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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25034 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Modernity is complex and confusing, I think Moldbug makes the point that plenty of people who would have been quite capable in historical situations struggle to function in their interactions with the modern state, modern employment market, modern social customs, subtext.

I think about this a lot lately. I've been religiously watching Caleb Hammer's Financial Audit this year. Apparently this year in particular older fans of the show have complained that it's devolved into Caleb Springer, and all the dysfunction of humanity is paraded in front of the camera with a thin veneer of "Lets look at you finances" after 60 minutes of discovering what a low functioning member of society they are across the board.

That said, the same themes keep coming up again and again. Employment has gone totally fucky, and you need to SEO your resume and tailor it to each job application, probably using AI to save time. Because everyone is getting spammed with thousands of AI generated resumes for even entry level positions, so git gud. I'm not sure this is a state of affairs we should accept for mid-wit level career opportunities.

The second is that feeding yourself is fucked. Generational knowledge of how to make thrifty healthy meals has been lost, and low functioning individuals constantly struggle with the impulse to door dash poison, and finance it to boot. That said, cheap staples like beans, rice, etc are still widely available. So it's not totally impossible, and it helps if you were raised right.

The third is that there are arrays of predatory credit vehicles that would blow your damned mind. I knew about how terrible it was to run a credit card balance, and I knew payday loans were predatory to a point of exciting legal scrutiny. I had no idea there was a whole world of credit apps build directly into shopping apps. Pay in four, Klarna, other crap I'm probably not spelling correctly because somehow I've never actually been exposed to it personally. And seemingly the prevailing wisdom is at 18 you get a credit card, max it out because it's "free money" and then pay the minimums your entire life. Sounds like a fair trade, a few months of zero impulse control, followed by paying only a few hundred a month forever. I'd say it's just the show, but then I think back to my 20's and all the people I knew, even educated professionals, who did exactly that and were digging their way back out from it. Nobody balances a checkbook anymore, and cash isn't physical so that when you are out you are out. It's all imaginary numbers and notices you can ignore.

And I mean, that's a complexity disease that has hit the three main areas of your life, employment, feeding yourself, and money. It makes me think a lot about how the bar has risen to meet some minimum standard to meaningfully navigate society.

It makes me think a lot about how the bar has risen to meet some minimum standard to meaningfully navigate society.

Future shock is already here. The number of people who freak out at being asked to send an email is disturbingly high.

I have never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but my closest friend once described it as being at least partially about the transition from pre-Modern society, where everything a man might encounter was basically comprehensible, to Modern society, where a stroll down the road would reveal behemoths of concrete and steel and chained lightning that the average man could not hope to understand well enough to effect repairs on.

This is incredibly stark with cell phones. How many of us here have ever repaired a cell phone? Have you ever tried to coax, say, an elderly Chinese man though a non-standard use of their phone, with all the text in Mandarin? It is sufficiently advanced technology, and it is indistinguishable from magic.

Have you ever tried to coax, say, an elderly Chinese man though a non-standard use of their phone, with all the text in Mandarin? It is sufficiently advanced technology, and it is indistinguishable from magic.

No, but I have used Google Translate as part of an effort to help an elderly Chinese man communicate with a somewhat belligerent and unpleasant customer in his shop, and I have rarely appreciated the magic more.

I mean, to be clear, we have a kludge for credit(that’s what a credit score is). Information on how to feed yourself is widely available and you can usually tell when someone uses it. Employment I’ll grant you is harder, but still.

That you need a credit score to function in society as a whole should be illegal.

Yes, yes, I know, I know. I'm very well aware of how and why credit score functions. I get it.

I was still very well put out when I had to go purchase a new car unexpectedly, only to have the guy who went to check my finances come out and stare at me like I was some lost crytpid and blurt out 'You have no credit score.'

Yes, because I grew up around adults who abused credit cards and paid the consequences and who had no desire to go down that road, thank you very much. Only to find out late that, gee whillickers, if you want to function as an adult in society for some things, you actually need a credit score, and for that, you need a credit card.

Why, yes, I'm still salty about that. How could you tell?

(And before you ask, all my previous vehicles were old, used, family hand-me-downs.)

Boo hoo- credit scores show good breeding and conventionality. Of course people want to see them. Wouldn’t you?

I hate the antichrist.

I'd rather live in a society that I don't need to borrow to function, thanks.

Were you trying to purchase the car straight-up full cost and they still wouldn't sell it to you ? Or were you trying to get financing on it?

Financing.

As an aside, it's really flattering that you guys think I'm successful enough to just buy a car outright when needed. I wish.

In the end, I just had my father co-sign the note with me, which is something that's done when you either have no credit or bad credit. Not great, but not terrible.

I'm confused as to why you're annoyed about the existence of a "risk of lending money" rating when you would also like to to be leant money.

It's like being mad that traffic lights exist but also wanting to drive on a road without getting t-boned. Credit scores enable institutions to lend you the money to get the car you want, and keep overall borrowing costs lower for you!

It’s annoying when ‘I am very careful about borrowing money’ gets interpreted as ‘I am a bad credit risk’. One understands why but it’s still insulting.

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Come on man, your expectations aren't reasonable here. You wanted to borrow money, so of course your credit history was relevant. That isn't "needing to borrow to function", that is "needing to borrow to build confidence that you can be trusted to borrow more".

Why wouldn't income history be enough to build confidence that I can pay shit back? Naturally, someone who gets paid in cash under the table can't provide one, but even in the land of Freedom such inconveniently physical dealings are rare in the year of 2025 on a high enough salary level... right?

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I would want to see them, of course, as a matter of due diligence. But I think for me "no credit score" is the highest possible credit score. Then again most things about the US feel slightly dystopian to me.

Same, brother, same.

Well, except I didn't opt out of credit cards because I saw people in my life abuse them; I opted out because I didn't like the complexity and I have low executive function and I am sure I would forget to pay off the balance if I actually got one; I have gone months without checking my bank account when I was depressive. But I still have managed to amass almost six figures worth of savings in my checking account just by being frugal over the years, which makes my finances better than all those people who apparently cannot afford a sudden $1000 expense. But, nope, landlady still wants to see a fucking credit score. I had to show her my bank statement to convince her to rent to us. If I ever decide to buy a new car, I'll just get a cashier's check and pay up front.

I still have managed to amass almost six figures worth of savings in my checking account

Inflation is eating your lunch, you could at least have some of that in like Treasure notes so you're not losing money.

I have gone months without checking my bank account when I was depressive.

Interesting. Depressive but able to maintain a steady stream of income from a reliable job? I've only been very depressed when unemployed of massively underemployed. I envy the six figures, whew.

Why not do low cost ETFs or index funds? You don't need to look at those and you make lots of money.

Not op, but have a wife who suffers from a lot of anxiety and dysfunction around money.

