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And the best part is, you're being downvoted for this.. I dunno, apparently a lot of HN thinks that it's impossible to believe that banks are generally run by

And the best part is, you're being downvoted for this.. I dunno, apparently a lot of HN thinks that it's impossible to believe that banks are generally run by bastards while simultaneously believing that 99% of these instances are completely voluntary and completely avoidable? If you keep track of what you're spending your money on, it's not a problem you're gonna have to ever deal with - and I say this as someone that's played this game with Wells Fargo in the past. But apparently, advocating for people to be responsible for their own actions is a radical and terrible thing nowadays.

outworlder 11y ago
Sure. For well-educated, silicon valley types with a resident accountant. You're missing out on the part that says that the poor (which many times goes with lack of basic education) are hit the most by these fees. Not to mention that overdraft fees are a ridiculous concept to begin with.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  I hope you're seriously not implying that it takes an accountant to know how you're spending your money. Every checking account you can walk into a bank and get provides you with a paper register...
danharaj 11y ago
It's probably because people usually grow out of the stage of political awareness where one imagines human beings to be atoms that aren't connected to one another. If you think that 'personal responsibility' or whatever allows you to judge someone as stupid, inferior, or deserving of misery, then you will have a bias that makes you see people as individuals cut off from all social and economic context because it gives you the most leverage to rationalize their misfortunes away. People are all connected and all economic relations are social relations. If you treat everyone without their social context, you're basically saying that every powerful individual or institution can make relations with them a minefield because all that matters is that it's their weaker counterparty's responsibility to avoid all the mines. After all, everyone 'consents' to a 'voluntary' exchange. How could 'voluntary' exchanges be bad??? Your worldview is just a very immature way to rationalize predatory institutions and hostile power structures. Actions cannot be judged as voluntary except in context. The context that people like you and the grandparent tend to take is, at best, one of the law or some insipid moral principles based off of a rancid individualism.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  You seem to know an awful lot about my worldview based on nothing more than a statement of the completely true fact that these wounds are almost entirely self-inflicted. "Minefield"? "Don't spend money you don't have available to spend, otherwise bad things will happen" is a principle that most people are taught as children. You seem to conflate the ideas of personal responsibility and the idea of deserving whatever gets thrown your way. We can talk about how crappy the idea of overdraft fees are all day long, but at the end of the day, it comes down to "doctor, it hurts when I do this", the response to which is "don't do that, then." The mechanism of the pain might be the result of a bad actor, but it's still your fault for inflicting it in the first place.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    Again, this sort of reasoning allows every institution to open the doors to maximize the chance that vulnerable people fail in order to capitalize on it. There are many, many, many more traps in the world than overdraft fees for vulnerable people to account for. Governments, banks, employers, etc. are all hostile towards people. Every detail you have to track in order to not get fucked is a liability The silence on your part on what responsibility our institutions have for the people they serve is deafening. What you don't say tells me as much about your worldview as what you did say. It's all boring as hell, trust me.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      A detail such as "don't spend money you don't have"? Violating that principle will get you into trouble in ways that go far beyond checking accounts. Are gun manufacturers to blame as some part of power structure when you point it at your foot and pull the trigger? If not, why?
      - danharaj 11y ago
        One would think a bank account were an instrument for storing and retrieving one's own money. Banks opted in customers to a system that would allow them to extract fees from people who work with low account balances. They exist. Furthermore, if you look around this post's comments you'll notice that banks do far more than just charge for overdrafting. They specifically optimize for extracting such fees and behave in an adversarial way. It is often difficult to know what balance one actually has unless one does all their accounting by hand. This is a ridiculous cognitive burden that people with ample account balances do not have to work with. Every institution acts adversarially in this way, because institutions operate to maximize their power as much as they can. It is not ridiculous to think that human institutions should be structured to serve people, not exploit them. > Are gun manufacturers to blame as some part of power structure when you point it at your foot and pull the trigger? If not, why? This is a stupid analogy. A better analogy would be, say, if you tried to withdraw money from your bank account, and if you overdraw, instead of rejecting the transaction, the ATM shoots you in the face. It doesn't even fucking matter. The point is that some humans with a lot of power optimize the extraction of resources from lots of humans with very little power. You think that's ok and that a society structured around humans being hostile and exploitive towards each other is a good thing, and I think that's objectionable.
jkestner 11y ago
Don't forget to read all your EULAs! Not everyone can afford to educate themselves on every consequence of every interaction with a corporation that is actively trying to obscure those consequences. I'm generally not ignorant, and I naively thought last week that if I transferred some money into a checking account on the same day that a payment was taking the balance below zero, I'd end up positive when the transactions were run at the end of the day. I got dinged $35.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  See, this is an instance of the bank clearly being a dick, for lack of a better term. The money was there, you were being responsible, you still got dinged. This is wrong. Now, how much do you want to bet that's not the case on some high-90s percentage of overdrafts? The comparison to EULAs is specious at best. It's not like it's some legalese small print buried halfway through a lengthy document - they're disclosed separately and prominently, in part, because they're legally forced to.
  - jkestner 11y ago
    I think the EULA comparison is valid because in my case, the rules that explain that behavior (perhaps a transfer from another bank may take "1-3 days to be accessible") are also probably written somewhere, but the overall amount of noise, added to the noise of my daily worries, means that I'm likely to miss it. I'm not going insert into the conversation a guess of what percentage of overdrafts are fair/unfair. I agree that many overdrafts are the exclusively fault of the account holder, but I tend to grant leeway when the bank has a general history of "being a dick."
fredkbloggs 11y ago
Well, I expected to be downvoted. This is one of the most heavily Progressivist boards on the entire Internet, so it goes without saying that this view is unpopular. And downvoting is much easier (and faster, and consequence-free) than arguing the facts, especially when they're not on your side. If I weren't willing to accept this, I wouldn't post here. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
darkmighty 11y ago
Not talking specifics here, but there's a point that people must be shielded from their own ignorance (or even plain stupidity). There are lots of things to know about, and many people simply won't ever know about them by pure chance. I believe the law should actually be maximally protective of individuals up to the point it starts severely compromising the flexibility of businesses or individuals. Doing any less is masochism in my opinion. For example, roads have guard rails in high traffic areas that mostly protect people from their stupidity -- you shouldn't speed near ledges otherwise; doing so would be stupid, and from then you could be small distraction away from death. It frees mental bandwidth and cuts transit times of travelers with little added cost. Nobody should have to suffer needlessly for poor decisions (not even taking into account most times it's just bad luck -- let's assume worst case it's just stupidity) if we can prevent it, and sometimes education won't work (not as fast as it should). I've been stupid quite a few times with regards to physical/career risks myself and have a few otherwise very bright friends make stupid decisions. If those were preventable they should be prevented. They are much more efficient ways of teaching than allowing very significant mistakes to be made. In particular, any safety mechanism for which if the majority of affected users post facto would agree upon can likely be put in place beneficially (which I would argue is the case for limiting overdraft fees). You can think about it as if instead of needing people to learn about the innumerable (and mounting) hazards of the systems around us, we can free mental bandwidth and create other systems that learn about the hazards and protects us so we don't have to worry about it.

