Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

So, we don't want to give homeless people jobs because that's uncompassionate. Everyone knows they are charity cases and the only kind thing to do is give them charity, not opportunity.

And we don't want to give loans to poor people because that's clearly predatory lending. They would be better off without the option to decide for themselves because everyone knows how stupid they are and how incapable they are if making any kind of decent decision.

That's a recipe for a permanent underclass.

Opinion of a formerly homeless person who took out a Payday loan to go stay at a dive of a hotel for three nights to escape a deadly storm. My logic: three nights in a hotel was cheaper than replacing my laptop, which I needed to keep earning money.

I had no idea how I would eat for the rest of the month and didn't care after walking past a river about six times wider than I had ever seen it and my "safe" campsite for weathering the storm that was currently under probably six to ten feet of water -- before the worst part of the storm rolled in. I just knew I would be in a hotel that night if there was any means whatsoever to arrange it so I wouldn't die that weekend.

I think the author of the story aptly addressed this as an all to common justification. The tricky ethical bit isn't whether or not cases like your own do exist, but rather really how many of them are there on the whole?

The more you chip away at the human rights of poor people, the more you succeed in making sure "cases like my own" cannot possibly exist.

And that's exactly my point. Your assumption that I'm some weird statistical outlier is exactly the problem.

It comes across to me roughly like this:

"Oh, Doreen is actually smart or something. But that's the rare exception among the poor. So fuck the rest of 'em!"

The fact of the matter is that things like payday loans exist to exploit the poor and homeless in a way that ensures that they live perpetually in debt.

To take your argument to its rational extreme, it would be a bad idea to disallow poor people literally selling themselves to a corporation because that's taking away their basic rights.

And this is literally something that happens when you don't put regulations to stop it [1]. The fact that the poor predominately are people who take payday loans which often end up exploitative of their situation should tell you that payday loans might be a bad thing! The norm is that people are not escaping payday loans. Payday loans need to go and we need an actual safety net in place.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/09/us-payday-lo...

to disallow poor people literally selling themselves to a corporation

This isn't a right we grant other people, so, no, it is not the logical conclusion.

The antidote to a Payday loan habit is more earned income or other access to resources that aren't borrowed. So if you want to solve this, give cash gifts to poor people you know, help vulnerable people access earned income or other resources, work on solving the housing supply issue in the US and/or work on addressing the healthcare issue in the US.

I do what I can to provide useful information to homeless and at-risk Americans as my contribution, for example:

https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/

https://genevievefiles.blogspot.com/

http://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/

https://www.pocketputer.com/

https://writepay.blogspot.com/

Simply cutting people off from the shitty resources they currently have access to without giving them something better only makes their problems worse. It's easier to cut people off than provide additional (superior) support and most people arguing vociferously for cutting them off are not actually actively working on better solutions, so it ends up being a big fat "fuck you" to the poor with a self-righteous justification to make it sound better.

> This isn't a right we grant other people, so, no, it is not the logical conclusion.

It isn't something people are allowed to do now because we've decided that it was too societally abused in the past. Look up the history of voluntary indentured servitude, for example.

We developed other instruments. Indentured servitude was a way to pay a debt when money per se and financial instruments were relatively primitive. It was kind of the debt version of barter.

Develop better instruments and solutions, and then Payday loans can join indentured servitude and dinosaurs in museums.

From the article it sounds like the author's analysis identified people who would end up in default with high probability, but were still profitable to loan to because revenue from payments + collections exceeded the loan.

And if the author had had more clout / underlings she could have done a more thorough analysis of spending patterns to identify who would buy ephemerals like entertainment vs necessities like food or shelter.

And if there was buy-in from the government then they could add government assistance to the program, like negative interest rates for essential purchases or something.

But C1 and every other business is focused on making a profit next quarter, while the government is focused on getting re-elected, so there's nobody around to do any development like that.

so there's nobody around to do any development like that.

I'm doing what I can and can't even get adequate Patreon support.

Everyone always has an excuse. If you want a better world, roll up your sleeves or pull out your checkbook and actively support something better rather than telling me why it can't and won't change.

For other HNers out there that may have the time this weekend, here are some good resources that should get you started on helping out those in your community:

Donate a book to help rehabilitate the incarcerated: https://bookriot.com/2015/09/03/donate-books-prisons/

Volunteer to help the incarcerated: https://www.bop.gov/jobs/volunteer.jsp

Help end homelessness today: https://endhomelessness.org/

Help feed the homeless: https://www.homelessshelterdirectory.org/

Help feed anyone that needs food: https://www.feedingamerica.org/find-your-local-foodbank?refe...

Help feed hungry children and babies: https://www.foodpantries.org/

Help those in need near you: https://www.redcross.org/volunteer/volunteer-role-finder.htm...

Yapping about the nuances of helping others on here means jack-squat to those people in your community that need help now.

Any amount of help is 'good enough', any amount of volunteering is 'the best way to do things', any amount of canned food for a hungry child is 'spending money wisely'.

If a solution to a problem hurts more people than it helps then it's not the correct solution to the problem.

The bigger problem is that the powers that be want to constantly take away the shitty solutions the poor currently have access to without actually providing them better solutions. Then, after continuously shrinking the opportunities available to the poor while not really helping them, they blame the poor for failing to escape poverty.

Offer better solutions and watch payday loans et al wither on the vine instead of trying to justify taking yet more away from the already underprivileged.

> And we don't want to give loans to poor people because that's clearly predatory lending.

Loans are not inherently predatory. Giving loans without interest is a noble thing to do. Of course, many people don't like that, and want to take advantage of the poor, which makes loans with interest predatory.

I spent too much time homeless and listening to well-heeled people spout their hypocritical BS to buy that.

I was actively trying to figure out how to establish an earned income from the street. I was being told I was "panhandling the internet" for trying to monetize my websites. I was not being taken seriously. I was not having scads of charity thrown my way. Etc.

Nearly six years of that has convinced me that when people set these ridiculous high-minded standards it's really code for "Fuck poor people" while sounding virtuous.

If you want to proactively offer interest-free loans to poor people through your church, more power to you. If you want to argue with me on the internet about why making loans available to poor people via the marketplace is bad and mean, sorry, not buying it. If all the good people who spouted nonsense at me while mistreating me while I was homeless had actually done anything at all genuinely helpful, my problems would have been resolved substantially faster.

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