The contract you agree to for credit cards or other forms of debt you choose to take on will specify things like late fees and that it's up to the company's discretion whether they report you a late payment to the agencies. If they didn't have this clause, you'd just be complaining that they report everyone indiscriminately rather than giving people a break when it seems appropriate.
> The contract you agree to for credit cards or other forms of debt you choose to take on will specify things like late fees and that it's up to the company's discretion whether they report you a late payment to the agencies. If they didn't have this clause, you'd just be complaining that they report everyone indiscriminately rather than giving people a break when it seems appropriate.
Thanks for making ridiculous assumptions and putting nonsense in my mouth. Nobody opined on anything in the first place. I was merely asking a legal question, because calling someone to demand an immediate payment to avoid direct harm to them sounds an awful lot like extortion, whether I like the approach or not.
If you want to know whether I'm impossible to satisfy or whether I think the company could in fact cut people slack while getting their $15 and avoiding potential extortion, you could just ask me. Yes, I think that's perfectly possible. Call the person up, tell them you'll waive the credit report if they make a payment by the end of the day, and optionally remind them that according to their contract, there is a $15 fee if they pay by phone. There. Now the person gets to spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it to make an informed decision. No need to put nonsense in my mouth.
But you're putting nonsense in the creditor's mouth. You don't know what the conversation was like, you only have the summary of one person who feels wronged.
All I did was I took the story at face value and asked a legal question without saying anything else about anyone. You felt I was somehow "putting nonsense in the creditor's mouth". OK, so why make a ridiculous response instead of just telling me I should wait to hear the other side's story? Or even better, maybe asking what I was thinking in the first place instead of putting your own nonsense in my mouth?
Large financial organizations have teams of analysts whose entire job is to relate consumer information, such as credit scores, to statistical outcomes. If the credit scores weren't giving them useful information, that would show up rather quickly.
That was something subtly different. The banks more or less knew they were taking poor risks, the problem is it wasn't their risk to take. They quietly packaged these bad mortgages along with others and resold the mess to less sophisticated investors (like pension plans). Then the bubble burst, the well dried up, and banks started collapsing. It wasn't a mismanagement of risk, it was criminal fraud writ large.
I would argue that credit bureaus leaking all your information to criminals and then charging you money to protect you from those criminals is also criminal fraud writ large.
We've established that sufficiently advanced fraud can overcome the ability of organizations to vet the info that’s given to them. If the credit bureaus are actually organizations dedicated to fraud, then the fact that many other organization fall for it doesn’t tell us too much about their accuracy.
If Osama bin Laden's ghost appears to you and says "There will not be a terrorist attack in New York tomorrow.", and then there is, and this repeats a few times, the fact that his statement is, facially, a lie, and the fact that he can't even exist doesn't matter. You have an input that correlates with a certain output. The intent of the person who provided you the input, or even how nonsensical you think the input is, doesn't change its statistical usefulness.
They didn't. Pension plans and individual investors are not sophisticated financial organizations. They rely on those that are to do their job in a non-fraudulent manner. They didn't.
Committed or were complicit in the fraud and got in too deep to recover from the inevitable crash. This has all been widely and loudly reported on for a decade. There's a reason people are pissed that the executives who ran these institutions into the ground and fucked up the economy were barely prosecuted.
I'm sorry, but is the reason that Equifax isn't in the same class as these guys because Equifax was totally upstanding, never cut corners or fudged numbers and were absolutely upfront when this security breach happened? Because if that's so then I'm curious about the breach they detected three month prior that they tried to cover up.
Equifax is just as shady as those lenders - more so IMO because they have absolutely no obligation or business relationship directly with the individual's whose private data they compromised.
So in addition to the info being valid or the organization evaluating it being too stupid to evaluate it correctly, we also have the possibility that these organizations are involved or complicit in the fraud.
Why am I supposed to take it as a given that if these organizations use the info it must be useful, then?
If it's not, they're wasting money for no reason, and someone will come along and do the same thing without giving the credit bureaus any money. They're not actually legally obliged to use credit bureau data. They could just throw money at people in the street and hope they get confused and throw back more.
A bank isn't an individual who is lending his own money. It is an organization that lends other people's money and needs a veneer of justifications for the choices they make, and credit reporting agencies are a perfect choice. You mentioned earlier that banks have statistical teams making these analyses, but most simply don't because that provides counter-information that undermines the whole value of credit reporting agencies (which is that they outsource the politically fraught choices and makes it easy to say "well we just followed their ratings, just like everyone else").
