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Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

I get what you mean, but what's the alternative? How should you behave if you're exempt from normal social boundaries because of your personal tragedy? Shout at random people? Throw things? Punch some guy in the face?

Seems to me it's better to try and be kind, and treat others right despite your horrible situation. The person you're treating cruelly because of your personal trauma could easily be going through a trauma worse than yours.

Apologies if I misunderstood what you were getting at, though. I wasn't clear on which social boundaries you'd propose to exempt people from.

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> I get what you mean, but what's the alternative? How should you behave if you're exempt from normal social boundaries because of your personal tragedy? Shout at random people? Throw things? Punch some guy in the face?

I don't mean to put words in obblekk's mouth (text box) so what I perceived them as meaning is: I don't think the person you're replying to was advocating for direct person-on-person action. When we see people protesting or pushing back against or loudly saying "this is wrong and I won't have it and neither should you" kinds of things, we should consider how our personal situation could rapidly change to be like theirs. And, in a lot of cases, would have been like theirs but for some skill at leveraging a few strokes of uncontrollable luck.

To me, it's like when people complain that "those damn unionized trash truck drivers are making $90,000 with a lot of overtime and a pension." Why is the response to try to tear them down, when the correct, to my mind, question is "why don't I have that, too?"

> To me, it's like when people complain that "those damn unionized trash truck drivers are making $90,000 with a lot of overtime and a pension." Why is the response to try to tear them down, when the correct, to my mind, question is "why don't I have that, too?

Because if total salary income were uniformly distributed across the population, the average would be like $80,000 a year.

casting aside a debate of whether its true every job is 80k/yr...lets say it is. What then? the market...the free market would supposedly adjust for all required goods

I'm failing to see the problem with that. Sure, $80k is less than $90k, but it's a hell of a lot better than what the vast majority of Americans currently enjoy.

I'm responding to the point of why people don't ask "why can't I have that too?" The answer is because it's literally impossible--everyone can't be above average. I myself don't think a flat income distribution would necessarily be bad. But I think most people think garbage men should make less than the average income, and doctors or programmers should make more than the average income. We can argue about how much more and how much less, but if you take any level of inequality as a premise, you can't reconcile garbage men making $90k.

And that overlooks that whatever measures would be needed to flatten the income distribution like that would also shrink the overall pie, as in Europe. The fact is that, even accounting for what the OECD calls "transfers in kind" (such as provision of government health insurance) American households have a lot more disposable income than European households: https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm (select the "gross, incl. social transfers in kind" drop down under "perspectives").

Americans aren't irrational. The majority is deliberately voting for an economy that produces more disposable income for the top 60%, at the expense of the safety net for the bottom 40%. This feature of the economy is reinforced over time due to immigration. Europeans migrate here to work as programmers, because they can make $500k/year in San Francisco versus $150k/year in Germany. My immigrant mom just came back from a long trip to Australia the other day, complaining how "small and close together the houses were." She said "America is really a land of opportunity. You can get rich here. You can't get rich in Australia." She doesn't care about communities suffering in generational poverty in Appalachia or Baltimore. And she is a party-line Democrat voter!

The alternative is to hold the institutions that inflict this suffering on people proportionately accountable for it.

One of the reasons we don't, is because the socially required reaction to this abuse is to suck it up, and suffer in silence.

What is the equivalent of a bank having its home wrongly taken away from it? Locking the doors on one of its branch offices and boarding it up for a few months?

There's an enormous level of asymmetry in the damage a large institution can inflict on a person, either by accident, or malice, compared the reverse. And that's not okay, and we shouldn't consider it to be okay. We need to do better.

The solution is to weaken the liability limitation of LLCs. If a company willfully breaks the law, its shareholders need to be held responsible, in proportion to their ability to affect change in the the company.

That's not the problem. Wells Fargo shareholders won't be proportionately punished for this, regardless of whether it's an LLC or not. The root of the problem is that the firm itself isn't being proportionately punished.

