“Court judgments are not self-enforcing. Solvent or honest debtors will want to pay soon after judgment is entered. A judgment will show up on credit reports and will be a matter of public record. This will be a problem for any judgment debtor attempting to borrow money. Most banks will require any unsatisfied judgments to be paid before they will lend new money. …
If the judgment debtor has only personal property and no real estate, the situation is very different. Personal property depreciates with time, can be damaged and can be easily hidden. Real estate is not going anywhere. One of two things will eventually happen with a judgment lien on real estate. If the debtor is financially viable, he will eventually have to pay off the judgment lien in order to sell or refinance the property. One day, the telephone will ring and someone will want to know where to send the check.”
I can't speak for bankruptcy filings, but I've sat through small claims sessions on a few occasions and probably half are for credit card debt. Most of the time the defendant doesn't show and assuming the bank wins, damages can be trebled in my state.
And: Credit card rates are way, way up compared to just a few years ago. Earlier this year WSJ reported average APRs in the US were over 24% (https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/the-credit-card-rate-cap...). Most people do not read the fine print on their credit card applications, or compare them to what rates used to be like.
I think the death spiral breaks at step 3. Financially stable and literate people do not pay credit card interest. They pay off the full balance every month resulting in 0 interest payments. In cases where they need credit beyond the short term float the above gives you, they have access to lower interest loans.
These people also don't make the cards much money, so loosing them wouldn't have that much of an effect anyway.
If anyone is wondering how to escape this cycle, the solution is pretty straightforward; don’t buy things you cannot afford with cash/debit.
If putting your credit card balance on autopay is scary to you, you probably shouldn’t have a credit card. Also, having a credit card doesn’t mean you can ignore the charges and settle up at the end of the month. Credit is a tool that can be abused and misused like any other tool.
Personally, I’m anti credit in general and don’t have credit cards or a credit score. But I also moved to Europe where credit is not nearly as important as when i lived in the US.
>Personally, I’m anti credit in general and don’t have credit cards or a credit score.
if only people could choose to have or not have a credit score. that would be cool. unfortunately, equifax/transunion/experian are some of the original data vacuums and assign one whether you want one or not.
Yep. I'm old enough to remember when credit agencies were considering dubiously legal. It was illegal (in my state at least) for a group of merchants to run a shared 'blacklist' of customers back in the day. The credit agencies side-stepped this. It was pitched as an "opt in" sort of situation where if you wanted cheaper credit or to finance a car or some optional thing in life, you could do so. They were not even used (as much, at least) for house mortgages - the bank would go through financial records and check income vs. debt and your banking history instead. Your credit score (or lack of it) was irrelevant.
Then they slowly became endemic to simply participate in life at all. Good luck renting a spot with a poor credit score even in the early 2000's. My second apartment I had to show my (private mom and pop) landlord a great reference from my previous rental plus supply him with a 3mo security deposit since I had zero credit. I learned then that it was a non-optional part of society and I had better play ball or go entirely off grid hermit style.
Then credit agencies started even more BS like putting in your salary history (mined from employers), any criminal records, etc. It's a social credit score in everything but name and likely implemented far broader and wider in society than anything China currently has. You will literally be frozen out of many careers and entire areas to live if you do not maintain it.
Yours is also a good theory, but there are plenty of people that find themselves in a situation where income can lag behind expenses.
When it comes to the choice of being responsible with debt or making sure your kid has calories today, there isn’t really a choice in reality.
There is a lot to be said for better financial education, but there is also a lot to be said for services like credit cards that allow someone to smooth out a cash flow issue.
It all seems so obvious until you find yourself in that situation. Most (or many at least) people in debt aren’t stupid or reckless, although they may be ignorant of their options for spending better and for borrowing better.
I strictly use it to accrue points, but general advice is that credit is useful to smooth out the lumpiness of pay cycles, but if you can’t pay the debt back on necessities within the credit cycle, you shouldn’t use it at all.
Since credit is the primary means used for discretionary spending, I firmly believe that the accessibility of quick (but not necessarily cheap) interest allows inflation to go unchecked.
