The whole “protect the children” stuff makes a lot more sense when you realize that they treat their children like their possessions, so it’s less “let our children live their best lives” and more “don’t mess with my long term investment”
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
It may strike you as weird, but lenders love to lend money to poor people who will have trouble paying back their loans. Obviously, lenders want to be repaid, and obviously the more money you have, the easier it is to settle your debts, but (paradoxically) that means that if you have a lot of money, you expect to pay less to borrow.
In other words: because poor people have a higher likelihood of defaulting, their loans come with higher interest rates and worse terms. Debt is steeply regressive: the less money you have, the more you're expected to pay. The industry term for this is the "risk premium": the riskier a loan is, the more it costs the borrower.
Lenders are always seeking the highest possible return on their loan-books, which makes that "risk premium" awfully tempting. Why loan $1m to Elon Musk at 0.5% interest when you can make 10,000 $100 payday loans to non-union Tesla workers on food stamps at 1,000% interest?
Obviously, the fly in the ointment here is the risK in "risk premium." The reason the risk premium exists is that poor borrowers have a harder time paying their loans. That can be good, up to a point: if you're Klarna and you're originating loans to people Chipotle lunches on the installment plan, you want your borrowers to miss several payments. Klarna loans are free if you pay them back on time, but if you miss a payment, you're hit with a huge penalty charge and sky-high interest (on top of the principle and the penalty). On a small purchase, penalties and interest can quickly add up to a triple-digit APR.
That's where Klarna makes its money: people who miss their burrito installment payments. However: if a Klarna borrower goes bankrupt before they've repaid the principle, Klarna loses money. A successful loan-book of unsecured burrito mortgages depends on the existence of many missed payments and few defaults.
"Financial innovation" is often just a project to decrease the risk in risky loans, but without decreasing the risk premium you get paid for issuing those loans. It's a way to eat your cake and have it too: even though you've reduced the likelihood that you'll have to write off your loan, you still charge the borrower as though that risk is unchanged. As with so many aspect of finance, "innovation in lending" is a way to shift value from the financial industry's customers to itself.
Remember the subprime crisis? The whole point of collateralized debt obligations and swaps was to offer loans to people with bad credit – even loans they obviously couldn't pay back – without incurring a default risk. Subprime mortgages supercharged the practice of loan origination and resale (where a bank offers you a loan and then sells that loan to someone else, so your default becomes their problem) by splitting the loans into pieces. These pieces were recombined according to complex mathematical formulas that supposedly "proved" that the default risk from poor borrowers had been "offset" by combining them with other borrowers' loans and wrapping them in opaque insurance contracts.
Those subprime mortgages came with cheap "teaser rates" – the interest rate you paid over the first couple years – but then the interest payments "ballooned" to farcical sums that borrowers had no hope of repaying. Those farcical sums were the risk premium. When financier transmuted these high-risk 30-year mortgages into complex derivatives, they were effectively promising their customers a piece of that risk premium for 28 out of the 30 years that the mortgage ran for.
But it wasn't all financial engineering: subprime mortgage salesmen could also promise customers that they wouldn't lose everything even after a wave of borrower bankruptcies and defaults. That's because mortgages are secured: they are backed by deeds for the homes the borrowers own(ed). If a borrower goes bust, the lender can repossess their house or apartment and sell it to recover the loan amount.
Now, the finance sector did repossess a fuckton of houses after the crash. Foreclosure and eviction became official policy: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Obama that a wave of foreclosures was necessary to "foam the runways" for the banks, so Obama encouraged banks to foreclose on their loans, rather than restructuring them so that Americans could keep their homes:
But even with these foreclosures, lenders and their customers lost hundreds of billions on the subprime crisis. That's because all that subprime lending pushed the price of houses up and up and up, so when the market collapsed, those mortgages were "underwater" – the money from selling the foreclosed homes didn't cover their outstanding loans.
Collateralization – backing loans with legally binding promises to surrender some asset if you default – is a way to reduce risk, but it can't eliminate it. Assets degrade: houses burn, cars get totaled, jewelry is stolen. Assets also devalue: a loan backed by bitcoin at $111,000 on the eve of Trump's election will be underwater today with bitcoin at $64,000. This devaluation can also occur when your house's value plummets because Elon Musk repeatedly bombs your neighborhood with flaming rocket debris, or when your Tesla's resale value collapses after Musk throws a string of Seig Heils on national television.
