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A hexbear.net commainity. Main sure to subscribe to other communities as well. Your feed will become the Lion's Main!
Good comrades mainly sort posts by hot and comments by new!
State-by-state guide on maintaining firearm ownership
Domain guide on mutual aid and foodbank resources
Tips for looking at financials of non-profits (How to donate amainly)
Community-sourced megapost on the main media sources to radicalize libs and chuds with
Main Source for Feminism for Babies
Maintaining OpSec / Data Spring Cleaning guide
Remain up to date on what time is it in Moscow
https://x.com/adamscochran/status/1995501382171025884
My money is on the Chinese shutting down their gamer gatcha market to Japan dominoing to the AI market imploding via Nvidia going bankrupt or some shit
It's kind of amazing how I can just comment "American century of humiliation" on basically every serious story about the US and have it be relevant.
95% of sales volume is financed
that's a funny way to describe using a credit card
There are a lot of "buy now, pay later" like Klarna/layaway type options people use especially for Christmas, it's not necessarily credit cards, it would be interesting to see a more specific stat
That 67% not paying it back with the month is still wild, even if it was a lot of credit cards they're still going into (I imagine deeper) debt.
Not necessarily. Klarna and services like it offer zero-rate loans for like 3 or 6 months, because they don't operate like a bank making money off the interest of the loans they give, they're a fintech who make their money raising capital, or by packaging your 12-installment doordash with millions of other people's small debt and then selling it in debt markets. Essentially the thing that led to the 2008 financial crash, but now this time instead of mortgages, it's financed burritos and Christmas presents. It does seem that thesemicroloans have a lot of delinquency, so... Yea.
Could have sworn they are making money from the retailer side if it. Because I pay them every time a customer uses their service.
How are they making money from bundling up bad 0% interest debt and selling it? They would be losing money right off the bat.
You're right, I forgot to mention commissions from the merchant side as part of their revenue stream. Klarna reports about 2.76% average commission, so the rest is only consumer loan repayments.
As to how do they make money? The short answer is they don't, because they don't have to. Revenue or profit don't matter to investors and the people trading the stock; they are interested in user growth, with the hope of one day jacking up the interests and commissions once they have become indispensable and have enryone hooked on cheap, easy credit.
The slightly longer answer: I've been looking at Klarna's financial reports for a while, and they are bleeding money.
The problems will come if/when anything disrupts the hype cycle: either making delinquency rates much higher because of a financial crash, bond sales/ratings lower, stock prices drop, or a combination of the three makes everyone realize an average loan of 28 bucks for 6 months is a terrible business model, and the whole house of cards comes crashing down, bringing who knows what with it. I don't think it'll go down like in 2008, because some Obama-era regulations to prevent that are still in place, but it'll be a big shock to consumer debt markets for sure, and will more than likely mean that you'll only be able to buy a car for dodge charger sold outside of an army base kind of rates, or a house with a generation-spanning repayment plan.
Disclaimer: I only know the barest bones of finance and bookkeeping, so I might be out of my depth here. But if it looks bad to a dumbass like me, imagine how bad it can actually be.
Dog the bounty hunter busting down your door to repossess the burrito you ate 6 months ago.
I'm here to secure 700 Calories, one way or another
just try and take my precious calories fucko
shitting and pissing in a bag so i can give it back to them
or by packaging your 12-installment doordash with millions of other people's small debt and then selling it in debt markets
they WHAT It's 2008 2 all over again
Exactly my point. The statistic is essentially nonsense when most digital payments in the u.s. involve a credit card.
as he explains in the tweet, it's not the 95% that's really concerning, because of credit cards. it's the 67% that openly admit they'll need more than a month to repay this debt. apparently this group used to be 20%.
It's really not
people buying all their regular everyday purchases on credit is bad, actually
theres a lot of us that pay off balances immediately and use the credit card for convenience, security and perks.
credit cards have way better user protections for fraud than debit cards. if there's a bogus charge, i can dispute it without that money going missing from my cash account. the onus is on the card company to figure it out, because i don't have to pay for it. so they invariably reverse the charges while conducting their investigation. debit fraud can be brutal, because the longer the bank dawdles, the more fees and payment rejections you can incur while your balance is artificially low.
i only need to carry a little bit of cash, and my particular card gets cash back between 2-4% on all kinds of shit like groceries, fuel, retail household items etc.
the only time i pay with some other method is when there is a card convenience fee / cash discount... which is becoming more frequent and often exists with independent contractors and muncipalities.
using a CC for everyday purchases is not any more precarious than using other forms of payment unless you can't trust yourself to stay in a budget... in which case, you shouldn't use checks or a debit card because you can totally go crazy with those too and get buried in fees, not to mention the punitive banking moves like reporting to chexsystems, after which you're gonna be punitively de-banked and forced into the realm of short term loans and those strip mall check cashing services with exorbitant fees.
Noted, adding credit cards to my mental list of evil capitalist bullshit that ostensibly leftist hexbear users will vehemently defend, right next to car ownership
"socialism is when u use cash and checks. the more cash u use, the more socialism you are doing." - carl marcks
I mean, not really if you treat it like a debit card and never spend more than you actually have in the bank. Then you benefit from whatever points or rewards your credit card offers
Living your life dancing on a bear trap is fine just so long as you're really careful to never step on the trigger. Plus, the bait is really tasty!
