Okay, first of all, this has somehow turned into a religious debate about who is correct, which is, uh, not what this is. (_I_ happen to think that all Jewish law is basically that, Jewish law, and as the vast majority of Christians do not consider themselves 'Jews', those laws are actually fairly irrelevant, and even if they _are_ important, they should be interpreted the correct way to read Jewish law...by thousands of years of decisions by Jewish rabbis, not some random Christian guy reading the text without context.)
What I was doing here I was simply explaining how 'The New Covenant' thing worked to those people unfamiliar with the concept. That taken without the explanation, it literally only means no animals are unclean, and thus while it might void some dietary laws, it doesn't say anything about mixed fabrics. Taking metaphorically, however, which is how it is explained in the text, it voids pretty much all the purity laws.
I was explaining this because I get tired of people bringing up dietary laws and mixed fabrics to point out that Christians are hypocritical about gay marriage and other stuff in the OT, and then Christians manage to turn around and be exactly as hypocritical as they are accused of by asserting that all that magically disappeared via the new Covenant, when in actuality either _just_ specific dietary laws disappeared, _or_ all such laws disappeared.
There's no real logical interpretation where mixed fabrics and cheeseburgers are okay but homosexuality is not. Waving 'The New Covenant' around (Which Jaybird was doing jokingly, but I've seen done seriously.) is not an explanation.
Secondly, the idea that the Decision and Letter of Council is more important than what is explicitly a _god-given_ Vision seems a bit dubious to me.
Yes. The difference is whether or not a problem is there to _be_ solved in the first place.
Democrats may say 'Well, there's a hole in the side of that, and we only have wood, so we have to patch it with wood'. (Which is workable for a house but not really for a car.)
What they don't say is 'We need to use more wood, let's just pile it on the roof and in front of the door and keep having shipments of wood delivered everywhere.' That would be the equivalent of being in favor of 'more government' as some sort of abstract.
Democrats are using wood to solve problems, sometimes well, sometimes poorly, but the problems really do exist. And they only reason they seem fixated on wood is that they are only in charge of wood...they have no other options.
Meanwhile, Republicans are wandering around removing wood from already existing structures that work just fine. Structures where there is not actually a problem, or where the problem that a hole exists already. And they're just sorta _imagining_ that something replaced the wood.
I think I've taken that analogy about as far as I can go.
Not really aware of many Democrats who are “pro” government in that sense. Seriously, the R’s have a very sizable ‘small government’ wing, but there really is no “big government” wing on the left.
Indeed. Every position officially taken by the Republican party, seems to be 'The government should always been smaller'. In fact, often when the smaller government option is taken, the GOP turns around and _demands it becomes even smaller_, even if we just did exactly what they said. Witness health insurance mandate, the 'small government' version of fixing health care. Or cap and trade, the 'free market' version of stopping pollution.
The _few_ examples of Republicans wanting government to be bigger in _any_ sense is when it makes sprawling bureaucracies to create some sort of private industry partnership that exists solely to funnel money out of the government (Aka, Medicare part D, our military using mercenaries, etc.)
Otherwise, the answer is _literally_ 'make government smaller' as the solution to every conceivable problem. Their policy is simply their policy.
So Republicans often seem to assume that Democrats are operating in the opposite manner. That their answer is to make government 'bigger'.
Democrats...do not think like that. The Democrats, for better or for worse, still exist to attempt to solve problems. And, yes, the answer in politics is usually 'Use the government', but that's just because, duh, the politicians are _in charge_ of the government.
Or, in other words, the Democrats are carpenters who suggest building every structure out of wood. Which is, indeed, sometimes not the correct solution. Sometimes the free market will make metal structures, and sometimes nothing actually needs to be built at all. But the Democrats are at least trying to solve problems, and, as the people we have put in charge of the government, attempt to solve them via the government.
Republicans, OTOH, are carpenters who insist that nothing new ever be build using wood, under any circumstances, and that all wood structures be modified to use less wood, and it appears by 'less wood' they actually mean 'no wood'. Structures should instead be build out of metal...which means, as carpenters, they will just _stand there_ and hope metal structures appear out of thin air. And then they complain that the lack of magical metal structures is due to too many wooden structures.
(Or, rather, this _used_ to be true. At this point, it's clear the Republican's entire operation exists solely to foil Democrats in whatever way they can. They are, in a phrase that seems to be making the rounds, 'post policy'. They exist solely to say and do random things that will cause people to vote for them, and would be completely happy if they never actually had to cast a vote. I am describing the Republicans of a decade ago.)
I didn't mean to imply it was. I was just pointing out that the verse that supposedly gets rid of the food rules (Although it actually just speaks to clean vs. unclean animals and nothing else) does appear to get rid of all 'cleanliness' laws, period, or at least that's the interpretation of the guy who _had_ the vision.
Without that interpretation of the vision, it's still not allowed to cut the edges of your beard or wear mixed fabric clothing or eat cheeseburgers or eat blood. Or have gay sex. The only thing the _vision_ literally says is 'Pig are cool'. The metaphor, however, (Which is specifically explained.) is that there is no such thing as 'clean' or 'unclean' behavior, and hence it's hard to see why homosexual behavior wouldn't be allowed under that.
Although, as you point out, it may not actually be okay to eat blood at all...although that verse is a bit vague, and it actually seems like that's a specific requirement for those specific circumstances. It's described as 'James' judgement' and not some actual judgement from God.
I think its because many Republicans and libertarians have a relatively static, un-changing view of what government should or should not do and in case of conservatives what society should and should not look like. Libertarians have less static social views than conservatives. If your ideology requires a relatively unchanging version of government and society than you see consistency as a virture.
Bwahahahaha.
Yes, those consistent views that caused them to invent, then reject, cap and trade. Or invent, then reject, a health insurance mandate. Or invent, then pass, Medicare Part D.
I forget, are conservatives for or against immigration? (It rather depends on whether or not Hispanics vote for them.)
War? For or against? Jackbooted thugs, yes or no?
And those 'static' idea of suddenly deciding they were always against contraceptives.
Oh, and let's not forget the 'Let's get rid of all taxes and replace them with a national sales tax' supporters.
Right now, conservatives are against changing anything _solely_ because the group in power is not Republican, and it's easy to stand there and assert they have a 'static view of government'. But that is not actually true in any sense.
During the heyday of the Great Society, most liberals would have been revulted by open homosexuality and same-sex marriage. In fact, JFK’s adminsitration actively persecuted homosexuals out of the federal government. Now equality for homosexuals and same-sex marriage is part of liberal orthodoxy and a self-evidently correct.?
During the heyday of the Great Society, most conservatives would have been revulted by racial intergration. Now equality for the races is part of conservative orthodoxy and a self-evidently correct. This was a pretty fast and radical change over a period of forty or fifty years.
I would point out that this is an example of the fact 'conservatives' are not 'static' as much as 'three decades behind liberal but changing at the same rate to maintain their gap', but the actual fact is, civil rights have very little to with 'the role of government' in the first place.
For people who have not read those verses, they only _ explicitly_ void food laws, and actually only the 'Which is clean and unclean animals?' food law. They are silent on things like cheeseburgers and eating blood, and also silent on shaving the sides of your beard, which I see pretty much every Christian male doing. All they literally allow is eating shellfish and pigs.
In _actuality_, those verses are about Jew vs. Gentile distinction, a big issue at the time, and the person _experiencing_ the vision, Paul, says that what has been revealed to him to to not call anyone unclean. This is one of the very Biblical metaphors where the _person who told of about it then proceeded to tell us what it meant_.
Now, removing _all_ rules about what is 'clean' and 'unclean' would appear to cover both how people shave and who they have sex with, in a universe where people actually tried to read the actual text of the Bible instead of making up crap and then trying to find ways in which the Bible supports it.
This is dubious, first is there really a hard distinction between ethnic and racial, if so what is it?
Yes, that's a weird argument to make. Especially with the statement that's what caused the 'parallel culture' of the black population.
Because that just happened randomly, don't you know. It wasn't the result of centuries of deliberate behavior.
Likewise, could the 'parallel culture' of Hispanics in the US have anything to do with part of society that seems to believe they are all here illegally and constantly demands they be deported and locked up have to show papers? Why on earth would Hispanics be hesitant to interacting more with society?
It's rather hilarious how people pushing racist policies will turn around and argue for those racist policies on the grounds that people of that race might not integrate as Americans because of...the...racism...those people...are pushing?
<blindingly obvious statement>The more a race is treated as different, the more any group is treated as 'other', the slower the integration will be.</blindingly obvious statement>
Aren't almost _all_ assaults, and all sexual assaults, 'merely' unwanted touching in certain, specific ways? (1)
'Hey, all that guy did was touch the inside of her vagina with his penis! What's all this nonsense about sexual assault?'
