Can we use bankruptcy records to determine who can become president then?
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No, no… see, it’s DIFFERENT if you’re rich. /s
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I should point out that it’s entirely possible to buy citizenship in several EU countries if you have a few million to spare. Off the top of my head, Cyprus and Malta do this. Maybe others. So this is nothing new or particularly shocking, lots of for example Russians have done this and continue to do this.
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Why the hyphen in “credit-scores” Cory ?
If you are a millionaire you can get citizenship in almost any country in the world. You don’t have to worry about immigration quotas or anything. Just try to keep the criminal connections on the DL.
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In some cases of the 1%, those “criminal” connections might be an asset!
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While our financial approach is similar to @jandrese’s (use CCs and never carry a balance), there are sometimes hiccups that speak to your statement. For instance, when a particular lender suddenly drops an autopayment, or suddenly makes it virtually impossible to make a payment on time to force fees and interest accrual. Objections were handled by the lender’s ombudsman, which of course rejected any refunds or waiver. Next step would be arbitration. 
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Blame the death of organized labor for making such work distasteful for those seeking living wages. American citizens have not ever taken up jobs left vacant by “illegal alien sweeps” various states employ. People would rather collect public assistance than work in agriculture grunt work or dangerous meat packing work…
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Spending beyond your means lowers your credit score though…
The credit companies make it sound super magical and mysterious, but the process is pretty simple:
How much credit you have available - how much you are using - big penalties for red marks (nonpayments, bankruptcies, etc…) - minor penalties for regular transactions to discourage people from gaming the system.
If you want a good credit score have two or three credit cards with high limits ($10k or more) and spend a bit on them each month and pay it off.
Carrying a balance month to month reduces your score.
The whole point of the system is to answer the question “if I give this person money what is the chance they will pay me back?” That’s all it is good for. This is why if you never use credit your score is low, they simply don’t know and assume the worst. This is also why using it as a measure of trustworthiness in anything other than lending money is a mistake, but one that people are going to make over and over because there isn’t a standardized universal replacement.
Going back to the old system isn’t perfect either. Plenty of black people with good credit weren’t able to get apartments/loans/etc… back in the day. I’d argue that the current effectively market based system is more resilient against corruption/discrimination than pretty much anything else we’ve used throughout history. What’s more, a “better” system would likely be even more problematic. Do we want a machine to measure our worth as individuals and determine if we are suitable for a job? Do we want a system where we have to find thousands or millions of completely unbiased people to make snap judgements on people? It’s a thorny problem with no easy answer.
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Ian was deliberately emphasising the mundanity of the system in order to deflate the hyperbole of the initial reporting.
My objection isn’t to the idea that this system may be abused. It’s to the hysterical exaggeration of what the system is and the common assumption in reporting around this that the existence of the system is prima facie evidence that it is being abused.
Can this system be abused? Sure, any state power can be. China is certainly not alone in leveraging the machinery of state against dissidents.
China has problems, yes. But the coverage of Chinese issues in western media is biased to an extreme degree. As to why that is a problem, see the Bill Kristol tweet I posted upthread.
As with Iran etc., China is demonised in order to manufacture consent for eventual war.
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It’s the equivalent of a green card. It’s common knowledge.
I wasn’t judgemental either, just noticing the correlation. Note that I have a credit card (several, actually), but don’t use them for credit. It is a bit different in Europe, because there is no real difference between credit and debit cards.
Having talked with people working in that business, I would say it is a real problem. People have mo idea how much their banks sell about them.
Note that the acceptance of cash varies a lot between countries. Scandinavian countries have become almost cashless. Germany is still very much a cash country. The USA seemed to me addicted to plastic during a visit last year.
Credit unions look better and better everyday.
We’re getting there. I see more students on my (very large) campus using cards, though lots of people use debit instead of credit cards.
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To the benefit of the corporate banks either way, of course. This is why there’s pushback against the trend in Sweden, where cash transactions are almost exinct:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/sweden-cashless-society-is-no-longer-a-utopia/
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I don’t think they are much different.
It is quite simple, really. Cash in untraceable. This has plus and minus points.
Anything else is traceable. If you use a customer rewards system or if you use any kind of bank issued payment device, you will be traced. How much depends on your local legislation but even in Europe, with comparatively tight laws, banks sell a surprisingly amount of data. Any bank.
Most people do not care. They are happy about customer rewards systems and they don’t care if google knows their GPS position, list of friends, communications and complete shopping list. They also don’t care about tinder knowing about their sex habits.
Eventually, some of them will realise that, for example, their being on the pill while not buying condoms or their habit of ordering extra bacon with their max size burger is going to rack their insurance premiums high. Or something else. In the mean time, the others will continue to say that they have nothing to hide and feed google and co.
You and I can of course try to evade the system by paying cash or not having a smartphone, but that is going to become more and more suspicious as time passes.
Credit unions are owned by the members, not by a private, for profit corporation. They also give much better returns on savings. So, yeah, they really are different.
They probably should. It has real world implications for privacy. As long as we live in democratic societies that have clear laws, then it’s not as much of a problem, but history tells us that can change quickly.
It should not, and that’s the problem. There is no guarantee that we’ll be living in democratic countries with the rule of law tomorrow. None. The point of having privacy is to give you freedom to live life as you want to live it, instead of how others in your society wish you to live it. Today it’s tracking to sell you shit, tomorrow it could be tracking to make sure you fall in line with prevailing norms.
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With me, you are preaching to the choir…
Citation needed. Or to put it another way, how can one even have a credit score without first obtaining and making use of a line of credit? Answer: one cannot. Your entire credit rating is predicated upon the use of credit.
A history of paying the same debt down on a monthly basis seems to actually raise ones score and the lack of such history will lower it. This is the opposite of what you assert here.
And my point is simply that having a high or low credit score is not an indicator of anything other that ones relative love of servicing a debt.
