Seems like a total misrepresentation of what the critics to the left said about it, and like you're trying to pull a "both sides do it" / "the truth is in the middle" act without substance.
For example the Los Angeles DSA argues that SB827 would not have even lowered rents [0] and would have worsened housing for poor families. You can disagree with that, but that is absolutely not the same as it "not being good enough".
So that's the problem. No plan is going to be perfect. Better remains the enemy of good enough and I think this would have been a really good start. Note that the rebuttal posted here demands the repeal of Costa Hawkins. Doing so would strip all homeowners of the right to evict renters from their own home. Please tell me how that helps any homeowner whatsoever. Or if you don't care about homeowners (in which case why should they care about renters?), please tell me why California would be a better place by doing that to every single homeowner in the state?
I personally think you need to build bridges not tear them down and there's a lot we can agree on when it comes to California infrastructure
But if you're going to veto everything that's imperfect, IMO you're just perpetuating and exacerbating the existing situation. I suspect SB827 will be back next year because the hyperbole (from the left BTW not both sides in this case) about Scott Wiener being a closet Republican was absurd and it took an insane degree of cherry picking of his voting record to make that case.
I read that ~54% of homeowners vote as opposed to ~28% of renters. I think the proposition to repeal Costa Hawkins is really going to bring out the vote here and the numbers are not on the side of renters. I note also that the cost of California Home Ownership is just not all that high once you get out of the major cities. I had to give a talk at UC Merced a couple months back and I was really tempted to immediately move there and buy a mcmansion for the price of a single room condo in SF.
Finally, this could have been a wonderful opportunity to put an additional proposition out there that we could all agree on. Too bad we're so busy fighting with each other while the other side of the political fence slowly assimilates power.
It’s just a regressive position on diversity masquerading as being a reasonable progressive one. Take something that’s easier to fix from a centralized location, and instead argue for individual responsibility. Like how instead of complaining about oil companies destroying the environment and corrupting our political system, we should all just recycle and buy Teslas, like a buncha radicals or something :)
I think sure, do what you can at an individual level if you want but that’s so much less important. You’re not gonna change the household conversations happening in millions of houses, and telegraphing what YOU are doing for your daughters in Silicon Valley is more narcissistic than political.
Depends. In my view you can be all for diversity but at the same time not deliberately attempt to achieve an underrepresentation of a particular group.
I went one step further and made myself an FF extension to blank out any links to Medium (and other useless sites) from any page. I forget they exist until I come across one of the countless posts complaining about the suck. Or I realise the reason images and other content arent showing is because it's a custom domain hosted by medium, then they get added to the list.
Advice for SF people: Stop talking about changing the god damned world when what you're actually working on is a middleman payment processor. You sound like your head is planted so far up into your ass you can see daylight again.
E: Just to point out what I actually believe so I’m not just doing a drive-by insult - let capitalism and self interest be just that, like how a pizza delivery guy or payday loan provider probably isn’t deluding themselves about making an impact. Leave talk of societal impact to actual politics.
I agree with you in theory but I feel that Stripe is an exception in that they have made it vastly easier for people to start businesses that will change the world.
Related to this is the talk the founder of Asana gave at Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. If you can make the people that are on the front lines of doing good a bit more efficient then you are doing good yourself.
> payday loan provider probably isn’t deluding themselves about making an impact
Having worked at a YC-backed alternative to payday lender (https://www.//lendup.com) and having spent a lot of the time in the call center listening to our customers, I'd suggest that a lender to folks without access to credit can have much more impact than you could possibly imagine. Being able to instantly inject $500 into the bank account of someone that needed it for a car repair or they'd lose their job when they couldn't get it elsewhere was only one of the many, many examples. Now multiply that by hundreds of thousands of customers, and the impact is not trivial by any measure.
Taking something that is incredibly painful and making it a delight at scale is a beautiful thing, almost no matter how trivial that thing is. I'm reminded of when Steve Jobs forced the Apple team to shave 30 seconds off of the startup time, because multiplied by the number of people who use Apple devices it's the equivalent of years in aggregate.
I love that there are thousands of companies trying to change the world by making the one thing they work on absolutely perfect. It's a great thing.