What an idiotic statement.
1) I almost said 'all' assaults. But technically shooting someone is not 'touching' them, but is assault. But sexual assault pretty much requires touching.(2)
2) Yes, people can sexual assault others with an object they're holding, such as broomsticks. However, someone touching an object they're holding to someone else does counts as 'touching them', as decided by the court in Sister in Car Backseat v. Brother in Car Backseat.
There is no actual way society can thrive with just five specialties (You need, at minimum: doctors, three or four _different_ types of engineers, lawyers, biologists, chemists, telephone sanitation specialists, and probably more I haven't throughy of)
So I have to suggest that the thing we want to do is _fix_ the situation we're in. And thus, the things we should teach would be:
Computer science
Electrical engineering
Education
Neuroscience
Psychology
Why? In the hopes we get some sort of actual workable 'self education' system working, where we don't actually need 'colleges' in the current sense, but people can self-educate. Perhaps via subconscious education, or implants, or just AI teachers that personalize themselves for each student.
I am assuming we'll get something like 100 years advancement in 10 years. This will hopefully be fast enough to _stop_ everything else from falling down the memory hole, and hey, even if it _does_, we have it all in the computer so can easily relearn it!
Heck, the worse case scenario is that we build an AI that runs everything. Which sounds like it could be bad, until you realize that any other five majors would have resulted in us dying because we left out doctors or automotive engineers. (Hey, everyone who left those out...how are we going to get food to our cities?) Robot overlords _probably_ won't have us starve to death.
Alternately, let's go with teaching Politics, to see if we can get this New World Order removed somehow. ;)
Which would be a reasonable point if there was actually some demand for 1-day or, in this case, one month loans. There is not.
The _payday_ companies are the ones that have structured their loans in such a way that they 'have to' charge absurd amount of interest. Which, incidentally, seems equivalent with banks in your example, but really isn't, because neither banks nor payday lenders aim exactly at 'getting their money bank', they obviously aim higher...and if only 9% run off on their loan instead of 10%, banks make 1% of what they, on average, have lent out to people each day, whereas payday lenders would make 365%!
It's all well and good to say 'The interest is correct for such a risky loan of such a short term', but the question then arises so 'So if there would be less interest on longer term loans, thus resulting in lower payments, thus resulting in _more_ people paying back their loan, why does such a loan not exist?'
In fact, payday are structured _to_ cause defaults. There's absolutely no reason to assume that someone who does not have $X, where X is close to their monthly salary, one month will suddenly have $X*1.50 next month. Or even $X*1.20. Even some sort of 'short term' payment plan should have that being paid off over six months, in amounts lower than the original loan.
Such a loan does not exist because payday lenders _want_ people to be unable to pay, so they can roll over the loan each month, keep charging more fees. And banks are happily collecting fees from the bounced payments.
And this is ignoring two issues on top of that:
a) Payday lenders are so massively profitable they're utterly reckless, lending money to people who never should have gotten loans. 'Haha, jokes on the payday people', people think, ignoring the fact that someone having debts they cannot possibly be pay back and get absurdly worse each month makes it nearly impossible for people to recover from poverty. There's a reason we make it illegal for banks to loan money they know cannot be paid back, and it's not to protect the banks.
b) Payday lenders are actually charging rather high rates _even if_ you take their amount of defaults into account. 700% interest rate, with a repayment in a month, will break even if about _three out of ten_ people won't pay back their loan, and the rest will pay back only that original loan. In reality, about one out of ten default, and another two out of ten end up in a downward spiral where they pay three or four times their loan.
My sympathy starts to wane with “they don’t have time to go to Walmart.” Maybe there’s more to it? Are Walmart credit activities limited to particular times of the day? Maybe Walmart can expand its hours. But then, maybe they’d have to charge more. Hmmm.
Erm, I don't think I was very good at explaining that. Walmart _barely_ offers credit cards. You have to find a Walmart with a 'MoneyCenter', which I've never seen. (I think you can apply online, but I only know that because I actually searched for 'walmart loans'. They don't mention anything about this in the store that I've seen.) I just mentioned Walmart because you asked why they don't do loans.
That their existing cards are maxed out suggests deeper problems. It means that they’re probably not good bets to loan money to at rates you would consider reasonable.
Or it just means that banks see no point in extending more credit to them when they can just wait and hit them with fees.
Like I keep saying, banks have a perverse incentive to _not_ lend money to the poor.
If the bank is _really_ lucky, their customer will go to a payday loan place (Or now get one from them), which will attempt to automatically repeatedly deduct the loan amount from their bank account in a month, result in multiple fees from that alone!
If the bank is not lucky, well, that person will just run out of money, and the bank can hit them with a fee for that.
And, of course, it's nearly impossible to get banks to stop letting people automatically attempt to pull money from your account, hitting you with a fee each time.
Will you at least acknowledge that this is a pretty surreal conflict of interest? That banks are not operating honestly, and have absolutely no incentive offer a loan they can make $5 on when instead they can repeatedly make $30 on overdraft fees? Will you admit that this is _not_ a good way to structure things, and thanks to our megabanks, there is very little completion in banking?
And “They’re better off not borrowing the money because they can’t pay it back” seems like a determination somebody else should make.
Uh, yeah. That's my point. The people who go to payday lenders are one of two types of people:
1) reasonable-ish credit risks, that _should_ be able to get a loan somewhere for 30% or maybe 40%, but because our society likes to prey on poor people, they cannot.
2) People who, under no circumstances, should be able to get a loan, because they will _not_ be able to repay it. It is actually a _bad_ thing for them to get a loan. All that will accomplish is to start lumping on absurd amounts of more debt. There's a _reason_ it's illegal to loan money to people you know cannot pay it back. (And banks would not, in fact, loan to such people, no matter what the interest rate. Payday lenders, however, are not very good at risk determination.)
"Manufacturing cost' is not what 'supply' means. 'Supply' is the amount a seller is willing to sell at a specific price. I don't understand how you misstated that when you stated demand correctly. (Supply and demand are the same thing, but flipped around.)
Supply _can_ change based on manufacturing cost. Or it might not change in any noticeable amount, because of other things.
For example, selling an airbag-less car (in addition to that model with it) is going to require more work on the part of the car maker. They have to make that car, label it, also ship it to dealers along with the airbag model. Or perhaps they don't expect it will sell, in which case, hey, look, no supply.
Saying 'Supply is equal to this one part of supply, and thus if it goes up supply will go up' is nonsense. Supply is half a dozen different things, some of which is just random guesses on the part of the manufacturer. You can even get weird fuckup where supply moves the 'wrong way'.
And one of the contributing factors, I must point out, is the price of related products, which is especially relevant to my 'store brand cereal' example. Almost nothing else matters there for price...the seller is going to price it almost entirely based on what the name brand cost.
Meanwhile, as I pointed out, the _demand_ of the poor is very inelastic for necessities and they will buy the cheapest damn thing possible.
Exactly. Payday loans are just the worse of it, being so obviously abusive. So I'd like a serious answer to a question. Let me explain:
Lending is no longer working off people depositing money in banks. Instead, banks dick around with that money by putting it in crazy investments, secure in the fact they can get money to loan to other people from the _Fed_ loaning them money. (This is why we get no fucking interest on deposits anymore.)
Conclusion: Banks no longer need our money to make loans. Loans would exist without our money in banks.
Question: Why on earth should we still have a system of banks to operate our checking accounts?
Seriously. Someone tell me the answer to that. Someone tell me why it wouldn't be more sane to simply give our money to the government, and have them hold it for us? (Which is, uh, actually what's going on now, anyway. It's just held by the Fed in the name of the bank.) What possible purpose, economically, are _checking accounts_ in banks serving?(1)
Besides being willing to invest _our money_ in random shit, that is, which appears to provide no benefit to us, so fuck that reason. And besides having some way for banks to suck our money way in random fees and other bullshit?
Please note I'm not saying we should ban banks offering private checking accounts or whatever, I'm asking a question as to the actual harm the country would suffer if the government started offering checking accounts and 90% of people switched to them.
Also note that I know 'the Fed' and 'the government' aren't the same thing, I just don't actually care whose doing this. Or, hell, some sort of entity like the Post Office, created to operate separately and be self funded. Or as was suggested elsewhere, just _use_ the Post Office.
1) I explained the 'Where loans really come from' thing because whenever I ask this question people go 'So they can loan them out to other people.', which means they've been watching too much It's a Wonderful Life and do not understand how it currently works. Banks _used_ to lend your money out. Currently, banks are big investment houses that just happen to hold our money and have a direct line to the Fed to borrow money from.
Because getting credit cards takes time, and you usually can't pay your rent with them.
