I didn't word my statement clearly.

No, I wasn't "charged" to be a member but I had to agree to sequester $10.00 in my account as my membership stake or some such.

If and when I decide to close the account, I get my $10.00 back.

LK

I left out an important detail. So I can understand why you'd see them as separate issues. The piece of information that I left out is that my friend's financial decision making have led him to live in his mother's house. His mobility could be regarded as a side-effect of his inability to purchase his own home or to get a lease.

LK

This has got be the third dumbest idea Microsoft has had in the last decade

Hey, as someone who competes against proprietary solutions (including Microsoft) with Free Software solutions, I wholeheartedly endorse this change!

What I frequently see is businesses that hire a developer to code a solution, and that developer has Technet, so he chooses whatever technology he thinks is best on there, and then when the customer gets ready to deploy it, they find a chain of Microsoft dependencies that all need licensing and CAL's, and often get roped into a software maintenance agreement for 5+digits over their initial cost estimate. Often it gets big enough to require new hardware and a virtualization solution too.

I get "second-opinion" work from them, but it's often too late to do anything else. I've heard of some (that I don't work with) who 'just get Technet' too.

If there's a silver lining, it's that I often get first-crack at the next project. But either way, this is a great decision on Microsoft's part as far as I'm concerned!

And, here we have yet another example why FLOSS falls behind. People want software with specific features but they want it for free.

I was going to say he could probably pay xTuple to add the feature, but it appears somebody else already did.

It's not my intention to be judgmental about anyone's circumstance.

I come from modest beginnings. I'm not the best handler of money. I have a friend who's a good example of what I'm talking about.

He and I are from very close parts of town. We both come from divorced homes. He went to art school and I went to college. We're both pretty good in our respective fields. He is over 40 with no children. I am 37 with several children.

Despite the fact that we had similar educational backgrounds, he can rarely go an entire month without overdrawing his bank account. I own my own home and he does not.

He's my friend so I don't judge him. I don't look down on him. I don't think this makes me a better person than him. It does make me more fiscally astute. On several occasions I have asked him why he doesn't make certain changes and the answer usually ends up being that he prefers his system of financial management to one with more stringent rules. He has the freedom to pick up and move whenever he wants to, while I do not.

Basically, people choose their own lives. There are pros and cons to every decision. Choose yours widely.

LK

The Nigerian scam still works on this principle. They send you a check drawn from a foreign or at least out of state bank. You deposit it and the check clears. One business day later all of the funds are available. If you're stupid enough to send them the money, when your bank finally figures out that the check was worthless, they back-charge your account. You end up several thousand dollars negative that you have to repay out of your own pocket.

Despite the instant clearing, this process can sometimes take 8 weeks to play out.

LK

It's called money management. You don't go and burn it all as soon as you get paid.

The current statistic is that 70% of the people in the US do. Wages are flat, taxes continue to increase, and prices are skyrocketing (despite the phoney numbers from BLS).

The check cashing services are also closely allied with the pay day loan services that charge interests that work out to something like 240% on annualized basis.

Except they're not intended to be used on an annualized basis. If a loan of $100 is made for 30 days, what is the proper fee to charge? 240% would be $20.

It costs money to process these transactions.

Correct. What is the proper fee on a $100 30-day loan? Count teller time, paperwork processing costs, non-repayment losses, and a profit that can keep the business open.

It is not as much as the banks charge as fees and the fees can be unreasonably high.

A bounced check can easily be $30 overdraft + $40 returned check fee at a bank.

But still that is not as bad as what these check cashing services charge.

oh?

Please educate yourself about the plight of the poor at the hands of check cashing services on one hand, checking account with fees on the other hand

Agreed. See your wise subject line.

I wholeheartedly agree. The problem I see is that many conservatives and liberals are all for government partnership with big business, when it suits them.

LK

With all due respect sir, you don't know what my life and upbringing were like.

I've been luckier than many. Perhaps in some ways, I've been luckier than most. However, I have faced more than my fair share of hardship.

These are not perpetual infants that we're talking about. These are people who are presumably adults and are responsible for their own decisions, rational or not.
At some point, we become responsible for ourselves.

LK

Please don't take this question as an attack, I do not mean it as such...

Have you ever offered to give one of those domestic employees a $10.00 loan to open an account at a Credit Union?
$10.00 interest free, paid back $2.00/month...

I would suspect not. I would also suspect the reason is that you know they either wouldn't take it or for some other reason it wouldn't work out.

My point is that at some point, people are responsible for their own decisions and their own positions in life.

LK

You are not paid by your employer, that's an economic fallacy.

*Of course* employees who work for a company are paid by the company.

You, as an employee, add some amount of value to the goods and services provided by the company, and *that* is where your pay comes from.

If this perverse theory were true, then employees who add no value could never be on the payroll. Companies in the red for the year could never pay their employees, etc. I guess you never worked in a large company, eh?

You seem to be confusing source of funds with expenses, or perhaps applying all-cash day labor transactions to corporate accounting. Try a basic accounting text.

There's no economic theory that treats a company as a zero-value entity. Not even Marxism - even though it assumes that all things that need to be invented and built are extant, it still assigns value to those things.

I switched to a credit union in 2010 after I got fucked over by S & T Bank. My credit union charged me $10.00 for membership.

If you're in a bad financial situation, it can be hard to come up with a spare $10.00 but isn't that better than getting charged $4.00 EVERY TIME you want to access your money?

Yes, being poor sucks. But at some point, you have to start making decisions with an eye towards the long term.

LK

since property is itself an artificial creation

A given implementation of property rights has some artificial trappings, but even insects implement property rights by defending marked territories. Every animal has this idea hard-wired in. Heck, one could stretch the argument to walnut trees.

Georgists tend to ignore Nature in their search for an abstract ideal.