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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.
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.
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.
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.
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