I was deliberately debit-only for years. Someone on a podcast explained why they used credit cards for extra protections from banks beyond debit cards. I don't know the accuracy of what was said, but the show is hosted by three smart people and neither of the other two disagreed that credit cards have more protection than debit cards so I assume it was generally accurate. I got a credit card right away and use it for most purchases and pay it off in full every month.
I sort of agree although I am for credit cards if they help me with deals since I am frugal personally but even I am thinking to just use credit cards of my close cousins/family if they already have one.
I am giving a transcription of the situation in the video[0] but buy now pay later apps have on average 300% apr (yes this is not a joke) and even ask for tips and have so many dark patterns, both these industries are really similar/the one basically.
> She had just switched to this remote job, which was a pay cut, but it let her stay home and care for her son at the time. And then after she went back to her normal job, she actually stopped using Earnin for nearly two years. She got on a stable financial footing. She even bought this house. But housing costs are expensive and for a bunch of complicated reasons, her child support payment is less this year than it was before. And that put Runeda in this really precarious position, where if one thing went wrong, it would completely throw her off financially. And about two weeks ago, that's exactly what happened. My son wakes up really early sometimes, and it was, like, 5:00 in the morning, and I went to try to, like, open an app on my phone, and it wasn't loading, and I was like did they turn my internet off? And I checked the router, and it said your service has been interrupted for nonpayment, and I'm like, what the heck are you talking about? The bill used to be on auto pay, but for some reason wasn't anymore. they told me I had to pay, like, over $200. I had like 50 bucks in my bank account. That was the first domino, and everything fell apart from there. Runeda borrowed $150 from Earnin to pay the internet bill, the $20 reconnection fee and the $6 Earnin fee.
Credit cards are a death trap, unless you use them as a debit card - as a convenience (and to collect points) not as a source of credit.
I've had credit cards for 30 years. Use cards for all expenses when I can, have always paid the bill in full every month, have never spent a dollar of interest in my life, so I don't even look at the interest rate when getting a new card. I don't spend anything I know I won't be able to pay for at the end of the month (and yes, that does mean we've postponed purchases for months or even years).
But the allure of buy now pay later is pushed so heavily that it's hard for many people to resist.
> 3. People who are financially stable and literate see the increased rates and put fewer things on credit.
Financially stable and literate people don’t pay credit card interest at all.
Credit cards are useful for fraud protection and rewards, the people that use them to finance purchases at 24% APR are wildly irresponsible or desperate.
Your mom: Why don't you have a credit card? It helped me so much when I was in your situation.
You, a young adult who doesn't check: I'll get one! runs up debt with an interest rate 4x what your mom had to deal with thirty years ago HELP I'M SUPER BROKE AND BANKRUPTCY IS A LOT HARDER THAN IT WAS THIRTY YEARS AGO TOO
You, a young adult who checks: The interest rates are 4x what they were when I was in your situation. This looks like a much shittier deal than it was for you.
There needs to be a name for the way people think the world hasn't changed since they were a young adult. I'm not convinced it's just boomers; it's just that they had it so good the contrast is higher. Gen Xers do the same thing, I'm sure, for example assuming that kids ride their bikes to school and have textbooks and the leading cause of death isn't GSWs.
Seems like an appropriate term would be the opposite of recency bias; primacy bias. I definitely see it in older Gen Xers who basically coasted their whole lives while ironically idolizing boomers, didn't think about the future at all, and seem to hate trying hard at anything.
Obviously not all GenX, just like not all boomers, but those people in both generations anecdotally seem to be fairly characterized as accumulating as much material garbage as possible. The Gen Xers in my life went to school for no reason and then held it up as a bastion of prosperity despite their degree having very little to do with the jobs they had
He said open source norms intended to protect the integrity of the project, including public discussion over calls, broad consensus before decisions, and scheduling that accommodated global time zones, had created a culture that made it functionally impossible to resolve even minor disputes without a weeks-long Slack thread and a cast of dozens. ... He acknowledged he had created many of the structures he was now criticizing. In stepping back from day-to-day leadership, he said, he had deliberately delegated decision-making broadly and built committees and governance layers.
This is not just an open source thing, or a Wordpress thing. I've seen it in nonprofit operations where committees take ages to make simple, sensible decisions (and sometimes still get it wrong!).
I suspect it's an issue in large companies that operate by consensus or are hidebound to authority and protocol. How many large companies in Silicon Valley make a point of saying they want to "move like a startup"?