Regarding the subprime crisis, the biggest victims were the largest banks -- the most sophisticated being put completely out of business -- so not sure what the bit about pension plans comes from (many of those made a lot of money on it).
Credit scores change constantly. What your 80 point drop told creditors is "This person might not have enough money to pay their bills, or is careless or forgetful.". You are perceived as higher risk because, statistically, you are a higher risk. Those of us who maintain excellent credit do it in part by making sure our money gets where it's supposed to. I check online to make sure payments post, or hand in payments in person, or call in the rare case these days when there's no other way to check.
Fortunately, credit scores usually recover rather quickly from one-off delinquencies if you stay current afterward. And I bet you'll be paying more attention to your bills now, won't you?
The credit score is doing exactly what it's supposed to.
I was surprised how much they change constantly, for silly things like how much balance you have on your credit cards.
My wife & I both have excellent credit scores, and we pay all of our bills in full every month. Nevertheless, I've noticed a ~50 point swing in credit scores from month-to-month, all dependent on whether airline tickets, furniture, or charitable contributions happened to make it onto this month's bill. Our debt-to-liquid-assets ratio is something like 0.1%, so there's never any real risk of not having money to pay it off, but of course the credit bureaus don't have information about our assets, so they evaluate us against what other people our age have, which (being Millenials) is not very much.
Knowing how the system works, we can take steps to game it, like not putting any major purchases on credit card in the 3-6 months before getting a mortgage. But still, it's slightly ridiculous that something that's supposed to measure your creditworthiness can swing so much over short time periods.
It's not that weird. If your score is, say, 750, 50 points is about a 7 percent change. My finances very easily vary 7% from month to month!
50 points also isn't likely to make much difference, especially if your score is already good. Loans basically go off tables. Essentially if you're between A and B, you get this rate for this losan, C and D gets this rate, etc.
Once you're past 700, you're already getting good interest rates and banks will fall over themselves to loan you money if your income supports the loan size. When I was at 780, the loan officer couldn't give me a lower rate on a mortgage - I was already getting a fraction of a percent over prime.
You can eliminate credit score swings by never generating a credit card statement with a balance. You can do this by paying your card off prior to the statement date.
I spend between $1000-$2000 on credit cards a month and collectively I generate statements with less than $10 spread across 4 cards. My credit score is rock solid from month to month.
If you have six figures of liquid assets (what 0.1% debt vs liquid assets implies) this should be no problem at all.
We usually just set all our cards on autopay-in-full and forget about it. Is there a way to have them autopay before the statement date, or do you need to proactively check every month and make a payment right before the statement date?
It's worth remembering that an important aspect of your score is your value as a customer. Risk is one element. Carrying a balance gives you more value than if you never carry a balance.
This is an oft passed around urban legend, but it's not true. You can try for yourself by opening up a free CreditKarma account and seeing what happens if you zero out all your balances.
I'd take that with an entire shaker of salt; you are assuming CreditKarma knows the FICO formulas. Even the prediction engines used by the actual credit bureaus are notoriously unreliable at telling you what will happen given a particular change in inputs. Probably not accidental, they don't want to expose the algorithm.
Foisting responsibility onto customers with more important things to worry about, rather than into organizations whose only purpose is to keep track of these things?
It is not my job to go out and manage my customer's finances and take their credit cards or write myself checks from their accounts, and I'd be quite rightly arrested for theft if I tried.
Ah, but there is no indication they didn't. What happened is that the check was sent, but did not arrive. In other words, the customer and his agent (the postal service, probably) in the exchange did not fulfill their job of getting the money to the business. That is not something the business can control, and if you try to make it their responsibility, they will simply start refusing payment by mail, since it would be a constant and high level source of fraud.
Ah, you may be right, but even that still makes the report valid.
Let me tell you what I hear as a business person if you tell me my letter to you was misdelivered: "My mail delivery is unreliable so it's your problem."
Well, no, you didn't tell me it was unreliable, so I couldn't adjust my risk perception or take special precautions. And if you ever want to do business with me again, you're going to come in and execute the transaction on site and not leave with the goods until the bank confirms it's cleared.
On top of which, most billing contracts specify that payment is due whether or not you were notified. You are supposed to keep track, too.