A major problem of being poor is the lack of _time_. Most of the people who borrowed from a payday lender could _probably_ borrow the money elsewhere. (1)
The problem is that they don't have the time to figure anything out, because they're working two part time jobs and can't afford day care and the goddamn banks decided to start closing at 3:30 in the fucking afternoon. (Seriously, what the hell is going on with that?) Also they tend to be poorly informed about their options. And the car broke down and needs a new transmission and they don't get paid until next week, and their existing credit cards are maxed out.
There's a reason payday lenders are open 24/7. (And I'd have no problem with their costs being somewhat higher. But not the absurd abusive shit they pull.)
1) And the remainder are such poor risks that _no_one _ should be loaning them money. No, those people are not 'helped' by a payday lender...having one more month before running out money, while racking up an absurdly large debt that is just going to balloon each month they can't pay it is not actually 'helpful' in any sense of the word. ('Help, help, the room I'm standing in is filling with water!' 'Here's a large block of ice you can lay on to keep from drowning!')
By making them conform to the same rules as regular banks, you’re effectively banning them because the default rate on the loans is so high that such businesses would collapse when stripped of the higher interest rates, leaving nothing to take their place.
We can actually figure out the 'correct' interest rate, because we have another example of lending to the poor: Credit cards.
Granted, those people possibly aren't _quite_ as poor as the people being loaned to by payday lender, but the fact is that credit cards tend to be below 30% interest, and there's really no way that 700% interest can be reasonable. 45%, maybe. You want to argue 60%, fine. But 700% is insane.
At a loan period of one month, that means each of them pays $30 on every $100. Which means statistically, mean they expect literally three out of ten of the people they lend to never pay them a single dime, and the remainder to pay them on time, with no late fees or rollovers!
Of course, the payday industry will claim the default rate is somewhere between 10%-20%, but that's an outright lie, because they're including 'rollovers' as defaults. (And you will notice 700% is _still_ too high by 10%. No, 10% profit a month on loans is not normal.) The average amount of rollovers for loans is something like 2, which means that, of the loans that get paid back, people average paying back $165 for that $100 loan.
And, hilariously, payday lenders probably do have a lot of their loans default that normal banks would not have made...because they were idiotic loans to start with. Because they don't bother to check the riskiness of borrowers because they are making so much money. They don't _need_ to make sure of anything.
If they raised their rates again, new companies would beat them because there are very low barriers to entry in such businesses. Heck, immigrant mom and pop store owners could do it out of their cash registers.
The barrier to entry to lending money is pretty high. You need to have enough money to make enough loans to actually cover the statistical spread.
It's like operating a casino. You cannot start a casino with $10,000 in cash, with $100 bets. Even if your house advantage is 2%, you could indeed lose the entire $10,000 through sheer chance at the start and then you can't make any more bets to recoup the money and you're completely fucked.
There's probably some banking terminology to cover that, but I don't know what it is.
Now, _eventually_, the payday loan problem will correct itself. Some sort of entity with ethics and money will start the ball rolling. That is, in fact, what the suggestion the Post Office do it is about.
But, like I said, part of the problem is that the _obvious_ people to do it, the banks, have created a system where they profit from payday lenders. No one else actually _has_ any sort of infrastructure to hold money and assess risk and do all the other banky things that loans require. (Payday lenders, for example, do not actually calculate interest rates, or figure out risk.)
Walmart actually does that. Except it's called a Walmart Credit Card.
Credit cards are basically the very thing I was talking about. It's lending money to the poor, at (mostly) reasonable interest rates, which turn out to be somewhere between 20% to 30%.
The problem is that no one does that short term. And note by 'no one' I mean 'nowhere that actual poor people can find and use'. It might actually exist, I don't know. (The payday lenders have very good SEO, so I can't find any useful results.)
Banks refuse to do it, because they make a lot more money by instead having their own customers sign up with a payday lender, and then bounce a check or get a overdraft. Hey, look, they just made $30 instead of that $3 in interest. (Ah, perverse incentives, how we love you. It is so awesome that your bank wants you to spend more than you have so they can hit you with fees. There's no way that could ever go wrong.)
And Walmart is not actually allowed to make loans, for some reason, except via issuing a credit card. There's all sorts of weird regulation there, which somehow allows payday lenders to exist but not Walmart loans.
(Oddly enough, Walmart is considering getting into mortgages for some reason. Ans Sam's Club is offering small business loans. These are presumably different than payday loans.)
Do you mean going against market principles to provide low interest rates to high risk individuals via government intervention?
I did not say 'low' interest rates. I said _reasonable_ interest rates. 15%. 30%. 45% I don't care. Whatever the risk is. You know, ones that are actually in line in the amount of risk poor people present, and not crazy-ass 700% interest rates.
If you are making loans with a 700% interest rate, either those loans are in line with the risk and you are making loans to non-existent people who are dying of cancer in two weeks, and should probably stop loaning money to such absurdly high risks, _or_ the loans are nowhere in line with the risk.
Likewise, there is absolutely no real reason to ever have loans with exactly one repayment point of a single month. This makes people have to pay _more_ money at once _than the entire principle of the loan_. That is functionally insane...if they didn't $200 last month, how the fuck would they have $260 this month? That makes no sense... _unless_ the purpose of that is to cause them to default on the loan, hit them with penalties, and roll over to another month.
There _are_ actual ways to calculate the amount of interest, vs. the amount of repayment, to be assured that, statistically, you make money. Payday loans are fucking nowhere near that, at all. (And they're even worse than the calculations would imply, because, like I pointed out, they're rigged to come due all at once, so people _can't_ pay them back. But even _with_ the deliberately high level of default, they _still_ are completely out of scope.)
The reason the payday loan industry exists is that banking industry has deliberately refrained from providing poor people loans, not that that is a reasonable amount of interest to charge poor people. The reason banks stay out of the market is that they make so much money from payday loans. They own payday lenders, they make money from overdrafts, etc. And now, they're actually entering the payday lender market themselves!
Of course, more ethical smaller banks could provide loans and stop this nonsense, pretending such an entity as 'smaller banks' and/or 'ethical banks' existed.
In Texas, people with cars that get them to and from work can’t actually drive them because they fail safety inspection. So they have to spend money they don’t have in order meet someone else’s definition of safety. Maybe this is for their own good, but let’s not pretend that there aren’t tradeoffs here. Let’s not pretend that the tradeoffs aren’t going to disproportionately hit those that can’t afford the nice stuff that people like me can afford.
You're going to have to explain what the hell you mean by 'safety inspections'. I've never had to have any sort of safety inspection of my vehicle in my state of Georgia. Emission inspection in metro areas, yes, safety inspection, no.
And driving around unsafe cars has rather obvious implications for everyone, assuming by 'safety' you actually mean _safety_.
Payday loans are what give them the ability to borrow money. Liberals want to take away that option. This is probably a better example than safety inspections.
Payday loans exist to fill a void that the giant banks are purposefully avoiding because, wait for it, they own the payday lenders.
There is absolutely no reason that poor people could not get short term loans with reasonable interest except that banking is an oligarchy and small banks do not exist anymore. (Please note that by 'reasonable' interest, I mean something like 15% interest, or Fed+10%, not the 300% or more interest that payday lenders have.)
Oh, and, of course, now the banks actually have gotten into payday lending...by being as abusiveness with the interest as traditional payday lenders, while _also_ having direct access to their customers bank accounts. (Which rather demolishes the entire excuse of 'we might not get paid back' used by traditional payday lenders to justify absurd interest rates.) Oh, and they've found more ways to be abusive, taking the entirety of money out of customer's amount exactly a month later and hitting them with penalties for overdrafts.
For some completely inexplicable reason, no bank has bothered to create any sort of loan for the poor with a reasonable interest rate and reasonable monthly withdrawals from the customers account. For _some_ reason, nowhere exists where poor people can say 'Hey, I'm short $100 this month due to car payments, can I borrow $100 and pay you $28 for the next four months? I have direct deposit to your bank, you know I have a job and I'm good for it.'
No, instead, the poor borrow $100 one month, the bank attempts to suck out $130 exactly a month later, it's not there, the banks hits them with an overdrafts, etc...
I see no reason to explain why this is a problem, why this is deliberately abusive behavior by the oligarchs who own our banking industry (Which we just fucking bailed out.) of the most vulnerable people in society who literally have no other choices. Either you understand the problem or you don't.
Incidentally, I did not actually suggest banning payday lending. I suggested 'doing something' about it. Like, you know, making it conform to the same rules about interest rates that everyone else has to.
While I am against saying 'The conditions the poor live under isn't crappy enough' (Which is basically what the article argues.)...
...my point was actually there's no evidence that the poor would actually _save_ any money, or actually get _paid_ more, by reducing safety regulations. It would go straight into corporate profits.
