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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.
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.
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.
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Everyone gets Flanderized even people who are ostensibly playing themselves.
Not everyone, but the vast majority it seems.
Even flanderising gets flanderised.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
That sounds like a heresy, mate. Better let a specialist check it out. There are catholic priests in your vicinity.
Hah, I'm literally quoting St. Athanasius. This is why I'm Orthodox. ;P
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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.
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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
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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.
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:
Quote from the linked report:
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:
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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.
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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.
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