>Having worked at a YC-backed alternative to payday lender (https://www.//lendup.com) and having spent a lot of the time in the call center listening to our customers, I'd suggest that a lender to folks without access to credit can have much more impact than you could possibly imagine. Being able to instantly inject $500 into the bank account of someone that needed it for a car repair or they'd lose their job when they couldn't get it elsewhere was only one of the many, many examples. Now multiply that by hundreds of thousands of customers, and the impact is not trivial by any measure.
This is exactly the mindless "head-in-ass" crap the OP was talking about. You're not helping that person by lending them $500 at 400%+ APR [0]. You are trapping them into a debt cycle they will most likely never recover from until default. Subprime lending is a predatory practice which has been around forever, no matter how you flip it. It is legal under our system though, so you're more than welcome to do it and profit from people's financial ignorance. Just don't try to pretend like you're helping anybody.
Yes, clearly I just don't understand the complex problems they are tackling. I'm certainly not calling them out on being shady and awful like every other payday lender since forever [0].
A few takeaways from their most recent CFPB fine of $6 million :
>"Misled consumers about graduating to lower-priced loans"
>"Hid the true cost of credit"
>"Reversed pricing without consumer knowledge"
>"Understated the annual percentage rate"
>"Failed to report credit information"
It's honestly sad how weak the CFPB is, but at least it's something. This entire industry is a stain on humanity.
Yes, I was there for all that. I am incredibly proud to call myself a LendUpper and I have no regrets.
All of that stuff was either done on accident when the company was a small handful of people or is pretty innocuous (we got in trouble for not displaying on our advertising that the rate may differ from the imaginary icon we showed, which displayed one of the possible rates based on how much money you took out. Or getting nailed for trying to give people a discount if they promised early repayment and not giving the discount if they didn't pay in advance).
Literally any company that had that regulatory weight on it would have the same number of things the CFPB could go after if they could, but no one else is trying to play by the rules and just operate out of sovereign nations.
To translate what was just said: payday lenders do, in fact, delude themsleves into thinking they are making an impact. It’s always the same material about “helping people in their time of need”.
But the point isn’t about the immediate impact on people’s lives at the moment of funding ... rather the longer impact during the time that they will hold the debt, and the high interest cost to those who can afford it least. Multiply that into man-years per your Steve Jobs anecdote! ️(smh)
There’s a reason usury is illegal, and why payday lenders have to pair with sovereign nations and shady legal structures, and why google won’t even list you, etc.
shame.
But oh no. I’ve just bad-mouthed a YC company on HN! Here comes dang!!
Lending to subprime borrowers is hard, because there's high default. Most payday lenders solve for that by having those that don't pay enter into a cycle of more and more loans that compounds.
You know what LendUp does if a customer doesn't pay? It just stops, and tries to get you to pay back the original loan. No more compounding.
That's a big difference. I you think charging $30 total interest for an instant $200 loan to someone with bad/no credit is evil and doesn't make a difference, you probably don't understand the realities of what people would have to do if LendUp weren't there.
LendUp is run legally as a licensed lender in California. The shady legal structures in native american nations is what they're fighting. I'm damn proud to have spent a couple of years trying to solve it.
> LendUp is run legally as a licensed lender in CA.
Okay? ... every company has the same licenses. CashNetUSA, Quickloans, Captain America Loans, and hundreds of other companies. Including even most with the shady legal structures, based in Malta, etc. Google won’t list the Deleware ones either. Advertising platforms don’t like them. Cities don’t like them. Regulators watch them closely and frequently press charges.
> I’m damn proud to have spent a couple of years trying to solve it.
Look this is probably going to seem uncivil, but given the poor ethics of what you are talking about, I have no qualms shaming.
I spent a few years founding a payday business. Ultimately, despite having the same “forgiveness” policies and “innovative” loan structures, and telling myself all the same junk you are telling yourself (CFSA PR propaganda) I couldn’t bring myself to treat poor people like a crop to be harvested. You know that forgiveness or not, the majority of borrowers are repeats, and that there is a huge incentive to maximize this. Essentially, people use you instead of a bank.
There is no escaping that this means you are in the business of siphoning 10% off of an already poor person’s wages on an ongoing basis, and that’s without compounding. (Sounds like 15% by your numbers)
Do you really feel good that you did this? You drank some silicon valley koolaid, worked as someone else’s employee and harvested poor people? And then acted as the company’s mouthpiece afterward? Because you want to feel congruent with your resume?