outworlder 11y ago

Sure. For well-educated, silicon valley types with a resident accountant. You're missing out on the part that says that the poor (which many times goes with lack of basic education) are hit the most by these fees. Not to mention that overdraft fees are a ridiculous concept to begin with.

Karunamon 11y ago
I hope you're seriously not implying that it takes an accountant to know how you're spending your money. Every checking account you can walk into a bank and get provides you with a paper register...

danharaj 11y ago

It's probably because people usually grow out of the stage of political awareness where one imagines human beings to be atoms that aren't connected to one another. If you think that 'personal responsibility' or whatever allows you to judge someone as stupid, inferior, or deserving of misery, then you will have a bias that makes you see people as individuals cut off from all social and economic context because it gives you the most leverage to rationalize their misfortunes away. People are all connected and all economic relations are social relations. If you treat everyone without their social context, you're basically saying that every powerful individual or institution can make relations with them a minefield because all that matters is that it's their weaker counterparty's responsibility to avoid all the mines. After all, everyone 'consents' to a 'voluntary' exchange. How could 'voluntary' exchanges be bad??? Your worldview is just a very immature way to rationalize predatory institutions and hostile power structures. Actions cannot be judged as voluntary except in context. The context that people like you and the grandparent tend to take is, at best, one of the law or some insipid moral principles based off of a rancid individualism.

