Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers • Hacker News Board

Re: Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

#401

Post by thebradbain » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 7:02 AM UTC

water554 wrote: post #203

pxc wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither party is willing to solve homelessness by actually fucking housing people , and you're calling a homeless person a moron because their assessment of the two parties which, to avoid disturbing the existing economic order, mutually assent to that permanent state of crisis , doesn't include enough conciliatory language for you about how Orange Man Bad? Jesus Christ.

So to be clear, you are saying my tax money should be used to house the homeless, at exorbitant rates, while I cannot afford to buy house myself. I don't agree with this. I don't think homelessness can be solved by building more housing. Not sure if you have lived near homeless encampments before. If you know you know.

> So to be clear, you are saying my tax money should be used to house the homeless, at exorbitant rates

Yes.

> While I cannot afford to buy a house myself

Affordable housing should be a right to everyone. Anyone, including you, should have the option to live in affordable housing that is nice, ideally with amenities and gardens and common areas if they cannot afford to pay for that on their own. Public housing, like it is in some other countries, should be not a stigmatized fallback but the normalized default. And that’s what the property taxes on the home I currently own should be paying for, so if — for whatever reason — I can no longer afford it or no longer want it, I can move into a dignified public housing accommodation too.

> Not sure if you have lived near homeless encampments before

I have. And my conclusion doesn’t change— they should have housing. Nice housing and the help they need to get back on their feet. We all should.

Re: Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

#402

Post by standardUser » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 7:06 AM UTC

bequanna wrote: post #155

sizzle wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t even afford a home right now on a tech salary with sky high rent paying off my landlords 2% refi’d mortgage and student loans making it impossible at 6-7% fed interest rate hikes and inflated home prices after the insane COVID housing price bubble increase. I feel like life won’t start for another 5+ years for people like me, unless we gamble on being underwater on an inflated mortgage entering at the peak of…

The Fed was responsible for low mortgage rates because they were purchasing MBS. Mortgage rates are currently back to something more historically normal. If you’re upset about anything, it should be a about rates being so low for so long, which drove up home prices.

These are some big facts. The down-voters may lack some historical perspective.

Re: Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

#403

Post by symlinkk » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 7:14 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #330

I’ll never see a single penny from WF, but I’ll also never forget they helped turn a smallish life catastrophe into a decade of my life being chaotic hell. They were not the root cause. They weren’t even systemically the worst challenge I faced. They were the gigantic multiplier on both though. I had a persistent medical issue I couldn’t treat because it was determined by insurance companies that treatment would be e…

I am struggling to understand this. You wrote a big check to a family member, they didn’t cash it for awhile, and when they finally did cash it you didn’t have enough money in your account and got hit with fines?

That does not sound evil. And how big were these fines that you’re claiming it took a quarter of your life away?

Re: Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

#404

Post by hnfong » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 7:16 AM UTC

bumby wrote: post #108

klyrs wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are greater sins: we have a military, you know. Raising a child means teaching nuance in ethics. I've had similar conversations with my kid, arising from questions like "why do robbers exist?" "Why are some people homeless?" "Why do murderers exist?" Ethics is full of gray areas, and refusing to engage in hard conversations increases the risk that your kid will make the wrong call if they ever find themselves i…

I agree that they main point of ethics is providing a decision framework in the grey areas (if they were clear-cut, there would be no discussion). But that seems off-place here. It leads to the question about "when is it okay to steal?" There's an obvious "defense of necessity", but that doesn't stop at stealing someone's means to a living. If it's legal to steal food in a disaster, it doesn't matter if that food com…

> It leads to the question about "when is it okay to steal?"

There are certainly situations where it is _morally_ OK to steal. You're confusing the question with when it is _legal_ to steal, which by definition there is none.

> If it's legal to steal food in a disaster

See above.

> The colloquialism described seems like one of those heuristics that feels true at first glance but quickly breaks down on further inspection

Slippery slope?

Re: Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

#405

Post by ipaddr » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 7:18 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #332

xyzelement wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// But the fact remains that things are objectively, numerically harder for us So I never dug into this before but I found this interesting chart from the US government [1] It does seem like a relatively smaller percentage of young people own homes today vs 40 years ago - but not as shocking as you'd imply: Percentage of people Percentage of 35-40 who own a home: 1982: 70% 2021: 62% So while the trend is down - it st…

Small sample size, but many of the people that I know that are that age and own a home inherited it, they didn’t buy it.

This happens in each generation

Re: Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

#406

Post by imtringued » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 7:27 AM UTC

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #374

Eisenstein wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You want to fleece your own... but others you let just... walk in ? I don't recall the person you replied to mentioning that. Why is it impossible to levy property taxes on real estate in your own state from people who live somewhere else?

