The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Ecc 9:11
Bitcoin is good for the economy because it encourages spending. It's better than having a electricity as a resource and not using it. Miners buy equipment which is income to the producer. Also increases employment in the power plant and the factory producing the equipment.
The high interest rate is for the high risk. If anyone who could qualify for a lower interest rate, wouldn't go and borrow at the higher interest rate.
High interest is only for high risk when the lender is forgiving more of their loans. That's the risk - too much forgiving means they need to make up the difference with a higher rate for the fewer people who do pay it back.
The parent is arguing (correctly) that you can't have both high interest rate and a low/zero rate of loan forgiveness while claiming to be ethical.
Respectfully, zornado is correct and I'm not sure why he's being downvoted.
The market cannot operate without a free market for risk-taking and a free market for assessing confidence of repayment as expressed in interest rates. Borrowers are not entitled to money at a set interest rate in the private market (I would argue this should apply to the public market as well, or at least the markup through banks should be minimized). Saying "these interest rates are too high" is the credit market equivalent of saying "the price of this car is too high, give it to me cheaper".
The individual defaults if they file for bankruptcy. Until then the terms of the loan, voluntarily signed, determine an interest rate and an obligation to repay. The lender is not obligated to forgive a loan; if that were the case credit liquidity would be nonexistent. (IANAL)
> Another of these apps, Okash, took this logic of stigmatization even further, harvesting users’ contacts and calling bosses, parents, and friends to shame defaulters into repaying.
(emphasis mine)
This has nothing to do with free markets for risk-taking or confidence assessment. If you want markets like these to work well, you build them using information, not shame. Shame is a tool of last resort used by abusive lenders who are too lazy/stupid/corrupt to do their homework.
This is just another bog standard case of powerful actors abusing weaker ones. These lenders are targeting populations who don't have the knowledge or the resources to "correctly" default or file for bankruptcy, or to defend themselves against abuse when they do manage to do it correctly.
If the borrower defaults, the lender is supposed to stop hassling them and write off the loan. There are a whole bunch of other things they can do, but again, those things are not ethical.
That's treating delinquency and default as the same thing. Even if your debt isn't forgiven, if you repay late, then the present discounted value of that future money is worth less to the creditor than had it been paid on time.
Tala, Branch, and all these fintech firms are taking out debt themselves in order to lend to these individuals. Thus, they are paying interest. If you are late in your payments, they are floating you on their debt lines for longer.
Thus, even without loan forgiveness, a higher interest rate make sense to account for the risk if delinquency.
Secondly, even if they don't forgive the loan formally, internally it will eventually be taken as a writedown. You can default on a loan and they never get the money back without loan forgiveness existing. That again affects their rate of return and thus needs to affect their interest rate.
If instead they shouldn't be allowed to charge above a certain interest rate, then that will internet come with denying credit to a lot of the population.
People always want to have it both ways: don't discriminate against poor people by denying them credit but don't charge them the interest rates that are required to offer them credit. It's why people simultaneously complain about how sub-prime was predatory but also complain that the banks aren't doing enough to get low income people into home ownership. You can't have it both ways.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be regulation limiting the types of loans allowed, interest rates, etc. Uneducated people in developing countries are probably not the best rational actors when it comes to making complex financial decisions. Some regulatory paternalism (and even libertarian paternalism by the govt through forcing clearer information on loan terms) is definitely warranted.
My point is fundamentally you can't have it both ways. Interest rates are a reflection of risk. And the result would be denying people access to financial services. We should be honest ourselves about these tradeoffs instead of pretending we can simply have our cake and eat it too.
There is only so much philanthropy money from the Gates Foundation, World Bank, etc. The rest of the capital to fund development ultimately comes from the private sector wherein there must be a sufficient return on that capital to justify its use in that scenario. Otherwise, the capital will simply just go elsewhere.
And again there could be other solutions. A massive overhaul to tax policy worldwide could provide a massive new source of capital to solve the problems of economic development. But I'm not holding my breath for such changes in a world where the super rich have only become more adept at tax evasion.
Disclaimer: I worked in online lending at Avant. I know some of the Tala guys as I live in Santa Monica. And my wife works at the World Bank in international development.
The article mentions "...high rates of borrowing on weekend nights as evidence that loans are marketed and taken in moments of inebriated revelry."
Assuming that's true, and considering all the data these fintech operations are collecting, surely they can't believe they're funding development rather than consumption.
That makes some sense for the bank. But a person who doesn't qualify for low rates certainly shouldn't qualify for a high rares loan, as that only raises the risk.
The thing about python, as overall language philosophy, is convention over enforcement.
If you want your team to have a particular style and use certain features, then you should agree to do it and then use automated tools (like pep8, flake) to check that code complies with those rules, but it is up to you how you want to write the code.
Python 3 is typed. Not strongly typed but the point remains. Python is used in a lot of domains and I feel the strides the language has made over the past decade have made it very competitive and a worthy addition to any programmer's toolbox.
I've used Python a fair bit for a variety of semi-permanent or long scripts. I would have liked types more as well. Discovered MyPy after those instances.
It has a very nice strong typing add on in mypy. Highly recommended for a couple of years now. It’s technically optional but your CI process should take care of that.
I can't speak for all, but most vegan/vegetarians I know, myself included, don't view processed meat substitutes like this as a staple. They are expensive and seen as less healthy compared to less processed plant protein.
