Fuck you, Wikipedia
-
@hungrier According to the graph posted earlier, roughly 35% of their revenue came from sources other than interest on loans. If we assume all of that came from overdraft fees, that would give a total revenue just under $100B, or ~$65B of other revenue. If they had other non-interest revenue, which they surely did, that would mean overdraft fees were less than 35% of their revenue, their total revenue was >$100B, and revenue from sources other than overdraft fees was >%65B.
-
@HardwareGeek As a note, Bank of America alone had $115 billion in revenue in 2019. (source). Commercial banking (which is only a subset of the whole bank industry, but the relevant one I think) shows at ~450 billion (source).
So $34B in overdraft fees comes out to ~7.5% of total revenue.
As a note, that headline number seems...overstated? All the evidence I can find shows that actual overdraft fees are somewhere around half that (~15B, 11.4B at the banks that are required to report such things, plus ~4B estimated at smaller banks). Note that of that 11.4B, 9B was at 5 particular banks. The 34B number comes from basically one source, an "estimate" from Moebs Services (that doesn't cite its own sources).
This source https://www.truthorfiction.com/did-banks-collect-30-billion-in-overdraft-fees-in-2018/ claims that it's likely that most of that is actually in other service fees (as the 30B number seems to refer to total service fees).
-
@HardwareGeek said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
They'd process transactions in the order received, and if you were in the red for even one minute, they'd impose the NSF fee.
I remember hearing stories about some that would reorder those so the highest amount hit first in order to maximize the number of transactions that incurred the NSF.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
On the other hand, you have banks who outright admit they are raping your ass
Please stop with this whataboutist nonsense. By that line of reasoning we could shut down this entire website because why complain about minor stuff like terrible code when there are children starving in Africa.
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
If so, why does the "structuring withdrawals to maximize overdraft fees" scam exist?
Does it? My bank processes all credits for the day before debits, such that even if I ended up in the red for some amount of time, so long as I transferred in enough to get back in the black everything was fine at 3am the following morning.
On the other side, I accidentally stayed in the red because I wasn't paying attention twice in the last month (something that's only happened once ever previously. I blame unexpectedly not getting paid for this issue.) and the overdraft protection fee was $12 (that was waived because I'm a "premium member" automatically).
What banks are doing this?
Are you sure you're at a bank and not a credit union?
Pretty sure. Its logo is prominently red with a flag on it and has the audacity to use my country's name.
-
@Deadfast said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
On the other hand, you have banks who outright admit they are raping your ass
Please stop with this whataboutist nonsense. By that line of reasoning we could shut down this entire website because why complain about minor stuff like terrible code when there are children starving in Africa.
WHY ARE YOU COMPLAINING INSTEAD OF CURING CANCER?!
-
@HardwareGeek said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
If so, why does the "structuring withdrawals to maximize overdraft fees" scam exist?
Does it? My bank processes all credits for the day before debits, such that even if I ended up in the red for some amount of time, so long as I transferred in enough to get back in the black everything was fine at 3am the following morning.
Many (most? all?) banks didn't use to do that. They'd process transactions in the order received, and if you were in the red for even one minute, they'd impose the NSF fee.
Sure sure, but what was being insinuated was that the reverse of what I described was being done: namely that transactions were being processed to debit everything first before any credits so that an NSF was much more likely to occur and also unavoidable.
On the other side, I accidentally stayed in the red because I wasn't paying attention twice in the last month (something that's only happened once ever previously. I blame unexpectedly not getting paid for this issue.) and the overdraft protection fee was $12 (that was waived because I'm a "premium member" automatically).
Do that a few more times, or without overdraft protection, and the fee will rise significantly, and they'll be far less likely to waive it.
Sure sure, but at that point why do you have an account you know you're going to not have money in? They waiver the fee because I'm so profitable for them anyways.
-
@Tsaukpaetra said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@HardwareGeek said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
If so, why does the "structuring withdrawals to maximize overdraft fees" scam exist?
Does it? My bank processes all credits for the day before debits, such that even if I ended up in the red for some amount of time, so long as I transferred in enough to get back in the black everything was fine at 3am the following morning.
