171–180 of 292 posts
Here's an idea - aggregate debt at pennies on the dollar and sell it back to the debtor at twice the amount it'll still be pennies on the dollar and you'll make a nice profit.
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What constitutes acknowledgement?
I think the options are two: bully and harass the debtors until they pay or go to courts and try to get the default judgement. As the program points out what they buy is name and number. So I suppose if the person involved showed up in court and demanded any sort of confirmation of debt (like original bills perhaps?) then the case would be dismissed. After all the company needs some proof. But they overload the court…
Georestricted in Australia.. Anyone have a summary?
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At the end of the day it's a comedy show not a news show and his job is to make people laugh. You can't make people laugh with jokes about insider domain knowledge only possessed by experts. If you consider the constraint that Last Week Tonight is primarily a comedy show themed around important newsworthy issues rather than an investigative journalism show it's hard to imagine it done any better.
> At the end of the day it's a comedy show not a news show and his job is to make people laugh He and Jon Stewart keep (kept in the case of Jon) using this excuse when they get things wrong, but when they get things right they take all the glory they can get. The show(s) have to have some sort of accountability. For example Couric was just ripped for adding 6 seconds of dead air on a documentary....but that's literal…
Wont the debtors have to report the forgiven debt as income on their taxes, potenially triggering a very difficult tax situation?
Site is here: https://www.ripmedicaldebt.org/ Actually it's pretty simple. They figure out who needs the debt relief. They then go buy the debt for pennies on the dollar from one of the companies that has it. Then they forget about it. (I'd say they just delete the Excel file it's in, but there is lots of negative karma going on above this post about how wonderful Excel is) From their website "Through sophisticated d…
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My main problem with John Oliver is that he often chimes in on subjects he doesn't know anything about with folksy common sense logic that is often wrong. I remember him mocking some system for using tapes for storage on the belief that a technology that is so old cannot possibly be useful in modern technologies. In his latest clip, he mocks information being passed by Excel. How does he think things happen? Some mag…
At the end of the day it's a comedy show not a news show and his job is to make people laugh. You can't make people laugh with jokes about insider domain knowledge only possessed by experts. If you consider the constraint that Last Week Tonight is primarily a comedy show themed around important newsworthy issues rather than an investigative journalism show it's hard to imagine it done any better.
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Could you give an example of said facts and an alternative interpretation of them?
His interpretation of the Venezuelan crisis. He pointed to the price of oil driving the issue. Nowhere did he mention the crazy socialist/populist programs that Chavez and his successor Maduro. The main problem in Venezuela is the erosion of property rights. Nowhere in the report was this mentioned.
You could probably use debt forgiveness as a collection technique: If the person doesn't agree to start paying it back, you threaten to forgive the entire amount all at once in a way that is not tax-advantageous. Now you owe taxes on your $80k of extra income(forgiven debt), and the government is less lenient than banks when they're collecting tax debt. They might eventually be able to get it discharged, but it'd req…
How exactly is forgiven debt considered income?
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1099c.pdf
The borrower also gets a copy, and the IRS will know to look for it when the borrower files his taxes.
I'm obviously wrong about this, but I'm surprised there isn't a greater arbitrage opportunity in this -- if one could average out just $10 in collection on average, you'd make a sizable profit on the debt he bought... I wonder if you were to just call and tell these people you bought these debts, and if they'd like to make a donation to help you keep doing this work in the future, I'm curious if it could be self-sust…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the end of the day it's a comedy show not a news show and his job is to make people laugh. You can't make people laugh with jokes about insider domain knowledge only possessed by experts. If you consider the constraint that Last Week Tonight is primarily a comedy show themed around important newsworthy issues rather than an investigative journalism show it's hard to imagine it done any better.
> At the end of the day it's a comedy show not a news show and his job is to make people laugh He and Jon Stewart keep (kept in the case of Jon) using this excuse when they get things wrong, but when they get things right they take all the glory they can get. The show(s) have to have some sort of accountability. For example Couric was just ripped for adding 6 seconds of dead air on a documentary....but that's literal…
It's not meant to be an excuse, it's meant to be an accusation. If a comedy show is so much better at news than a news show, that's a major failing on the part of actual news shows.