And yes, this is okay, because until we have a proper socialist system, it is, in fact, our responsibility to pay our debts. Don't like it? Don't incur debts.
As a business person, you’d put a customer through the wringer for one missed payment due to communication problems? I hope you have a monopoly in whatever market you serve, because otherwise that’s a great way to lose all of your customers.
Anyway, we’re back to making it the responsibility of the customer with a thousand more important things to think about, rather than of the business that’s dedicated to the stuff.
And if you think it should be that way, great. But it’s obvious to me that it is that way because of the power imbalance, not because it’s right.
If the customer is using it as an excuse, yes I would. They’re trying to weasel out of their responsibilities, responsibilities they almost certainly incurred voluntarily.
If you don’t make payments as agreed, your credit score goes down. If you do, it goes up, and will soon recover from the perfectly reasonable dip it took from your mistake. It’s pretty simple.
So if the customer's cheque doesn't get to you, that's the customer's fault, but if your letter doesn't get to the customer, that's also the customer's fault?
If you don't pay your bills, I think it's entirely reasonable for businesses to tell each other about that so you don't defraud them out of a lot of money.
>the entire banking
system promotes systematic moral hazards and has lowered the purchasing power of stagnating wages for most people
"Why are people defaulting on their bills!?"
The whole notion of transfer of majority responsibility to an individual is one of the slimiest things in this society. We get monitored by an array of hidden surveillance measures and algorithimic judgement we have no way to properly counter or defend ourselves against. Meanwhile central credit gets to borrow money and get bailed out.
This isn't complicated. You incur a debt, you pay it. If you can't, people aren't going to want to do business with you, and will quite reasonably refuse.
You are trying to make everyone else responsible for my finances and I'd damn well thank you to stop, since they're mine.
I understand that clearly. But clearly there are classes of institutions and people who...
1. Make a mockery of prudent allocation of money and get bailed out when their games get messed up
2. Mess up the purchasing power of any money you possess far more than any individual defaults or even class of individual defaults
3. Impose grave and hidden responsibilities on individual borrowers and mass surveillance...
They are messing up your finances far more than the most reckless individual borrowers ever could. *
PS - How is finance going to deal with the multitrillion dollar pension bomb? With prudence or with a combination of a game of musical chairs and chickens until stuff gets serious? How is your financial discipline, as an individual, going to protect you from manmade tsnumais?
Pffft. The WEF is a celebrity getaway in the Swiss alps for the same people who caused the 2008 crisis and got away with it. If they’re making that prediction in good faith, it’d be a preemptive confession of guilt. If not, it’s just a distraction from their routine crimes.
"You" have statistics attached to you. Default rates, lifespan, cancer risk. Given people A and B in similar life and financial situations, A or B might defy the statistics that say they'll both pay or default, but they probably won't. The only way a bank or anyone can predict this is statistically.
This looks like a snake oil salesman rebranded CBRAM as a memristor and hoped nobody qualified would notice that they're claiming a revolutionary breakthrough.
They explicitly say that isn't the case: " SDC memristors are distinct from (and superior to) Conductive Bridge RAM (CBRAM) technology and represent their own class of memristor."
No, they make a claim and their only sources are their own work that doesn’t appear to have been peer reviewed or even vouched for by anyone that doesn’t work for them.
A true memristor as envisioned by Chua would be a revolutionary device of extreme utility. If knownm has what they say they have, the company would be worth billions. But they’ve been around for years and their website looks like every other scammy snake oil site out there.
Hah, I just noticed, the founder and the CTO have no industry experience and I can’t find anyone who does connected to the company. They started this scam fresh out of college.
And more: Their "angel investor" and "chief administrative officer" is the founder's mother, but this is very carefully sidestepped in the bios. Every time I look closer, it's one more classic sign of a scam.
Who are their process engineers? Where is their fab? Are they contracting with a third party? Who? Will they vouch for the technology?
Ahahahaha, as it were:
"In January of 2018 AHaH Computing was proven feasible with Knowm SDC Memristors on the open-source Memristor Discovery platform. As of January 2019, Knowm SDC Memristors passed four years of shelf-life testing and have shipped to researcher in over forty countries."
The "Memristor Discovery Platform" was made by... Knowm. (in other words, "it works because I say so").
Are you sure this isn't a practical joke?
We've been here before. Companies make all sorts of microchips that do a lot, a little, or nothing at all, and many are counterfeit and outright frauds. When a small company in New Mexico with no experience tells you they're going to revolutionize computing, just walk away.
