Thanas wrote:......
The past two pages have all been about the ethics of the situation, which are fucking shitty.
Yes, that's why I it confused me when I was told that things had gotten off topic.
mr friendly guy wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:LadyTevar, speaking purely for myself, is there any way in which I have failed to address his questions?
I do consider his behavior unethical, and have stated my reasons, but I am not aware of any specific question or point he has asked, which I failed to address.
Sigh. You argued on three broad grounds Simon.
1. A paternalistic argument on the grounds that its a decision you find irrational and he shouldn't be able to make that decision- I countered by appealing to the ethical right of autonomy irregardless of whether you consider the decision irrational using the usual definition of the word, ie not logical. I gave several examples of how this paternalistic argument is rejected in the real world.
His right to autonomy means he has a right to make his own decisions. It does not mean you have a moral right to profit by cooperating in his self-destructive actions.
If a man tells you he wants to hang himself, it is not a morally neutral decision to sell him a length of rope. And that isn't paternalism.
2. The return for myself was high and is likely to cause hardship, despite the fact he demonstrates an ability to pay it off. I and Ralin pointed out he has the ability to pay it off. And Ralin doesn't even like me.
I also point out, (a fact which the mod noted) that the amount he owes me is less than the amount he owes others, meaning my actions caused a lesser hardship to him, using your guidelines of course. This of course feeds into point 3.
The issue here is that he has borrowed from numerous people, a very large total sum of money (a hundred fifty thousand dollars, ignoring the loans to the bank since all he has to do for THOSE is make interest payments).
Even stipulating that he earns $150 an hour, that is a thousand hours' wages for him- a considerable sum of money. If he borrowed interest on terms comparable to the ones you accepted, then it bounces to 1500 hours' wages. He would have to work for over half a year
doing literally nothing but paying off these loans. to finish paying them all off.
In your own OP you say "In desperation, he quit his hospital job..." and picked up another, more lucrative one that exposes him to "places your visit are hell dodgy... and colleagues have been attacked before with driver by drug seeking patients." In addition to this, he is working a second job.
So he's putting his safety at risk on a day to day basis, working odd hours, to make enough money to pay off these loans he made to "friends." Loans which are so large that it will realistically take him the better part of a year to pay them all off even if he lives like a monk. And that's
assuming he doesn't get stabbed by the crazy criminal friends of one of the crazy criminal clients he's taking on in the "hell dodgy" neighborhoods where he's working to earn enough money to pay off the loans.
Now, what just happened to this guy... That may not count as "ruining someone's life," it certainly comes close. You,
personally, are not responsible for ruining his life, but you are now seeking to profit from the ruin of his life.
3. Lending him money to make the investment at this point feeds his "addiction."
With regards to point 3, I pointed this is exactly how bank loans work. If you consider lending money to people to invest, er I mean put money into ventures which could net losses as feeding their addiction, you're in essence arguing all loans are unethical if the investment fails to pan out. I asked you to clarify this. So far you've not.
I have actually already done that, you just didn't pay attention.
To summarize, banks do not lend people money
for the express purpose of supporting their unsecured investment. To do so would be risky for the bank, in addition to being ethically problematic.
The bank is willing to lend you money for stupid purposes
if you offer them collateral, but that is ultimately because the bank is willing to take everything you have and leave you crying in a ditch if that's what it takes for them to net a profit. It is not a valid model for how to behave ethically towards one's "friends."
Would you leave this guy penniless in a ditch if that's what it took to "get back" the extra $2000 this guy recklessly promised you in an attempt to avoid bankruptcy when his FOREX gambling left him in danger? If so, don't expect people to do anything other than call you a worthless snake. If not, don't try to justify your behavior by comparing yourself to a bank.
And even given the bank's ruthless willingness to hurt people in order to get its money bank,
the bank would not expect such exorbitant interest rates. Because the only kind of people willing to promise such interest rates are those who are desperate (and unlikely to ever repay the money) or those who are lying (and unlikely to ever repay the money).
So at best, you are morally equivalent to an amoral entity (a bank),
but less intelligent.
Personally, I occasionally do stupid things, and I occasionally do evil things, but I try not to be both stupid and evil at the same time.
I know you're not the sharpest tool in the shed, but no one claimed the bank was saying its a good idea. Only that its not in the same vein as gambling at a casino. Now I know you're most probably never taken out an investment loan in your life, but in investing there is always risk. Yeah I know right. Risk, what a concept. As per the rules, the higher the risk the higher the return. To have a high risk but same return as a low risk investment, is not a good idea, since people can just invest in the lower risk option for the same reward. However a high risk with high return idea, the idea isn't as bad. As anyone who has even picked up a book on investing knows, invest based on your risk profile. Just because I am not willing to take such high risks, doesn't mean someone else isn't, nor should they be denied the option to take risk short of some great societal need.
This does not make it ethical for you to
further increase the risk associated with an action that is already so risky that when it went wrong it turned their life inside out. In this case, you are increasing the cash value of the risk this man has been exposed to by $2000.