Many (most? all?) banks didn't use to do that. They'd process transactions in the order received, and if you were in the red for even one minute, they'd impose the NSF fee.
Sure sure, but what was being insinuated was that the reverse of what I described was being done: namely that transactions were being processed to debit everything first before any credits so that an NSF was much more likely to occur and also unavoidable.
That's actually not what I was talking about; it's even more evil than you imagine: a lot of banks have been caught structuring debits to process largest-to-smallest, so that if an overdraft occurs, the number of individual overdrafts you get charged for is maximized.
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
That's actually not what I was talking about; it's even more evil than you imagine: a lot of banks have been caught structuring debits to process largest-to-smallest, so that if an overdraft occurs, the number of individual overdrafts you get charged for is maximized.
Sweet. Well unfortunately I manage my money slightly better than that (almost always, demonstrably) so I should be safe. Sorry for those that cannot (or refuse to) do the same.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Dragoon said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
but at the end of the day, the vast majority of the sub-prime loans that were the root of the issue would have been denied by the banks if it were not for the government intervening.
At the end of the day the banks emerged out of that victorious -- by collecting whatever money they could from victims and the bailout from tax payers, haven't they?
What happened is that banks saw that they stand to make profit either way and just went with the flow. They would have probably done the same even without government encouragement.
And somehow you think the banks were the villains here.
And "what happened to the victims" was more of a rhetorical question. They lost everything they had, and banks didn't lose a cent.
Oh geez, no! Taxes aren't that high here!
@HardwareGeek said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
Many apartment and other urban dwellers can't even do that.
That's not the point. You can move to a rural area and grow food there. You can't start a bank.
@boomzilla said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
My moral ground is plenty high here, no matter where the bank doll touched you.
Your moral ground is that of a leech, IOW well below sea level.
Happily safe from the strain of rabies that infected you.
@boomzilla said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
Dumb, drunk and envious is no way to go through life, son.
And that's how you are obviously going through it -- you envy Wikimedia because they are spending more than you will ever be able to afford.
Which I'm sure made sense in your delirium. Except that I don't care how much money they have. I'm just annoyed by their dishonest begging.
-
@Dragoon said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
As for the USA you had your own version of banks robbing people blind back in 2008 if I remember correctly.
You do not. The US government decided that poor people needed houses so they heavily encouraged banks to take on bad loans to let these people have houses. This went poorly. The banks didn't want these loans, because they don't make enough money from poor people to justify the risk.
They were deemed too big to fail, bailed out by tax money and quite a lot of golden parachutes popped open.
The US government had told the banks to back the bad loans and that the US government would back them, as far as the banks were concerned, they had entered into a deal with the government prior to the crash. So they kinda had to bail them out, as the government caused the problem. Other entities that were heavily invested in the markets also ate shit and they did get bailed out, which is a boondoggle of epic proportion.
What happened to the victims?
Well, most of the people that should have never qualified for a house to begin with lost their houses and ruined any credit that they might have built up. This caused a series of other ripple effects as well.
This was not the direct fault of the banks (though they played their part). I am not going to say that they were blameless in this (they weren't) but at the end of the day, the vast majority of the sub-prime loans that were the root of the issue would have been denied by the banks if it were not for the government intervening.
This I can confirm as being true. From 2004 to 2008 I worked at one of the major banks in the US as a programmer in the loan origination department of IT. Our loan originators were extremely pissed about having to give out loans to people they knew would default on the loans at some point. It's why the banks also then hedged those loans and sold them regularly to other banks. This of course lead to the loans essentially being kited between banks until the eventual default (seriously, the bank has an entire hedging department). Now, because the housing industry knew that all these people would be getting loans that shouldn't be...the housing industry boomed, until of course...the crash. Where I live there are still lots of "new" housing subdivisions that were never finished with plenty of houses that have never been occupied just rotting.
All this was caused by the government. IMO though the banks never should have agreed to such a deal, but I'm sure the people who would have said hell no to it weren't involved in the decision making.
-
@CodeJunkie said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
All this was caused by the government. IMO though the banks never should have agreed to such a deal, but I'm sure the people who would have said hell no to it weren't involved in the decision making.
They should have just put some fundraising appeals up on their web pages.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
At the end of the day the banks emerged out of that victorious -- by collecting whatever money they could from victims and the bailout from tax payers, haven't they?