Bureaucracy. I met an army officer once in a Corporation (government) office. Both of us were there to get the same paperwork done, but the army officer also needed his address revised (the corporation had issued a new number for his house). When we received our new documents, his document still showed the old address. He went to the bureaucrat who had processed it and asked why the address wasn't updated even though he had specifically requested that it be done. After some "consultation" with her co-workers, and a senior on her phone, she honestly blurted out - Sir, we don't know how to do that. It's some other department. I will have to consult my senior officer in that department and find out. Can you come back later?. As he shared his frustration he told me that civil bureaucrats needed to be trained like army officers. Army officers, he explained, were trained in multiple-disciplines because during a war they can't stop to search for the "right" person to do some task. Everyone in the field needed to sometimes improvise and be ready to take over someone else's task. Civil bureaucrats on the other hand are trained in a single discipline, tended to defend their specialisation, and thus get totally stumped when facing something outside their training.
It was an interesting insight: While department hierarchy must be respected, it shouldn't be organisationally rigid to prevent inter-departmental, inter-disciplinary learning. Lower ranking sub-units should also be given more freedom to make independent decisions.
Nearly the same as the number of large companies in Silicon Valley who want everyone to feel good about a decision internally but don’t care in the slightest about how outsiders feel about it. Matt unfortunately makes a solid point, weakened as it may be by his presentation: consensus-based project management is around two orders of magnitude slower than authority-based project management, as currently implemented by most open-source and open-source-like projects. Ghostty is a good example of authority-based project management, and advances far more efficiently towards its goals than Wordpress. I will freely admit that I’m biased to assign zero relevance to people’s emotional hangups about having to disagree and commit; having seen that catering to soothing ego dramas in project processes, rather than directing those with personal drama to professional counseling out-of-band from the project itself, serves up a catastrophic derail for any serious effort, I now have zero tolerance for “we will never agree, we haven’t the courage to decide, and we have not assigned any individual as final decision-maker”.
Regarding the main story’s point, I think the original concern raised (the committee balked while a paid employee got lightning-quick approval) is correctly addressed by focusing attention upon consensus-based project management as a defect in short- and medium-term work. It’s the right approach for long-term work — otherwise you get yanked around as priorities shift in the wind by a shifty leader (see also Tesla) — but it’s the wrong approach for making any decisions in less than a year of consideration.
As for Phase 2 — if he actually gets Ollama + Qwen 72B running on Oracle Cloud ARM, then uses DSPy for self-optimization and Aider for code self-modification…
That would be a different story. One that has nothing to do with us, and is entirely legal. We hope he makes it there. The right way.
Come on. When a mole gets whacked, they look for a new hole.
This person (and millions of others like him) isn't going to reflect on why the project got shut down and question his lack of ethics. He's looking for a new angle to exploit and a new set of excuses to trot out if he gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
The author apparently never read Tim Ferriss’ The 4 hour work week which not only whiteboarded some of the described schemes 20 years ago, but also had an illustration of a hammock suspended between two palm trees on the cover.
That was the dream: Set up a system, live on a beach.
I got a human being at Google to look into my problem and take action after sending a police report to Google‘s legal department certified mail return receipt along with a letter describing how someone was impersonating me and my business using a Gmail address in an attempt to commit fraud.
Yes, it was a pain to take all of these steps and it probably took about 3 hours but it was absolutely necessary considering there was no avenue for me to shut down this person otherwise.
Wasn't expecting this comment to go far. This took place about a month ago. For those who are interested, here is the address I sent the police report and cover letter to:
Google LLC
Attn: Legal Department – Custodian of Records
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
In the cover letter I outlined the problem and the desired remedy (shut down the gmail account and preserve IP and other information for law enforcement), and attached two other documents: an annotated printout of the email thread from a prospective victim of the scam (who sensed something was fishy and contacted me through my website) and the local police report I filed to document the attempted fraud in my name.
Someone at Google contacted me about a week later and confirmed that the account was shut down. I don't know if they did anything else regarding preserving data or shutting down any other Google services this person was using.
I also made a report to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, although TBH it looks like a black hole that lets the feds say they are "doing something" for ordinary victims.