To be fair, MS did not revolutionize computing when it was founded. They didn't make anything that everyone else wasn't already making. I'm trying to think of a single thing that they did before the company was worth a billion dollars that was in any way revolutionary, technically. I can't think of a single thing (lots of stuff since then, BTW, but I think that's a bit unfair ;-) ). They executed well, both in development and in business and they had a good combination of good business foresight and lucky breaks. They were also pretty ruthless.
I know. :) It's fun in two ways, in fact. In one way, I could say "See? New Mexican companies are all criminals!", but in the other, I can point out that Microsoft, while scrappy, was basically trying to sell something they knew they could build - and everyone else more or less did, too. They made something important, and evolutionary, but not revolutionary.
Any company that says "The revolution is here!" is suspect, but if they can't actually give you a device that brings major, practical, commercially important changes, it's probably bullshit.
Through-hole scale components are valuable for people to play with. They're accessible for researchers and hobbyists, but don't necessarily present potential for massive, commercial scaling.
Why don't you just talk to them yourself instead of ranting on YCNews. It amazes me how many people don't follow the guidelines on this site and the mods just let it fly. Every single one of the members of Knowm you can directly email. I know because I have actually talked to them. One lady is not on Linked in so you will have to talk to her through her her academic email.
Also your "ha no industry experience" is pretty laughable considering the entire Quantum Computing Industry is blossoming out of universities and PHDs. Musk had no Rocket ship industry experience, Zuckerberg had no social media industry experience, Paulmer Luckey had no hardware or entertainment industry experience, etc. I can go on forever.
Maybe instead of mocking someone elses work and slandering their name with barely a whiff of an idea of who they are and what they are doing you should engage in some sort of meaningful criticism or debate.
I'll not be responding or reading your reply. So feel free to do whatever with that knowledge. Just thought I should mention that this site is apparently supposed to be about hackers conversing in useful conversations and enlightening themselves. So maybe try to stick to that.
You don’t ask a scammer “are you a scammer”. And there is no “Quantum Computing Industry” yet outside some scams and hype. We remain nowhere near real quantum viability. And Musk hired people with experience. I can’t find anyone with experience connected to this company. Nobody talks about it publicly except the founder and hyped up press releases, and their documented staff are mostly dedicated to “intellectual property”. This is a scam and/or patent troll. End of story.
Obligatory reminder that "memristor" is mostly a marketing hype word at this point. No clear example of the original memristor hypothesis has ever been crafted, and there is wide disagreement on what should or shouldn't be called a memristor, and it's not even agreed whether a memristor can physically exist at all. And hearing about the "first" memristor <whatever> is basically a biannual occurrence.
Also, reminder that even if someone manages to make a real memristor and everyone agrees it is a memristor, it may not end up being a big deal. They have some nice hypothetical properties, but they're not magic, and any widespread use would probably take decades.
In the 60s/70s, an EE/CS guy named Leon Chua did some clever math that suggested we could build transistor-like devices that had a non-linear relationship between charge and flux and called it a memristor. He didn't build one, and as far as I know it's not something he's spent all that much time on since.
In the 90s somebody at HP must have mentioned memristors in hearing range of their marketing department and suddenly HP was going to have a product to market in a few years.
Yeah. Never happened. Nobody's done it.
In theory, such a device could allow us to do things like build extremely low power non-volatile memory (a flash replacement, basically). A lot of marketing hype has talked about completely replacing computer RAM with non-volatile memristor-backed memory, but again, neither it nor anything like it has happened. But as it turns out, battery-backed DRAM covers a multitude of sins anyway.
The actual debate over physical possibility is because it's too low-power, to the point that an actual implementation might violate lower theoretical limits on the amount of energy required to change the state of a bit. In other words, it might violate the second law of thermodynamics, which is something of a problem.
Yes, memristors are real, and no, their properties are not magic[1]. As I stated elsewhere on this thread, you can even make them at home[2]. It's even been discussed here on Hacker News before[3].
They are real if you accept the branding of of companies trying to sell products that don’t really do much to people who are lured in by buzzwords. Those of us who actually do real work have serious doubts.
The original hypothesis was based on the existent resistor, capacitor, and inductor. The memristor would complete the symmetry between these components and the underlying physics.