I wouldn't say victorious or even unscathed, many of them took several financial hits. Many smaller banks simply went under/were bought out by their competitors.
What happened is that banks saw that they stand to make profit either way and just went with the flow. They would have probably done the same even without government encouragement.
The banks had already stretched their risk factor as far as they were going to. Federal regulations restrict banks to only take on so much risk, the banks had already reached that point (or were already very close to it) when the government came in and offered backing for the banks to exceed that level of risk. Had the government not offered that backing they would not have offered those loans as they were prohibited from doing so.
And "what happened to the victims" was more of a rhetorical question. They lost everything they had, and banks didn't lose a cent.
They lost billions, many smaller banks folded completely. The mortgage holding companies are the ones with the golden parachutes (and can't forget GM).
As I noted earlier, it was a horrible mess and the banks arn't without blame but you seem to be disproportionally focused on the banks when there is plenty of blame to go around.
That's not the point. You can move to a rural area and grow food there. You can't start a bank.
No, most people can't do that. They really don't have the skills to make a go at it. Further, for most of the US you are going to require ~5 acres of prime growing ground (more if it isn't prime ground) and a good growing season to live off what you can grow. That is a non-trivial amount of work to cultivate. But please go on about how anyone can just grow all their own food.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Dragoon said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
but at the end of the day, the vast majority of the sub-prime loans that were the root of the issue would have been denied by the banks if it were not for the government intervening.
At the end of the day the banks emerged out of that victorious -- by collecting whatever money they could from victims and the bailout from tax payers, haven't they?
What happened is that banks saw that they stand to make profit either way and just went with the flow. They would have probably done the same even without government encouragement.
It's worse than that. The entire "the government forced them into it" narrative is nonsense and completely false; it was the banks' idea from the beginning.
The concept of "too big to fail" didn't originate in the 2008 crisis, but in the S&L crisis of the 1980s, when the government bailed out failing banks who had gotten themselves into hot water. And the banks learned their lesson: they were officially considered too big to be held accountable, so they could take predatory actions without consequences and get bailed out when it goes wrong.
Privatized profits and socialized losses! The best of both worlds!The idea that the government had a gun to the banks' heads, forcing them to accept bad loans that they knew were bad, is pure fiction. If it were true, banks wouldn't have been able to get away with refusing to make bad loans. But that's not true, as the one I've been banking at since well before 2008 was never in any danger because they refused to make bad loans. (Somehow, the government never shut them down over this.)
Making bad loans was good for the banks, because they sold them off to third parties before the bill came due. It was good for the loan officers working at the bank, because they get their commissions based on the loan being made initially rather than it being successfully paid off. It was good for the third parties they sold the loans too, because they packaged them up into bonds and sold them off to unsuspecting investors.
It was good (and well understood, and affirmatively desired, with eyes wide open) by everyone in the process except for the victims who got scammed by those loan officers into loans they couldn't afford, under terms they couldn't understand, and the victims who bought the bonds because they'd been flat-out lied to by the banks about how stable they were.
-
@Tsaukpaetra said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
If so, why does the "structuring withdrawals to maximize overdraft fees" scam exist?
Does it? My bank processes all credits for the day before debits, such that even if I ended up in the red for some amount of time, so long as I transferred in enough to get back in the black everything was fine at 3am the following morning.
On the other side, I accidentally stayed in the red because I wasn't paying attention twice in the last month (something that's only happened once ever previously. I blame unexpectedly not getting paid for this issue.) and the overdraft protection fee was $12 (that was waived because I'm a "premium member" automatically).
What banks are doing this?
Quite a lot of them. The bank I worked for did this, although I think to some degree they have been called out on it enough (and probably sued) and have had to change their ways. If I recall correctly they would process credits first, but still structure the debits from greatest to least in order to maximize the amount of overdraft fees for each withdrawal after you were negative.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@boomzilla said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
And somehow you think the banks were the villains here.
I am sure they were real darlings, forgiving loans and giving money away to poor... oh wait. They did no such thing. They collected.
Well, yeah, that's how loans work. The borrower is supposed to pay the lender back. You've completely lost the plot now, haven't you?