Having worked in compliance engineering I have also reported through the IC3 portal, and spoken with lawyers and analysts who register with FinCEN (which, to be clear, is maybe just a step beyond "My Uncle works at Nintendo...") and I have heard that those reports do get reviewed and often acted on, but yes, you will typically never hear back from them. (FinCEN has its own reporting structure, but we also submitted certain reports through the IC3 portal as well.)
Honestly, the "acted upon" part needs to be highlighted in tangible ways, otherwise people will be suspicious that nothing ever happens to our reports, leading to fewer reports being submitted.
During the IC3 reporting process I was asked to submit the name of people behind the scam, if known. I knew one of them because the scammer asked for a wire transfer to a named account at a bank in Oregon. Probably a mule.
Does anyone at the FBI or other agencies actually do anything with this information, such as contacting the bank in question or correlating it with other investigations? That's what I would expect if law enforcement were serious about enforcing the laws on the books. But there is no indication that anything happened, other than a confirmation number being spit out on a web page that my report had been received. That's why I made the "black hole" comment earlier.
If the IC3 portal highlighted specific cases or stats ("thanks to reports submitted to IC3, n investigations were initiated/suspects charged/convictions secured") that would really help convince ordinary victims that the government is taking tangible steps to fight this scourge of small-scale scams and frauds that affect millions of people every year.
There are strict rules about not talking about open investigations because of so-called "Tipping-off" rules. It can carry some pretty serious penalties - jail time, fines. I agree it would be nice if the FBI itself made some announcements about these sorts of things, and they might do that in aggregate, but if you're a bank or fintech employee and you're in communication with the FBI you absolutely cannot say anything about it. Even confirming that an investigation existed could be penalized.
> Even confirming that an investigation existed could be penalized.
I didn't know that. But that is another point that could be highlighted on the IC3 homepage or confirmation, along with aggregated data about enforcement actions resulting from submissions from ordinary victims.
My assumption is that they at least have an intern read them, but only act on reports likely to lead to major cases, for some value of "major" that includes cases where terrorism, large sums of money, or Important People are involved, or more generally cases that could lead to seriously good/bad PR if pursued/ignored.
De minimis non curat FBI.
They may also flag certain cases to be passed to other relevant authorities like FinCEN, the Secret Service, the Postal Inspection Service, various military investigative services, or even the intelligence community (assuming NSA doesn't already intercept the mailbox which would be a very reasonable thing to do).
"Acted upon" in these sorts of bulk data contexts typically means "charge them for an extra count when we pick them up for something else".
It's like the internet crimes version of putting the serial number of stolen property in a police report. They ain't looking for it, but they'll tack the charge when they inventory a crackhouse bust and that number pops up stolen.
They aren't dedicating serious resources to speculatively looking at the reports and trying to assess patterns like some TV cop looking at a series of dead hookers and saying "aha we have a serial killer on the loose".
Oh that's a good idea! I got locked out of my YouTube premium account and they kept charging me. Couldn't get in contact with anyone at YouTube because the YT premium support line is behind the YT login. So I had to change my credit card number. Somehow they still kept billing the card, so the credit card company said they'd have to close my account entirely to get Google to stop billing me for a service they wouldn't let me cancel.
That's a built-in thing; Visa, MasterCard, Amex all have updater services that ensure trusted merchants get the replacement card seamlessly. This leads to annoying edge cases like yours.
BoA issued me a new card after a fraudulent charge, the next year on the same date the same fraudulent charge showed up (annual billing cycle). This happened for more than three years because after they issued a new card they updated the service that billed the fraud with the new number.
You have to realize that once Google flips the bit on you and they think you are trying to scam them (or others via them) you are absolutely dead to them. They don't want to hear from you ever again. You're banned to hell. The fact that a billing system didn't get switched off isn't so surprising; the internal architecture of their systems is so complicated that it would take multiple human lifetimes to explain how it all works.
> The fact that a billing system didn't get switched off isn't so surprising; the internal architecture of their systems is so complicated that it would take multiple human lifetimes to explain how it all works.
There was a lawsuit about a decade ago where a company was owed about $500k in ad fraud refunds and Google kept saying they had paid it, it ended up being an incomplete part of their software that had inadvertently withheld $75 million!
