91–100 of 364 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's unhinged. > Is financing your lunch a sign of societal decay? Maybe, maybe not. Financing your lunch means you can't pay for your lunch. And then somebody comes to search profit in that. Yep, it's societal decay. Ah, but he draws the line at sports bets, he doesn't like that.
Interesting, because sports betting is waaaay more voluntary than eating. Eating is voluntary, if only for short while.
He brushes over ethical concerns of BNPL but draws the line at sports betting. But BNPL by design encourages you to buy things you can't afford and complicates your finances with more timed bills to pay. It makes it more likely people don't budget well and form buffers. A PNBL would be better, add 10% tithe to every purchase that goes to a checking account. Once that reaches $1k it overflows to an index fund. He says…
Not trying to be snarky, genuinely curious what the sales pitch is here.
> If you think the price of oil will be $120 after a year, you can use futures or options on futures to make this bet. If you think the S&P 500 will be over 6,500 within 2 years and the yield on 10Y Treasury bonds will be 4.25%, investment bankers will help you express this view for a fee. I’m sorry but I think the either the author or I have entirely lost the plot. Finance is a game we play to make humans better off…
Agreed that this author and the industry as a whole go too far in the direction of finance for finance's sake.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You state this as if it's a fact but I think most people would disagree. If morality is subjective, then that means there is nothing objectively wrong with murder, rape, pedophilia, chattel slavery, or any number of things that most civilized people would find abhorrent. I'm not even trying to make a religious argument about the source of some objective morality, I don't think it's necessary to solve that to answer t…
This quickly devolves into semantics as you pointed out. Do you mean that reasonably all people agree that murder, rape, pedophilia, etc. are bad? Aka if close to everyone thinks something, then that's an "objective" opinion? If so, that makes sense. However, the parent comment may mean to say that wrong and right are qualities that humans place on things/events/communications... and I think that makes sense. Physics…
Leaded gasoline.
I think this would be more informative if it dropped all moral pretense and just talked about the economics objectively. If we’re gonna call a spade a spade, bnpl is one of a dozen services that extracts money from those whose judgment we doubt (like gambling, lottery, junk food?, drugs, overpriced status-symbol vehicles, or even “digital goods”).
Your statement is pretty subjective! Not going to defend gambling but "junk food" and "overpriced status-symbol vehicles"? Digital goods as an entire concept? You can think it's all for the stupids, but I'm not seeing how it's some objective truth. Even if you're some stoic who thinks spending money on leisure is just incorrect at a fundamental level, but I think you're going to find yourself in the minority there.
I'd have no problems with BNPL if wages kept up with necessities like housing, tuition, and healthcare, or if those services were provided to citizens for free in exchange for higher taxes. Or even if minimum wage would move, like, at all.
What I think this is a better sign of is this: a very lopsided finance industry against workers and borrowers due to the fact that paychecks only arrive on a two-week schedule but burrito debt is freely available at any time. And when they stack fees on top of a burst of interest, it is really, really looking like they are becoming an enemy.
I hope they fuck up the implementation and end up losing money to hackers.
When the interest is paid out of a store’s marketing expenses, it’s pretty ambiguous who specifically pays it, but the money ultimately comes from the store’s revenue. If it results in higher prices, the people who actually use “buy now pay later” aren’t going to be the only ones paying more, since they pay the same price as everyone else. The costs are spread across all customers. Depending on demographics, this cou…
A tax is a deadweight loss in one sector that (hopefully) funds something else in a (hopefully) net-worthwhile way.
Calling a facilitating cost like marketing or finance or customer support a "tax" is like calling the need to pay to clean the bathrooms at your business a "tax", if you squint and look at it from far away it's kind of similar but it’s also totally uninformative.
In some abstract way, the social obligation for small businesses owners to send their kids to pricey afterschool classes is a "tax" paid by their customers, but that's probably not a useful way of analyzing a complex system
I keep hearing people express dismay that people are financing their lunch, sneakers, or concert tickets. But this has been the norm for a while, no? I can't remember the last time I didn't utilize credit at a restaurant or retail store. If you use credit cards, it doesn't make sense to reflexively admonish people for using BNPL for everyday purchases. To be sure, BNPL is in many ways a predatory innovation. But it i…
I keep hearing people express dismay that people are financing their lunch, sneakers, or concert tickets. But this has been the norm for a while, no? I can't remember the last time I didn't utilize credit at a restaurant or retail store. If you use credit cards, it doesn't make sense to reflexively admonish people for using BNPL for everyday purchases. To be sure, BNPL is in many ways a predatory innovation. But it i…
If there was a thing that worked like a credit card, but without the credit part, I'd probably be using that instead.
One reason is that someone’s or a company’s income doesn’t always align perfectly with when they want to buy things.
This logic doesn’t change just because the thing being financed is a burrito.