@CodeJunkie said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
All this was caused by the government.
If the bankers had any scruples and at least a notion of professional integrity that wouldn't have happened. Blaming government for something banks could have flat out refused is missing the point.
Points are definitely being missed here, but perhaps it's because you're not from around here and don't know what was going on. The government was practically paying the banks on the one hand and threatening them on the other.
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
It's worse than that. The entire "the government forced them into it" narrative is nonsense and completely false; it was the banks' idea from the beginning.
No.
Affordable Housing, Diversity Mandates Caused Mortgage Crisis - Competitive Enterprise Institute
Banks and mortgage companies have long been under pressure from lawmakers and regulators to give loans to people with bad credit, in order to provide “affordable housing” and promote “diversity.” That played a key role in triggering the mortgage crisis, judging from a story today in the New York...
As a Washington Post story shows, the high-risk loans that led to the mortgage crisis were the product of regulatory pressure, not a lack of regulation. In 2004, even after banking officials "warned that subprime lenders were saddling borrowers with mortgages they could not afford, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development helped fuel more of that risky lending. Eager to put more low-income and minority families into their own homes, the agency required that two government-chartered mortgage finance firms purchase far more ‘affordable' loans made to these borrowers
There's more at the link, including links to stories in that text which I'm not going to reproduce.
-
@boomzilla Yes, I'm well aware of The Narrative. I've been hearing it for 11 years now. It still fails to address the counterexample. If banks were affirmatively required to make bad loans, how did the ones that didn't make any get away with refusing to do so?
-
Which is why I never used the words forced. I used the words encouraged and incentivized, which there is no arguing that the government did. The moral bankruptcy of banks being what it is, they were happy to take it. But that doesn't change the fact that they had reached a point (prior to the government offerings) where they had reached the limit of the risk they wanted to take.
Fannie and Fredie owned the vast majority of the sub-prime loans. They fully understood what they were buying, there was no deception in what they were.
-
@CodeJunkie said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
All this was caused by the government. IMO though the banks never should have agreed to such a deal, but I'm sure the people who would have said hell no to it weren't involved in the decision making.
The government enacted the rules that encouraged it because the banks lobbied hard for it, and provided plenty of "experts" that said it would be absolutely OK what with modern finance and so on. After all, they had some of the brainiest people working for them (they could use Math!
) so they could hardly be wrong on this. The silly thing is... their math trickery would have worked too, except that the risk models didn't account for correlated risk and risk contagion. Oh dear. 
(Remember, this crash was not a USA-only phenomenon, so it definitely wasn't just the Federal Government to blame. The big banks though, they operated worldwide and were utterly in this in every aspect from start to finish, the crooked bastards...)
-
@dkf Didn't realize they lobbied for it, but that does make sense. More sense to be honest. Both parties are most definitely at fault though.
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@boomzilla Yes, I'm well aware of The Narrative. I've been hearing it for 11 years now. It still fails to address the counterexample. If banks were affirmatively required to make bad loans, how did the ones that didn't make any get away with refusing to do so?
Wow, that's lame. Who fucking knows? You could be mistaken, for one (that's honestly the biggest probability here since you're still denying that it happened and haven't provided any sort of backup for that, not even the name of the institution, let alone any documented evidence). Also, regulatory pressure doesn't hit everyone the same. If enough banks succumbed then the ones who continued to resist might have gotten away with it. That's a thing that happens a lot in all sorts of different situations.
-
@CodeJunkie said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@dkf Didn't realize they lobbied for it, but that does make sense. More sense to be honest. Both parties are most definitely at fault though.
Yeah, but remember: they were lobbying for the government to subsidize it. And it's not like there weren't already plenty of politicians who wanted it to happen for reasons of their own.
-
@boomzilla said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@CodeJunkie said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@dkf Didn't realize they lobbied for it, but that does make sense. More sense to be honest. Both parties are most definitely at fault though.
Yeah, but remember: they were lobbying for the government to subsidize it. And it's not like there weren't already plenty of politicians who wanted it to happen for reasons of their own.
Very true.