Solve the second problem, and then maybe the first one will become the bottleneck.

There was that one guy who showed up at the bank with a moving truck, sheriff's deputies, a lawyer, and a court order to seize the bank branch's assets. When they started to take the bank manager's desk and chair, that finally convinced them to pay attention and pay up.

But this was after they tried to steal his home (which they didn't even have a mortgage on) and dragged him through court and refused to pay the court costs.

So, not optimal, but still something that should be happening more frequently. If a few hundred thousand bank branches got repo'd every year, one for each time they ripped someone off, that should cause them to take notice.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/wronged-homeowners-reposses...

Banks would rightly collapse if people took their business to credit unions. No random violence required.

the issue is that it's really, really hard to get that message out to everyone and have them understand the importance and the reasoning.

to paraphrase Frank Herbert, it is the mark of a human that they will remain in the trap, that they can kill the hunter and thus remove a threat to their species.

Credit unions are all the rage when the economy is roaring, but they are typically the first to run into issues or fold on first sight of troubled waters. Their history is full of examples of having to be rescued by the federal government, including all the times commercial banks had to be rescued.

The main difference in my view is struggling commercial banks get absorbed, where as struggling credit unions close.

I am not sure which one is better, but I am wary of all the calls to go all in on credit unions. They've been available for almost a century now. They have a noble goal in that they've always tried to serve those in need, but I am not sure they are the solution.

I did a thought experiment. If FDIC and NCUA deposit insurance didn't exist, would I trust a bank of a credit union more with my deposits? I landed with credit unions due to the overt malfeasance of banks.

The FDIC exists to keep banks afloat, because they're untrustworthy on their own.

If everyone moved their money to credit unions, they'd become just as bad as banks.

I don't consider size to be the primary determiner of how banks operate re: good or bad. I consider the ownership model to primarily determine incentives and behavior. They are, of course, are not uncorrelated, but rather when attributing primary cause, I see credit unions incentives aligned with their clientele because they are one and the same. Whereas banks have a larger discrepancy between owners and customers.

A bank exists to serve the interests of their shareholders, a credit union exists to serve the interests of their members. Unless you happen to be a significant shareholder in your bank, credit unions are more aligned with your interests.

All things exist to serve the interests of itself.

I don't think much of this is true. While corporate credit unions did participate in TARP[0], for example, that's not the common perception. Not only were they primarily corporate credit unions rather than consumer credit unions, far fewer of them participated in the program than banks: around 20% as many.

For people, credit union accounts are federally insured just like bank accounts are, but credit unions are typically much more resilient than banks given the additional restrictions on how much leverage they can engage in. They close less often than banks, and also seem to be more likely to merge than close[1], contrary to your claim.

You're welcome to keep banking elsewhere, but it's all credit unions for me and my extended family.

0. https://thefinancialbrand.com/news/bank-culture/tarp-on-cred...

1. https://www.bankrate.com/banking/credit-unions/list-of-faile...

Perhaps I summarized incorrectly, I was getting most of that information from here https://ncua.gov/about-ncua/historical-timeline

(your linked sources are horrible sources just in case you were not aware: both are paid media fronts designed to drive revenue through clicks, not reliable sources)

My bad on the sources, I searched for links to support my memories, and didn't pay close attention.

No clue why you're being downvoted, what you say is the correct response. Suffering is all around us and deep, but that's not license to inflict more of it on others.

It ain't a license, true, but I have a much harder time blaming the one lashing out due to suffering than I do blaming the one inflicting that suffering in the first place.

My understanding was that the GP wasn't saying that people should commit violence in the face of such a severe personal and institutional tragedy, but that we have this idea that people in tough enough situations reach a point where they're no longer in a place to act rationally. The surprise is that more people don't snap.

Good question, but I don't know. I'm not trying to recommend anything. Not sure it's even solvable.

Reading this article prompted this observation about myself.

I do wonder how often I have been wrong to get frustrated with someone, rather than extend more grace. I'll try to remember to consider this in the future.

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