181–190 of 329 posts
Why should society be bailing out the banks who loan money to folks who cannot afford it then turn around and bail out people who borrow money and cannot afford it ? If you are broke file bankruptcy and reset your life. Quit trying to steal tax dollars
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Then I guess option B is all I’m left with.
OK little story here Abusive drunk family, plenty of legal issues as a child, ran over by a drunk driver, ( flatlined 3 times in ICU for a month and disabled ), divorced 2 times, 2 kids, married again, adopted 2 kids, worked my way into silicon valley, now I do ok cliff notes of my life. Judge me all you want but what I have learned is life is a fight to the death. You can lay down and let it run over you complaining…
We're sitting on enough resources to feed and house everyone, and the rich would still be fabulously rich.
"I struggled, therefore struggle is okay" is not the answer.
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How is that actionable? Are you going to show up at Jeff Bezos’s house and rob him?
It's actionable by passing laws that limit the upside executives can extract from capital investments and raise minimum wage on large business. There will always be unexpected expenses, so you have to pay people enough to be able to save. Much better than making people dependent on those who control the mechanisms for allegedly limiting unexpected expenses; that's just a plan for increasing social control available t…
You can argue about taking down the rich (they have too much power, your jealous, etc), but don’t for a second pretend you’re doing it to uplift the poor.
And what mechanism do you propose? Just a 100% tax on any gain over X%? Do you realize how easy it would be to then just sell at that threshold and invest in something else?
Okay these loans certainly sound like a bad deal, but what are people supposed to do? Say your car breaks and you can’t get to work. For all of us here billing out >$100hr or whatever your local consulting rate is, the answer is some calculus around the cost of losing your job vs the cost of fixing it. But for MOST people, the cost of fixing it is functionally infinite. They literally do not have even a few hundred d…
You had me until: > Yeah, they know the loan is bad. They probably don’t have any other options. I think it’s a pretty poor assumption to assume all the people taking out these loans understand exactly what they’re getting into, and what other options they may have. I think there should be a mandatory 20 minute education session for anyone taking out a payday loan/installment loan.
Okay these loans certainly sound like a bad deal, but what are people supposed to do? Say your car breaks and you can’t get to work. For all of us here billing out >$100hr or whatever your local consulting rate is, the answer is some calculus around the cost of losing your job vs the cost of fixing it. But for MOST people, the cost of fixing it is functionally infinite. They literally do not have even a few hundred d…
Your income level does not make you wealthy, it is your capacity to absorb financial speed bumps. At uni, I made less money than some of my peers but I felt wealthier than them. This continued into our professional lives and had nothing to do with our relative income levels. Back then I always had spare cash to spend when an opportunity arose. An unplanned weekend trip away, a celebratory night out, no problem. Sure…
I know you think it's mostly middle class but I grew up in dirt poor white ghettos and I could write a book on how many people make this mistake. Surviving sucks.
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Ahh, okay. I guess we'll just let people die in the streets then.
People aren’t dying in the streets because Bezos has 100 billion. Pointing to rich people is just a distraction for people who can’t do math. Even if you could magically trap all of them in the US and wealth tax them away, it’s a meaningless drop in the bucket. Seize all of the money from everyone with 50 million+ in the US and you don’t even have enough to pay for Medicare for all.
Okay these loans certainly sound like a bad deal, but what are people supposed to do? Say your car breaks and you can’t get to work. For all of us here billing out >$100hr or whatever your local consulting rate is, the answer is some calculus around the cost of losing your job vs the cost of fixing it. But for MOST people, the cost of fixing it is functionally infinite. They literally do not have even a few hundred d…
Now, my first thought was good! They are so predatory. But what the report talked about was that in that case, these people still need the same amount of money and instead turn to loan sharks and organized crime which put them in an even worse position. At least with a payday loan, there is bankruptcy courts to protect them and no one is physically harming them or their families. I hope I never end up this desperate but it is a more complicated situation than it first appears.
The old adage is true, being poor is expensive. This is largely driven by transportation issues. They can't get to the wholesale club or save enough to buy in bulk. Instead they buy toilet paper one $3 roll at a time at the local CVS or bodega.
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This brings up a tangential question I've had lately. When I played video games (especially RPGs), I always ended the game with a mountain of unused resources at my disposal. I rarely used items, cash, etc, unless the ROI was plainly evident. Many of my friends would just burn through cash / items as soon as they had them, and were often in a bind during tough battles / situations. I wonder if this followed us into l…
There was a studying showing that the trait behind this tendency towards saving, the ability to delay gratification, is present relatively early in childhood, and has strong predictive effect on success in life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_gratification#The_Stan... . Perhaps this implies that no matter how rich society gets, there'll always be people who just burn though whatever they earn. This would parti…
What's the connection there you're implying [1]? I would think that the higher (capacity to) save is an artifact of peer pressure/ecosystem effects. If a frugal person is still expected to have a big house, or else be seen as weird, that imposes a constraint that forces a lower savings rate than they prefer.
It's a hard Gordian knot to cut, but once everyone expects normal people to pay a certain expense, you can get stuck in that kind of bad equilibrium.
[1] between "some people always burn through everything" and "people in some poor countries have higher savings rates than in rich countries"
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I don't want to tut-tut the poor, but I do want to tut-tut consumer culture in general. There are a whole lot of people who _should_ be able to afford an unexpected car repair bill, and could quite easily do so, if they weren't spending $100 a month on cable TV, $800 every other year on a high-end smartphone, $500/month on owning an SUV when a $200/mo economy car would serve just fine, etc., and put the money into a…
This is victim blaming. Do a little back of the napkin budget on $4,200/month (GENEROUS) take-home pay in say, Fremont, California. You run out of money real, real quick.
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Just because it's cheap doesn't mean there aren't cheaper alternatives. Most people could easily replace that with a netflix subscription for $13, since they already have an internet connection.
Yeah, but then the cable companies will charge you anything over 1TB. And if you have more than 2 screens, because of kids, it will add up, so the cable company will relax that cap IF you also buy cable TV. Remember cable companies are assholes.
Let's assume we devote 70% of the 1TB cap to streaming (netflix, youtube, etc.). This leaves 300GB for anything else, which be more than enough. Using netfilx's highest bitrate for 1080p, we get 268 hours of content for 700 GB. At the highest bitrate for 720p, we get 518 hours of content. Dividing that by 30 days, we get 8.9 and 17.3 hours per day for 1080p and 720p respectively. 8.9 hours split among two screens (one for kids and one for adults) might be tight if they don't have anything else to do, but 17.3 hours sounds more than enough if the kids are in school and the adults are employed full-time.