-
@HardwareGeek said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
Admittedly, we weren't blameless in the situation. If we had controlled our spending better while I was unemployed, we could have continued making payments for a few more months, which might have delayed the foreclosure and forced sale; a month and a half later, I had a job and could have resumed making payments.
Don't blame yourself for that. Nobody keeps savings so big they can run more than 2 years without any income. You've already done way more than can be reasonably expected to. In hindsight it looks like these 2 months would make all the difference, but you had no way of knowing. That offer could've as well happened 3 months later, or half a year earlier, or any other point in time. Life kicked you way harder than you could possibly prepare yourself for without going full ascetic. You did good.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Dragoon said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
Had the government not offered that backing they would not have offered those loans as they were prohibited from doing so.
Had they not been greedy they wouldn't have accepted that backing.
HEY GUISE LETS CHANGE HUMAN NATURE!
There's plenty of blame to go around, but self interest is too important to improving our lives to let pinkos like you give it a bad name.
@boomzilla said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
No.
Affordable Housing, Diversity Mandates Caused Mortgage Crisis - Competitive Enterprise Institute
Banks and mortgage companies have long been under pressure from lawmakers and regulators to give loans to people with bad credit, in order to provide “affordable housing” and promote “diversity.” That played a key role in triggering the mortgage crisis, judging from a story today in the New York...
You may want to check the credibility of your source:
I'm pretty happy with them, especially when someone quotes some losers like sourcewatch instead of addressing any actual argument.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
am sure they were real darlings, forgiving loans and giving money away to poor... oh wait. They did no such thing.
They did forgive some loans. I don't know how many, but short sales typically involved forgiveness of the shortfall. (Which is at least part of why short sales took so long; banks were reluctant to approve them because they lost money on them.) Which put the defaulting borrowers in a different hard spot, because the forgiven amount becomes taxable "income", just when they're broke and least able to pay taxes.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@boomzilla said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
instead of addressing any actual argument
There is no credible argument without credible source.
TDEMSYR.
Citing right-wing sources on political matters isn't credible in my book.
Citing left-wing sources as an appeal to authority is hilarious in my book.
You could have as well quoted Fox News.
Yes, those damn John Birchers at the Washington Post! How could I? You have really turned being obviously and hilariously wrong into an art form.
-
@Dragoon said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
Further, for most of the US you are going to require ~5 acres of prime growing ground (more if it isn't prime ground) and a good growing season to live off what you can grow. That is a non-trivial amount of work to cultivate.
It's also a non-trivial amount of money to acquire that land. It's been a while since there was land available to just homestead. (Cable TV "reality" shows tell me there may be some such land in Alaska, but that doesn't exactly solve the problem; it's not an easy place to survive. From what little I've watched of Discovery, I get the impression that most either just barely survive or give up and move back to civilization, and these are people with some previous wilderness survival experience; your typical city dweller would probably be dead in a month, and that's not even considering the winter.) 150 years ago,
you@levicki might have been right; now, not so much.
-
@Gąska said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
you had no way of knowing. That offer could've as well happened 3 months later, or half a year earlier, or any other point in time.
Yeah, hindsight is 20/20. We kept expecting I'd have a job any moment. I got a short-term contract at a very good rate (more than I'm making now, with 10 years additional experience) very soon after I lost my previous job. Little did we know that I'd have only one more contract, for all of two months and at a rate less than 60% of that, in the next 2 1/2 years, and that I'd go an entire year without so much as an interview. We kept thinking the next job was right around the corner.
The big problem (besides the lack of income) was that we continued discretionary spending as though I still had that $175k contract, even while we were draining our savings. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find that our spending actually increased from what it was during my previous job. I've been unemployed twice since then, and I've learned to put the brakes on, hard, on discretionary spending until regular income is restored, because that has always taken longer than expected. I just wish I'd learned it a few years sooner.
-
@HardwareGeek said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
They did forgive some loans. I don't know how many, but short sales typically involved forgiveness of the shortfall. (Which is at least part of why short sales took so long; banks were reluctant to approve them because they lost money on them.)
OK, this is a part I don't get. How does that work, when the bank no longer owns the loan because they turned around and sold it off to a third party?
-
@Mason_Wheeler I dunno. You'll have to ask someone more versed in the black arts of creative finance.