The point being that risk mitigation is never risk elimination, but markets have a hard time distinguishing between the two. Partly that's because of risk shifting. A lender who can "securitize" their loans (turn them into bonds and sell them off to investors) can insulate themselves from risk, because the people who buy the bonds are now carrying that risk.
So many of our crises come from the intersection of these two phenomena: the promise of reducing loan risks without losing the risk premium and the fact that risk reduction can fail suddenly (or be revealed as nothing more than risk-shifting). The first phenomenon creates vast credit bubbles, the second one pops them.
This leaves would-be usurers on an endless quest for new ways to lend money at a premium to poor people while reducing their own risk. You don't need technology to do this – all you need is a captive audience of broke people whom other lenders won't touch.
When the US government adopted the racist practice of "redlining" (denying government-backed loans to Black borrowers), they created a market for predatory pseudo-mortgages called "contract buying." Contract buying is like a mortgage, but without the equity: miss a payment and you get evicted, and you aren't entitled to any of the sale price of the house, even if it was 99.99% paid off when you got kicked out.
Lenders can tip the scales in their favor by making up arbitrary junk fees, and a smart lender waits until the house is almost paid off before whacking the borrower with a ton of these fees. The borrower misses a payment, the seller repossesses the house and sells it again:
Contract lending never went away. Wherever you find a desperate, disfavored group who are locked out of the credit system, you'll find scumbag contract lenders running this scam. Take long-haul truckers, among the most exploited workforce in America. Long before Uber made worker misclassification (treating an employee as an independent contractor) mainstream, the trucking industry was effectively indenturing truckers, exerting more control over their lives than a boss could ever impose on a waged worker, while disclaiming any employer-related responsibilities. Truckers don't get health insurance or sick leave – and they don't get paid if they have to sit at a port for 20 hours waiting to pick up a load.
But the exploitation of truckers doesn't stop with mere wage theft. Truckers also "contract buy" their trucks. Their bosses issue loans that let drivers buy their trucks on terms that allow the company to repo the truck after a single missed payment. And of course, bosses have total control over truckers' wages, so a canny boss can wait until a truck is nearly paid off and then stop the driver's wages, forcing them to miss a payment and lose their truck, which can be sold on to the next victim:
Subprime auto-loans bring this same profitable arrangement to regular drivers who just need a car to commute, pick up groceries, and shuttle the kids to and from school. A subprime auto-loan often contains the "teaser" and "balloon" rates at the heart of the subprime mortgage bubble: for the first year or two, your car payments are affordable, but then they shoot up to a sum that you can't possibly pay. The lender then repossesses your car, zeroing out your equity, and sells it to another victim:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s
But the subprime car industry puts a decidedly modern spin on the contract lending scam that has been used to profitably rob so many Black home borrowers and long-haul truckers. Subprime lending's risk-reduction relies on repossession. A subprime car lender doesn't just get rich by charging poor borrowers more money that rich borrowers for shittier, older cars. Subprime car dealers repeatedly "sell" that car to many, many poor people, on conditions that all but guarantee that the borrower will default on their loan and lose their car.
This is where tech comes in. Ubiquitous digital networks and computing make it much easier to repo a car. This started with the humble lo-jack, a simple tracker marketed as a way to locate lost or stolen cars. Subprime auto-lenders were early and aggressive lo-jack adopters, because you can't repo a car if you don't know where it is. Installing a lo-jack is much cheaper than paying repo men to drive around looking for the cars you want to claw back, which means that you can sell cars to people who represent worse credit risks, charging a higher risk premium, and still find the car when those high interest rates force your borrower into default.