There exists a huge swath of people that have their loss aversion with money cranked up to 11. They've had the same savings account since their parents signed them up for it as a child, and they aren't changing it. It took me 5 years to convince my wife to just change her savings account from a 0.02% interest account at a credit union she grew up with, to another FDIC insured high yield account that had 3%. She had tens of thousands of dollars in there, it was all the money she had ever saved in that one account rotting away to inflation. Getting the money moved over caused her so much anxiety it was a household event. She was terrified something would happen to it. What would happen? She didn't know, but the overwhelming undefined anxiety was real none the less.

5 years of carrot and stick badgering/showing off my brokerage account, she finally took some of that money and put it into some mutual funds I had selected for her, with a commitment to add more. Then the anxiety took hold again and the plan to move more stopped, because the stock market is scary. At least she left what she'd put in, in. What I convinced her to move over to stocks has now outgrown the balance she left in savings. That makes her happy. But she seems to have memory holed how much she dragged her feet, because she gives me shit for not having her do that sooner or with more money. But that's just marriage I guess.

They wouldn't accept cash? I mean, literally piles of Benjamins?

No, most people will not accept grocery bags full of cash for tens of thousands of dollar purchases. That comes with reporting and the like.

No, most people will not accept grocery bags full of cash for tens of thousands of dollar purchases. That comes with reporting and the like.

Yes but there's a lot of paperwork when buying a car. Filing a form 8300 isn't intractable.

Bold of you to think that I had the cash on hand at the time to just buy a car off-hand.

Mind, the only reason I was purchasing said vehicle was due to a truly amazing set of circumstance that wrecked the engine of my previous one.

I'm still salty about that, as well.

Pro-tip kids - always, always manage what maintenance you can yourself, and not rely on others.

Bold of you to think that I had the cash on hand at the time to just buy a car off-hand.

I assumed it from the complaint. Usually when people complain about credit scores being required it's for something they think isn't relevant, like employment or rent (which is usually paid in advance, not arrears) or indeed buying something with cash. Needing a credit score to get a car loan seems pretty reasonable.

Credit cards are truly evil. I mean, I use them. I've used them for 20+ years and never had a single finance charge or fee ever, while accruing thousands of dollars in cash back rewards. They paid for my Switch 2 in fact.

But they're still evil. The yawning gaping pit they represent, which I have to balance on the edge of every time I run up their balance each month (within my budget) and then pay off in full is nightmarish. Because there is nothing stopping me, besides 20 years of inflexible habit and discipline, from just YOLOing with the nearly $40k of available credit they make available to me.

I watch some of these Financial Audits, and people's minimums on all their cards is over the amount I manage to save each month. I'll watch someone my same age, my same income, and they are looking at 5-10 years of aggressively budgeting and paying off debt to get back to zero. Meanwhile my assets appreciated more than my annual salary the last few years. But in another timeline, with only slightly different choices early on, I could have been them.

Half these people, when asked about a specific credit account, just go "I don't know, they just gave me that card when I bought X". X could be a car, a new roof, a large plumbing job, etc, etc. Like in my driveway story below, fucking everything is trying to get you to sign up for a new credit card now. People unthinkingly just take them. "Yeah, more free money" they think.

As I've gotten older, my arrogance at being part of the Credit Card Master Race has waned. Fuck them.

Credit cards do not fail us; it is we who fail credit cards.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

It's been a while since I read the books; Captain Samuel Vimes does not, I presume, live in a world that extends easy credit to the working class. Because if he did, he'd just buy the $50 dollar boots with his (terrible) 30% APR credit card, keep his debt payments to the recommended 10% of his income ($3.80 a month) and have them paid off in 1 year and 5 months at a total cost of $61.39.

As a rule, money now is worth more than money later. It's not generally worth 30% more now than it will be in a year -- most of that is to cover the risk of nonpayment, a little overhead, plus some profit for the bank -- but if you're in a situation where it is -- not at all uncommon, especially for people who are struggling financially -- having the option of borrowing at that rate can be extremely helpful.

If you're treading water and your car breaks down and needs a $700 repair, going $700 in debt certainly isn't good, but it's a lot better than losing your job because you can't get to work. If your new job got things mixed up and sends your check to the wrong address, you're much better off if you can cover rent and groceries for the week or two that might take to get figured out -- if the timing's right, you might not pay any interest at all.

Much is made of how long and how much money it takes to pay off a credit card if you only pay the minimum. The bank could very easily solve this problem by raising the minimum payment such that the payoff time is at most two years (so, at most 170% of the principal)... but of course they'd rather you pay less each month for far, far longer. ... But you can counter this devious ploy by just deciding yourself to pay that much!

And if you're not in that situation? Well, you can just not borrow money! It's not impossible for you to be worse off for having another option available to you, but there's a reason that result is unintuitive: it's hardly ever the case in real life. And it certainly isn't here. All you have to do is not be an impulsive idiot!

... Which, of course, is the whole problem. Lots and lots of people are impulsive idiots. I haven't watched these audits, but I've got no doubt you're characterizing them accurately.

I hate the idea of denying responsible, thoughtful people every opportunity to better their circumstances in order to protect irresponsible fools, but I'm very doubtful that works from a Utilitarian perspective. I suppose limiting total credit to a more reasonable percentage of income might be a bearable compromise?

Realistically, I can't complain. Like you, I pay off my credit card every month, and in an emergency, I've built up a disturbingly large line of credit I could use to buy a great deal many things should a serious need arise.

Given that I get cash back on purchases, said company is basically paying me to use their card.

But, y'know... I wouldn't really cry if I had to give it up. Yeah. I could make that sacrifice. Easy.

Once in a while The Motte ditches culture war and sounds admirably left populist...

Horseshoe theory is ✨real✨

I mean, it largely comes down to just realizing that the "Doesn't completely fuck up your entire life" use case for credit cards is narrow, and the "Completely fucks up your entire life" use case for credit cards is unbounded. In theory a credit card could cover an income or a savings gap. You hear stories all the time of people having to put essential home repairs like a water heater or an HVAC system on a credit card because that's all they had. And yet, I have literally never heard that story end with "And then next month I scrounged up the money to pay it off". The story always goes "And that's why 5 years later I have high 5 low 6 figures in credit card debt". It's almost as if, much as it would have sucked, they'd have been better off without hot water or without central air until they scrounged, picked up hours, did gigs or begged until they had the money.

But who knows, maybe that's my emergency savings privilege talking.

You hear stories all the time of people having to put essential home repairs like a water heater or an HVAC system on a credit card because that's all they had. And yet, I have literally never heard that story end with "And then next month I scrounged up the money to pay it off".

That's because if we do, it's a nonissue and not something we talk about.

Last year, my car needed some repairs. As I tell the story, I paid for them - with some grumbles, but I paid it.

To tell it with some more detail... I didn't have a lot of money in my checking account at the time. But that was a nonissue: I just put the repairs on my credit card, and then a few weeks later I transferred enough money to my checking account to pay off the bill when it came due. So a credit card was rather handy then. Except I don't tell that part of the story, because it was rather a nonissue in my life.