Before we argue that 'The poor should be able to save $2000 by buying cars without airbags', we need to realize that car companies will make cars without airbags, saving themselves $2000, and then sell them for _$500_ less, because, why the fuck not? Why would they lower prices more than that? That's enough to get the poor to leap on board.
And the shitty food that the poor, and _only_ the poor, already buy...why would they change their prices at all? The entire market, as a whole, would instantly relax safety standards on the crappy stuff...and leave prices the same.
Prices are not based on manufacturing cost. Prices are based on how much people are willing to pay for something. The poor, as they don't have much money, already have very little choices, and almost everything they buy is an immediate necessity. Supply is the same, and as the poor won't be (and can't be) 'less willing' to buy the stuff (Aka, demand will be the same) that means that the _price_ will be the same. Prices are not set by a profit fairy adding X% to the cost of manufacturing.
So, yes, I agree with you. It's not worth reducing safety standards to 'help the poor spend less money', which is a rather idiotic goal. I was just saying that I don't actually thing reducing safety standards will _do_ that in the first place!
Flame retardant clothing for kids has always been a completely baffling concept.
In an actual house fire, people do not die from fire. If you die in a house fire, you wan around dodging flames until you passed out, then you died from smoke inhalation/suffocation, _then_ you caught on fire. Everyone knows this. I don't know when they started teaching the 'stay low to the ground and crawl out of the fire' idea, but this is very basic stuff that I learned when I was like eight.
And when you're _not_ in a house fire, why the hell are you putting your clothing up to an open flame?
Yes, it's for 'children', who can be stupid...but the thing about flame retardant clothing is that it still transfer heat just fine. It's not fricking asbestos. So, again, why are you holding an open flame so close to your body?
And parents, why on earth are you allowing your children to be so close to an open flame? What sort of shitty parenting is going on there that they're playing around inside the fireplace, or holding a lit candle up to their clothing?
And, BTW, it's not like 'sleeve caught on fire' is going to kill someone, anyway. Wouldn't be fun, but probably not lethal.
Flame retardant clothing makes sense if you're a priest who wears long billowing robes and lights candles. Or for firefighters. Or for something like a wedding train or any other piece of clothing that is so long it is not really in control of the person wearing it.
Indeed. Why _shouldn't_ the poor be allowed to live in rotted half-collapsed houses and eat meat-slurry discarded by from the pet food factory because it was too old?
We _all_ know this is where things will end up.
And wouldn't _that_ be for the best? Because the alternative is homelessness and starvation. We are complete unable to solve the problem of the poor in any manner than making things incredibly cheap for them.
In fact, why do they even need houses? Can't they just sleep in the factory and eat factory slop?
If a rising tides lifts all boats, well, the people without boats are drowning. And while lowering the floor of the ocean may result in the poor taking longer to hit it, but it's still the bottom, they're still drowning, and it takes fucking longer to get back to the surface.
Heaven forbid we just throw them a goddamn life raft instead of inventing ways for their sinking to be less work.
Oh, incidentally, people. You want to make things cheaper for the _poor_? How about, I dunno, doing something about payday loans and whatnot? And giving them the ability to actually borrow money? The poor actually spend _more_ money on basic shit than the middle class do, because they end up buying it hand to mouth and the absolute cheapest thing, which breaks immediately. Some sort of system where the poor could actually _borrow_ money at a reasonable rate to cover expenses would save them a fuckload more than supposedly paying them $10 more a day because of lack of safety regulations. (Which would not happen anyway, because pricing does not work like that.)
I really wish people were taught basic economics in school.
There seems to be this rather absurd idea that _everyone_ has bought into that businesses are operated in some sort of 'fixed profit' mode, a concept that they are attempting to make X dollars profit and if the government makes them do something that reduces that amount, they will either raise prices or cut salaries.
In the _actual_ world, businesses cut salaries and raise prices exactly as much as they can get away with. Pricing, of both goods and services and of salaries, is entirely set by supply and demand, and has fuck-all to do with any sort of expenses in any direct sense.
Now, obviously, things are priced _above_ the expense required to make them, it would be a rather stupid business plan to sell them for less. So that, plus some amount of profit, is the price the market set, so in turn that's what businesses sell them for _in_ the market. But there's some sort of mental confusion infecting almost _everyone_ that 'how much something costs to make plus a set amount of money' is how prices are determined, so adding to 'how much something costs' will make prices go up, like it's some sort of dial. Add two dollars to the cost, add two dollars to the price. Uh....no. Really, no.
I mean, seriously, I heard people laughing at the Papa John's guy when he claimed he'd have to raise pizza prices by 11 cents a pizza to provide health care, which is, yes, stupid, but _I_ was laughing at the idea that he already had the ability to raise prices by 11 cents and had...decided (?) not to do it? But would decide otherwise if something else happened? What? Huh? I don't even know... That is not how pricing works.
Now, what could happen, if no place provided health care, that all pizza places now have an addition 11 cents per pizza, which makes it likely that, _eventually_, pizza will end up averaging 11 cents more. OTOH, if there are _already_ pizza places paying for health care, then that isn't going to do anything.
But corporations stand there and keep repeating 'We pass taxes on to customers' and 'We pass safety expenses on to employees' and everyone buys it, and not a single person asks 'Wait, if they do that, then why are they _lobbying_ against such expenses? Why do they care?'
Likewise, why do they want tax breaks for their industry? Under _their_ logic, won't that just result in the entire industry charging people less, and the industry making the same amount.
Of course it doesn't. We really need to teach people how 'pricing' works in school.
But a GMO label wouldn’t be like a “Contains Thiomersal” label because the GMO label doesn’t tell you anything about what the package contains, because GMO isn’t a chemical compound, it’s a history of how a thing came to be.
No, a GMO is a genetic modified organism. It's not really a 'chemical compound', we usually don't refer to produce that way, but 'wheat' isn't really a 'chemical compound' either, yet that appears to be listed on a label.
Both non-genetically modified wheat and genetically modified wheat are actual things, that are actually in the food, not 'processes'. GMO food is _made_ of chemical compounds, just like all food.
You're just trying to assert that GMO things and non-GMO things _are_ the same thing, that the genetic modification makes no difference, so it's...unfair(?) that one of them is labelled differently. Regardless of that, they are, in fact, _things_.
You know, the only people bringing up the First Amendment are the ones bringing it up so they can claim that it’s irrelevant and we shouldn’t bring it up. There’s a name for this kind of fallacious argument.
You realize First Amendment grounds are _exactly_ the reason that Kazzy was opposed to GMO labeling, which is the point of this entire article, right? In fact, the article quotes that 'To me, mandated speech is just as much a “free speech” issue as halting it.'
But apparently we've reached the point for goalpost moving, where apparently now free speech is _not_ an issue, and the new concern is that it's too much work to keep track of GMO stuff.
I eagerly await whatever reason is next, now that I've pointed out the stupidity of complaining about food producers having to keep track of exactly what goes in the food they sell...like, uh, they already have to.
What brand new made-up principled reason will it be? What theory will be next?! I'm so excited! Perhaps labeling GMO foods requires spot inspections, which are a violation of the third amendment!
And the reason to not want to pass a law changing the status of limitations is...?
Please note I did explicitly say that there were perhaps legal reasons for asserting the status of limitation interpretation by the court was _legally_ correct. If someone says the law was technically incorrect and the court should follow the law, well, I think they're wrong, but I can follow that position.
Misogyny requires not supporting _fixing_ the law. It requires stating that people should have no legal recourse against pay discrimination as long as such discrimination can be kept secret 180 days.(1) If that is what you claim, please explain why and how that makes any sense.
Alternately, please explain why you think people should not be able to sue for gender discrimination in wages at all, and how _that_ isn't misogynistic.
Like I said...lawsuits...the great and powerful equalizers that the libertarian right insists will fix all harms without any sort of regulations at all. No matter how powerful the entity harming people , if they are wronged, they can just sue! Until, of course, people _do_ start suing, at which point that must be stopped immediately.
1) Actually, it's technically worse than that. All corporations would have to do is _slowly_ engage in discrimination and there would be no point that a lawsuit would actually be worthwhile. Hire men and women at the same pay, change men pay's upward 1% a year and keep women's the same, and after 10 years men are being paid 20% more but at no point could the women sue for more than the 1% pay difference she just got.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Ideology is the Enemy: The Creeping Victory of “Consistent” over “Judicious””
Okay, first of all, this has somehow turned into a religious debate about who is correct, which is, uh, not what this is. (_I_ happen to think that all Jewish law is basically that, Jewish law, and as the vast majority of Christians do not consider themselves 'Jews', those laws are actually fairly irrelevant, and even if they _are_ important, they should be interpreted the correct way to read Jewish law...by thousands of years of decisions by Jewish rabbis, not some random Christian guy reading the text without context.)