Before you say I don’t know blah blah about LendUp ... hear this: A great many Payday companies came before LendUp, attempting the PR of being “ethical” and “innovative”, with the same practices. And by far they have not been the last. They’re all still in the business of fleecing at least 10% off of the people who can afford it least. There’s always money in stealing from the poor. The only innovative thing they did was to con YC. (hi)
Do not deceive yourself or others. It is not an honorable business. It is a called a VICE INDUSTRY for a reason, and you guys didn’t do anything to “solve” it (by your own admission of the word “trying”).
I know ... you want to stand by what you did, but if I were you, I would put that one in the rear view.
I have a serious medical condition. I was sexually abused as a child. I spent nearly 6 years homeless.
The last thing I want is someone trying to "rescue" me. I've spent enormous amounts of time trying to figure out how to solve some really hard problems without approaching it as charity and rescuing other people.
For example, I am trying to start a program to help homeless people and others with barriers to regular employment start making money online, even if it is only in dribs and drabs. I do what I can to advocate for more development of market-rate, inexpensive housing rather than "homeless programs" per se. I want to see the fabric of society change such that we have less homelessness. I absolutely don't want to see more Big Feels (TM) efforts to Help The Homeless because that almost always means giving them temporary relief that often actively helps keep them stuck and then expecting them to grovel in gratitude.
Having thought about this a whole, whole lot, I think good business models are the single best way to make the kind of civilizing impact I desire to see.
We need more Ghandis, who taught India financial self sufficiency as the antidote to being Britain's bitch, not more Jesus Christ Superstars, who at this point is a meme of "the only good man is a dead man who died a martyr." I assume that was what the world needed 2000 years ago. But I would like to see less charity and more healthy fabric of society that makes the lives of ordinary people work better without them having to prove they have some problem that merits positive intervention of some sort.
I"m fine if people feeling like their vision will "change the world" is the motivation they need to put themselves through the hell that starting a company can be. I'm extra fine if that framing has them thinking in terms of "How does this genuinely improve the lives of people and not just milk them for money to line our pockets?"
That's the magic of the whole setup. When you present the situation as "making the world a better place", it's easier to swallow ethical transgressions and other illegal or immoral behaviors (Uber is a great example of this)
My favorite is how if you check out any oil companies website, pretend you knew nothing about them and you’d think they were green peace by the messaging on their site.
The most basic form of this is undermining or exploiting a group of people as your core business model, and then donating a small portion to charities that help that same group. Or even better, the ceo’s unrelated pet cause, an astroturf group, or a foundation where they hire family members as a way to skirt gift taxes.
Compassionate capitalism is lovely ;)
It’s absolute bullshit that you assume you know so much about me from browsing my web presence
I didn’t ask for an apology and what I said about my life is true. You seem to have some kind of complex about class where you feel you need to make a point but without actually expressing anything of significance. I am not at all trying to prove any kind of point about what your class background means or doesn’t mean. I made a very clear comment and you replied snarkily with assumptions about what my background might be. And I replied that you are wrong, which is true.
What are you trying to get at? What is your point? It looks like you want to be an asshole unless I can somehow prove I am the poorest kid from the roughest situation still posting on hacker news. But all you’re posting is pithy bullshit.
What did you expect? That I had a website that says “I am very poor, please donate money to me?” Or maybe “I am a tough SOB from the hood that made it good at google and now i’m a crypto millionaire who boxes in my spare time to drown out the aggressive tendencies I acquired in my youth”?
Keep in mind they literally have 0 accusers, and when the women they worked with were interviewed they all had 0 complaints, and even at the time of publishing the book was categorized as satire. The name "The Exile", IIRC, refers to the fact they were a satire of the piece of shit Americans that Ames and Taibbi witnessed coming to Russia as the USSR was falling in order to ravage the country in its moment of weakness.
Next let's confront Steven Colbert on his past as a right wing nutjob.
For example the Los Angeles DSA argues that SB827 would not have even lowered rents [0] and would have worsened housing for poor families. You can disagree with that, but that is absolutely not the same as it "not being good enough".
0: https://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827