I mean, it largely comes down to just realizing that the "Doesn't completely fuck up your entire life" use case for credit cards is narrow, and the "Completely fucks up your entire life" use case for credit cards is unbounded.

But it's not. 82% of American adults use credit cards. More than half didn't even carry a balance.

You hear stories all the time of people having to put essential home repairs like a water heater or an HVAC system on a credit card because that's all they had. And yet, I have literally never heard that story end with "And then next month I scrounged up the money to pay it off".

There's no story if that happens.

As one of the ostensible leftists on here this just makes sense. Left wing populism is personally advantageous for everyone who does not have so much wealth they never need to work again. Wealth inequality is so high it is damaging almost every aspect of western societies and the conflict between the upper classes is at the heart of a vast number of culture war issues. The usual consensus here on a lot of issues, like whether we should import an infinite amount of indians to drive programming/IT wages as close to zero as possible, is actually isomorphic to the left populist position (i.e. infinity indians is not a good idea).

Left wing populism is personally advantageous for everyone who does not have so much wealth they never need to work again.

In the short term, sure.

Wealth inequality is so high it is damaging almost every aspect of western societies

Yes, it turns out that when you ban new development and innovation and bestow the wealthy a heckler's veto on any such thing society gets damaged. I blame the conservatives for that, but I also find said conservatives to be very invested in calling themselves leftists, so I couldn't tell you whether or not your model for what a left-wing populist is (and thus, who to blame) matches mine.

the conflict between the upper classes is at the heart of a vast number of culture war issues

Actually I'd argue that the lack of conflict in the upper classes causes most of that (though we may also disagree who those upper classes are). When there is conflict, there is competition and space for reform. When there is capture, corruption and stagnation naturally follow; O'Brien only exists if the upper classes are in complete lockstep.

why left-wing populism all of a sudden

"Conservative" (or more accurately, "progressive-conservative") and "Reform" don't evenly break across "left" and "right", nor does either have a monopoly thereon. It's not an intuitive thing.

Left wing populism is personally advantageous for everyone who does not have so much wealth they never need to work again.

This is straightforwardly not true. State owned businesses perform poorly. Europe which has much more left populist crap is a decaying retirement home. Like most populism leftwing populism is very specifically selected for what scratches the grievance hindbrain of the most people listening to just so stories about how homelessness is really caused by the fact that Bezos has a really big yatch.

I'm talking about Labour movements and politics (i.e. how the modern day Anglosphere Labour parties got started). Left wing populism gave us the 8 hour workday and 5 day workweek, and I'm personally glad that I don't work the 12-hour shifts and 6-7 day alternating workweek that private industry would prefer. As for state owned businesses I don't think that you can really say they all perform poorly - there are plenty of them that do incredibly well. Singtel has done so well that it has actually bought and acquired a decent portion of the private cell companies in other countries, for instance. And as for Bezos, isn't a large portion of his workforce reliant on welfare to survive anyway? Amazon is the worst of all worlds - the public purse is subsidising all their expenses in exchange for no return at all.

Left wing populism gave us the 8 hour workday and 5 day workweek

I don't really buy this framing. I know unions love to claim credit for it and maybe they have some path dependent reason for why compensation grew in that particular shape rather than 9 hours and higher pay, but firms were always going to have to compete for labor as capital built up and this necessarily leads to higher compensation one way or the other.

And no one ever seems to talk about the other end of the ledger for these special interest lobby groups we call unions. They don't represent the interests of everyone, only their members and do so almost always at the cost of everyone else. They hollowed out the competitiveness of our auto industry and after doing so simply banned outside competition so they could collect rents from everyone who wants a car. Through the Jones act they've killed our ability to ship things between our ports effectively so despite having an incredible gift of natural waterways we send things over land inefficiently. They've prevented port automation raising the cost of all import and exports. The unions are one of several big factors in retarding out ability to build the housing and infrastructure we need as they lobby to pork up bills with guarantees to use over priced union labor in contracts.

Behold Europe and it's pathetic nongrowth for a vision of what a union dominated society looks like.

As for state owned businesses I don't think that you can really say they all perform poorly - there are plenty of them that do incredibly well. Singtel has done so well that it has actually bought and acquired a decent portion of the private cell companies in other countries, for instance.

I looked into this because I'm always curious for these examples and Singtel is just simply not a state run company. The government does own a lot of it's shares but this isn't really what people mean when they talk about state owned companies. This is literally just a publicly traded company that the state owns a lot of shares in and doesn't have any real impact on whether it would succeed or fail.

And as for Bezos, isn't a large portion of his workforce reliant on welfare to survive anyway? Amazon is the worst of all worlds - the public purse is subsidising all their expenses in exchange for no return at all.

There is no support the state can give to the people that can't be categorized indirectly as subsidizing employers. If you want to redistribute income to people who's labor isn't very valuable, and I do support doing this, then you're inescapably subsidizing the firms they are employed by, no way out of it. Hell same for the higher paid employees.

in exchange for no return at all.

you mean besides the tax revenue of course.

And all of this is just distribution blame for the past, take a look at Mamdani for a vision of what leftist populism actually looks like with Charlie brown lining up for the 80th attempt at kicking the football of rent control and subsidized housing in the hopes that this time they'll prove the economists wrong.

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This is all reasonable and I’m very sympathetic to it. But then again, I don’t feel that someone too stupid to understand compound interest and with a time preference too high to understand saving money and/or not maxxing out every loan facility they have should have the same power over the direction of our shared society as me.

Because there is nothing stopping me, besides 20 years of inflexible habit and discipline, from just YOLOing with the nearly $40k of available credit they make available to me.

And yet, like you, tens of millions of responsible middle class people go their entire lives without ever deciding to blow their credit card limit, get a second mortgage and put it on the roulette table, or put their retirement savings into extreme out of the money options recommended on /r/wallstreetbets.

This is all reasonable and I’m very sympathetic to it. But then again, I don’t feel that someone too stupid to understand compound interest and with a time preference too high to understand saving money and/or not maxxing out every loan facility they have should have the same power over the direction of our shared society as me.

Interesting point, and yeah I have to admit that dumber people often do screw up major societal decisions. The tricky part is deciding who gets to decide.

And yet, like you, tens of millions of responsible middle class people go their entire lives without ever deciding to blow their credit card limit, get a second mortgage and put it on the roulette table, or put their retirement savings into extreme out of the money options recommended on /r/wallstreetbets.

Hmmmmm, I wonder at that assumption. Not many people wear their net worth on their sleeve, and lots of people finance what on the surface looks like a stable middle class lifestyle. They might not take out a second mortgage on their house to bet it on black. But they do take out a variable rate HELOC to remodel the kitchen for a dubious increase in home value.

I've been religiously watching Caleb Hammer's Financial Audit this year.

Watching just a few minutes of a recent episode, can you tell me what you like about it? Caleb seems extremely cruel in an obviously performative way, and frankly he comes off as almost evil to me.

I did watch one of the earlier ones where he seemed much more good-hearted and trying to help. These recent videos he just seems as if he's aiming to humiliate people.

