7Figures2Commas

Apparently they found recent grads with very large student debt load but commensurately high future earning potential had inaccurately low credit scores.

Credit scores measure the risk of future default based on past borrowing behavior. A borrower's credit score is not "inaccurately low" if there is little to no past borrowing behavior to apply the credit scoring model to.

Lenders can and frequently do take into account criteria other than credit score, such as income, when underwriting loans. In some lending markets (mostly commercial), individual consumer credit scores aren't even used.

That Earnest and other upstart lenders are choosing to more heavily weigh factors other than credit score is not particularly interesting. The true test of their underwriting criteria will come in the next down cycle. Having worked in this space, I should point out that there are many consumers with high incomes (or high earning potential) who are vulnerable. As such, I'd suggest that income and earning potential alone are of limited use in underwriting. It's not uncommon to see borrowers with high incomes who also have very low credit scores because they were over-leveraged and had serious negative credit events occur.

I can assure you that you don't have to be a member of the the 0.1% to profit in a downturn. If you can buy shares of stock and call options, you can short shares of stock and purchase puts.

Of course, you'll never win much sympathy profiting from sanity. If you want sympathy, help "grow the economy" by leveraging yourself to the hilt and blaming evil bankers when your debt catches up to you. But please recognize that you're not really growing the economy; you're just mortgaging your future.

...we've been in this cycle of "easy money, spend spend spend" followed by "crap, bubble". Sure there's money to be made on the upside, but there's even more to lose on the way down.

I'm sure this comment will be downvoted, but there's just as much if not more money to make on the way down. When people, companies and governments take on too much debt, and capital is misallocated, incredible opportunities to profit are created.

Agh, this thread is just full of people boasting about their immunity to interest in Facebook. Congratulations, you're fantastic, oh that we could all be as enlightened as you.

That said, this study doesn't surprise me. In terms of public posts everyone projects their "best life", so you're browsing through a catalogue of amazing experiences while you sit at home feeling a little fat.

I'm not sure what the answer to that is.

I'm not on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. (and I'm probably one of a very small minority who has never had accounts) and I wouldn't consider myself "enlightened."

I think "the answer" is to reflect on what it is that adds value to your life and what subtracts value from your life.

If your personal use of social media is focused on activities that you conclude are beneficial, there's no reason you should stop using it. On the other hand, if your use of social media is making you less happy, you should treat it the same way you'd logically treat anything else that makes you less happy.

Unfortunately, as these studies demonstrate, a lot of the people using social media aren't happier for it, and more problematically, many clearly aren't reflecting on that.

To a large extent, yes, but social media has made faking a lifestyle you don't lead even easier. Anybody with a smartphone and a desire to portray themselves in a particular light can do so pretty effectively with very limited intelligence and skill required.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxVZYiJKl1Y

This is social media.

Except for the fact that most of what the Johnson's appear to have is contrived.

This unhealthy obsession with eating in tech is starting to give me indigestion.

I represent a seller with a property in South America that might meet your needs. Are you in the market?

Thanks for your feedback on the quality of the architecture. Are you suggesting that I try to come in with a starting offer of $350 and see if we can close somewhere just north of $400?

http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm

If you're suggesting that the member banks of the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks have banded together to manipulate Fed policy so they can stick it to retail banking customers, please do yourself a favor and research how the Federal Reserve System operates. The policy decisions we're discussing are made by the Federal Open Market Committee and Federal Reserve Board. If you educate yourself as to their composition, you will quickly see that member banks, let alone a handful of large member banks, are not calling the shots.

The "sagging interest rates" are a product of Fed monetary policy, and much of the fee-generating behavior you describe has been motivated in some part by the Fed's monetary policy too. But please don't let that stop you from blaming the banks.

In New York City, many of the businesses that move in are banks. There are more than 1,800 bank branches in New York — 60% more than there were a decade ago.

There was an article about this in the Wall Street Journal last year[1]. Excerpt:

But why open a branch on every corner? The blame, it turns out, lies with us. We're asking for it.

TD, which has more than 1,300 branches in cities up and down the East Coast, conducted a customer survey and discovered that, compared to the rest of the nation, New Yorkers are obsessed with branch convenience. While folks in other towns value frivolities like friendly service, New Yorkers more often rank convenient ATMs and branches a top priority. They want locations near their homes, their offices and the offices of their spouses, says Mr. Giamo. They want to see their bank everywhere they go.