What I was doing here I was simply explaining how 'The New Covenant' thing worked to those people unfamiliar with the concept. That taken without the explanation, it literally only means no animals are unclean, and thus while it might void some dietary laws, it doesn't say anything about mixed fabrics. Taking metaphorically, however, which is how it is explained in the text, it voids pretty much all the purity laws.
I was explaining this because I get tired of people bringing up dietary laws and mixed fabrics to point out that Christians are hypocritical about gay marriage and other stuff in the OT, and then Christians manage to turn around and be exactly as hypocritical as they are accused of by asserting that all that magically disappeared via the new Covenant, when in actuality either _just_ specific dietary laws disappeared, _or_ all such laws disappeared.
There's no real logical interpretation where mixed fabrics and cheeseburgers are okay but homosexuality is not. Waving 'The New Covenant' around (Which Jaybird was doing jokingly, but I've seen done seriously.) is not an explanation.
Secondly, the idea that the Decision and Letter of Council is more important than what is explicitly a _god-given_ Vision seems a bit dubious to me.
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Yes. The difference is whether or not a problem is there to _be_ solved in the first place.
Democrats may say 'Well, there's a hole in the side of that, and we only have wood, so we have to patch it with wood'. (Which is workable for a house but not really for a car.)
What they don't say is 'We need to use more wood, let's just pile it on the roof and in front of the door and keep having shipments of wood delivered everywhere.' That would be the equivalent of being in favor of 'more government' as some sort of abstract.
Democrats are using wood to solve problems, sometimes well, sometimes poorly, but the problems really do exist. And they only reason they seem fixated on wood is that they are only in charge of wood...they have no other options.
Meanwhile, Republicans are wandering around removing wood from already existing structures that work just fine. Structures where there is not actually a problem, or where the problem that a hole exists already. And they're just sorta _imagining_ that something replaced the wood.
I think I've taken that analogy about as far as I can go.
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Not really aware of many Democrats who are “pro” government in that sense. Seriously, the R’s have a very sizable ‘small government’ wing, but there really is no “big government” wing on the left.
Indeed. Every position officially taken by the Republican party, seems to be 'The government should always been smaller'. In fact, often when the smaller government option is taken, the GOP turns around and _demands it becomes even smaller_, even if we just did exactly what they said. Witness health insurance mandate, the 'small government' version of fixing health care. Or cap and trade, the 'free market' version of stopping pollution.
The _few_ examples of Republicans wanting government to be bigger in _any_ sense is when it makes sprawling bureaucracies to create some sort of private industry partnership that exists solely to funnel money out of the government (Aka, Medicare part D, our military using mercenaries, etc.)
Otherwise, the answer is _literally_ 'make government smaller' as the solution to every conceivable problem. Their policy is simply their policy.
So Republicans often seem to assume that Democrats are operating in the opposite manner. That their answer is to make government 'bigger'.
Democrats...do not think like that. The Democrats, for better or for worse, still exist to attempt to solve problems. And, yes, the answer in politics is usually 'Use the government', but that's just because, duh, the politicians are _in charge_ of the government.
Or, in other words, the Democrats are carpenters who suggest building every structure out of wood. Which is, indeed, sometimes not the correct solution. Sometimes the free market will make metal structures, and sometimes nothing actually needs to be built at all. But the Democrats are at least trying to solve problems, and, as the people we have put in charge of the government, attempt to solve them via the government.
Republicans, OTOH, are carpenters who insist that nothing new ever be build using wood, under any circumstances, and that all wood structures be modified to use less wood, and it appears by 'less wood' they actually mean 'no wood'. Structures should instead be build out of metal...which means, as carpenters, they will just _stand there_ and hope metal structures appear out of thin air. And then they complain that the lack of magical metal structures is due to too many wooden structures.
(Or, rather, this _used_ to be true. At this point, it's clear the Republican's entire operation exists solely to foil Democrats in whatever way they can. They are, in a phrase that seems to be making the rounds, 'post policy'. They exist solely to say and do random things that will cause people to vote for them, and would be completely happy if they never actually had to cast a vote. I am describing the Republicans of a decade ago.)
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I didn't mean to imply it was. I was just pointing out that the verse that supposedly gets rid of the food rules (Although it actually just speaks to clean vs. unclean animals and nothing else) does appear to get rid of all 'cleanliness' laws, period, or at least that's the interpretation of the guy who _had_ the vision.
Without that interpretation of the vision, it's still not allowed to cut the edges of your beard or wear mixed fabric clothing or eat cheeseburgers or eat blood. Or have gay sex. The only thing the _vision_ literally says is 'Pig are cool'. The metaphor, however, (Which is specifically explained.) is that there is no such thing as 'clean' or 'unclean' behavior, and hence it's hard to see why homosexual behavior wouldn't be allowed under that.
Although, as you point out, it may not actually be okay to eat blood at all...although that verse is a bit vague, and it actually seems like that's a specific requirement for those specific circumstances. It's described as 'James' judgement' and not some actual judgement from God.
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I think its because many Republicans and libertarians have a relatively static, un-changing view of what government should or should not do and in case of conservatives what society should and should not look like. Libertarians have less static social views than conservatives. If your ideology requires a relatively unchanging version of government and society than you see consistency as a virture.
Bwahahahaha.
Yes, those consistent views that caused them to invent, then reject, cap and trade. Or invent, then reject, a health insurance mandate. Or invent, then pass, Medicare Part D.
I forget, are conservatives for or against immigration? (It rather depends on whether or not Hispanics vote for them.)
War? For or against? Jackbooted thugs, yes or no?
And those 'static' idea of suddenly deciding they were always against contraceptives.
Oh, and let's not forget the 'Let's get rid of all taxes and replace them with a national sales tax' supporters.
Right now, conservatives are against changing anything _solely_ because the group in power is not Republican, and it's easy to stand there and assert they have a 'static view of government'. But that is not actually true in any sense.
During the heyday of the Great Society, most liberals would have been revulted by open homosexuality and same-sex marriage. In fact, JFK’s adminsitration actively persecuted homosexuals out of the federal government. Now equality for homosexuals and same-sex marriage is part of liberal orthodoxy and a self-evidently correct.?
During the heyday of the Great Society, most conservatives would have been revulted by racial intergration. Now equality for the races is part of conservative orthodoxy and a self-evidently correct. This was a pretty fast and radical change over a period of forty or fifty years.
I would point out that this is an example of the fact 'conservatives' are not 'static' as much as 'three decades behind liberal but changing at the same rate to maintain their gap', but the actual fact is, civil rights have very little to with 'the role of government' in the first place.
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For people who have not read those verses, they only _ explicitly_ void food laws, and actually only the 'Which is clean and unclean animals?' food law. They are silent on things like cheeseburgers and eating blood, and also silent on shaving the sides of your beard, which I see pretty much every Christian male doing. All they literally allow is eating shellfish and pigs.
In _actuality_, those verses are about Jew vs. Gentile distinction, a big issue at the time, and the person _experiencing_ the vision, Paul, says that what has been revealed to him to to not call anyone unclean. This is one of the very Biblical metaphors where the _person who told of about it then proceeded to tell us what it meant_.
Now, removing _all_ rules about what is 'clean' and 'unclean' would appear to cover both how people shave and who they have sex with, in a universe where people actually tried to read the actual text of the Bible instead of making up crap and then trying to find ways in which the Bible supports it.
On “Why Conservatives Can’t Win Non-White Votes, Heritage Foundation Edition”
This is dubious, first is there really a hard distinction between ethnic and racial, if so what is it?
Yes, that's a weird argument to make. Especially with the statement that's what caused the 'parallel culture' of the black population.
Because that just happened randomly, don't you know. It wasn't the result of centuries of deliberate behavior.
Likewise, could the 'parallel culture' of Hispanics in the US have anything to do with part of society that seems to believe they are all here illegally and constantly demands they be deported and locked up have to show papers? Why on earth would Hispanics be hesitant to interacting more with society?
It's rather hilarious how people pushing racist policies will turn around and argue for those racist policies on the grounds that people of that race might not integrate as Americans because of...the...racism...those people...are pushing?
<blindingly obvious statement>The more a race is treated as different, the more any group is treated as 'other', the slower the integration will be.</blindingly obvious statement>
On ““Of course, one man’s sexual assault is another man’s sexual fantasy come true.””
“Some “assaults’’ are merely unwanted touching…”
Aren't almost _all_ assaults, and all sexual assaults, 'merely' unwanted touching in certain, specific ways? (1)
'Hey, all that guy did was touch the inside of her vagina with his penis! What's all this nonsense about sexual assault?'