The third is that there are arrays of predatory credit vehicles that would blow your damned mind. I knew about how terrible it was to run a credit card balance, and I knew payday loans were predatory to a point of exciting legal scrutiny. I had no idea there was a whole world of credit apps build directly into shopping apps. Pay in four, Klarna, other crap I'm probably not spelling correctly because somehow I've never actually been exposed to it personally. And seemingly the prevailing wisdom is at 18 you get a credit card, max it out because it's "free money" and then pay the minimums your entire life.

Yeah this is an underrated terrible part of modern life. I personally think we need to massively reign in credit card companies given the fact that if someone carries a huge debt load for even half a year, it can set them back a decade in their financial life. It's frankly insane what we allow here.

Watching just a few minutes of a recent episode, can you tell me what you like about it? Caleb seems extremely cruel in an obviously performative way, and frankly he comes off as almost evil to me.

I wanted to ask the same question, I found the clips I saw on tiktok initially funny and then rapidly they became boring and sad when it was the 10th iteration of "you spend all your money on an $800 bi weekly F150/hellcat and doordashed burritos YOU IDIOT" as some mildly confused mildly obese person from heartland America stared at him with a 95 IQ gaze.

Stupid people are stupid, and it's way more fun watching their antics on a fun reality show like Love Island versus a sad one like Caleb. At least the Love Island people are hot.

Everyone gets Flanderized even people who are ostensibly playing themselves.

Not everyone, but the vast majority it seems.

Even flanderising gets flanderised.

Hammer has “broken character” on the show before and revealed that the participants are told he’s going to play up meanness for the cameras but that it’s a bit. This was when one of the participants broke down crying at one of his wisecracks, and he tried to console saying he wasn’t trying to be hurtful, he’s sorry, this is the mean guy stuff they had agreed to.

So, it’s all consenting adults, and probably it’s meant to make viral clips to help promote the show, but I’m also uncomfortable with the meanness.

Yeah this is an underrated terrible part of modern life. I personally think we need to massively reign in credit card companies given the fact that if someone carries a huge debt load for even half a year, it can set them back a decade in their financial life. It's frankly insane what we allow here.

As is common, trying to alleviate the suffering of the wretched (in a paternalistic rather than charitable way in this case) results in more suffering for everyone else. Credit cards are great. You can buy things without carrying cash around, without being present, without having to apply for credit at every place you might buy things. You don't need to trust the merchants and they don't need to trust you. And you don't have to pay for this service if you don't want to. But as with many useful things, you can get hurt with it, and trying to make it "safer" will almost certainly increase cost and reduce utility.

Credit cards are moronic. Debit cards are great. If you have to put small ticket item on credit, it is good to have some friction in the system to think twice whether it is a good idea.

Debit cards violate the whole "need to trust the merchant" thing. Fraud on your credit card means the bank is out the money. Fraud on your debit card means YOU are out the money until the situation is resolved.

Fraud on your credit card is nearly impossible nowadays. At least here in EU you have to have secondary (sms or bank app) confirmation for every online transaction.

The EU may be a crime-free paradise, but there's still plenty of credit card fraud in the US. And not all of it from online transactions.

In my estimation, in my country you'd have to do something like visiting a blatant phishing website to get scammed out of your money. I've heard of no cases where a physical vendor could do that. What are some typical cases in the US?

Given theNybbler's environment, the first thought would be credit card skimmers. They're not common, but urban areas finding 'modifications' to gas stations happens enough I've seen it in person. Moving to NFC/smart card transactions rather than magstripe helps, but we haven't fully migrated over, in no small part because the US chip cards kinda suck, so we still have magstripe and a lot of card issuers having to deny sketchy transactions. Most people who do it get caught pretty quick, but only after doing a lot of damage.

Less common is the old analog loophole: someone writing down (or taking a picture of) a card number, name, and CVV code.

Most online vendors also need zip, too, but if you're stealing card numbers in a diner, you can make some educated guesses about zip codes pretty easily.

I don't know how they're done, except it's not phishing. Bizarro charges appear on the card, I call the credit card company (or their fraud detection unit calls me) and it's taken care of. In one case the source was obvious because I had happened to use two different cards at the same vendor, and both got hit while no others did.

That just means you buy everything with cash and only trust a few big merchants like Amazon with your debit card information. I don't see why that's a big deal. Fuck credit cards.

You don't see why making it impossible to operate as a small business online is a big deal?

That just means you buy everything with cash and only trust a few big merchants like Amazon with your debit card information.

I buy stuff that isn't available on Amazon. Some of those merchants apparently haven't had the best security practices. With credit cards... that's between the issuer and the merchant, all I have to do is tell the issuer that I didn't make the charges.

I mean TBF there’s third party processing companies that do it now. Like Shop- make an account with them is mandatory to check out at some of the retailers I use that stock not available on Amazon products.

There's a thing that can let you pay without carrying cash around, without being present and without having to apply for credit. It's called debit cards. You spend money you actually own, as opposed to some weird exercise of "paying back the money you spent during the month" that I once was surprised to learn most Americans apparently have to engage in. You can't be preyed upon with tricky overdraft fees because if you don't have the money, you simply can't spend it.

You can't be preyed upon with tricky overdraft fees because if you don't have the money, you simply can't spend it.

Oh if only that were true. I found out the hard way that my bank would happily let transactions through that my checking account couldn't cover, then charge me a $50 fee on top of having to bring the account positive. There are some very predatory banks in the US.

That aside credit cards do have other advantages. They aren't insurmountable but do exist.

  • A business which expects you might have incidental charges (say, a hotel which offers room service billed to the room) will put a massive hold on your card if you use a debit card, because they can't be sure they will be paid otherwise. Was quite a shock to me when I was traveling at 20 and found I had no money in my checking account after I checked in to the hotel. This can generally be worked around by getting the hotel to remove the ability to bill those things to the room, but a credit card is easier.
  • While both credit cards and debit cards will work with you to return fraudulent charges or things you dispute with a merchant, when you use a debit card you are out real actual money until it gets resolved. With a credit card it's just a pending charge on your account, for which I don't believe you even pay interest. So you don't really lose out on the use of that money as the process resolves.
  • Credit cards do have rewards in the US (though I'm told not in European countries). These can be, but aren't always, profitable for you if you take advantage of all of them. The credit card company is banking on you not taking advantage, but if you can (and have the discipline to follow through) it's a good deal.
  • You do in fact need a credit history, at least here in the US. Even bad credit is often reckoned to be better than no credit. Having a credit card and paying off the balance establishes that credit history (though it isn't the only way).

So there are rational reasons to use a credit card. You don't have to, but they can be beneficial if you can avoid the trap of spending money you don't have.

Oh if only that were true. I found out the hard way that my bank would happily let transactions through that my checking account couldn't cover, then charge me a $50 fee on top of having to bring the account positive. There are some very predatory banks in the US.

Yeah, and if you use a credit card that won't happen. (Since 2009, they can't even charge you an over-the-limit fee unless you specifically opt-in).