The next wave of automotive usury-tech was a kind of systematic exploration of the entire space between a car that is repossessed and a car that isn't. Some subprime cars are fitted with an extra stereo system that can only be controlled by the borrower over a wireless connection. Miss a payment and this secondary stereo turns itself on and starts playing earsplitting threats about what will happen to you if you don't pay up. The only way to turn it off is to make the payment. The next step is remote immobilization: miss too many payments (or violate a lease clause by crossing the county line) and your car just stops working:
But the apex of this usury-tech comes from (where else?) Tesla. Miss a Tesla payment and your car can do way more than just immobilize itself and tell the dealer where to get the car – it also unlock its doors, flash its lights, honk its horn, and back out of its parking space when the repo man arrives:
The cheaper the repo, the riskier the loan can be; the riskier the loan, the higher the risk premium. Digital tech makes repo much cheaper, so wherever you find digital tech, you find digital arm-breakers coming up with ways to robo-repo the things you buy.
There's India's subprime phone lenders, who pre-install usury-tech on their phones. This is a tool that spies on the phone's owner, building a dossier of the owner's most frequently used apps. When the owner misses a payment, the phone starts disabling the user's favorite apps, working its way up the list to the most indispensable ones:
It's the digital version of the mob loan-shark who breaks a finger, then your hand, then your arm. The more graduated the threat matrix is, the more payments you can capture. A borrower with a broken finger can get to a pawn-broker to sell their wedding-ring; a borrower with two broken legs has a much harder time.
Digital arm-breakers aren't an epiphenomenon of digitization alone. Usury tech only works if the device's owner can't disable it. Remember: a computer is flexible. The only computer we know how to make is the "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine," defined as a device that can compute ever valid program. If your phone is running a program that disables your apps, then you can install another program that disables that program. Same goes for your car's lo-jack; the stereo system emitting ear-splitting complaints about your car note; and the immobilizer hooked up to your ignition.
That's where the law comes in. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to produce a tool that bypasses an "access control." That means that if a computer is designed to block you from modifying it, removing that block is a felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $500k fine. DMCA 1201 doesn't distinguish between modifications undertaken for a lawful purpose (changing your printer so it works with generic ink) and unlawful purpose (breaking the locks on a DVD so you can sell infringing copies). DMCA 1201 criminalizes anything the manufacturer dislikes. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model."
DMCA 1201 is the reason you can't neutralize the digital arm-breakers by deleting or blocking the usury-tech in your car, phone or other device:
Here's where it gets interesting. Apologists for DMCA 1201 insist that the law is necessary, because it lets device makers lock malicious parties out of your devices. Apple leads the pack here: they use DMCA 1201 to block independent repair of their devices, insisting that this isn't done to extort high fees from you or to force you to throw away and replace last year's iPhone after you drop it. No, Apple does this to protect you – from unscrupulous repairers who might install malware on your phone:
And Apple says the reason it blocks you from installing apps without using its App Store is to protect you from malicious apps – not to control the app marketplace, where it makes $100b/year on payment processing junk-fees, siphoning off 30% of every dollar you spend in an app:
Apple's greatest accomplishment isn't technological, it's psychological. Apple managed to convince millions of people that buying products from a multi-trillion dollar corporation with close ties to both Trump and Xi makes them members of an oppressed religious minority, and those members of the "cult of Mac" tie themselves into knots insisting that Apple would only ever use its powers for good:
But moral behavior doesn't consist solely of resisting the temptation to do bad things – to be truly moral, you must not put yourself in temptation's path in the first place. Morality isn't the strength to resist the siren's song – it's the humility to recognize your own weakness and tie yourself to the mast:
By giving itself a veto over its customers' choices, Apple deliberately sailed into siren-infested waters, after first putting a gun on every mantelpiece it could find. Now the company is drowning in sin, while spraying gunfire in every direction.
Today, the company is getting into the leasing business. Having monopolized its markets and eliminated the possibility of growth by making and selling things, the company is becoming a lender. As a lender, Apple wants to maximize the risk premiums it can charge, while minimizing its actual risk. That's why the new version of iOS – the operating system for iPhones and iPads – comes with software that lets lenders brick your device if you miss a payment:
The code steals a trick from India's subprime phone lenders, giving Apple the ability to "restrict apps and services when payments are missed." It hooks into a "Partner Finance Lock," which allows Apple to sell devices to third-party userers who want to get into the subprime game, promising those customers all the imaginative flexibility a digital arm-breaker could dream of.