What an idiotic statement.
1) I almost said 'all' assaults. But technically shooting someone is not 'touching' them, but is assault. But sexual assault pretty much requires touching.(2)
2) Yes, people can sexual assault others with an object they're holding, such as broomsticks. However, someone touching an object they're holding to someone else does counts as 'touching them', as decided by the court in Sister in Car Backseat v. Brother in Car Backseat.
On “Thursday Night Bar Fight #8: The Darker Side of Higher Education in the 21st Century”
There is no actual way society can thrive with just five specialties (You need, at minimum: doctors, three or four _different_ types of engineers, lawyers, biologists, chemists, telephone sanitation specialists, and probably more I haven't throughy of)
So I have to suggest that the thing we want to do is _fix_ the situation we're in. And thus, the things we should teach would be:
Computer science
Electrical engineering
Education
Neuroscience
Psychology
Why? In the hopes we get some sort of actual workable 'self education' system working, where we don't actually need 'colleges' in the current sense, but people can self-educate. Perhaps via subconscious education, or implants, or just AI teachers that personalize themselves for each student.
I am assuming we'll get something like 100 years advancement in 10 years. This will hopefully be fast enough to _stop_ everything else from falling down the memory hole, and hey, even if it _does_, we have it all in the computer so can easily relearn it!
Heck, the worse case scenario is that we build an AI that runs everything. Which sounds like it could be bad, until you realize that any other five majors would have resulted in us dying because we left out doctors or automotive engineers. (Hey, everyone who left those out...how are we going to get food to our cities?) Robot overlords _probably_ won't have us starve to death.
Alternately, let's go with teaching Politics, to see if we can get this New World Order removed somehow. ;)
On “Safety, at what price?”
Which would be a reasonable point if there was actually some demand for 1-day or, in this case, one month loans. There is not.
The _payday_ companies are the ones that have structured their loans in such a way that they 'have to' charge absurd amount of interest. Which, incidentally, seems equivalent with banks in your example, but really isn't, because neither banks nor payday lenders aim exactly at 'getting their money bank', they obviously aim higher...and if only 9% run off on their loan instead of 10%, banks make 1% of what they, on average, have lent out to people each day, whereas payday lenders would make 365%!
It's all well and good to say 'The interest is correct for such a risky loan of such a short term', but the question then arises so 'So if there would be less interest on longer term loans, thus resulting in lower payments, thus resulting in _more_ people paying back their loan, why does such a loan not exist?'
In fact, payday are structured _to_ cause defaults. There's absolutely no reason to assume that someone who does not have $X, where X is close to their monthly salary, one month will suddenly have $X*1.50 next month. Or even $X*1.20. Even some sort of 'short term' payment plan should have that being paid off over six months, in amounts lower than the original loan.
Such a loan does not exist because payday lenders _want_ people to be unable to pay, so they can roll over the loan each month, keep charging more fees. And banks are happily collecting fees from the bounced payments.
And this is ignoring two issues on top of that:
a) Payday lenders are so massively profitable they're utterly reckless, lending money to people who never should have gotten loans. 'Haha, jokes on the payday people', people think, ignoring the fact that someone having debts they cannot possibly be pay back and get absurdly worse each month makes it nearly impossible for people to recover from poverty. There's a reason we make it illegal for banks to loan money they know cannot be paid back, and it's not to protect the banks.
b) Payday lenders are actually charging rather high rates _even if_ you take their amount of defaults into account. 700% interest rate, with a repayment in a month, will break even if about _three out of ten_ people won't pay back their loan, and the rest will pay back only that original loan. In reality, about one out of ten default, and another two out of ten end up in a downward spiral where they pay three or four times their loan.
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My sympathy starts to wane with “they don’t have time to go to Walmart.” Maybe there’s more to it? Are Walmart credit activities limited to particular times of the day? Maybe Walmart can expand its hours. But then, maybe they’d have to charge more. Hmmm.
Erm, I don't think I was very good at explaining that. Walmart _barely_ offers credit cards. You have to find a Walmart with a 'MoneyCenter', which I've never seen. (I think you can apply online, but I only know that because I actually searched for 'walmart loans'. They don't mention anything about this in the store that I've seen.) I just mentioned Walmart because you asked why they don't do loans.
That their existing cards are maxed out suggests deeper problems. It means that they’re probably not good bets to loan money to at rates you would consider reasonable.
Or it just means that banks see no point in extending more credit to them when they can just wait and hit them with fees.
Like I keep saying, banks have a perverse incentive to _not_ lend money to the poor.
If the bank is _really_ lucky, their customer will go to a payday loan place (Or now get one from them), which will attempt to automatically repeatedly deduct the loan amount from their bank account in a month, result in multiple fees from that alone!
If the bank is not lucky, well, that person will just run out of money, and the bank can hit them with a fee for that.
And, of course, it's nearly impossible to get banks to stop letting people automatically attempt to pull money from your account, hitting you with a fee each time.
Will you at least acknowledge that this is a pretty surreal conflict of interest? That banks are not operating honestly, and have absolutely no incentive offer a loan they can make $5 on when instead they can repeatedly make $30 on overdraft fees? Will you admit that this is _not_ a good way to structure things, and thanks to our megabanks, there is very little completion in banking?
And “They’re better off not borrowing the money because they can’t pay it back” seems like a determination somebody else should make.
Uh, yeah. That's my point. The people who go to payday lenders are one of two types of people:
1) reasonable-ish credit risks, that _should_ be able to get a loan somewhere for 30% or maybe 40%, but because our society likes to prey on poor people, they cannot.
2) People who, under no circumstances, should be able to get a loan, because they will _not_ be able to repay it. It is actually a _bad_ thing for them to get a loan. All that will accomplish is to start lumping on absurd amounts of more debt. There's a _reason_ it's illegal to loan money to people you know cannot pay it back. (And banks would not, in fact, loan to such people, no matter what the interest rate. Payday lenders, however, are not very good at risk determination.)
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"Manufacturing cost' is not what 'supply' means. 'Supply' is the amount a seller is willing to sell at a specific price. I don't understand how you misstated that when you stated demand correctly. (Supply and demand are the same thing, but flipped around.)
Supply _can_ change based on manufacturing cost. Or it might not change in any noticeable amount, because of other things.
For example, selling an airbag-less car (in addition to that model with it) is going to require more work on the part of the car maker. They have to make that car, label it, also ship it to dealers along with the airbag model. Or perhaps they don't expect it will sell, in which case, hey, look, no supply.
Saying 'Supply is equal to this one part of supply, and thus if it goes up supply will go up' is nonsense. Supply is half a dozen different things, some of which is just random guesses on the part of the manufacturer. You can even get weird fuckup where supply moves the 'wrong way'.
And one of the contributing factors, I must point out, is the price of related products, which is especially relevant to my 'store brand cereal' example. Almost nothing else matters there for price...the seller is going to price it almost entirely based on what the name brand cost.
Meanwhile, as I pointed out, the _demand_ of the poor is very inelastic for necessities and they will buy the cheapest damn thing possible.
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Exactly. Payday loans are just the worse of it, being so obviously abusive. So I'd like a serious answer to a question. Let me explain:
Lending is no longer working off people depositing money in banks. Instead, banks dick around with that money by putting it in crazy investments, secure in the fact they can get money to loan to other people from the _Fed_ loaning them money. (This is why we get no fucking interest on deposits anymore.)
Conclusion: Banks no longer need our money to make loans. Loans would exist without our money in banks.
Question: Why on earth should we still have a system of banks to operate our checking accounts?
Seriously. Someone tell me the answer to that. Someone tell me why it wouldn't be more sane to simply give our money to the government, and have them hold it for us? (Which is, uh, actually what's going on now, anyway. It's just held by the Fed in the name of the bank.) What possible purpose, economically, are _checking accounts_ in banks serving?(1)
Besides being willing to invest _our money_ in random shit, that is, which appears to provide no benefit to us, so fuck that reason. And besides having some way for banks to suck our money way in random fees and other bullshit?
Please note I'm not saying we should ban banks offering private checking accounts or whatever, I'm asking a question as to the actual harm the country would suffer if the government started offering checking accounts and 90% of people switched to them.
Also note that I know 'the Fed' and 'the government' aren't the same thing, I just don't actually care whose doing this. Or, hell, some sort of entity like the Post Office, created to operate separately and be self funded. Or as was suggested elsewhere, just _use_ the Post Office.
1) I explained the 'Where loans really come from' thing because whenever I ask this question people go 'So they can loan them out to other people.', which means they've been watching too much It's a Wonderful Life and do not understand how it currently works. Banks _used_ to lend your money out. Currently, banks are big investment houses that just happen to hold our money and have a direct line to the Fed to borrow money from.