You can't be preyed upon with tricky overdraft fees

Most banks will let you overdraw your account.

Mine doesn't do so by default.

Mine tricks people into signing up for "overdraft protection" (even the name is Orwellian!) with a story that it will save you from embarrassment at the grocery store if your card declines or something, and doesn't tell you anything about the $35 fees (and how they are completely silent so that you have no idea you are in the red until you actually remember to log in and check your balance, so it is very easy to overdraft several times and get nailed with a fee each time). I went online and turned it off once I figured it out, but that was years after I got my first bank account.

In 2009 or so, a little after Chase purchased my bank WaMu, they fucked up whatever data transfer the acquisition involved. My debit card ended up pegged to a backup savings account (with like $500 in it) rather than my chequing account (with $50,000 in it). This all happened completely silently, and obviously without my consent. I didn't find out until they finally declined a transaction - after charging me $350 in overdraft """protection""" (man, you're right, that is such an evil name) for around $50 in small purchases. Like you, I didn't even know it was on by default, because there was no chance I'd ever need it.

When I went in to, very angrily, get them to reverse this, they a) told me that it was too large an amount for the agent to easily refund, and b) still took the chance to upsell me on other services. Sigh. I think I finally got it through their stupid heads that they were about to lose a customer (and possibly get sued - not sure how practical that is for a mere $350, but I sure hope the system is set up so that banks can't simply steal money without consequences).

I can only imagine how poorly it goes when somebody who's barely scraping by gets screwed over by these people. The modern world is just too complex for humans.

The day before I went to move out to an apartment for the first time, my credit union creatively applied charges and deposits to drop me into the negatives, then charged me $35 per transaction. They functionally stole $1500 from me, and then raided my mother's and sister's accounts when mine ran out. Then stonewalled, insisting that there was just nothing they could do about it before I had to leave to be two hours away at college, now broke.

When I set up my daughter with her first account, I went on a very nasty rant about overdraft protection, right in front of the banker lady, until we clarified 10 different times that there was absolutely no overdraft "protections" set for her account.

I can only imagine how poorly it goes when somebody who's barely scraping by gets screwed over by these people.

Why imagine? This happens every single day all over the western world. There are entire industries devoted specifically to screwing over the poor and struggling, and there's so much profit in payday loans and other loan-sharking behavior that criminal gangs fought violent conflicts over them in the not-so-distant past. It has been known as an incredibly pernicious social evil since at least the time of the old testament (see the biblical prohibitions on usury), and any society that cares for its people maintains those prohibitions because fucking over the lower classes like this is bad for the rest of society too - unethical exploiters get financially rewarded, and the desperate problems caused by the underclasses being in terrible financial situations leads to increased crime and anti-social behavior.

I'm perfectly fine with increasing cost and reducing utility in this situation. Yes credit cards are convenient, no I don't think the societal ills they unleash on the financial illiterate are worth the amount of convenience they provide. I like having them, and don't think we should get rid of the entire industry, but I'd be happy to make it significantly more inconvenient to use them if we could stop the predatory behavior.

I'm perfectly fine with increasing cost and reducing utility in this situation.

Yes, of course you are. Because you value the wretched above all others, because that is the general rule everyone is taught. This is itself a problem with modernity, if modernity goes back to AD 1 anyway.

I do not value the wretched above all others. I value God. I think there are plenty of ways in which we should make life harder for the poor, in fact. Like restricting healthcare and social security and such. That being said, I still don't think that promoting ruinous usury is a good.

I do not value the wretched above all others. I value God.

Unfortunately, as you probably guessed from my AD 1 reference, Christianity values the wretched above all others.

No I understood the reference, and I disagree with your take on Christianity. The point of Christianity is to become like God. "God became man so that man could become God."

While an obsessive focus on compassion for the weak and wretched is indeed an outgrowth of Christianity, I personally see it as a cancerous and false one, as many educated and thinking Christians do nowadays.

The point of Christianity is to become like God. "God became man so that man could become God."

That sounds like a heresy, mate. Better let a specialist check it out. There are catholic priests in your vicinity.

More comments

Except in this context Christianity directly opposes usury, the problematic and exploitative behavior in question. For some reason (I legitimately have no answer) most modern Christians have just completely ignored the teachings on usury and how bad it is. Even if you want the wretched to suffer, usury and issues like this cause problems that damage society as a whole - unless you have active sadism and want to make society and your own life worse to make the wretched suffer even more, preventing this kind of thing is to the advantage of the non-wretched as well.

Watching just a few minutes of a recent episode, can you tell me what you like about it? Caleb seems extremely cruel in an obviously performative way, and frankly he comes off as almost evil to me.

Yes, he's a man after my own heart.

LOL this is a non-answer, but at least it's funny. I'll give you that. ;P

Yeah this is an underrated terrible part of modern life. I personally think we need to massively reign in credit card companies given the fact that if someone carries a huge debt load for even half a year, it can set them back a decade in their financial life. It's frankly insane what we allow here.

The problem is that progressives (both in terms of race and class) spent decades promoting the message that “access to credit” was a key axis of intersectional inequality and the reason why various communities were locked out of “building wealth” that must be remedied as soon as possible. Of course lending to poor people, because of the inherent credit risk, can only be viable at very high rates to cover the many, many defaults involved.

Either you ban lending to the poor, and progressives whine about people locked out of credit and the opportunity to build wealth, or you allow them to borrow, and face the consequences. Blaming the lenders is ridiculous.

Progressives were never demanding that the poor get increased access to credit cards; banks have never had a problem marketing high-interest, low limit credit cards to the poor. The argument was that it was stupid for banks to deny mortgages to people with jobs who were currently paying more in rent than what the mortgage payment would be if they bought, on the grounds that they were too high a risk. It's also an argument that no one has made in the 20 years since banks went further than the progressives asked them to and started writing mortgages to people who couldn't pay them off if they lived to be a million, then repackaged them as AAA securities.

It's also an argument that no one has made in the 20 years since banks went further than the progressives asked them to and started writing mortgages to people who couldn't pay them off if they lived to be a million, then repackaged them as AAA securities.

Not quite no-one. Kochtopus-funded economist Kevin Erdmann has been arguing for over a decade that a huge part of what is wrong with the post-Great Recession economy is that post-crisis regulations on mortgages have destroyed the bottom half of the owner-occupied housing market for no good reason. Erdmann and Scott Sumner have successfully convinced me that their contrarian theory of the 2008 crisis is probably correct:

  • Pre-2006, rents and prices in a number of cities with restrictive zoning, and in particular greater LA, increased faster than incomes because of a housing shortage. This wasn't a bubble, it was supply and demand.
  • There was a bubble in the "Contagion cities" like Las Vegas, driven by people migrating out of California for cheaper housing, creating a temporary surge in demand which local supply couldn't keep up with in the short term. But that would have resolved itself spontaneously as supply caught up with demand.
  • The national picture looked sufficiently like a housing bubble that the Fed decided to raise interest rates until the bubble burst.
  • Because there wasn't a bubble, this meant raising interest rates high enough to cause a recession.
  • The 2008 banking crisis was caused mostly by the recession, and only secondarily by poor lending practices. Subprime was never large enough to cause the bank losses we saw.
  • The Fed doesn't cut rates fast enough once it is clear we are in a recession and a financial crisis because they don't want to be seen as bailing out irresponsible bankers and homeowners.
  • For 4-5 years after 2008, the main way low interest rates stimulate the economy (by encouraging housebuilding) doesn't work because it is illegal to build in HCOL cities and post-crisis regulations mean nobody can get a mortgage in LCOL cities.