When it comes to the subject of community, a lot of people don't want to accept that communities are dynamic. The ways in which they change are almost always driven by the needs and wants of the people in those communities, even though you will always find vocal people in those communities who swear that can't be the case.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/all-those-banks-in-new-york-city...

Theranos often drew the same employee’s blood twice, first with blood from a finger prick and then the traditional method of a needle in the arm, according to one former Safeway executive.

The former executive said he worried that Theranos’s finger-prick process was still a work in progress. “If the technology is fully developed, why would you need to do a venipuncture?” this person said, using the term for a traditional blood draw.

The concerns deepened when Theranos’s test results for several Safeway employees differed from the results the same employees got from other laboratories, according to the former executive. Another former Safeway executive confirmed those recollections.

Theranos also backed away from putting its blood analyzers in Safeway’s clinics so patients could get the results quickly, the current and former executives said.

Instead, Theranos said blood samples collected at Safeway would have to be shipped to a central lab for analysis, according to the former executives.

Wow. The Theranos story just keeps getting worse.

Your response sort of demonstrates the point I made above about most people not being attracted to most people.

In a career of 30 years, you found yourself working closely with a total of one woman who you were attracted to and who you thought might be "willing to become interested" in you. This co-worker was your equal, and you dealt with your feelings in what seems like a mature manner that caused no professional harm to you or her.

Where's the problem that needs solving?

I don't know what you consider "getting to close to any woman at work," but I have seen plenty of men build close working relationships with female colleagues, mentor female direct reports, etc. And vice versa. I would also point out that lots of people, male and female, simply don't want to invest the time and energy required to build strong professional relationships.

Final comment: I am a heterosexual male in a committed relationship and I have never avoided a professional relationship with a woman out of fear of the "problems" you refer to. Interestingly, there are many women decision-makers today and the number of women in positions of power and influence will only grow, so men who avoid relationships with women as you suggest are just as likely to find their own professional and business interests harmed. Fortunately, I simply don't believe that most male professionals are operating the way you believe they are and I have met plenty of men and women with strong professional networks who reflect that.

1. How many years have you been working?

2. How many times in your career have you found yourself working closely with a woman who you found attractive and who made it clear she was interested in you?

3. In these situations, how many times were you the woman's superior, equal or direct report?

I think answers to the above would be more beneficial to this discussion than the admission that you could theoretically be tempted by a co-worker to cheat on your wife.

I'm sorry you've interpreted my attempts at responding to your comments as being dismissive, but, based on my own experiences at work and in business over the past decade and a half, I do feel strongly that the world view you have apparently adopted, which assumes that men tend to build professional relationships with women only when they harbor romantic interest and avoid them when they don't out of paranoia, does not reflect what happens in most professional settings. Furthermore, I cannot imagine that taking such a world view into every professional interaction with a member of the opposite sex can be a positive influence on the interaction.

The mere fact that there exist statistical inequalities between the sexes does not in any way prove that your world view is the root cause of these inequalities.

As one example, I did not say that I was giving signals of interest to coworkers, much less on a regular basis.

You previously wrote:

My experience has been that men who aren't attracted react really negatively to me giving off signals that I am interested.

I'm genuinely confused. If you are not giving signals of interest to men you are interacting with in a professional capacity, how do the reactions of men who you're ostensibly interacting with in a personal capacity relate at all to your professional ambitions?

When I try to make professional contacts, I am asking individual men to trust me as an individual. Many of them have far more reason to decline taking that bet than to accept the risks involved.

Our backgrounds and experiences might very well be quite different, but I think attitude plays a big role in how your efforts pan out and going into interactions with this kind of world view is not healthy in my opinion.

I am an adult male professional. If there's a good reason we should do business together or help each other professionally, I don't care if you're half squirrel. I don't know what you're asking of the folks you meet, and when and how you're asking, but in my experience, most professionals, male and female, don't harbor irrational reservations about building strong working relationships with colleagues of the opposite sex.

A man does not need to be attracted to me to be worried that close collaboration -- working late together, having dinner together, etc -- will lead to other people wondering if there is an affair.

While there is nothing fundamentally wrong with professionally-appropriate "close collaboration" between two colleagues, "close collaboration" is possible without "working late together" or "having dinner together."

In my experience the vast majority of working professionals, even those who forge close ties with their colleagues, don't see working late or dining frequently with colleagues after work hours as being fundamental to "close collaboration." They have their own lives and don't want to be spending their evenings with co-workers, male or female.