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Because getting credit cards takes time, and you usually can't pay your rent with them.
A major problem of being poor is the lack of _time_. Most of the people who borrowed from a payday lender could _probably_ borrow the money elsewhere. (1)
The problem is that they don't have the time to figure anything out, because they're working two part time jobs and can't afford day care and the goddamn banks decided to start closing at 3:30 in the fucking afternoon. (Seriously, what the hell is going on with that?) Also they tend to be poorly informed about their options. And the car broke down and needs a new transmission and they don't get paid until next week, and their existing credit cards are maxed out.
There's a reason payday lenders are open 24/7. (And I'd have no problem with their costs being somewhat higher. But not the absurd abusive shit they pull.)
1) And the remainder are such poor risks that _no_one _ should be loaning them money. No, those people are not 'helped' by a payday lender...having one more month before running out money, while racking up an absurdly large debt that is just going to balloon each month they can't pay it is not actually 'helpful' in any sense of the word. ('Help, help, the room I'm standing in is filling with water!' 'Here's a large block of ice you can lay on to keep from drowning!')
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By making them conform to the same rules as regular banks, you’re effectively banning them because the default rate on the loans is so high that such businesses would collapse when stripped of the higher interest rates, leaving nothing to take their place.
We can actually figure out the 'correct' interest rate, because we have another example of lending to the poor: Credit cards.
Granted, those people possibly aren't _quite_ as poor as the people being loaned to by payday lender, but the fact is that credit cards tend to be below 30% interest, and there's really no way that 700% interest can be reasonable. 45%, maybe. You want to argue 60%, fine. But 700% is insane.
At a loan period of one month, that means each of them pays $30 on every $100. Which means statistically, mean they expect literally three out of ten of the people they lend to never pay them a single dime, and the remainder to pay them on time, with no late fees or rollovers!
Of course, the payday industry will claim the default rate is somewhere between 10%-20%, but that's an outright lie, because they're including 'rollovers' as defaults. (And you will notice 700% is _still_ too high by 10%. No, 10% profit a month on loans is not normal.) The average amount of rollovers for loans is something like 2, which means that, of the loans that get paid back, people average paying back $165 for that $100 loan.
And, hilariously, payday lenders probably do have a lot of their loans default that normal banks would not have made...because they were idiotic loans to start with. Because they don't bother to check the riskiness of borrowers because they are making so much money. They don't _need_ to make sure of anything.
If they raised their rates again, new companies would beat them because there are very low barriers to entry in such businesses. Heck, immigrant mom and pop store owners could do it out of their cash registers.
The barrier to entry to lending money is pretty high. You need to have enough money to make enough loans to actually cover the statistical spread.
It's like operating a casino. You cannot start a casino with $10,000 in cash, with $100 bets. Even if your house advantage is 2%, you could indeed lose the entire $10,000 through sheer chance at the start and then you can't make any more bets to recoup the money and you're completely fucked.
There's probably some banking terminology to cover that, but I don't know what it is.
Now, _eventually_, the payday loan problem will correct itself. Some sort of entity with ethics and money will start the ball rolling. That is, in fact, what the suggestion the Post Office do it is about.
But, like I said, part of the problem is that the _obvious_ people to do it, the banks, have created a system where they profit from payday lenders. No one else actually _has_ any sort of infrastructure to hold money and assess risk and do all the other banky things that loans require. (Payday lenders, for example, do not actually calculate interest rates, or figure out risk.)
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Walmart actually does that. Except it's called a Walmart Credit Card.
Credit cards are basically the very thing I was talking about. It's lending money to the poor, at (mostly) reasonable interest rates, which turn out to be somewhere between 20% to 30%.
The problem is that no one does that short term. And note by 'no one' I mean 'nowhere that actual poor people can find and use'. It might actually exist, I don't know. (The payday lenders have very good SEO, so I can't find any useful results.)
Banks refuse to do it, because they make a lot more money by instead having their own customers sign up with a payday lender, and then bounce a check or get a overdraft. Hey, look, they just made $30 instead of that $3 in interest. (Ah, perverse incentives, how we love you. It is so awesome that your bank wants you to spend more than you have so they can hit you with fees. There's no way that could ever go wrong.)
And Walmart is not actually allowed to make loans, for some reason, except via issuing a credit card. There's all sorts of weird regulation there, which somehow allows payday lenders to exist but not Walmart loans.
(Oddly enough, Walmart is considering getting into mortgages for some reason. Ans Sam's Club is offering small business loans. These are presumably different than payday loans.)
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Do you mean going against market principles to provide low interest rates to high risk individuals via government intervention?
I did not say 'low' interest rates. I said _reasonable_ interest rates. 15%. 30%. 45% I don't care. Whatever the risk is. You know, ones that are actually in line in the amount of risk poor people present, and not crazy-ass 700% interest rates.
If you are making loans with a 700% interest rate, either those loans are in line with the risk and you are making loans to non-existent people who are dying of cancer in two weeks, and should probably stop loaning money to such absurdly high risks, _or_ the loans are nowhere in line with the risk.
Likewise, there is absolutely no real reason to ever have loans with exactly one repayment point of a single month. This makes people have to pay _more_ money at once _than the entire principle of the loan_. That is functionally insane...if they didn't $200 last month, how the fuck would they have $260 this month? That makes no sense... _unless_ the purpose of that is to cause them to default on the loan, hit them with penalties, and roll over to another month.
There _are_ actual ways to calculate the amount of interest, vs. the amount of repayment, to be assured that, statistically, you make money. Payday loans are fucking nowhere near that, at all. (And they're even worse than the calculations would imply, because, like I pointed out, they're rigged to come due all at once, so people _can't_ pay them back. But even _with_ the deliberately high level of default, they _still_ are completely out of scope.)
The reason the payday loan industry exists is that banking industry has deliberately refrained from providing poor people loans, not that that is a reasonable amount of interest to charge poor people. The reason banks stay out of the market is that they make so much money from payday loans. They own payday lenders, they make money from overdrafts, etc. And now, they're actually entering the payday lender market themselves!
Of course, more ethical smaller banks could provide loans and stop this nonsense, pretending such an entity as 'smaller banks' and/or 'ethical banks' existed.
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In Texas, people with cars that get them to and from work can’t actually drive them because they fail safety inspection. So they have to spend money they don’t have in order meet someone else’s definition of safety. Maybe this is for their own good, but let’s not pretend that there aren’t tradeoffs here. Let’s not pretend that the tradeoffs aren’t going to disproportionately hit those that can’t afford the nice stuff that people like me can afford.
You're going to have to explain what the hell you mean by 'safety inspections'. I've never had to have any sort of safety inspection of my vehicle in my state of Georgia. Emission inspection in metro areas, yes, safety inspection, no.
And driving around unsafe cars has rather obvious implications for everyone, assuming by 'safety' you actually mean _safety_.
Payday loans are what give them the ability to borrow money. Liberals want to take away that option. This is probably a better example than safety inspections.
Payday loans exist to fill a void that the giant banks are purposefully avoiding because, wait for it, they own the payday lenders.
There is absolutely no reason that poor people could not get short term loans with reasonable interest except that banking is an oligarchy and small banks do not exist anymore. (Please note that by 'reasonable' interest, I mean something like 15% interest, or Fed+10%, not the 300% or more interest that payday lenders have.)
Oh, and, of course, now the banks actually have gotten into payday lending...by being as abusiveness with the interest as traditional payday lenders, while _also_ having direct access to their customers bank accounts. (Which rather demolishes the entire excuse of 'we might not get paid back' used by traditional payday lenders to justify absurd interest rates.) Oh, and they've found more ways to be abusive, taking the entirety of money out of customer's amount exactly a month later and hitting them with penalties for overdrafts.
For some completely inexplicable reason, no bank has bothered to create any sort of loan for the poor with a reasonable interest rate and reasonable monthly withdrawals from the customers account. For _some_ reason, nowhere exists where poor people can say 'Hey, I'm short $100 this month due to car payments, can I borrow $100 and pay you $28 for the next four months? I have direct deposit to your bank, you know I have a job and I'm good for it.'
No, instead, the poor borrow $100 one month, the bank attempts to suck out $130 exactly a month later, it's not there, the banks hits them with an overdrafts, etc...
I see no reason to explain why this is a problem, why this is deliberately abusive behavior by the oligarchs who own our banking industry (Which we just fucking bailed out.) of the most vulnerable people in society who literally have no other choices. Either you understand the problem or you don't.
Incidentally, I did not actually suggest banning payday lending. I suggested 'doing something' about it. Like, you know, making it conform to the same rules about interest rates that everyone else has to.
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I don't understand your response.