[Mercatus Center] economist Kevin Erdmann

Erdmann and Scott Sumner have successfully convinced me that their contrarian theory of the 2008 crisis [free 70-page report, Amazon book] is probably correct:

Quote from the linked report:

In the standard view of the housing and business cycle of the 2000s, there are at least eight interconnected assumptions:

(4) The boom was fed by deregulation of banking, pressure from government regulators, or both, which led banks to make too many mortgage loans.

We will show that these assumptions are unwarranted. Lending during the housing boom was mostly directed toward affluent households.

I prefer the theory advanced by American Enterprise Institute economist Peter Wallison (free 90-page report (p. 441), Amazon book).

Quote from the linked report:

Before the enactment of the GSE Act in 1992, and HUD’s adoption of a policy thereafter to reduce underwriting standards, the GSEs followed conservative underwriting practices. For example, in a random review by Fannie Mae of 25,804 loans from October 1988 to January 1992, over 78 percent had LTV ratios of 80 percent or less, while only 5.75 percent had LTV ratios of 91 to 95 percent. High-risk lending was confined primarily to FHA (which was controlled by HUD) and specialized subprime lenders who often sold the mortgages they originated to FHA. What caused these conservative standards to decline? The Commission majority, echoing Chairman Bernanke, seems to believe that the impetus was competition among the banks, irresponsibility among originators, and the desire for profit. The majority’s report offers no other explanation.

However, there is no difficulty finding the source of the reductions in mortgage underwriting standards for Fannie and Freddie, or for the originators for whom they were the buyers. HUD made clear in numerous statements that its policy—in order to make credit available to low-income borrowers—was specifically intended to reduce underwriting standards. The GSE Act enabled HUD to put Fannie and Freddie into competition with FHA, and vice versa, creating what became a contest to lower mortgage standards. As the Fannie Mae Foundation noted in a 2000 report: “FHA loans constituted the largest share of Countrywide’s [subprime lending] activity, until Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began accepting loans with higher LTVs [loan-to-value ratios] and greater underwriting flexibilities.”

HUD’s policy was highly successful in achieving the goals it sought. In 1989, only one in 230 homebuyers bought a home with a downpayment of 3 percent or less, but by 2003 one in seven buyers was providing a downpayment at that level, and by 2007 the number was less than one in three. The gradual increase in LTVs and CLTVs (first and second loans combined to produce a lower downpayment) under HUD’s policies is shown in Figure 4. Note the date (1992) when HUD began to have some influence over the downpayments that the GSEs would accept.

Can I blame the lenders and the progressives?

In general this argument that political pressure has forced businessmen to be immoral is not very convincing for me. I hope to live in a society where generally businessmen have lines they won't cross, like openly defrauding the poor.

They aren't "openly defrauding" the poor. We have all these disclosure laws about credit cards, which among other things tell people how much and how long they'll be paying if they only pay the minimum. The people who get into credit card trouble want to get stuff and pay only the minimum. They may want this because they are stupid and foolish, or they may want it because they figure if they get in deep enough someone will bail them out, but they want it.

Yeah I agree the openly defrauding was inaccurate. I'm angry about it. But you are right it's not fraud, though still immoral imo.

I mean, sure, technically you aren't wrong.

But even with everything spelled out for them, few people appreciate the reality distorting effects of 30% interest. They don't appreciate how quickly it is to get in trouble, or how slow it is to get out. They either never learned, or never really appreciated the rule of 72. They never had pointed out to them that their credit card debt doubles every 2-3 years, while a gold standard S&P500 index fund earning the historical average of 10% takes 7 years to double. They have no grasp of the fact that everything they put on a credit card that is accruing interest is eating up 2.5x more of their precious life than the equivalent amount saved in an S&P500 index fund gives them back. Closer to 10x more than a run of the mill savings account.

Math, and especially interest rates, aren't real to most people. Even explained to them, it doesn't translate into years of their life like it should. It was certainly never taught to me that way, nor I suspect to you. It was only in retrospect, in my 30's, looking at my nest egg thinking "This represents 10 years of my life" did these realizations hit.

Now imagine you never have a nest egg.

If we arrange the world to "protect" people like that, we make life worse for all the rest of us. A lot worse, because these people are so incapable. Just as a world without fast cars and sharp knives is worse than one with them, so is a world without (or with very limited) credit cards or any of the other things those people can hurt themselves with.

Yeah, there’s a meme on Anglo-reactionary Twitter, which I will do a post about at some point, that essentially says well you know popular democracy was designed for and works for 130 IQ Anglos. And the further you get away from that, you know, either the worse your democracy becomes or the less democracy you can have. Much of the American system over the last 150 years and before (thanks in some part to the wisdom of the founders) has been engineering things so that they still kind of work even when most voters aren’t 130 IQ Anglos, but there’s a limit to every system. Brazil is a democracy. India is a democracy. There are localized corruption issues but, generally speaking, these are countries in which the most popular party wins a majority in the legislature etc etc. They are still poor and dysfunctional.

I'm not sure my observations really correlate directly with "democracy only works with 130 IQ Anglos" and more, our entire society is developing pitfalls left and right in fundamental activities that everyone needs to navigate (getting a job, feeding yourself, managing your money) where the only winning move is to not engage in a whole swath of behavior.

I mean, to illustrate my point, maybe I'm getting old, or I am too paranoid about dark patterns, or what. But I got my driveway done. Dude who did it sends me an invoice. It's been generated in some off the shelf business solution, so I'm not mad at him about what comes next. But in the process of attempting to accept and pay for this invoice, it pitches me a credit card, with no obvious way to say "No I don't want a new credit card" without also shutting down the whole process. But after looking at the screen for a few minutes trying to find the hidden "I don't want a credit card, but I would like to pay this invoice button" and failing, I hit the "No Thank You" button and the whole process shut down, and it told the guy I had rejected his invoice.

I ended up paying him by check before he left.