Its not impossible. That's not the point What i mean is real estate taxes as they are today are not a factor to seriously dent foreign or corporate wealth from vacuuming all properties available. 10k year in property tax is a pittance to a Sheik, a shenzen factory owner, an indian tech entrepreneur, your average venezuelan govt bureaucrat, or a REIT. 10k is not peanuts to the average wage earner in the US. The former…

This is a pretty shallow argument. Americans should be glad that foreign citizens are funding housing because it means they can build more housing with that money. It is Americans who get to choose whether to build more or not and they have decided to instead block new housing.

Re: Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

#407

Post by eyelidlessness » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 7:27 AM UTC

symlinkk wrote: post #403

eyelidlessness wrote: post #330

I’ll never see a single penny from WF, but I’ll also never forget they helped turn a smallish life catastrophe into a decade of my life being chaotic hell. They were not the root cause. They weren’t even systemically the worst challenge I faced. They were the gigantic multiplier on both though. I had a persistent medical issue I couldn’t treat because it was determined by insurance companies that treatment would be e…

I am struggling to understand this. You wrote a big check to a family member, they didn’t cash it for awhile, and when they finally did cash it you didn’t have enough money in your account and got hit with fines? That does not sound evil. And how big were these fines that you’re claiming it took a quarter of your life away?

My family member probably forgot to deposit the check. The bank knew it had been illegal to honor the check for over a year, because all checks expire. They admitted they honored the check illegally, but they claimed I had defrauded them. Which I had not, neither in intent nor their own rules, nor the law. They still put a black mark on me that limited how I could operate financially that wouldn’t expire for a decade even though they knew they broke the law. I didn’t have any recourse. Hope that helps you understand.

Edit: and the fines were too much to afford at the time but were not nearly as harmful as a decade record of “fraud” I didn’t commit. Maybe people here don’t realize it but when you have a record of fraud you can’t… do the things you all think are normal? Having a record of fraud because a bank told you they don’t care they know you didn’t commit fraud is ten years of recovering your financial reputation.

Re: Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

#408

Post by ljf » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 7:36 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #313

xyzelement wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really true that previous generations didn't have to sacrifice to buy homes? That seems patently false to me. First, previous generations were significantly more thrifty which meant more cash on hand. Don't believe me? Let's say you save 30 bucks a day starting at 20 (most of us can easily do that by controlling how much we eat out) - that means you have 110k in your bank for a down payment on your 30th birthda…

> Is it really true that previous generations didn't have to sacrifice to buy homes? That seems patently false to me. Take a look at average home price by year: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-house-price... Now compare that to average wages: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/awidevelop.html

Don't forget that until about the mid 90s most people were only buying with one income. And even into the 2000s that second income was often significantly lower.

So that graphs never align that well when you look back and try to say 'in the past it was 3x salary for a house, now it is 6x'

That is as buyer are now competing for houses with two good salaries to buy with.

Re: Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

#409

Post by Falkon1313 » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 7:54 AM UTC

vkou wrote: post #107

Meekro wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you mean, but what's the alternative? How should you behave if you're exempt from normal social boundaries because of your personal tragedy? Shout at random people? Throw things? Punch some guy in the face? Seems to me it's better to try and be kind, and treat others right despite your horrible situation. The person you're treating cruelly because of your personal trauma could easily be going through a tra…

The alternative is to hold the institutions that inflict this suffering on people proportionately accountable for it. One of the reasons we don't, is because the socially required reaction to this abuse is to suck it up, and suffer in silence. What is the equivalent of a bank having its home wrongly taken away from it? Locking the doors on one of its branch offices and boarding it up for a few months? There's an enor…

There was that one guy who showed up at the bank with a moving truck, sheriff's deputies, a lawyer, and a court order to seize the bank branch's assets. When they started to take the bank manager's desk and chair, that finally convinced them to pay attention and pay up.

But this was after they tried to steal his home (which they didn't even have a mortgage on) and dragged him through court and refused to pay the court costs.

So, not optimal, but still something that should be happening more frequently. If a few hundred thousand bank branches got repo'd every year, one for each time they ripped someone off, that should cause them to take notice.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/wronged-homeowners-reposses...

Re: Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

#410

Post by jliptzin » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 8:05 AM UTC

esoterica wrote: post #339

jliptzin wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have started a number of businesses, even what I considered the unsuccessful ones still made me more money than I would have made at any 9-5 I could have had at the time. You just have to be willing to do something boring and compete against businesses that aren’t currently being run well. Starting the 7,000th craft beer company is gonna be really hard but (for example) being the #1 powerwashing company in your tow…

What makes you think being the #1 powerwashing company is going to be any easier than making an equivalent amount of money in the corporate world? Do you have any reason to believe you are better at powerwashing than the other 99 guys in your town?

The point is to pick a boring business where it’s easy to become #1 in a market based on current competition, clientele, skills, etc.

In the corporate world you are still trading your time for money. When you own a business you decide what and how much you want to do, up to and including nothing at all while still making an income. Boring businesses make it easy to hire people to do the stuff you don’t want to.