LogFAQs > #955957356

Reigning_King posted...

Clearly my insight has caused so much cognitive dissonance within you that you couldn't understand my post. Credit cards have nothing to do with mortgages, at least not directly, but it's all part of the same financial system designed to exploit most while truly benefiting few. People in the states call the social credit system China is implementing ridiculous and dystopian, while participating in an even more dystopian system that they can't even recognize since it has been in place for so long here and they've been conditioned to accept it as normal.

Imagine being denied a job or housing you're qualified for or can prove you can pay for just because you haven't borrowed enough money from the banks and lived life consuming more than you need. You don't have to imagine it, since that's actually how it is.

I like that you respond to me criticizing your weird rant with another weird rant. iirc, your credit rating has limited impact on hiring and it's more a matter if you have bankruptcies in your personal history. As for buying a home, obviously credit SHOULD directly factor into that because they have to look at some loans to determine how good of a prospect you are for other loans, but you can buy a home without a loan, so that's technically irrelevant. Even with apartments, you can just pay upfront at the start of a term to get around that.

adjl posted...

Credit cards are able to offer those benefits because of people that are sucked into their system that rack up interest payments. Certainly, it's not that hard to avoid ever paying interest on credit cards (by basically treating them as a debit card with an extra step and paying down any balance you accumulate before your statement is due), but the entire model is designed to prey on people that lack the impulse control, financial planning ability, or financial stability to stick to that process. If it weren't, it wouldn't be profitable enough to be worth offering the service, let alone offering it with all of the added benefits that you're enjoying.

They make money on the transactions themselves, not just on the interest payments from those transactions. And some of the tangible benefits have nothing to do with their ability to "afford" the benefit, but more to do with their strength -- such as you have greater protections because they can chargeback retailers who can't do shit. And it's actually worse than that for the retailer, because they can impose additional fees on retailers who have excessive chargebacks at which point the retailer struggles with profitability.

Other benefits like airline miles cost them basically nothing. It's just the cashback that takes from their pocket, because they're giving money back to the consumer.

However, and much more importantly, most credit cards are embedded within other companies *because* those companies want to avoid suffering transaction fees. As for the profits they make on interest, keep in mind they also lose money on non-payments.

Reigning_King posted...

Housing prices are way too fucking high anyways because of artificial scarcity

What?

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There are precious few at ease / With moral ambiguities / So we act as though they don't exist.