Another interesting question is if they are EM radiation.
It should be the most efficient way to travel. Going from Turing machine to Turing machine, a virus with a really advanced universal exploit, impregnating civilizations like ours around the time they develop both radio tech and computers.
Civilizations with the capability to travel in that fasion would be dominant.
> LendUp is run legally as a licensed lender in CA.
Okay? ... every company has the same licenses. CashNetUSA, Quickloans, Captain America Loans, and hundreds of other companies. Including even most with the shady legal structures, based in Malta, etc. Google won’t list the Deleware ones either. Advertising platforms don’t like them. Cities don’t like them. Regulators watch them closely and frequently press charges.
> I’m damn proud to have spent a couple of years trying to solve it.
Look this is probably going to seem uncivil, but given the poor ethics of what you are talking about, I have no qualms shaming.
I spent a few years founding a payday business. Ultimately, despite having the same “forgiveness” policies and “innovative” loan structures, and telling myself all the same junk you are telling yourself (CFSA PR propaganda) I couldn’t bring myself to treat poor people like a crop to be harvested. You know that forgiveness or not, the majority of borrowers are repeats, and that there is a huge incentive to maximize this. Essentially, people use you instead of a bank.
There is no escaping that this means you are in the business of siphoning 10% off of an already poor person’s wages on an ongoing basis, and that’s without compounding. (Sounds like 15% by your numbers)
Do you really feel good that you did this? You drank some silicon valley koolaid, worked as someone else’s employee and harvested poor people? And then acted as the company’s mouthpiece afterward? Because you want to feel congruent with your resume?
Before you say I don’t know blah blah about LendUp ... hear this: A great many Payday companies came before LendUp, attempting the PR of being “ethical” and “innovative”, with the same practices. And by far they have not been the last. They’re all still in the business of fleecing at least 10% off of the people who can afford it least. There’s always money in stealing from the poor. The only innovative thing they did was to con YC. (hi)
Do not deceive yourself or others. It is not an honorable business. It is a called a VICE INDUSTRY for a reason, and you guys didn’t do anything to “solve” it (by your own admission of the word “trying”).
I know ... you want to stand by what you did, but if I were you, I would put that one in the rear view.
To translate what was just said: payday lenders do, in fact, delude themsleves into thinking they are making an impact. It’s always the same material about “helping people in their time of need”.
But the point isn’t about the immediate impact on people’s lives at the moment of funding ... rather the longer impact during the time that they will hold the debt, and the high interest cost to those who can afford it least. Multiply that into man-years per your Steve Jobs anecdote! ️(smh)
There’s a reason usury is illegal, and why payday lenders have to pair with sovereign nations and shady legal structures, and why google won’t even list you, etc.
shame.
But oh no. I’ve just bad-mouthed a YC company on HN! Here comes dang!!
Making neighborhood gossip easier is worrying on many levels.
A hack that has been used in the past to scale totalitarian social control is to employ what is essentially a viral enforcement mechanism: basically, getting people to inform on their neighbors. It only takes one or two visible instances of this behavior with a violent outcome and it replicates quickly, following an exponential growth rate until the population is saturated with informants.
Reporting on neighbors and peers is much of the glue which has held together the worst authoritarian regimes: DPRK, East Germany, Nazi Germany ... as well as being a primary strategy for causing the revolutions which put those regimes in place.
A platform like this:
- lowers the friction of informing
- is vulnerable to anonymity / spoofing / automation / remote manipulation
- allows for stories of informing to persist in the community memory as always-online posts, increasing their effect across time
- is connected to a de facto surveillance apparatus (the internet) to boot