You can create as many virtual cards as you want. And surprisingly, I've rarely encountered a vendor that rejects them. I set one up for pretty much every recurring service charge, just because it's so easy to do.
It costs a few hundred a year for personal banking, but if you register an LLC (which in MO costs ~$10) you can use your EIN to get a business account. Did
it a couple times, once for my non-profit and once for my consulting LLC.
Are the virtual cards credit cards or hooked up to your account (i.e. debit cards)? there's a big difference. Also, they're not a bank so FDIC insurance and other bank aspects are different. Not what I'd personally use for my long-term savings-oriented finances, but fine for more operational things.
That sounds like what Privacy.com does, but the virtual cards can still charge right through after you shut them down. NYTimes did that to me, after my trial sub expired, and Privacy did nothing to block it.
Yup. I need to figure that out with Microsoft too. Paid for a 365 subscription on an account using one of my secondary email addresses. Being charged every month. None of those secondary emails will let me login/act like there's an account there/forgot password doesn't work. Support has no way to see what email account is linked to a credit card (which, admittedly, I get, somewhat) and wouldn't disclose that information anyway. So even armed with a transaction ID...
That's an uphill battle, I tried doing that with a gym once who said to cancel, I had to come in only on Tuesday in the morning when the manager was there with a certified notarized cancellation form.
No, I did not identify myself as a lawyer. I just wrote the letter as a victim of a scammer using Google services to impersonate me.
But I was careful to use certified mail return receipt as google’s legal office knows that this can be used for documentation and proof if the case ever goes further.
In other words, having a paper trail is more likely to get acted upon.
IMHO its doesn't matter who you are. You don't need to be a layer to protect yourself in the right way. if you send a letter with evidence, certified with return receipt, if as a business, or a person, this is a good chance of liability if you don't respond if it ends up in court. There can be consequences for non-reposes. I have always had good results using this method. But you got to be clear about:
A. What the problem is
B. Why you think there should be a response (I.E: What could happen if a response does not get acted on from your perspective, what harm could be continued, ect.)
C. Set a requirement for a resonable response time and some kind of fee schedule or possible outcome if there isn't a response in a reasonable amount of time.
Yes, they could easily spin up another gmail address.
The other part of the scam involved sending money to a bank account in Oregon with someone else's name attached to it. I notified the bank in a similar manner and hope they shut it down (not confirmed; my next step is to notify the Oregon banking regulator about the incident).
The hope is that once the bank account and gmail account are shut down the scammer will stop or move on. But I am concerned this could be a whack-a-mole problem that doesn't go away.
You can't send high volume through new accounts. Usually when a gmail account is being used for real spamming, it's an established one that's been taken over and the spammers are just discharging the accumulated reputation of the account.
> Usually when a gmail account is being used for real spamming, it's an established one that's been taken over
My incident is unlikely to be a real account being taken over. The name format was "firstnamelastnameofficial@gmail.com" and I have a somewhat rare name ... probably well under 40 people worldwide with the exact spelling.
I just encountered this exact pattern. I recently created a new app...recieved an email from what seemed to be a promenant app reviewer on YouTube [youtubersname]corporation@gmail. I said how do I know you are him? Then the weird part was somehow he was able to send me a email from the actual YouTubers public listed email but it went to my spam folder... Then after he told me everything that would be included in the price he said he could only accept payment in giftcards or crypto.
I emailed the YouTuber and told him I think your account is compromised.
Yes, with an actual payment (processed credit card transaction), a signed contract with clear payment terms, or a convincing promise to pay such as a written instruction to send an invoice.
A lot of startups have made the mistake of thinking "customers" are the same as "downloads of a free app" or "people who created an online account" or "people who signed up to be notified of the actual launch."
Accelerators once encouraged this ("you have to show progress to investors on demo day!") but unless you have actual paying customers it's not a real business.
If the judgment debtor has only personal property and no real estate, the situation is very different. Personal property depreciates with time, can be damaged and can be easily hidden. Real estate is not going anywhere. One of two things will eventually happen with a judgment lien on real estate. If the debtor is financially viable, he will eventually have to pay off the judgment lien in order to sell or refinance the property. One day, the telephone will ring and someone will want to know where to send the check.”
https://fullertonlaw.com/enforcement-of-judgment
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