Another example, I'm at a museum, and they have a CR Code you need to scan to take you to the page where you can reserve tickets for a particular exhibit. I have an old phone (because I refuse to upgrade perfectly good phones every 2-3 years just because), with a QR code reader that used to be reliable. I scan the code, and I now know but didn't at the time that after scanning the code, instead of displaying it's contents, it displayed an ad which looked like it's contents. I click the ad not knowing it's an ad, it takes me to a page asking for my credit card. I think this doesn't look right, so I show it to the attendant at the kiosk asking if this is the correct form to get tickets for the exhibit. They assure me it is. It wasn't. My credit card got stolen. I should have trusted my gut on that one. I didn't realize until after the fact that the QR Code reader I'd been using extremely sporadically over a decade had become enshittified with predatory ads. These days Brave on mobile has a QR Code reader built in, but I'm not sure that was the case at the time. Although I may just not have known. Regardless I'm irritated at the constant state of shifting sands under my feet revealing pit traps I'm expected to avoid.

Once upon a time, as a young teen on warez sites, there was always the game of virus roulette. You'd go to download a no-cd crack off GameCopyWorld.com, which still exists, and you were presented with 3-6 buttons that all said "Download" on them. All but one were predatory ads which caused you to install a virus. Only one was the actual download link to the no-cd crack.

The no-cd crack may also be a virus.

Now it feels like that's how everything works. Everything is an app, and every app has dark patterns trying to steal from you. I like to think I'm not a retard, but it's getting to the point where it tricks me from time to time. I can't imagine how normies fare. If Financial Audit is any indicator, not well.

I should have trusted my gut on that one. I didn't realize until after the fact that the QR Code reader I'd been using extremely sporadically over a decade had become enshittified with predatory ads.

Well yes. You didn't pay for a QR code reader or buy a phone where someone is paid to write it as a native/bundled app. So the only incentive structure remaining is for someone to write a free one with the hopes of monetizing it later.

You'd go to download a no-cd crack off GameCopyWorld.com, which still exists, and you were presented with 3-6 buttons that all said "Download" on them. All but one were predatory ads which caused you to install a virus. Only one was the actual download link to the no-cd crack.

Or you could have just paid $50 for the game. Steam doesn't distribute malware and their website is pristine.

Now it feels like that's how everything works. Everything is an app, and every app has dark patterns trying to steal from you.

No, everything is an app and every app needs a business model. Sometimes the business model is clear (you pay us $90/yr, we give you app). Sometimes it's less clear but still approximately benign (you use Reddit, they sell the ability to mass-train on their content to AI company). Sometimes it's clear it's ad supported (Facebook, Chrome) with varying degrees of scrupulosity on their origins. Some are indeed funded philanthropically like Brave or Signal. Some are fundamentally scammy.

Even though the QR code reader built into my phone camera works fine as far as I can tell, the phone in general is old, slow, and doesn't handle apps or webpages with ads well, so I pretend like it doesn't work. A few weeks ago I had to pull a Karen at a bar to get the bartender to give or tell me what the drinks were, since I was absolutely not going to scan their QR code on my phone, and sit there reading 30 drinks off my old, slow, sad phone/wallet. He produced a tablet for me. I was saddened but bought a foofy drink anyway.

A week ago, I tried calling AAA to have my car towed. Previously, it was 7 miles free. Now it's apparently 3 miles free, and after that you're supposed to pay the rest in cash (it was going to be $80 or so), or read a stranger your credit card over the phone. I didn't believe that could possibly be the protocol. I said that I couldn't possibly pay that way, that's not how anyone pays for official services, and demanded that he offload the car on the side of the road. He said he should probably return it to my house then. I said he could return it to the three mile mark. He said I would have to pay for the return trip. We finally settled on him dumping my car on the side of the road, and me reading my credit card number to a stranger over the phone, to be charged $30 for the misunderstanding. My husband brought all the kids, gave it a jump, and it made it to the mechanic. I guess I should have tried that first, but was worried it was the kind of thing that would get worse if I tried continuing to drive it while malfunctioning.

I attempted to cancel AAA, but apparently all I can do is remove the auto subscribe, and write myself a note to check whether they try to take money anyway some months from now (which Amazon Kids has done, and unsubscribing involved multiple text chats and phone calls). Not dealing with weird shady towing practices was literally why I've been paying for AAA all this time! That is literally their value proposition!

When I taught at a charter school, a WhatsApp chat group was the official means of group communication, and I had to use the Microsoft Authenticator app to log into Gradebook, which cause innumerable problems. I have seen a couple of restaurants that don't have physical menus, just a QR code that you are expected to scan to order. At my hotel, all the VIZIO TVs demand that you make an account or download the app before they let you watch so much as a single channel.

It's extremely annoying.

I'm kind of worried over what I'm supposed to do to support my parents in this stuff as they age. They've never been great with consumer tech, especially smart phones. I'd be perfectly willing to drive over and help them occasionally to fix something or install something, or just show it how it works. But it increasingly feels like a never-ending battle. The apps, like you said, just get more confusing and more malicious. My parents are not at all senile, but increasingly at that "i'm too old for this shit" phase where they really don't want to bother learning new tech. I don't want to bother, but I feel like I have no choice.

It used to be the case that you could always opt out by calling a place on the phone, or driving to their physical store, or paying someone in cash. Increasingly it feels like we just have to use the app, which will constantly change without warning. That feels really predatory and impractical, and I can't believe it's being allowed in our society where the average US senator is 65 years old and heavily weights the opinions of old people.

When I was doing my master's, one of my lecturers was telling us about how the quality control standards on the Apple App Store are much stricter on the Google Play Store. After one too many instances in which some child was paying some scummy pay-to-win game on his parents' iPad and racked up four figures' worth of "micro"transactions, Apple apparently established a blanket policy of banning games targeted at small children. (I may be misremembering this somewhat: obviously you can install games from the App Store meant for small children. I think the crackdown was targeting games which seem to be marketed towards children, but which contain microtransactions.)

All well and good, I thought: children's brains aren't fully developed, this is common sense. But what about people at the opposite end of the telescope? Elderly people being taken in by Indian call-centre scammers and Nigerian princes is already a known issue. Maybe eventually we'll get to the point where the App Store will simply prevent you from installing an app if you exceed some age threshold. Sure they'll be accused of ageism (that's literally what it is) or discrimination against people with dementia, but I'm sure they'd rather ride that wave of negative publicity than the much bigger wave of bad publicity associated with thousands of elderly people having their bank accounts drained because they mistakenly installed an app which looked like WhatsApp but was actually something else entirely.

What I don't understand is how absolutely swamped with shovelware and cheap scams every app marketplace seems to be.
Mobile app stores have been bad for a while -- any popular game will have tons of shitty knockoffs with similar names available for download almost immediately -- but in the last few years, even Nintendo of "Nintendo Seal of Quality" fame has their eshops flooded with low-effort sleaze like "Hentai Girls: Golf"

Clearly this is a solvable problem; Reddit and Facebook purchased armies of jannies to carry out "Anti-Evil Operations" against wrongthinkers. The depressing conclusion would be that there are enough slop enjoyers and straight-up cretins out there to make stricter app store curation a financially unwise decision even taking into account the reputational damage caused by this slop. But I'm hoping there's some other reason for it.

It used to be the case that you could always opt out by calling a place on the phone, or driving to their physical store, or paying someone in cash.