This was always the trajectory of Apple's decision to sell you a computer that takes orders from its manufacturer, rather than its owner. Apple didn't invent the subprime gadget. It also didn't invent the GUI, the MP3 player or the smartphone. Rather, Apple took those gadgets mainstream – just as it will do with subprime gadgets. Just in time for the affordability crisis, the oil shock, the climate shock, the AI collapse and the tariff shock, the age of the digital arm-breaker has well and truly arrived:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/7asxci/oc_ygathok_the_ceaseless_hunger_final_boss_of_our/
This is the reveal of this ridiculousness during their game
I saw this video about a doctor who performed an MRI on a 5 year old and discovered she essentially had “brain damage” from excessive iPad use, as the white matter in her brain couldn’t form properly due to an understimulated environment.
Hmm it’s almost like there’s supposed to be adult figures responsible for monitoring her screen time and making sure she develops properly… certainly this isn’t the result of neglect at the hands of her parents…
“This 5 year old is brain damaged by excessive iPad use”
Translation: This 5 year old is developmentally impaired by neglectful parents who used an iPad as a stand-in for social and environmental stimulation / interaction for hours at a time during critical early stages of child development. The iPad is the cop-out.
“Children don’t have the strength to hold pencils anymore because they only use screens.”
Translation: Parents aren’t making the conscious effort to help their children develop necessary skills and letting iPads raise them.
When are people going to realize the iPads and whatnot are the instruments through which the neglect is happening through and not the cause? How the fuck do you let your child have such a severe lack of physical strength in their hands that they can’t hold a pencil properly?
People will see a study suggesting children with higher screen times have poorer or negative developmental outcomes and immediately say it’s the screens causing this, and not the more likely fact that higher screen time = less engagement time with their environment, physical exercise, parents, family, and their peers, all of which are NECESSARY for a healthy upbringing as a social species.
It’s like saying a dog who was kept in a cage all its life and left with atrophied muscles was damaged by the cage, and not by the fact its owners were too lazy to play or walk their dog in order for its muscles to build properly. The cage is the instrument of neglect and the owners are the perpetrators, in the same way parents are the perpetrators and weaponizing screen time as an excuse and painting themselves as helpless bystanders.
Ok ok okokokok. So! Chapter six! That happened! Wow!
…but, realtalk? This is kind of what I expected to happen when I thought of the hunters fighting a pack of Garou, even a small one like the Kin of Old Shuck (who I will be referring to as ‘The Pack’ from here on, because the full name is too long). Even with a battalion of armed zealots backing them up, the Garou are just that strong.
And the thing is, Stig wasn’t even really fighting, so much as he was playing with his food. Like, look at this man .
Does this look like a man who is taking this fight seriously? No, this is the face of a man who knows he’s in practically zero danger and is just fucking around for shits and gigs. It’s like Kitten says:
[ID: Kitten: "he hasn't even used his Warform"]
And when he does pull out the Warform it’s only A) When the Leopoldites have to use the actual power of Christ to hold him down (and piss him off). And he needs to escape.
[not to mention them pulling a fucking Hellsing reference while their at it. These guys wish they has as much aura as Alexander Anderson]
And B) when he gets Enraged TM at Grimal for having the audacity to have her ‘funny oar’ be lined with silver.
Both of which might just be because his Garou temper got the better of him.
I’m pretty sure the only reason any of the hunters stood even the smallest chance of making it out alive here is because Stig cares about being honorable (and, again, wasn’t trying his hardest) and because he was alone, If Matilda, or ‘Hunter of Hunters’ (who i will continue calling Matilda so we don’t get confused) hadn’t stayed behind with Jambles to keep watch over Marckus, there was no chance any of them were leaving that clearing.
And speaking of, it was very nice seeing Marckus again. I've missed my boy. And I’m very surprised by how…not maimed he is, i knew the pack wouldn’t have killed him yet, but the fact that he isn’t even that roughed up is surprising, considering it’s “been hours” since they took him, and especially considering that Matilda is a red talon, the group of Garou who hate humans the most, bar none.
It was also interesting to see that apparently Quosmicvoid’s theory about her being raised in the woods and living mostly in wild form is correct, considering she struggles to speak properly and can’t count higher than 10.