Meals more often revolve around beans, legumes, tofu, tempeh, seitan.
I think since many meat eaters are less familiar with cooking meals around these, they assume vegs are just subbing meat 1-to-1 with foods like Impossible Burger, Tofurkey, Quorn.
More often they are a food for convenience, special occasions like cookouts, specific recipes, or they happen to be the only option at a restaurant. Some I've known have used them as sort of an aid to transition to a plant based diet, if they happen to have cravings for meat.
However it's great to have more choices, and seeing brands like these in store gives more visibility to veg diets. (It's weird to me that this is the case, when the whole produce isle is vegan, but that's the way it is in a meat-by-default culture).
I'd put myself in the "want to eat less meat" bucket - I'm not a vegetarian. I eat meat, enjoy it, and don't have any health problems that preclude me from consuming it. I know farming meat at scale isn't good for the environment though, and if some kind of synthetics or lab-grown meats could provide the same enjoyment I get from traditional meat with less environmental impact at roughly the same cost, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Are you really not getting this, or just making straw men? "That's a huge win for the environment (and also animal rights)". The comment seems pretty clear to me.
If it's just straw men... nothing is black and white - the same people who say boo to "synthetic foods" (which is obviously a massive scale too) are not the same people who say "meat production is bad for long-term human survival". The issues are complex and overlap in weird ways.
Because it's better for the environment and health compared to what it's replacing(95% less land and 74% less water, plusmore humane). If people eating whole plant foods start eating this, it's not good, but if meat eaters do it's a win. And it's much more likely that way more meat eaters will use this as replacement.
The more processing a food stuff undergoes the more opportunity there is for it to be adulterated and/or contaminated.
Oftentimes it's not even intentional. e.g. An ingredient supplier from China delivers whey tainted with Cadmium, this gets mixed into a protein shake powder. Nowhere on the ingredients is Cadmium and the company producing protein shake powder had no intention whatever of producing Cadmium-laced shakes.
This type of thing has occurred multiple times quite publicly in pet foods. Contaminated cat food made from contaminated Chinese ingredients killed an ex coworker's cats years ago, if memory serves the contaminant was Melamine.
An effective means of protecting ourselves from these industrial errors is to avoid eating industrially manufactured foods altogether.
There was a case back in I believe it was the 80s where a red food dye was being derived from Coal tar. When the process worked flawlessly, there was no problem. But the dye was found to be carcinogenic, because the process, as one would expect, had a non-zero error rate. The public reaction to this news is what led to red M&Ms being deprecated for years, even though they supposedly didn't use the red dye in question. Which is the only reason I even know the story. I presume there are many instances of this kind of thing occurring that manage to fly under the radar.
Soylent was in the news fairly early on with contaminated China-sourced ingredients as well.
An even more recent incident has been chopped romaine lettuce as supplied to fast-food chains like Chipotle. Some supplier had contaminated heads with e.coli, the processor then spread the contamination to a much larger scale as they consolidated supplies from multiple farms, chopped it all up, then shipped it out.
By simply avoiding consumption of chopped lettuce, a minimal amount of processing, one significantly reduced the probability they would be exposed to the e.coli.
> By simply avoiding consumption of chopped lettuce, a minimal amount of processing, one significantly reduced the probability they would be exposed to the e.coli.
You seem to have an issue with globalization, not processing.
You seem to have an issue with reading comprehension, considering which sentence you specifically quoted.
What does globalization have to do with chopping lettuce on an industrial scale that disperses pathogens across massive batches?
It doesn't matter where the consolidated lettuce came from, the real problem is that it was processed.
Furthermore, in the example I'm referencing, which was thoroughly covered in the US news as the CDC got involved, we were dealing entirely with domestic suppliers from California and Arizona. But I don't see how that is relevant in the least. The problem is that the stuff was processed in aggregate.
> You seem to have an issue with reading comprehension
I don't want to have to link to the site guidelines, since I'm sure you're aware that this isn't a particularly nice thing to say :/
> What does globalization have to do with chopping lettuce on an industrial scale that disperses pathogens across massive batches?
Chopping the lettuce had nothing to do with E. Coli getting in it; the problem was that the lettuce came into contact with it after being picked. The reason why it ended up getting to a lot of people was because of improvements in transportation and preservation allowing it to be distributed further, not because it was processed.
The e.coli originated from an irrigation ditch getting contaminated by effluent from nearby livestock farms.
Processing expanded the contamination substantially increasing its reach to consumers, while also making it more difficult to narrow down which supplier had introduced the contamination.
From the consumer's perspective, by simply avoiding processed lettuce they significantly improved their chances of consuming untainted lettuce.
Highly processed foods are problematic when they’re unhealthy, which they usually are. The impossible burger seems to be healthy, relatively speaking - it’s not loaded with fats, sugar, and salt, unlike a lot of processed food.
People cheer while it's novel (like television, social media) but our children will hate it and feel cheated out of real nutrition by 'manufactured food'.
Or, quite possibly, since humanity's progress can't be stopped, our children will hate us once they open their eyes and realize who their favorite hot dogs and burgers were made out of and how we spoon fed them with corpses since their very first moments.
Edit: I believe that there's definitely a potential version of the future where corpse eating will be looked at the same way we look at cannibalism now.
The point you were making was clearly "we're feeding newborns dead 'corpses'", so I felt the need to make sure your appeal to emotion was at least somewhat factually correct.