My experience has been that men who aren't attracted react really negatively to me giving off signals that I am interested. So men who are not hoping to sleep with me can have powerful reasons to just not want to work closely with me in the kind of manner that could dramatically further my professional goals.

If a man or woman takes the risk of signalling romantic interest in a co-worker, he or she should be prepared for the possibility that the co-worker will react "negatively." While most adults are capable of handling this situation maturely and kindly, for obvious reasons the rebuffed party will almost certainly experience some level of discomfort after being rebuffed. This is the primary reason folks should be careful about expressing interest in somebody they have to work with. Are you prepared for the potential of self-inflicted awkwardness?

Unless you are frequently signalling romantic interest in the co-workers you are hoping will work most closely with you, I don't understand why you believe men who are not hoping to sleep with you are generally disincentivized from building a healthy and mutually-beneficial working relationship with you.

The only thing I can surmise is that your expectations around what "working closely" with a colleague looks like are unrealistic.

You could have fooled me with all of your seemingly confident talk about treble damages, which in reality is incredibly ill-informed.

The comment above me literally cited the relevant piece of the code under which treble damages could be pursued.

I see. So you're not a real lawyer, you just pretend to be one on HN.

The law doesn't hand out treble damages like candy. Please explain the legal basis under which landlords are going to magically receive these for civil breach of contract claims.

If the lessee is willing to pay the penalty, what's the problem? If the penalty isn't sufficient to deter the unwanted behavior, increase it until it is.

You are ignoring the practical realities of landlord-tenant relationships.

Let's say you rent an apartment from me and I add a liquidated damages clause to the lease. It states that you will owe me $50,000 if you are found to be subletting your apartment using a service like AirBnB. Unless you have $50,000, the liquidated damages clause is effectively worthless and you can easily choose to break the lease ("my landlord can't get blood from a stone"). If I increase the liquidated damages to $100,000, the deterrent effect likely doesn't increase.

Trust isn't about outcomes. In the case of AirBnB, it doesn't matter if the "guests" in the apartment or condo next door don't bludgeon me to death. Trust is violated when my neighbor ignores the terms of his or her lease (or legally binding HOA CC&Rs) and decides to turn the community into a hotel for his or her own gain.

It's all about perspective. For example, if I introduced you to somebody who painfully regretted not dating in his 20s out of, say, fear of rejection or relationship failure, you might come to see your past dating experiences in a kinder if not more positive light.

I wish women would make more of an effort to understand why men do what they do. Here is my general take on it...

From the author's referenced post[1]:

My experience is that men are either not very willing to talk to me one-on-one or, if they are, talking shop is the last thing they had in mind. They are looking for romance, not looking to help me professionally. When I say this to other women, they generally express immediate agreement. Men often deny it, criticize it or just stop talking when I say such things.

Most people are not attracted to most people. What this means is that most of the people you are attracted to won't find you attractive, and most of the people who are attracted to you are not going to be attractive to you.

Given this simple fact, believing that most of your interactions with members of the opposite sex are motivated by romantic interest is simply not realistic, no matter how handsome/beautiful or charming you are.

Maybe the tech industry (or a particular subset of the tech industry) is completely dysfunctional, but in my experience, most adult women and men are capable of interacting professionally without believing that all these interactions are somehow romantic in nature or fearing that they will be interpreted as such.

[1] http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gray-zon...

It's really because as I age I will be able to afford the comforts and convenience I've grown quite fond of. I will be able to take care of myself and loved ones in emergencies and afford insurance.

You seem to be making a number of flawed assumptions here.

The first is that you will age. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. You could be hit by a truck tomorrow and die. The second is that access to the comforts and conveniences you have grown fond of are primarily a function of your finances. But your enjoyment of the comforts and conveniences you can afford is also a function of many other things, such as your health, which could be compromised at any time by things you cannot predict or control.

If you feel my answer is inappropriate...

I think your answer is likely to evoke a strong response because it paints exploring intimate relationships and accumulating wealth as being mutually exclusive.

This flies in the face of data that suggests one of the best ways to accumulate wealth is to partner up. Marriage has been linked to wealth in numerous studies, and by some estimates, more than 90% of the millionaires in the United States are married.

Obviously, marriage motivated by financial gain is probably not advisable for most, but avoiding dating out of the belief that it will produce financial benefit is not very attractive either.

I would tell my 20 year-old self to ignore any advice from my 30+ year-old self.