Fun fact: boomers entered the workforce before credit scores existed. Credit scores were created in 1989, but people treat them like they were in the bible.
More than boomers entered the workforce - much of GenX did too
Credit scores are as old as the simpsons!!
It’s not going to get better until we start killing office buildings full of these people.
Do people want to go back to the system that was used before credit scores? Where the person serving the loan just made the choice based off if they thought you seemed trustworthy? Aka were a white man who went to the same church as them.
It’s so cute you think that credit scores aren’t racist.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/11/how-structural-racism-plays-a-role-in-lowering-credit-scores.html
Every system is racist because every system is human and humans are flawed. Credit scores include systemic racism and banks making calls based on their gut is direct practiced racism. Systemic racism is much easier to slowly over time work out as long as you recognize it. But the only way to stop direct racism is to take at least some of the power away from individuals.
The systemic racism like the structural one in the argument can only be gotten rid of if you entirely removed the concepts of loans. The problem with that is it is impossible. The majority of the folks who have attempted to outlaw usury and loans entirely are not really looked back upon fondly in a historical sense.
OR, maybe we need to make a new system. It’s not just credit scores or total anarchy, have some imagination, fuck.
For example, maybe a system where paying your credit card off on time or consistently having enough cash to not even need a credit card means that your “score” goes up. If it is truly about being reliable then that’s a no brainer, and yet…
We also shouldn’t be needing so much in the way of loans anyway and we deal with that by forcing minimum wage increases. It’s insane how much people have to put on cards and how normal it is to barely manage a monthly payment on a 30-40 year mortgage. The US and Canada specifically demand that you own a car and the weather is often very hard on them, too, yet once again the prices go up and up and you have to hope for the best that you can afford the payments which hide their increases behind and extended term or only a few more dollars which adds up to thousands on the other end.
Maybe the answer is less reliance on a debt based economy. Maybe the answer is to not bake into the fabric of society a mechanism that makes a lifetime of debt a foregone conclusion. Kill the loan shark for all I care. Why does everyone need a loan? Because it’s built to require one.
In an economy where skill (supposedly) correlates to income, income is expected to increase across a lifetime.
Therefore 25 year-old me borrowing excess income from 45 year-old me is a good thing, purely egotistically.
Furthermore lack of debt means every big purchase is preceded by hoarding. No matter which way you look at it this is bad for society. If I had 50k€ laying around it would be much more efficient resource-wise to lend it to my neighbor so they can build up their business, than to keep the money under my mattress and tell them to tighten their belt for another five years. They get a business, I get a bit more money in the end, everyone is richer and the economy is stronger.
Economics are not a zero-sum game. This belief that “if someone is making money then someone else is getting robbed” is deeply damaging, especially as it seems to be the main economic driver for Trump’s batshit insane administration.
Debt is good. Predatory practices are not. That is what regulations are supposed to curtail. Where I live “credit scores” are not a thing, banks only loan to you based on proof of income, a declaration of open credit lines, and your civil status (age, partnership status, dependent people). Racism and sexism are of course an issue, although if caught the banks face big fines. But it’s not like American credit scores are colorblind…
Ok, so, telling lenders they cannot vet lenders is not reasonable.
Our critiques of credit scores does not automatically mean we want them abolished in favor the previous wink and a handshake.
But American credit scores don’t measure your likelihood to pay back debts, they measure the likelihood of a lender to make money off of you. Those are nearly, but not quite, the same thing, and our current system, as the previous poster said, leads to a lifetime of debt obligations.
What we want is for life to not be dependant on debt.
Those are very different things.
The whole American credit system is frightening. You all but have to own a credit card (here they are only used by people travelling internationally), the credit card needs to be paid off manually (!?!? my bank just auto-withdraws the balance monthly), etc.
Here we employ a straightforward system to vet potential lenders : mortgages almost always have a contractual stipulation that you must use that bank to cash in your paychecks. Your bank will ask for proof of a stable income. You have to put down a downpayment. Defaulting on a mortgage furthermore puts you in a government registry; it’s not “a wink and a handshake” as you put it, but a formal tightly-regulated process.
There is nothing that the credit score system does that the Belgian system doesn’t achieve, except the part where it enables banks to prey on people through a privately owned and unregulated system used to push citizens towards short-term credit and needlessly dangerous financing habits. A 30 year-old with 50k€ in a savings account and no credit history sounds to me like someone who “should” get a mortgage a lot more than someone juggling 3 credit cards and a 10-year car loan. But the american credit system incentivizes the opposite. That is anarcho-capitalist predation.
That was a great writeup. I see that “someone earning money hurts everyone else” mentality on Lemmy constantly, its maddeningly stupid.
As a person with very little debt, this is the way.
That’s not so bad even
Aka were a white man who went to the same church as them.
in this case, because that’s a local direct connection as opposed to centralized.
The world works better when people help those closer in the society to them first. That’s also how routing metrics work in computer networks. This might seem gibberish, but I had a less fuzzy explanation, just forgot it.
Ah. Evolution. Connections form dependency both ways. And there’s always evolution in the society. It’s in your interest that racists would mostly connect to other racists, while smarter people to other smarter people, and dumber people to other dumber people, for evolution to work. Except, of course, that should preserve some mobility between these groups so that smarter people born in not so smart environment could change it, again for social evolution.
It’s important, somehow mostly talking about evolution in present time is attributed to fascists, while it can be seen everywhere.