Oh man, I should have included this story, but I forgot.

I had to sign up for a fucking app for my daughter's pediatrician! They literally handled all test results, scheduling, messaging etc exclusively through the Healow app, which was dog shit. I installed it, and attempted to get the account set up and synced with the doctors office properly, in their fucking lobby, and the piece of shit refused to work. Even just handing them my god damned phone and asking them to do it for me, they couldn't fucking do it. Eventually it just fucking worked for reasons that are opaque to everyone after trying enough times, but then eventually the app refused to update and wouldn't work anymore because my phone was too old. Because when you aren't wrestling with dark patterns and enshittification, there is always planned obsolescence.

We have a different pediatrician now. They have an ongoing problem where our Nurse Practitioner which we see is lazy about getting her files submitted, so our billing is always messed up. Nothing major, sometimes they tell us we owe a copay several weeks after we thought we were caught up. But at least there are actual people there we can speak to reliably, and they don't force us to go through a god damned enshittified app.

Enshittified doesn't mean "is shitty". It means "is shitty because now that you are locked in, they can exploit you". Just being shitty because they're cheapskates that can't spend the money on a good app doesn't count.

Enshittified doesn't mean "is shitty". It means "is shitty because now that you are locked in, they can exploit you". Just being shitty because they're cheapskates that can't spend the money on a good app doesn't count.

I see you are unfamiliar with the Healow app. Yes, it is shitty because they lock you in, and completely stop giving a fuck. It's more or less ubiquitous with Doctors offices, and if your Doctors office uses an app, it's probably Healow. I'm not even aware of another one. I think the Inova hospital system near me doesn't use it... yet. But virtually every other doctors office we had to use in Northern VA used it, although some were better about requiring it than others.

If your doctor's office uses an app, it's probably Healow. I'm not even aware of another one.

Mine uses Medical Brain.

That sounds like a nightmare. I've had much better experiences with healthcare in 3rd world countries that don't use apps.

At some point, I think at least 2-3 years ago, the default Android (and IIRC iOS) camera apps got the ability to scan QR codes. Honestly I try to have as few apps on my phone as I can get away with, though.

ETA: searching says it was 2017-2018 for Android.

Definitely before 2020 for Apple.

A cursory search says Brave didn't get this feature until Nov 2022. But it's an AI generated answer, so trust but verify. The event at the museum occurred probably summer 2021.

I'm sure the 130 IQ value is primarily for illustrative purposes, but there's no way in hell that when "popular"/modern democracy was established, the IQ of the average voter was in the 130s. I doubt you'd get there even if only considering land-owning freemen, let alone universal franchise for all "Anglos". It might be doable with a tight oligarchy, but that's not particularly democratic, is it?

To elaborate, 130 IQ is around 98th percentile. Early American democracy would probably have an average of 105-110, accounting for property requirements (implying some education and capabilities). The more universal it got, the closer it approached the population mean.

Since so many reactionaries and conservatives think that was America's heyday, by all right you only need 105 IQ "Anglos" to pull it off. That's not nearly as high a bar. Depending on which stats site you trust, that's only China, SK, Iran, Japan and Singapore. Well, minus being Anglos, but the Ancient Greeks weren't either and they did alright.

I can't speak for US and what bars one had to meet in order to be granted franchise there, but in 1900-01 Lower House elections in the Austrian part of Austria Hungary, 6% of adults had the right to vote. Assuming the population average IQ was 100 and enfranchisement being totally correlated with IQ, this correspends to the cut-off being 123.

But another way to think about it, is taking the meme to mean the average voter should have 130 IQ. Thus one has to find L, such that integrate(x*exp(-((x-mu)/15)^2/2)/sqrt(2pi)/15,x,L,infinity)/integrate(exp(-((x-mu)/15)^2/2)/sqrt(2pi)/15,x,L,infinity)=130. mu being population average IQ, and L the IQ bound for franchise, such that the average voter has 130 IQ. I don't have a CAS at hand to calculate L myself.

Apart from @EvanTh remark that the 6% of the voting class were not top 6% of the IQ, people 125 years ago had significantly lower IQ. This phenomenon is known as Flynn Effect and it has only recently started to plateau or even reverse.

What makes you think their voting requirements were closely associated with IQ?

Genuinely kind of surprised that our site doesn’t support native latex.

I mean, he could have used unicode and abbreviated the error function 𝒩 or φ, and the cumulant Φ which is perfectly usable notation. Would have saved like 80% of the chars and 90% of the parens. Not that I would object to having better math support here.

A cutoff of 123 does correspond to a (rounded) average value of 130 by my calculation (for a population mean 100). I didn't understand the need for a CAS though. Seems like something that any modern programing language can numerically solve for. Or just Newton's method if you're too lazy to open up the documentation for your favorite solver and can only remember one root finding algorithm like me.

Edit to add the calculation in case anyone doesn't trust my math (nullius in verba, etc):

f <- function(l) { 130 - 
  integrate(function(x) { x * dnorm(x, mean = 100, sd = 15)}, 
            l, Inf)$value/
  integrate(function(x) {dnorm(x, mean = 100, sd = 15)}, 
            l, Inf)$value
}
(l <- uniroot(f, c(100, 130))$root)
# 123.5779
scales::percent(1 - pnorm(l, 100, 15))
# 6%

Yes of course, it’s a laughably high threshold. That said there are some (dubious) estimates that the average Anglo IQ in the Victorian era may have been as high as 108, so gentry landowners having a say 116 average really wouldn’t be out of the question.

That said there are some (dubious) estimates that the average Anglo IQ in the Victorian era may have been as high as 108

Wild. Where can I find out more?

Example link

Basic argument: Victorians had faster reaction times than moderns. Reaction time (which is known to be about 20% correlated with IQ at an individual level) may be a better measure of true population-level g if the Flynn effect (rising population-average IQ test scores over time) is driven by education and not g. If you convert the average Victorian reaction time into an IQ based on the modern reaction time-IQ curve, you get 108. And a 8 IQ-point drop in genetic g is consistent with what you would predict based on dysgenic fertility over the intervening 150 years.

Counterpoint - why do we think that "ability to function in modern society" is better measured by reaction time than performance on IQ tests? All the work which validates the IQ-functionality correlation uses test scores and not reaction time.

what you would predict based on dysgenic fertility

How does that work? Under what population parameters?

There's an obvious potential confounder, and it seems to be present. I checked the first American study showing 208ms (Thompson, H. B. (1903). The mental traits of sex. An experimental investigation of the normal mind in men and women. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.) and the subjects it used were University of Chicago students.

I checked a later American study (Anger, W. K., Cassitto, M. G., Liang, Y. -X., Amador, R., Hooisma, J., Chrislip, D.W., et al. (1993). Comparison of performance from three continents on the WHO-recommended Neurobehavioral) showing 275.9ms. It used subjects living in working class and entry-level white collar housing. The University of Chicago is an elite university and in 1903, universities in general were considerably more elite than today (or 1993). These are different populations.

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