Karunamon 11y ago
You seem to know an awful lot about my worldview based on nothing more than a statement of the completely true fact that these wounds are almost entirely self-inflicted. "Minefield"? "Don't spend money you don't have available to spend, otherwise bad things will happen" is a principle that most people are taught as children. You seem to conflate the ideas of personal responsibility and the idea of deserving whatever gets thrown your way. We can talk about how crappy the idea of overdraft fees are all day long, but at the end of the day, it comes down to "doctor, it hurts when I do this", the response to which is "don't do that, then." The mechanism of the pain might be the result of a bad actor, but it's still your fault for inflicting it in the first place.
- danharaj 11y ago
  Again, this sort of reasoning allows every institution to open the doors to maximize the chance that vulnerable people fail in order to capitalize on it. There are many, many, many more traps in the world than overdraft fees for vulnerable people to account for. Governments, banks, employers, etc. are all hostile towards people. Every detail you have to track in order to not get fucked is a liability The silence on your part on what responsibility our institutions have for the people they serve is deafening. What you don't say tells me as much about your worldview as what you did say. It's all boring as hell, trust me.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    A detail such as "don't spend money you don't have"? Violating that principle will get you into trouble in ways that go far beyond checking accounts. Are gun manufacturers to blame as some part of power structure when you point it at your foot and pull the trigger? If not, why?
    - danharaj 11y ago
      One would think a bank account were an instrument for storing and retrieving one's own money. Banks opted in customers to a system that would allow them to extract fees from people who work with low account balances. They exist. Furthermore, if you look around this post's comments you'll notice that banks do far more than just charge for overdrafting. They specifically optimize for extracting such fees and behave in an adversarial way. It is often difficult to know what balance one actually has unless one does all their accounting by hand. This is a ridiculous cognitive burden that people with ample account balances do not have to work with. Every institution acts adversarially in this way, because institutions operate to maximize their power as much as they can. It is not ridiculous to think that human institutions should be structured to serve people, not exploit them. > Are gun manufacturers to blame as some part of power structure when you point it at your foot and pull the trigger? If not, why? This is a stupid analogy. A better analogy would be, say, if you tried to withdraw money from your bank account, and if you overdraw, instead of rejecting the transaction, the ATM shoots you in the face. It doesn't even fucking matter. The point is that some humans with a lot of power optimize the extraction of resources from lots of humans with very little power. You think that's ok and that a society structured around humans being hostile and exploitive towards each other is a good thing, and I think that's objectionable.

jkestner 11y ago

Don't forget to read all your EULAs! Not everyone can afford to educate themselves on every consequence of every interaction with a corporation that is actively trying to obscure those consequences. I'm generally not ignorant, and I naively thought last week that if I transferred some money into a checking account on the same day that a payment was taking the balance below zero, I'd end up positive when the transactions were run at the end of the day. I got dinged $35.

Karunamon 11y ago
See, this is an instance of the bank clearly being a dick, for lack of a better term. The money was there, you were being responsible, you still got dinged. This is wrong. Now, how much do you want to bet that's not the case on some high-90s percentage of overdrafts? The comparison to EULAs is specious at best. It's not like it's some legalese small print buried halfway through a lengthy document - they're disclosed separately and prominently, in part, because they're legally forced to.
- jkestner 11y ago
  I think the EULA comparison is valid because in my case, the rules that explain that behavior (perhaps a transfer from another bank may take "1-3 days to be accessible") are also probably written somewhere, but the overall amount of noise, added to the noise of my daily worries, means that I'm likely to miss it. I'm not going insert into the conversation a guess of what percentage of overdrafts are fair/unfair. I agree that many overdrafts are the exclusively fault of the account holder, but I tend to grant leeway when the bank has a general history of "being a dick."

fredkbloggs 11y ago

Well, I expected to be downvoted. This is one of the most heavily Progressivist boards on the entire Internet, so it goes without saying that this view is unpopular. And downvoting is much easier (and faster, and consequence-free) than arguing the facts, especially when they're not on your side. If I weren't willing to accept this, I wouldn't post here. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

darkmighty 11y ago

Not talking specifics here, but there's a point that people must be shielded from their own ignorance (or even plain stupidity). There are lots of things to know about, and many people simply won't ever know about them by pure chance. I believe the law should actually be maximally protective of individuals up to the point it starts severely compromising the flexibility of businesses or individuals. Doing any less is masochism in my opinion. For example, roads have guard rails in high traffic areas that mostly protect people from their stupidity -- you shouldn't speed near ledges otherwise; doing so would be stupid, and from then you could be small distraction away from death. It frees mental bandwidth and cuts transit times of travelers with little added cost. Nobody should have to suffer needlessly for poor decisions (not even taking into account most times it's just bad luck -- let's assume worst case it's just stupidity) if we can prevent it, and sometimes education won't work (not as fast as it should). I've been stupid quite a few times with regards to physical/career risks myself and have a few otherwise very bright friends make stupid decisions. If those were preventable they should be prevented. They are much more efficient ways of teaching than allowing very significant mistakes to be made. In particular, any safety mechanism for which if the majority of affected users post facto would agree upon can likely be put in place beneficially (which I would argue is the case for limiting overdraft fees). You can think about it as if instead of needing people to learn about the innumerable (and mounting) hazards of the systems around us, we can free mental bandwidth and create other systems that learn about the hazards and protects us so we don't have to worry about it.