People take these bad loans because they literally have no other choice. They are using these loans to buy groceries and cover bills, not splurge on non-essentials.
It's boringly, heartbreakingly common there to see small, multi-tenant commercial buildings where one of the tenants is a payday loan place, and another (if not the other) is a "video lottery"/casino type joint.
In the limited digging I ever bothered doing, both establishments (and often the building) were ultimately owned by the same party.
So, no. Not predatory at all...
By parallel in software engineering, branch merges/integrations used to be very expensive (in cvs/subversion/perforce) and thus were done rarely, and were more expensive and difficult because changes had more time to accumulate, but with DVCSs the problem is flipped on it's head and now we merge branches routinely without fear. We need to fix payroll so that running it on a nearly continuous basis is possible.
[1] https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1093187875166797824
I assume these customers have less a need to take out a payday loan, but it could also be the case that expenses > pay regardless of when you receive income throughout the month.
A and b are both true but don’t seem especially relevant; payments can still be made on a daily or hourly basis based on the work they are doing rather than bundled up at the end of a pay cycle.
Small companies that can’t afford to take payment +60 or +90 probably won’t have the liquidity to do +30 either, so if they have to pay people daily instead of every two weeks will probably struggle.
I've tried to teach teams of analysts version control, the xkcd panel is a documentary, not a joke.
Also, its 'totally possible' only in the sense that it really isn't: i.e. if like many tech people you ignore actual social, infrastructure, law and cultural issues and start blaming the users for why they don't use your brilliant tech product/live their lives like they're supposed to, or talk glibly about things you don't understand.
Seriously though, I wonder how they seriously imagine streaming money would work. The largest payment processors in the world and all the banks still use IBM mainframes that are the fastest transaction processors in the world. Shared ledgers threaten to consume all of the world’s energy while providing worse performance. I suppose continuously streaming money would consume massive amounts of bandwidth in addition?
And I did mean "totally possible" in the sense you indicate, that is, technically possible, but far from a solved solution (after all, I'm not quitting my day job to start offering this as a service). The historical reason for a payday is that cash is hard to move, so the armored car would swing by and people would line up for money; later banks would do the same thing. Because "paydays" and "paystubs" exist, other processes and organizations latched on to them as a standard place to add more process, so "running payroll" became a more and more complicated beast, thus making it even harder to make it an incremental process.
So the first barrier is now gone -- while some segments of the population are cash-heavy, modern inter-bank transfers and the rise of electronic payment systems mean that banks can easily handle the cash outlays necessary to support the demand for physical specie out of cash on hand (not to mention improvements in modeling that allow them to anticipate cash demand).
But the rest of the "hanger-ons" are not even close to being able to support this; everything from landlords asking for paystubs, to how payroll taxes are handled, to the way that benefits (like health insurance or retirement plans) are calculated, to the way that non-direct-payroll services like phone bills and cable bills are calculated, and the idea of limits on services (data, etc.) that are metered on a sliding monthly window instead of a continuous rolling window mean that it would be very difficult to do effective planning, unless all services started adopting these methods.
To actually allow people to do this you'd almost need to have intermediate services -- a "cell phone account" that gets funded, say, daily, and remits payments to the cell phone provider on a monthly basis. Similarly a "rent account", and so on, that would gradually allow you to get an idea of what your actual cash flow looks like, without having to deal with periodic shocks that represent lump outlays and receipts.
For now it's just an interesting thought that the foundation that the concept of "payday" is build on has turned to sand, and the question is whether we can find a way to take advantage of this new flexibility. Yudkowsky's tweet addresses one possible way that this may provide a benefit, and it's interesting food for thought even though I'm not completely convinced.
https://courierhelp.trycaviar.com/customer/en/portal/article...
The instinct to want to solve the big problem is a good one, but it's a path to hell paved with good intentions. You'll end up struggling to ever solve the big problem, and ignore a series of effective, small fixes along the way.
The US is stuck in a silly "American Tough" outlook of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps when a little bit of well targeted aide can help society immensely. There is a wonderful old MLK quote
> We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor
so as a society we should closely examine the money that gets funneled to quantitative easing, subsidies for fossil fuels and other corporate bailouts, along with the reduction of progressive taxes like luxury and estate taxes... and consider how far that money would go if put into SNAP, CHIP and public housing.
It is painful for me to watch individuals who consistently make poor financial decisions spiral into providing the payday loan industry with a large amount of revenue. But is it really more painful than watching compulsive gamblers lose their pensions on card games or video poker or speculation on regulated index futures?
Quote by someone.
In NYC Neighborhood Trust helped to develop this app in an effort to serve these people and help them avoid that type of circumstance.
Edit: I've even seen fast food places accept EBT.
Yeah, you may technically be able buy some lobster with your SNAP, but it would cost several days worth of benefits to do so. But if someone is willing to go hungry for a few days in order to indulge in a modest luxury, then why not let them? The whole point of these "free market" welfare programs is that people know best how to spend their money.
I completely agree, but the typical case isn't "hey, I rewarded myself for showing restraint in spending my benefits while I work myself out of poverty" (which I completely support) but "stars above, it wasn't enough, again, woe is me, I need more indefinitely and why change if they'll cut my benefits ones I have gainful employment?".
But back to the original topic, it's fine to argue that the typical food stamp recipient isn't high on the hog. It's not fine to act like no luxury good has ever been bought on food stamps, and every recipient is a meticulous steward of taxpayer's largesse, ceaselessly working toward the day when they don't need public assistance.
Can you please point out where anyone has ever legitimately argued that?
I think we're all aware social programs are abused. I also think we're better off with them, even being abused, than without.
Much, I would note, like so many in the broader discussion are arguing regarding these lenders...
How about where I entered the thread?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19100636
>chain emails claiming to document someone buying [luxury food] on food stamps.
--
>I think we're all aware social programs are abused. I also think we're better off with them, even being abused, than without.
And I think it's unrealistic to model the abuse as one-off, contained events instead of "pockets of underclass that grows up not knowing anything different".
Because, yeah. We're just going to talk past each other here if so. Back to my deadline.
Are you saying there aren't pockets of near-permanent poverty in America that depend on social spending? Nice, didn't know that was patched up.
Have a good day.
Is there a reason you thought my appellation was being applied to something else?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonconstable/2018/04/04/the-f...
Source?
/sarcasm /sorry
In CA several years ago, I checked out a payday loan place for a cash advance, and what surprised me was that, apparently, they suggest a bunch of (cheaper, non-profit) alternatives to using them, and only then approve the loan. I don't know if that's a law that they have to, but that seems like a better way to go about this.
Similarly, like you say, maybe the core problem is bad spending patterns. Posters like to copypasta the Vimes bit about "the poor are poor because they don't have the upfront money to pay 2x for something that will last 10x". Well, if true, maybe mandate that kind of counseling at payday lenders.
Those seem like better ways to address the core problem than banning the practice.
Your comment isn't a particularly helpful thing to say as it attempts to paint struggling people as frivolous, and undeserving of help.
There are many people who are barely scraping by, they drive an old car (because public transport in many places is a joke), and they're just one expensive repair away from having to make hard decisions.