And I'm going to assume GP is basically referring to the first paragraph of the next session regarding definition and criticism:
According to the original 1971 definition, the memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, forming a non-linear relationship between electric charge and magnetic flux linkage. In 2011, Chua argued for a broader definition that included all 2-terminal non-volatile memory devices based on resistance switching.[2] Williams argued that MRAM, phase-change memory and ReRAM were memristor technologies.[21] Some researchers argued that biological structures such as blood[22] and skin[23][24] fit the definition. Others argued that the memory device under development by HP Labs and other forms of ReRAM were not memristors, but rather part of a broader class of variable-resistance systems,[25] and that a broader definition of memristor is a scientifically unjustifiable land grab that favored HP's memristor patents.[26]
This paper rejects the existing definitions of memristors as in inappropriate expression (composition) of devices using magnetic flux and inductance. It really doesn't cover the systems that use electrically adjustable resistance.
Why would eliminate the ability to develop apps for the iOS? You could be able to download a development environment "app" from the Mac App Store just like now. You'd be a bit more confined inside the environment itself, but there is nothing that would prevent developing applications with Apple's own tools while disallowing installing anything outside of MAS.
Any ability to execute arbitrary code is the ability to bypass the MAS. What's more, it's nice and efficient - iOS apps in development are compiled right to x86 machine code for the "simulator" that is little more than a thin VM.
100% of the projections I've seen about MacOS becoming a walled garden have been from people that don't actually have any real familiarity with Apple's ecosystem as developers.
There are all sorts of restrictions Apple could place on software compiled "unofficially" with Xcode. For example, they could automatically sign it with testing certs that automatically expire after 7 days.
macOS is a more open platform because Apple has decided to leave it that way, not because the property is literally essential for development.
They already require periodic resigning of self-signed side-loaded apps on iOS, it doesn't stop even relatively casual users.
(That's actually the funniest part about all this, now that I think about it. While everyone is wailing and gnashing their teeth about some speculative possibility that macOS ends up locked down like iOS, Apple has been making iOS more open.)
Is there a significant number of power users who are resigning their apps every seven days? I find this somewhat hard to believe, given just how annoying it is, combined with the three-app limit.
I didn't even know there was a three app limit on it. Most people don't use very many apps. But yes, quite a lot of us routinely sideload apps on non-jailbroken iOS devices.
So you really think Apple is not going to not allow the Mac to run any scripting language or program that runs on top of a VM? Do you think they are also going to take away shell access?
They are also not going to allow any Electron apps?
This is exactly what I'm talking about. You're using bad or outdated second or third-hand info with no regard for the game of telephone involved in getting it to you, nor the anti-Apple zealots obfuscating the truth on its way.
Are you sure? I admittedly can't find a definitive source on this now, so perhaps the restriction is more nuanced than I realized.
What I do know is: if you try to use more intensive emulators like PPSSPP on a non-Jailbroken iOS device (via a developer account, enterprise cert, or similar), you will not get acceptable performance, because the emulator is forced to fall back into an interpreter mode.
The only JIT “restriction” is App Store policy. No downloaded code is allowed unless it’s JavaScript (and runs, as it happens, on one of the JITs iOS has built in). This is policy, not technical limits. You can even install a Python environment and code in it. And, as it happens, write code that downloads other code to be evaluated. Because you did it on your device with full knowledge. Not the developer who put it in the App Store.
I’m not even going to try and address whatever weird issues a console emulator might have, those always have problems being ported to non-x86 platforms, especially when they include a JIT. As it happens, dynamic recompilation of machine code not designed for that purpose can be pretty damn hard. Take a look at the posts the Dolphin emulator team make about the fun they encounter.
> I’m not even going to try and address whatever weird issues a console emulator might have, those always have problems being ported to non-x86 platforms, especially when they include a JIT. As it happens, dynamic recompilation of machine code not designed for that purpose can be pretty damn hard. Take a look at the posts the Dolphin emulator team make about the fun they encounter.
This isn't that! The JIT works when you remove iOS's sandbox (by Jaibreaking). And this applies to every iOS console emulator.
Oh, that's right, it's because iOS normally doesn't allow dynamic code modification in memory. That's not an iOS specific thing at all, Apple is just one of the few companies willing to make that nod to security.
The mere existence of a house on the other side of even a fairly big town can affect the fire safety of your house, because it affects the likelihood that emergency responders in the area will be overloaded by an excessive number of fires or medical calls.