In some sense who you are, who the person giving a loan is, and how that affects getting a loan is a predictive mechanism. It should work or fail for evolution.
Credit scores are a path around that similarly to Soviet planned economy being a path around markets, see how it worked that USSR, rich with resources beyond belief, had mostly poor and even malnourished population.
American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of food each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP84B00274R000300150009-5.pdf
The document you’ve linked talks about common perceptions and not much else, it’s short.
Anyway, nutrition is not just about amount of calories, one can consume a lot of calories but get scurvy.
BTW, the reason Soviet scurvy stats were not atrocious is that “sea cabbage” older generations remember (and hate, but it was there) being present in stores despite any deficit, and that all salt sold for food was iodised.
So - first, I’m not talking about amount of calories, second, I’ve read American food is notoriously bad nutrition-wise. Comparing USSR to Finland might be a better one.
The world doesn’t work better if people help those closest to them. The majority of the strife in the world exists because people help those close to them and treat others as outsiders. You can look at any system ever used and the point of failure is always someone tipping the scales intentionally to favor those near them.
You can look at any system ever used and the point of failure is always someone tipping the scales intentionally to favor those near them.
A bandit kills a traveler, the former is to blame because he initiated the action, the latter is to blame for being unarmed.
Those “tipping the scales intentionally to favor those near them” succeed because others don’t help those closer to them first.
And you can tell worthy endeavor from unworthy one better when it’s someone close to you. Thus more often helping the good things and more rarely helping the bad things.
So no, it does. Those near to you are on the opposite side of the spectrum from states, ideas and -isms. They are also more like you, as opposed to things you don’t know. Your life is just your own life. Unique and only one.
as a non-american: what the fuck is a credit score? who the fuck uses credit?
Almost no “traditional food” is older than 150 years.
Traditional food : bread
Show me a single loaf that is older than 150 years
I’m waiting
Let me get nananana’s old sourdough starter
Porridge has been around since roman times.
Is it comparable to today’s oatmeal? Is porridge a separate food from oatmeal?
Oatmeal is a type of porridge, but you can make it from a lot of grains
You: “Almost no”
Comments: pff look, some example!
Reading comprehension is in the dirt.
Back before the 1970’s if a woman was travelling she’d have her husband or a porter carry her bags. With the rise of women travelling alone there was suddenly a market for wheeled bags. Men didn’t want them because they made men look too weak to carry their own luggage.
Bro punch
You know how you can push some buttons on your wall and your house magically warms up or cools down? I know people who were alive before that existed.
Oh, and salmon sushi was invented in the 1980’s by the Norwegian fishing industry. Before that, no salmon in sushi.
bestest sushi
Who started putting avocado in sushi? I hate that shit. It seems like everyone thinks it’s key ingredient in sushi rolls now.
You know multiple people who are 123 years old???
Maybe either didn’t have it necessary it wasn’t widely used, or knew somebody (who was alive 20-30 years ago). Or both.
I was thinking of central heat and air conditioning accessible to the masses for home use. But you are right that the history of HVAC goes back much farther than that.
The term mullet was coined by the Beastie Boys in 1994
George Kennedy calls someone a mullet head in Cool Hand Luke.
The term has been around meaning a fool or idiot. Also the fish. The Beastie Boys were the first to use it to refer to the haircut.
I don’t know but I know for sure that the fax machine was invented before the telephone
Under our nose is overcoming group thinking.
I feel like, if there’s stuff happening out there that you haven’t heard of today, it’s because you’re not looking. We’re assaulted daily by what everybody is up to across the world. This tweet tried really hard to be deep and profound and instead, to me, kind of sounds like somebody who is just generally out of touch and got completely blown away to learn that desk bikes exist and kids love Minecraft.
You haven’t read that infamous xkcd strip have you?
It’s not about not knowing something exists. It’s asking what new things will people later on assume “always” existed
This tweet tried really hard to be deep
No it doesn’t
Dick Van Dyke is older than sliced bread.
I fucking love bread, but I’m not sure sliced bread is better than Dick Van Dyke. We may have gotten it all wrong from the get-go.
Sliced bread was the best thing since Betty White
1905 is a milestone of modern physics, because it’s when Special Relativity came out.
That’s older than the transistor, which was commercialized in 1951. But it’s also older than the vacuum tube triode, which was invented in 1906 or 1908.
In 1905, there were no amplifiers of any kind (though there were relay switches). There was almost no radio. The triode was a necessary invention for almost all of analog electronics.
Wtf is a triode?
God damn do I love it when I get to share a relevant Technology Connections video https://youtu.be/0UKCUMghTrc
three electrodes
Like a transistor only larger, less efficient and more fragile.
Meh, you could do signal amplification via transformers and tuned resonators.
It sucked, but it was possible.
That’s how we had telephones before we had tubes.
Transformers can increase voltage while decreasing current, or increase current while decreasing voltage, but can’t increase a signal’s power.
That’s a cool story, thanks for sharing!
The wright brothers flew almost 2 years before special relativity came out.
It’s 2025 and my invention idea from the 1980’s, the glow in the dark toilet seat, still hasn’t taken off. Makes me want to quit inventing.
Makes me want start pooping.
What were people doing before high fives??
This:
fr fr no cap
IIRC, people were slapping five (and then ten) in the 60s. As with a lot of cultural things, black people were doing it first.
A good hardy handshake and a cigarette.