And Jambles! I love Jambles, my scrimbly skrunkle who loves gambling and uses a commodore desktop and takes bets on whether they need to torture information out of a man with magical fish spirits.
He’s great, the whole pack is great honestly, I love their group dynamic, I wonder how they met though? They all seem to run in pretty different circles so I can't see them just bumping into each other.
[I love these guys, i hope they get to survive this encounter]
But anyway, back to the others, any how fucked they are, because they are still very fucked.
The arcanum hunters (+ one of the cappucci brothers and Gabriel) may have managed to run away after Grimal’s sacrifice, but that doesn’t mean much considering how much they’ve lost for basically no gain, lance 2 is gone, Grimal is probably dead, Kitten and Remold are injured and Stig is fine.
All the wounds he’s sustained will be healed by the time he catches up with them, and he’s still got his pack members to fall back on, all they really did was make him sad over prematurely ending his bout with Grimal, and that was because HE killed her. And he’s still coming after them once he’s buried her.
So all they’ve really done is go in, lose a bunch of guys, and retreat.
Meanwhile D and Brock are traipsing through the Umbra (which is its own can of danger worms) straight into the wolf's den.
Which is basically the same as walking into a trap, because while they might not know they can traverse the umbra, the pack does know about D, courtesy of Marckus, and we know that Matilda can take him on fairly well, and Brock too, and let’s not forget Jambles, who while he isn’t a fighter, is a Garou, which immediately puts him at an advantage over the humans.
So yeah, things are not looking good, the hunters are scattered, outgunned, and rapidly losing numbers. At this point I see only three ways they can get out of this without any more significant deaths:
A) Big D actually does know about the location of Old Shuck somehow, and is able to trade the information in exchange for Marckus and being allowed to leave safely, though whether the Leopoldites and Remold will be willing to let go of the idea of revenge and leave peacefully is something yet to be seen.
B) The Leopoldites pull a literal Hail Mary to save them all.
C) Palmer and Blair rock up with a Pentex kill squad,and everyone else as backup. Basically I’m imagining that everyone else in the coalition shows up because Palmer ‘convinced them’ to help, and the Belgian guys (G-kontoret i think) show up because there are in fact, gnomes here, somehow.
And that was one of the things they were interested in. And at first it’s framed as a good thing but it’s actually sinister because Pentex are, NOT, the good guys like they are evil AF and also the #1 human enemy of the Garou, if the Garou are Gaia's soldiers Pentex are the Wyrms soldiers. And then shit will go sideways, again.
But yeah I really don’t see a ‘clean’ way out here. I still think something Wyrm related is going to go down, AND I still think the Garou stuff will lead into Mage stuff later on because of their shared Wyrm connection (and Marckus).
“make yourselves impossible to ignore. 10,000 signatures on twitter is a lot but 10 unique personal emails is enough to derail an entire council session.”
If the last tumblr sexyman poll accomplishes anything I really hope it's that more undertale fans will go watch dungeon meshi
PLEASE DO! IT'S AMAZING!! IN EVERY WAY!
- It's written by a woman (Ryoko Kui my goat)
- The manga art is immaculate
- The anime animation is chef kiss
- The most popular ship in the fandom is femslash
- Senshi is actually considered a sexyman canonically
- Our main guy Laios is very autistic and it's incredibly plot relevant. May I say the plot just wouldn't happen if it weren't for this guy's special interest
- It has a sassy aroace cat girl as part of the main cast
- A union man and divorced dad is part of the main cast
- The humor is top tier, the editing in the anime is peak
- The food is really thought out and beautifully animated, always advancing the plot in some way and giving Senshi the opportunity to teach us about ecosystems in the dungeon
- It approaches the DND-like dungeon as an actual ecosystem with biodiversity and niches and a food chain, and it's very thought out
- The way the society of all "human" species is built and how the cultures interact and influence each other is also really thought out
Y’all have no idea how much this silly little raccoon means to me. Despite humanity’s preconceived notions about how disabled humans and nonhuman creatures alike go through life, Jimothy is loved by his fellow raccoons and adored by his human community. He’s truly living his best life. You go, girl!
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