While I am against saying 'The conditions the poor live under isn't crappy enough' (Which is basically what the article argues.)...
...my point was actually there's no evidence that the poor would actually _save_ any money, or actually get _paid_ more, by reducing safety regulations. It would go straight into corporate profits.
Before we argue that 'The poor should be able to save $2000 by buying cars without airbags', we need to realize that car companies will make cars without airbags, saving themselves $2000, and then sell them for _$500_ less, because, why the fuck not? Why would they lower prices more than that? That's enough to get the poor to leap on board.
And the shitty food that the poor, and _only_ the poor, already buy...why would they change their prices at all? The entire market, as a whole, would instantly relax safety standards on the crappy stuff...and leave prices the same.
Prices are not based on manufacturing cost. Prices are based on how much people are willing to pay for something. The poor, as they don't have much money, already have very little choices, and almost everything they buy is an immediate necessity. Supply is the same, and as the poor won't be (and can't be) 'less willing' to buy the stuff (Aka, demand will be the same) that means that the _price_ will be the same. Prices are not set by a profit fairy adding X% to the cost of manufacturing.
So, yes, I agree with you. It's not worth reducing safety standards to 'help the poor spend less money', which is a rather idiotic goal. I was just saying that I don't actually thing reducing safety standards will _do_ that in the first place!
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Flame retardant clothing for kids has always been a completely baffling concept.
In an actual house fire, people do not die from fire. If you die in a house fire, you wan around dodging flames until you passed out, then you died from smoke inhalation/suffocation, _then_ you caught on fire. Everyone knows this. I don't know when they started teaching the 'stay low to the ground and crawl out of the fire' idea, but this is very basic stuff that I learned when I was like eight.
And when you're _not_ in a house fire, why the hell are you putting your clothing up to an open flame?
Yes, it's for 'children', who can be stupid...but the thing about flame retardant clothing is that it still transfer heat just fine. It's not fricking asbestos. So, again, why are you holding an open flame so close to your body?
And parents, why on earth are you allowing your children to be so close to an open flame? What sort of shitty parenting is going on there that they're playing around inside the fireplace, or holding a lit candle up to their clothing?
And, BTW, it's not like 'sleeve caught on fire' is going to kill someone, anyway. Wouldn't be fun, but probably not lethal.
Flame retardant clothing makes sense if you're a priest who wears long billowing robes and lights candles. Or for firefighters. Or for something like a wedding train or any other piece of clothing that is so long it is not really in control of the person wearing it.
It makes no sense at all for children's pajamas.
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Indeed. Why _shouldn't_ the poor be allowed to live in rotted half-collapsed houses and eat meat-slurry discarded by from the pet food factory because it was too old?
We _all_ know this is where things will end up.
And wouldn't _that_ be for the best? Because the alternative is homelessness and starvation. We are complete unable to solve the problem of the poor in any manner than making things incredibly cheap for them.
In fact, why do they even need houses? Can't they just sleep in the factory and eat factory slop?
If a rising tides lifts all boats, well, the people without boats are drowning. And while lowering the floor of the ocean may result in the poor taking longer to hit it, but it's still the bottom, they're still drowning, and it takes fucking longer to get back to the surface.
Heaven forbid we just throw them a goddamn life raft instead of inventing ways for their sinking to be less work.
Oh, incidentally, people. You want to make things cheaper for the _poor_? How about, I dunno, doing something about payday loans and whatnot? And giving them the ability to actually borrow money? The poor actually spend _more_ money on basic shit than the middle class do, because they end up buying it hand to mouth and the absolute cheapest thing, which breaks immediately. Some sort of system where the poor could actually _borrow_ money at a reasonable rate to cover expenses would save them a fuckload more than supposedly paying them $10 more a day because of lack of safety regulations. (Which would not happen anyway, because pricing does not work like that.)
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I really wish people were taught basic economics in school.
There seems to be this rather absurd idea that _everyone_ has bought into that businesses are operated in some sort of 'fixed profit' mode, a concept that they are attempting to make X dollars profit and if the government makes them do something that reduces that amount, they will either raise prices or cut salaries.
In the _actual_ world, businesses cut salaries and raise prices exactly as much as they can get away with. Pricing, of both goods and services and of salaries, is entirely set by supply and demand, and has fuck-all to do with any sort of expenses in any direct sense.
Now, obviously, things are priced _above_ the expense required to make them, it would be a rather stupid business plan to sell them for less. So that, plus some amount of profit, is the price the market set, so in turn that's what businesses sell them for _in_ the market. But there's some sort of mental confusion infecting almost _everyone_ that 'how much something costs to make plus a set amount of money' is how prices are determined, so adding to 'how much something costs' will make prices go up, like it's some sort of dial. Add two dollars to the cost, add two dollars to the price. Uh....no. Really, no.
I mean, seriously, I heard people laughing at the Papa John's guy when he claimed he'd have to raise pizza prices by 11 cents a pizza to provide health care, which is, yes, stupid, but _I_ was laughing at the idea that he already had the ability to raise prices by 11 cents and had...decided (?) not to do it? But would decide otherwise if something else happened? What? Huh? I don't even know... That is not how pricing works.
Now, what could happen, if no place provided health care, that all pizza places now have an addition 11 cents per pizza, which makes it likely that, _eventually_, pizza will end up averaging 11 cents more. OTOH, if there are _already_ pizza places paying for health care, then that isn't going to do anything.
But corporations stand there and keep repeating 'We pass taxes on to customers' and 'We pass safety expenses on to employees' and everyone buys it, and not a single person asks 'Wait, if they do that, then why are they _lobbying_ against such expenses? Why do they care?'
Likewise, why do they want tax breaks for their industry? Under _their_ logic, won't that just result in the entire industry charging people less, and the industry making the same amount.
Of course it doesn't. We really need to teach people how 'pricing' works in school.
On “Why Not Demanding GMO Labeling is Udder Foolishness… (Get it? It’s a pun!) ”
But a GMO label wouldn’t be like a “Contains Thiomersal” label because the GMO label doesn’t tell you anything about what the package contains, because GMO isn’t a chemical compound, it’s a history of how a thing came to be.
No, a GMO is a genetic modified organism. It's not really a 'chemical compound', we usually don't refer to produce that way, but 'wheat' isn't really a 'chemical compound' either, yet that appears to be listed on a label.
Both non-genetically modified wheat and genetically modified wheat are actual things, that are actually in the food, not 'processes'. GMO food is _made_ of chemical compounds, just like all food.
You're just trying to assert that GMO things and non-GMO things _are_ the same thing, that the genetic modification makes no difference, so it's...unfair(?) that one of them is labelled differently. Regardless of that, they are, in fact, _things_.
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You know, the only people bringing up the First Amendment are the ones bringing it up so they can claim that it’s irrelevant and we shouldn’t bring it up. There’s a name for this kind of fallacious argument.
You realize First Amendment grounds are _exactly_ the reason that Kazzy was opposed to GMO labeling, which is the point of this entire article, right? In fact, the article quotes that 'To me, mandated speech is just as much a “free speech” issue as halting it.'
But apparently we've reached the point for goalpost moving, where apparently now free speech is _not_ an issue, and the new concern is that it's too much work to keep track of GMO stuff.
I eagerly await whatever reason is next, now that I've pointed out the stupidity of complaining about food producers having to keep track of exactly what goes in the food they sell...like, uh, they already have to.
What brand new made-up principled reason will it be? What theory will be next?! I'm so excited! Perhaps labeling GMO foods requires spot inspections, which are a violation of the third amendment!
On “The GOP’s Self-inflicted Wound”
And the reason to not want to pass a law changing the status of limitations is...?
Please note I did explicitly say that there were perhaps legal reasons for asserting the status of limitation interpretation by the court was _legally_ correct. If someone says the law was technically incorrect and the court should follow the law, well, I think they're wrong, but I can follow that position.
Misogyny requires not supporting _fixing_ the law. It requires stating that people should have no legal recourse against pay discrimination as long as such discrimination can be kept secret 180 days.(1) If that is what you claim, please explain why and how that makes any sense.
Alternately, please explain why you think people should not be able to sue for gender discrimination in wages at all, and how _that_ isn't misogynistic.
Like I said...lawsuits...the great and powerful equalizers that the libertarian right insists will fix all harms without any sort of regulations at all. No matter how powerful the entity harming people , if they are wronged, they can just sue! Until, of course, people _do_ start suing, at which point that must be stopped immediately.
1) Actually, it's technically worse than that. All corporations would have to do is _slowly_ engage in discrimination and there would be no point that a lawsuit would actually be worthwhile. Hire men and women at the same pay, change men pay's upward 1% a year and keep women's the same, and after 10 years men are being paid 20% more but at no point could the women sue for more than the 1% pay difference she just got.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.