The fact that you can find someone reckless enough to take a huge risk does not mean you are entitled to profit from that level of recklessness.
Go ask for a home equity loan and tell the loan officer that you plan to use the money on slots. See how long it takes them to hand you the pen. It won't be very, because they're not on the hook when your bet goes bad. Then go ahead and ask them for an unsecured line of credit to go invest in forex. See again how quickly they tell you to go fuck yourself. That will be very.
Firstly I just have to point out the home equity loan is secured, whereas the forex loan in your hypothetical is not. Totally fair comparison. Secondly, the bank did lend him money to invest in forex as stated in the OP how much he owes the bank. Are you trolling now or just really this stupid?
You are willfully ignoring his point.
The bank will let you take out a
secured loan because they can confiscate your house even if you blow off all the money and are unable to pay it back.
They are not exposed to risk.
The bank will let you take out an unsecured loan based on your prior credit rating (i.e. your history of paying off loans),
within limits. They do this because
on average it has proven to be a good credit risk. However, when they do this, they do
not charge anywhere near the interest you charged... Because as I said above, the only people who agree to pay at such rates are those who are desperate, and those who are lying. Both groups are bad credit risks.
In other words, unsecured loans at high interest rates are by definition risky investments.
If he can be expected to eat the consequences of his risky investment,
so can you. Stop pestering the man about paying off the interest on a loan you should never have agreed to collect that kind of interest on in the first place.
He had to go to everyone he knows and borrow massive amounts of money at an insane interest rate, and has yet to be able to make good on those debts in full. You keep saying "He paid it back!" as if it completely invalidates the MASSIVE upheaval in his life that resulted in him doing so.
If investments don't go right, people may have to make changes to their lifestyle. How do you live in a world where everything isn't so ordered, where risk exists everyday?
Oh wait. You've most probably never taken out an investment loan in your life, you have no fucking clue of the consequences and implications of them, and your knowledge of them boils down to "investment loans = evil." You're unwilling to shoulder the responsibility of dealing with the risk, so you act all surprise when people do deal with the responsibility by paying it off even if they have to make lifestyle changes.
There's "change my lifestyle by not going on vacation, because my dividends didn't come in like I'd hoped," and then there's "go be a doctor for the Mafia because the pay's good and I really,
really need the money. Like,
really, because Jimmy the Weasel will break my kneecaps otherwise."
It sounds like this guy is closer to the latter end of the spectrum. He's making choices that people just plain
do not make unless they are, personally, in grave financial danger.
In which case you have an obligation as a human being who is not a fucking psychopath* to NOT make the situation worse for him. And indeed, as a responsible adult who is not a fucking psychopath,* you should have foreseen that this would happen and either NOT loaned him money at all, or loaned him money at much, much lower interest.
________________________
*Unless you are a fucking psychopath, which is increasingly plausible. Two of the hallmarks of psychopathy are indifference to the consequences of risky behavior (which you are exhibiting), and indifference to the suffering of others (likewise)
You keep accusing me of selectively ignoring points I don't want to deal with, but the fact of his whole life getting turned upside down is established in the OP, and you have continually pretended that references to this were nothing but paternalism and assumptions that things must have gone bad.
So at $150/hour he earns somewhere 2-3 times what he would have earnt previously. Which was also mentioned in the OP. Somehow when we use the phrase "life turned upside down," to describe a bad situation, we tend not to think of earning 2 times more. So yeah, you're selectively ignoring points when you made that claim.
Maybe the problem is that
you are incapable of intelligently evaluating risk. Do you not grasp that he is making much more money because he works at an unsteady job that places his safety in danger? You yourself mentioned this- he is now working in shady areas at unusual hours, in a job where others have been attacked,
even though they were traveling with a driver. And this is in addition to his second job.
"Life turned upside down" is not a concept that automatically comes with a dollar sign attached.
PS Re the insult: I said I'm poor, not that I don't pay my debts. I have a personal desire to avoid property ownership or long-term entanglements (including debt) which would usually be needed to have valuable collateral. I like to be able to pick up and go, but I'm not drowning. I've seen others drown, and people like you threw them overboard.
Well that explains why you find investment loans so unethical. Problem is buddy, people have made money from leveraging, and people have lost. If you were responsible, you would assign the appropriate credit for your wins (ie to financial adviser or your own skill) and pay up when you lose, even if it means changing some financial habits to do so. As opposed to blaming the lenders.
The people who make money from leveraging are mostly intelligent professionals who handle their financial obligations with care.
The private individuals who make money from leveraging are lucky gamblers.
Then there are people who are idiots to be fleeced in the eyes of the pros- the
unlucky gamblers.
Unsecured lending to unlucky gamblers is not a wise course of action. Furthermore, unsecured lending
at exorbitant interest to unlucky gamblers is the moral equivalent of profiting off liquor sales to an alcoholic. It is not a thing a decent human being should want to do, even if it is, empirically, something people do.
