. It's much easier than punishing crime, after all, and since people with money had a lot of power in the past, the future will be better if they have less. Ideally, less than none. Instead of punishing individual behavior, it's easier to just punish people who seem similar to people who were successful in the past (the decadent, evil, exploitative past again). It saves the trouble of finding evidence of wrongdoing, and after all, everything balances out in the end, right?

So we don't need to bother with the rule of law or written contracts; whichever party, historically speaking, was in a position of lesser advantage must prevail in any dispute. Anyone who's less than hopelessly impoverished and disenfranchised must have achieved that exalted position through fraud, theft, or murder; how else could one prosper in that past? And surely anyone who is poor today owes it not to any defect in himself but to the inescapable injustices of that past. Else what progress do we find in the march of history?

So if you're a banker, it doesn't really matter whether you've followed the law. It doesn't matter if you've disclosed your policies properly and timely. It doesn't really matter because you're a banker and the other guy isn't. You're wrong, and you'll always be wrong, and you'll keep being wrong no matter what you do until you give up and die.

Progressivism, in a nutshell, seeks to replace rule by law with rule by victimhood, just as the original version sought to replace rule by sword with rule by law.

Afraid I'm just not having any. But HN sure is.