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Comment by towelr34dy | Hacker News Reader

How dare consenting adults do things I find offensive.

I don't drink. Drunk people act stupid. Let's ban alcohol. It'll be great. Prove to me it won't!

Oh, you enjoy alcohol responsibly? That's just anecdotal. Not like MY anecdotal evidence, I see drunks everywhere... everyone knows that. And they are all alcoholics who are depraved by predatory beer companies.

My anecdotal evidence is good and corroborated by my tribe. And you must prove me wrong, despite the fact that I'm the one making statements like we need to regulate something.

Oh, and of course, once we ban it, no mafia guy is going to start offering it in a sketchy way... there's NO WAY that will happen in a low class neighborhood because we really take care of our poor. I have this all planned out. Going with my gut to make emotive detached decisions instead of dealing with the grit of reality is so nice. /s

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I mean despite your terrible sarcasm, we do have rational regulations on things like alcohol or gambling because we recognize that it helps protect people overall, sometimes indeed from themselves.

Your argument is essentially 'I don't drive drunk, therefore we don't need any laws against drunk driving' since the expectation is that people will behave rationally. Or that we don't need regulations against things like cigarettes because people know the harm already.

Obviously there's room to debate on how socially dangerous something is and whether it warrents regulation; hence the ongoing debate on marijuana legalization; but in general he's right: relying on anecdotal evidence and extrapolating that is bad form. It provides context and reason for your arguments, but is not an argument in itself.

Err, we do have payday lending regulations. The new ones would basically destroy the industry. It would remove the vast majority of lenders of last resort. It wasn't just capping fees. It was 'making sure the lender could pay'

Let's see, who else does that... banks.

How? a credit score. Which has nothing to do with being able to pay truly pay long term or be sustainable. Some poor people have good credit. Some rich people have bad. It's... messy.

But please don't let the details of what you support actually alter what you support in name.

BTW, if the rules were only targeting continuation fees (i.e. multiple debit restriction part), I'd 100% support them. Remember, your talking to someone who has been there, done that.

I'm not against all legislation. I'm against privileged people sitting on a high horse, looking down on 'the commoners' and telling them what they need.

I personally would not have qualified under the new regulations when I took the loans.

I feel like I'm talking to someone who has good health wanting to ban sneezing instead of helping the sick. And you are talking to someone who has been sick.

I've spoken extensively here on HN about my experience growing up dirt poor; such as having to go through schooling with teeth quite literally rotting and broken down to the gumlines without being able to afford fixing them. So you arent exactly making a strong case for me here.

But to make an actual argument here instead of solely an appeal to my history: I know exactly how companies will behave when untethered from regulations. A great example is that banks would deliberately delay checks my parents would receive so that they could collect overdraft fees.

I don't have much sympathy for payday lenders given one of the regulations in the article was to prevent payday lenders constantly trying to withdraw money from accounts in order to collect on fees. And the regulations would've prevented payday lenders from deliberately giving poor people incredibly large loans that they could never pay back and be effectively stuck in debt with due to high fees. Acting like these regulations would've somehow stopped lenders is wrong at best and fearmongering at worst.

What are these rational regulations? Does the ban on buying cold beer from a gas station in Indiana have a strong backing showing that the cold beer barrier is reducing alcoholism? I’ll save to some time, there is no link. It’s protectionist crap hidden behind the guise of moralizing.

States have wildly different liquor laws they all claim are “rational”, which may be true but they certainly aren’t rational to protect people. They are just designed to exploit moralizers to protect (liquor stores, grocery stores, bars, legal firms, etc).

These laws are so stupid that there are only a few cities in the entire United States where you can consume a beer in public despite there being separate laws banning public intoxication! WTF!?

People are far from “rational” when getting on the moralizing icky feelings bandwagon.

You don't consider laws against drunk driving to be rational regulation?

Likewise, I find any and all laws criminalizing common scams to be gross and onerous. I would rather live in a free society, where I'm sure everyone would educate themselves and never fall for these scams, and if they did fall for one, then clearly the scam was good for them and they got something they wanted in exchange. Who are we to try to prevent that?

By your logic, most credit cards are a scam.

I think you need to look up the word scam. Then use words based on the dictionary definition of them the way the rest of us do. It helps in communicating when people use a dictionary to define words instead of the thoughts in their head.

We don’t need your oppression. Your heavy handed assumption that we enjoy alcohol responsibly is offensive.

If you want to be on the road when people are trying to get home from the bar, you should seek market solutions instead of ridiculous prohibition.

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