Bill Nye kind of is a dick though.
Some people are really warm in acute person-to-person interactions, but lack the chronic empathy to spread long-term kindness. See “southern hospitality” clashing with who those areas vote for.
Others have a well-oriented moral compass but are just really abrasive in person. That’s Bill Nye. I’ve met him and he’s not like, super mean but he’s got a bit of a holier-than-thou (or rather, smarter-than-you) complex.
Cool how you used the quote markdown for a bunch of stuff I didn’t say.
My argument is “The banks have a ton of capital. They are willing to grant lower classes access to that capital, as long as the bank is able to make some profit from it. If the bank cannot profit, they will just sit on that wealth and lower classes will lose the only access to such capital that they currently have.”
Like I said, the fact that many borderline necessities in the US require access to capital beyond one’s individual means, is a real problem but separate from this argument.
Nobody with financial sense is taking out a 16.9% loan on a car. 5% is pretty typical right now for people with a decent credit history.
Whether or not that’s reasonable, is certainly up for discussion.
Definitely shop around, but sometimes the dealership does have an actual competitive offer. Especially if you threaten to use external financing (and have the pre approval in hand), they might knock down their interest rate to save the deal, as the loan is where the money actually is.
You pay for the ability to access capital you do not currently have. Nobody owes you thousands of dollars with which to but a car. If you want to buy a car with money you don’t have, then you have to give the bank something in return. That something almost always is “more money than we initially lent you, over the course of the loan period” and if you shut that down, banks just won’t give loans anymore. Suddenly poor and middle class people have lost their biggest tool for accessing capital.
Lack of public transport is a separate problem. The US has dropped the ball across the board there. Only a handful of cities have any reasonable public transport and even those systems are old and often shitty.
Education being so expensive that it needs to be financed, is a separate problem. Education is too important to leave to the free market, letting our system metastacize to this extent is the result of decades of compounding failures.
16.9% interest is predatory, but “interest above inflation” is necessary if you want banks to do anything besides hoard money.
I’ve only met two Finns in my life, but they both assured me that licorice and sauna were on the citizenship application so I don’t think the /s is necessary.
Reasonable chance he never wrote one and Biden just said that to pacify the media.
Joke’s on me, I still have to use windows at work!