So what happens if someone who isn't lucky enough to have a good education in finance experiences sudden financial hardship and then relies on paying more on credit than they have in the bank? (An extremely common occurrence) Would you say the debt makes the situation better or worse?
And then, does that make you rethink whether its "not really" bad?
You refinance or ask your credit card companies for grace.
Or go bankrupt.
Very good point. I was responding to the “everyday purchases” not being all that bad to use a credit card for if you already have the money for it.
Sudden financial hardship is a much different situation and I agree, the debt would make it worse
Right, but I think the implication in "people" after "95% of sales" there is pretty clearly "our whole society", which presents the above problems. With the context, it made your comment read as "this doesn't need to change, and if it goes bad, it's your fault". But I'm glad you understand. We just very commonly have people from the Lemmiverse here with comments to the effect of "the status quo is good, actually".
When I first saw that stat I was shocked, thinking it was referring to buy now pay later. Just sat there for a solid minute thinking about how wild that was. "I bought stuff, but I didn't finance it!" oh- I did. Credit card.
95% of sales volume was financed? that's wild
i read a stat that while 95% was financed (which just means they paid with a CC, which lots of people do for convenience) a full ~66% were NOT planning on paying this charge off during the 30 day grace period.. which means they are getting hit with the exorbitant interest fees. which, to me, is fucking crazy.
20% interest on 50% off is still coming out on top. Depends on what they bought.
I bought everything on 0 interest. I’m not paying anything off in 30 days. Why should i?
I assumed that could mean those 4 payment plans or the 6/12/24 month offers.
i never trust those "90/180 days same as cash" type of flex pay plans offered at the point of sale, because too many have fine print for retroactive interest on the entire amount "borrowed" at purchase if you're even short a cent at 11:59pm on the payoff date. and naturally, they play games, taking like ~4 business days to process payments which is always like ~1 week around the holidays.
i know not all do, but enough do and i don't like being actively sold more than one thing at the same time (1) the actual doohickey, and (2) the one time financial product to borrow the money for the doohickey. with the CC, i have generally looked through the terms of using the card with a critical eye to find those landmines and plan how i will avoid them before opening the account.
Doesn't mean much since I assume it must also include all credit card payments. I'm sure there is plenty of bad news once you get into the details, but that number by itself isn't that surprising.
Most American retail is in the red until Christmas season, so it would make a lot of sense if consumer markets waited until about Christmas time to realize that they're crashing.
While I've heard this repeated my whole life ("it's called Black Friday because that's when we're finally in the black"), but I just have a really hard time accepting that the arch capitalists who run this country really operate the whole thing on a loss for 11 months and make all their profit in December? They rip us off every fucking day; there's no way they start making real money in December.
Or maybe because the fiscal year rolls in Sept or idk June, so they're showing profit after 3-6 months, which is maybe feasible
Yeah, that's made up marketing speak. It was created so that people would associate the name with something positive. The term originally came from police who hated dealing with the accompanying crowds and traffic.
I thought it was retail staff whp just dreaded the day
When you're rich, you can budget in terms of years. In fact, almost all "successful" businesses operate at a loss for five years or more before they are consistently profitable. The whole thing is held together with debt, family fortunes, and con jobs
For all we know the economy could be in free fall for like 6 months now but no economic reports means no problem.
Nvidia AI crash feels like a good bet.
It'd be way to wild to guess China sanctioning the US over invading Venezuela but it would definitely be the most poetic way to cause it. Also I really hope the US doesn't fuckin do that.
I do kinda of feel like once the "war in Venezuela" goes official it'll just be that
On one hand, watching the US get sanctioned and the whole thing crashing down would be funny. On the other hand, I do not really want to be watching that fireball explode while I have a front row seat also on Turtle Island...
OpenAI doing some Enron shit.
I've still got my chips on crypto! It has absolutely no backing, it's much more related to US treasuries than one might assume, and it's just waiting to pop!
Nah, I think crypto will crash alongside the market, but it won't be the instigating factor. If it was capable of doing that, it would have already.
95% financing?
the Chinese shutting down their gamer gatcha market
When I was younger, I thought the US needed a sort of "User Interface Administration" to handle everything from social media to advertising to video games. Something to put a set of policies down for content algorithms (always default to chronological sort, never remember user preference to do otherwise) and end the scammy pay-5.99-to-skip-this-1-hour-timer game design.
I don't believe the US is capable of this kind of policy. But if China did it, that would be so goddam cool.
I think this is indeed a thing that states that genuinely focus on the well being of the people should consider implementing. Something to set out a style guide for all government software and websites, and regulate user hostile design out of software made or distributed in the country (obviously, regulating appearance and such of UIs should be limited to preventing outright hostile designs, let the designers make their art, but government provided stuff should be cohesive and match each other aesthetically). We spend a lot of time staring at screens. Governments should be regulating away negative aspects of those experiences and tools for our physical and mental health that only exist because someone is getting rich by frustrating us or causing health harm through intentionally inefficient technology.
Things will continue to get worse and people will continue to do fuck all about it
Weeks in decades, decades in weeks
What is to be done?
