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> its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little
by dwedge 1y ago
> its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.
- kstrauser 1y agoI don’t make it a habit to curse out loud at my phone as I read things, but this did it for me.
- throwaway173738 1y agoIt’s like a bunch of apes took over our society and worked as hard as possible to make everything as cruel as possible for no particular reason.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- y0eswddl 1y agoyou can convince people to give up anything as long as it's in service of punishing "the bad ones"
- Vera_Wilde 1y agoHah! Yeah, the bonobo/chimp contrast shows it’s not an inevitability. We just optimized for the wrong equilibrium.
- Jensson 1y agoThe difference between bonobos and chimps are genetics and not culture, you can't train chimps to live like bonobos and vice versa. Us humans still has the genes that made us conquer and enslave the whole world, every single human culture that has ever existed enslave and murder animals, as we needed to do that to survive. You ain't gonna change those genes, so we just have to do the best we can with the genes we have and our genes are like Chimpanzees in that we want to murder and eat and exploit others, without that humans didn't get b12 and died out, so all our ancestors lived that way.
- dijit 1y agoFarming is an invention, the majority of human history was spent without farming of any kind, something like 80% of human history was in the hunter/gatherer phase. We should not underestimate the fact that where we excel is that we are better at passing off information to our offspring. This makes improvement over long periods possible as we can build off the backs of our ancestors.
- computerthings 1y ago[dead]
- abnercoimbre 1y agoHN folks ought to watch Good Fortune ft. Keanu Reeves [0]. Still out in theaters. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKWndx83RwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKWndx83RwQ
- GPurePro 1y agoNot even on my radar. Thanks looks like a good time
- the-mitr 1y agoThanks for the reco
- abustamam 1y agoIt looks like a good movie and in looking forward to its arrival on streaming but I'm curious the relevance of it to parent comment.
- abnercoimbre 1y agoCuriosity denied; it would spoil the plot!
- hippo22 1y ago[flagged]
- smallmancontrov 1y ago> If it could easily fetch more money, it would have been bid higher than £50. You know that isn't true. Auctions are noisy and poorly conducted auctions are worse. This is about some combination of sadism and negligence.
- djtango 1y agoOh hohoho but that would imply that the auction is inefficient and so surely rational actors would descend upon these auctions thereby converging this discount onto the true fair value of things. Heaven forbid we admit that markets are not comprised of spherical chickens and that disconnects exist...
- hippo22 1y agoAgain, the debtor could have sold the bike themselves and they didn't. Bidders could have recognized the bike's value but they didn't. This is a story about OP overvaluing a bike and nothing else.
- dwedge 1y agoI get your point but there are more factors at play here that you might not be aware of. The debt in question was council tax, every household in the UK pays this at a monthly rate, something like £140 a month. But what most people don't know is that these monthly payments are technically a "gesture of goodwill" from the council, and if you are late for a payment they will really quickly take it to court and send bailiffs for the full yearly amount so you're looking at £1500 plus court fees plus bailiff fees for attending immediately. Easily £2000 from missing £150. Next another little known fact - if you don't let the bailiffs in, they can't take anything. They can come back with the police if you let them in once. However they can levy on things that are outside, like a vehicle. So that's what happened here, and once they levy on the vehicle you are not legally allowed to sell it if you sign the levy. So the debtor in all likelihood ended up in this situation very quickly and could not sell the motorbike himself once the bailiff visited. As for the over valuation, I give you that but only in a very specific scenario - for the market where they sold it. Now as for why they sold it so cheap, why would they care? They only care about their fees. It they can visit three times by only pretending to knock on the door and charge three times, they will. When it came to this motorbike, they got paid the fees for selling it, the auctioneer got their fee, and nobody involved had motivation to market it. We're not talking ebay or well marketed property auctions here. In fact, the bailiff now gets to go back to tell them the debt isn't cleared and charge them for this visit as well.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoSpeaking with conservatively minded friends on this subject, they just shrug it off, smug in the knowledge that if they were in that situation they would immediately be able to pull themselves out of it. The fact that other people don't just do that is because they make poor decisions and therefore its all about 'personal responsibility'. There really is no convincing them otherwise.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- abustamam 1y agoI was chatting with a buddy about this. Older, libertarian fellow. He was in this situation, several times. And he was able to pull himself out of it. That was all the "proof" he needed to be against helping the poor, because if he could do it, anyone could do it.
- qingcharles 11mo agoI was talking to a conservative chap the other day during the SNAP crisis and he was foaming at the mouth that SNAP needed to be abolished. I asked him what to do about the people with disabilities who couldn't work. He told me he knew personally of two people born without arms or legs who have factory jobs earning $45/hour and have no need of SNAP and therefore anyone disabled who was claiming SNAP was a scammer. And if they really are that disabled, he went on, then their family should be taking care of them and not the state. p.s. this person has also never paid taxes in his entire life because "government is a scam"