jfager

27 ms·

211.
by jfager 16y ago
The point about credit cards was made because it's advice given to middle class consumers. I assume if 30% is too high for people with money, it's even more so for people without. From the perspective of the business making the loans, of
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by jfager 16y ago
In this particular case, we're talking about an online service, so no unscrupulous employees to get ripped off by or physical dangers to navigate. They also claim to be using advanced models for approving borrowers, and putting in place a
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by jfager 16y ago
They offer a minimum loan term of 2 months, and I can't find anything saying you're allowed to pay it off early to avoid additional interest accrual.
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by jfager 16y ago
The interest rates are high because the risk is high. Many borrowers simply don’t pay the money back. So we should tolerate placing the burden of compensating for that risk on the poor people who do pay their loans back? It's somehow o
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by jfager 16y ago
I do dismiss those. First, ZestCash is charging a substantially lower APR than payday loan shops (280% versus 480%). You're cherry picking one of their lowest rates and putting it against the assumption that someone's going to roll a payd
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ZestCash is Not Good.(jasonfager.com)
243 points by jfager 16y ago|136 comments
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by jfager 16y ago
In my experience, the notion that "I should go to the casino to try to get out of this" is one of those things, as well. They're both reflections of the same underlying issue, the division between "I'm helpless" vs. "I can do something".
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by jfager 16y ago
Or: go to the courthouse to get on a payment plan or ask the judge to waive the ticket or let you perform community service. It's not like you're the only person ever who hasn't been able to pay a ticket, that scenario gets handled all th
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by jfager 16y ago
The question of whether FB as it exists now would abuse such a system (yes, of course they would, they're awful) is separate from the question of whether or not said system would make business sense for a gigantic social network. If FB were
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by jfager 16y ago
I have long wondered why Facebook doesn't do this. Group birthday gifts, wedding registries, basically any social scenario where money needs to change hands, it seems like FB would be so well positioned to take an honest buck from.
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by jfager 16y ago
there's no real reason to lie to a match question on OKCupid Depending on how much emphasis you're placing on "real", sure there is. You could be using it as a proxy to lie to yourself. You could be trying to convince OKCupid that you'r
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by jfager 16y ago
Now, imagine your logo was a cow, or a bicycle, do you think the logo would be recognizable in any form? regardless of how well it was designed? Your logo is supposed to create an association between an image and your company. If your lo
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by jfager 16y ago
Um, isn't that the point?
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by jfager 16y ago
I'm granting that miles driven or number of cars on the road could go up, maybe way up. I'm just guessing, subject to actually doing the math, that increased efficiency and assumptions of reasonable limits on how much latent demand is actu
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by jfager 16y ago
How is that not a system failure? Because the car has some kind of intent? Well, we have an analogue for that today, too: who gets punished when a dog attacks someone? I'm not saying there are no details to work out. I'm just saying tha
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by jfager 16y ago
Like I said, you'd have to do the math. It's very possible that's true. But it's not a certainty. People have a limit on how much they want to drive regardless of how easy it is. After all, the store itself will still suck when everyone
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by jfager 16y ago
Some cars out today have automated emergency braking systems. There are also assisted cruise control systems that use a variety of techniques for maintaining a safe distance from the car ahead of you, even in low-visibility situations, and
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by jfager 16y ago
We deal with that issue today. Who is liable when brakes fail? It's usually determined on a case-by-case basis. Why would this system be any different?
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by jfager 16y ago
Because an automated system would be less prone to congestion, and the average time for travel would go way down. You'd have to do the math to find the break-even point, but I'd imagine that you could add many more cars into an optimally f
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by jfager 16y ago
Google currently hires people to drive their streetview cars. They could save a significant amount by automating that collection process. Beyond not having to pay drivers, you also don't have to have vehicles designed to keep their occupa
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by jfager 16y ago
All of that is fine, I agree, but his statement was stronger than "minimalism might cost more if you do it a certain way", it was "saving money is not a legitimate motivation for minimalism". The latter is what I disagree with. This is run
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by jfager 16y ago
A minimalist lifestyle can have many legitimate motivations. Sanctimonious anti-consumerism isn't one of these, nor is saving money. Why not? A minimalist lifestyle can save a ton of money. I have a year-long runway to work on whatever
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by jfager 16y ago
I'm not outraged that people can do that with email because I know how email works at a technical level, and I'm comfortable trading that control for a standard decentralized communication medium that I understand the implications of. I
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by jfager 16y ago
You get a notification when added to a group Any thoughts, then, on what Calacanis meant when he said "I was never informed that I was 'force-joined' to the NABLA group."? Was he just mistaken? Groups are private by default Okay, that'
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by jfager 16y ago
I left Facebook after their feature rollout at the beginning of the summer, so I can't check these things for myself. Do you really not receive notification when someone adds you to a group? If not, how is it easy to leave, given that you
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by jfager 16y ago
I haven't seen them used much in any of the open source Java projects I'm familiar with, I agree. We used them fairly extensively at my previous job, though, for implementing a mix-in pattern for boilerplate-free service endpoints, and the
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by jfager 16y ago
When I work with Java or C#, I accept this kind of code duplication as a fact of life. Java has had dynamic proxies since 1.4. As long as you're working with interfaces, you can do the exact same thing as the example given in this post.
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by jfager 16y ago
Why does .io seem legally risky to you? The British Indian Ocean Territory is currently a British protectorate, and the two countries that otherwise claim the islands are Mauritius and the Seychelles, both of which are peaceful and democra
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by jfager 16y ago
Oracle's lawsuit contained patent claims and a copyright claim. The parts that the parent comment is quoting refer to the copyright claim.
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by jfager 16y ago
That was in response to the complaint that the post looked at images of the same size and compared their quality, rather than looking at images of the same quality and comparing their size. If you know of a practical way to objectively do

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