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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

People must really like the dopamine rush of feeling outraged.

Giving people the option to not buy insurance is not evil. It's just a seller giving a buyer options at different price points.

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Giving people options that will in practice put them into spiraling debt slavery is objectively evil.

Given that the median household income in the US is $83k, I don’t think that losing $1k on a busted phone is likely to put many into “spiraling debt slavery”

57% of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck and don’t have an emergency $1k to spare.

If they had the money to buy the phone outright, they would probably buy it outright.

Great, lets remove the option of refined sugar, alcohol, saturated fats, detached single family homes (due to it resulting in individual cars, the leading cause of injury and death, and expenses that leads to "debt slavery"), etc.

Also, no more leasing/renting cars, or really any kind of borrowing at all, as people should not have the option to become liable in the future, for anything. Because if a $1,000 to $2,000 lease puts them in a spiral of debt slavery, anything more than that surely will.

You’re being sarcastic, but I actually kind of agree.

Not that these options should be removed, but that they should be priced according to their costs to society.

You see that with alcohol and cigarettes in developed countries.

Leases should be more tightly regulated and require full coverage insurance. It already works like that for cars.

Borrowing is fine insofar as the payments or debt don’t interfere with your ability to survive. A bad credit score shouldn’t prevent you from living under a roof or getting a job. UBI would make this much easier in practice.

>Leases should be more tightly regulated and require full coverage insurance. It already works like that for cars.

Not by law, but because the lender requires it. In this case, the lender doesn’t. There is no evil or not evil, it’s just a business decision based on the value of the collateral and likelihood of loss.

A decision can be purely logical and impersonal and still be evil.

Only poorly written villains from fiction do evil things because they enjoy harming people.

Evil actions in real life stem from systems in which they are completely justifiable.

It's not specifically the option to skip insurance, it's the option to finance something so prone to damage without insurance. And yeah, it's bad for that to be an option.

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