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Comment by jlcoff | Hacker News Reader

> (2) You cannot explain away 2008 as being the fault of the people who couldn't pay their mortgage. WTAF dude.

When you are subprime rated, you would have to be a complete moron to take a variable loan on you life. But sure, poor them, it's not their fault, it's the mean evil banker who gave them a tool to shoot themselves with ...

That the difference between you and me. I'm gonna give people the freedom to shoot themselves. You, well, you know better how each and every of them shall live there lives.

Remind me of ESR writing... http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/gun-ethics.html

Do you even realize your own mentality ?

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> When you are subprime rated, you would have to be a complete moron to take a variable loan on you life.

And loads of people were that moronic, do they really deserve to have suffered because some other people wanted to profit as much as possible from their stupidity? It's not like these morons had the tools to really assess what the fuck they were doing. Not excluding the fact that many of these loans were basically predatory, using the naivety/stupidity of these people against themselves to cash in.

Does all the world deserve to suffer through a major economic crisis because some morons are totally free to be predated upon by forces much more educated and sophisticated about the financial markets (and by extension doing that knowingly, pretty fucking evil)?

Libertarian ideology doesn't really hold much to reality, full freedom to do whatever is only achievable when the population is educated enough, humanity is not there yet.

What the actual fuck...

This thread is a horror show that is pretty hard to watch, and I knew it would be, but I think it’s worth it. But if you we’re wondering what the rich asshole tree vandals were doing earlier in life, this is it.

If you think it's an horror show, you're pretty frail... Toughen up, cupcake.

Ad hominems are frowned upon around here, just so you know...

No, only ad-hominem against people carrying the Gospel are frowned upon. There has been plenty of ad-hominem against me and I don't see you condemning those.

I believe that HN is very far from left-wing, not sure why you feel singled out, ad hominems are frowned upon anyone here, call them out and move on.

This defensiveness is really off putting, it seems like the only argument you can carry is "the left has a Gospel and I'm against it" and I still have absolute no idea what exactly you refer to and why you are against whatever you are referring to.

You just feel victimised and attacked for some reason.

Ad hominem is when you say someone’s argument is wrong because they’re a bad person. Ad hominem attacks are frowned upon because they cause good discussion to devolve into a shouting match.

In contrast, this thread has simply been establishing that jlcoff is a bad person. It’s not a fallacy or a derailment of the discussion to do so, rather it was the discussion. I can imagine why they feel attacked, it’s because they are literally being told they’re a bad person for their personal views. It would be implausible to expect a debate about the morality of working at a place you believe to be a scam, with such a person, to go without challenging them for it. And I wouldn’t expect such a person to respond without raising some form of “let ye without sin cast the first stone” defence and eventually just dribble out insults. My point is: you don’t have to worry about using community standards or HN policy to protect me from ad hominem attacks from them; all of this was priced in. It is inseparable from the nature of fraudulent schemes and the people who push them.

> ...humanity is not there yet.

Especially with the dogmatic left at the helm.

What does this even mean?

Catchphrases don't foster discussion, don't be on the thought-terminating camp, pretty idiotic reply to be honest.

The current mainstream [radical] left Gospel meets the definition of dogma, as in, they are just as bad as the darkest religion they themselves condemn. Not very difficult to understand.

No, it really is difficult to understand given that you are using circular logic to justify something.

I don't know what you refer by the Gospel of the left, and from there I can't figure out what exactly you are attacking.

What is even "radical left" to you? These are such non-specific terms that just got even less defined with this whole culture wars shit.

I don't know what you are talking about and you haven't exposed anything that I can talk about, just empty platitudes and terms that actually mean nothing...

You might have a point if the only negative outcome of 2008 was that a lot of people lost homes they could never afford.

It was the banks' and regulators' responsibility to not allow bad loans to be issued and resold as mis-labeled AAA investment vehicles. That is the part that broke the global economy.

NO, it's not the job of the government to save people from shooting themselves.

Mis-labeling a product is literally fraud.

Looked at from first principles, the market cannot work efficiently if people are allowed to lie. Lies create an enormous amount of waste through direct and indirect effects.

Government as the monopoly on power (and locking people up) has an important role to play in policing this.

> Mis-labeling a product is literally fraud

Such as Tesla FSD ?

Arguably yes.

I never said or implied that it was.

But (in the US at least), it actually is the government's job to keep the economy stable in order to "insure domestic Tranquility [... and...] promote the general Welfare"

> it's the mean evil banker who gave them a tool to shoot themselves with

Well, since that tool was largely fraud from which the bankers expected to profit (and did, in the short-term, until they got taken down by the rest of the industry doing the same thing) by externalizing risk, yeah, it is.

I don't recall anyone getting prosecuted for fraud even though the democrats would have dearly loved to have done so. The bankers packaged mortgages and made a profit just like they always did. The difference was, local banks were pressured to loan to people with dreadful credit, and the guarantees by FNMA and the optimistic ratings by S&P made it easier to package and sell the mortgage backed securities. In the end, the homeowners got to default on their mortgages but the bankers lost their livelihood.

You're putting the blame in the wrong place. I'd start by looking at FNMA. Don't take my word - read up on it.

Any time you bring up ESR as a positive figure , you lose. Something to consider. Even OSI banned him from their mailing lists, although way too late.

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