-
@Mason_Wheeler the 3rd parties are also banks. Or GSEs, which act much the same. In the more exotic products, they were selling parts of the revenue from the loan, not the loan itself (which has to have one clear owner).
I know my own mortgage was sold almost instantly--the brokerage doesn't keep any of its loans. But in a short sale, who ever ended up with the loan at that point can make a deal. Or not. That's one of the big reasons to sell them off--guaranteed money now, no risk of default later.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
I know my own mortgage was sold almost instantly--the brokerage doesn't keep any of its loans.
One of the pieces of information the lender gives you when you take out a mortgage is the percentage of loans they sell/keep. The last time we refinanced, we did so through our own bank, which we liked. They sold a fairly small percentage of their loans, but unfortunately ours turned out to be one of them. They sold it to another broker who, we knew from a previous refinance, sells 100% of their loans. I think they kept it just long enough to collect a single payment before selling it off to ShitiBank; unfortunately, they didn't sell it off.
-
@HardwareGeek said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
I know my own mortgage was sold almost instantly--the brokerage doesn't keep any of its loans.
One of the pieces of information the lender gives you when you take out a mortgage is the percentage of loans they sell/keep. The last time we refinanced, we did so through our own bank, which we liked. They sold a fairly small percentage of their loans, but unfortunately ours turned out to be one of them. They sold it to another broker who, we knew from a previous refinance, sells 100% of their loans. I think they kept it just long enough to collect a single payment before selling it off to ShitiBank; unfortunately, they didn't sell it off.
Mine was through a brokerage that basically doesn't keep any. They flat out said they were going to sell it immediately. And they did, before the first payment. Hasn't really mattered to me, but it's as vanilla of a loan as can be, at least for the "low down payment, but not subsidized or high risk" type.
-
I blame Goldman Sachs.
The Great American Bubble Machine
Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to d
-
@boomzilla said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@Deadfast said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
On the other hand, you have banks who outright admit they are raping your ass
Please stop with this whataboutist nonsense. By that line of reasoning we could shut down this entire website because why complain about minor stuff like terrible code when there are children starving in Africa.
WHY ARE YOU COMPLAINING INSTEAD OF CURING CANCER?!
Because I'm pretty good at one of these.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
And people think Wikimedia is spending money on frivolous things...
Yes, we do.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
There’s John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding
And people think Wikimedia is spending money on frivolous things...
Oh look, over there, what about him!!!! Good argument.
An old joke:
A lawyer does some work for a client and sends the client a bill for $1,000. The client accidentally sends the lawyer $2,000. Now, the lawyer is faced with an ethical dilemma -- what does he do with the extra money.(a) Keep the money and say nothing
(b) Split the money with his partnerThat, is the story of Wilkipedia.
People love Wikipedia, people use it and people are willing to throw money at it because they recognize its value. But Wikipedia (
The Wikimedia Foundation) has a problem. The money they take in far, far exceeds their actual operating costs.There are two obvious solutions to the "problem" of having too much money:
(a) Dear Wikipedia users, thanks to your tremendous generosity we have enough money to fully fund our operation for the next 8 years. Maybe longer if we're careful. Thank You. See you in 2028.
or
(b) Dear Wikipedia users, thanks to your generosity we have hired a staff of full time professional writers and editors. This will make Wikipedia even better by improving the quality of our content and eliminating the petty bickering and turf wars.
But instead, they chose option number 3:
Invent new ways to spend the extra money.
Spending that produces nothing of benefit and only exists to serve the vanity and egos of the people running The Wikimedia Foundation.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
Instead you lick their feet.
Nah, the ones with power are usually subs. It's all about power exchange - the fantasy is to trade places.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
They also don't provide any value to this world,
They arn't begging me for my money and acting like if they don't get my money their service will shut down.
yet I don't see you raising your voices against them
There is plenty of bitching in this forum about most (probably all, but
to verify) of them.But really, this isn't a just comparison. Those arn't not for profits that are running a beg campaign for money that they don't need, just so they can waste more of it on things that don't actually improve wikipedia.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@error said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
Nah, the ones with power are usually subs. It's all about power exchange - the fantasy is to trade places.
I don't think any member of say Sackler family for example would want to trade places with any of us.
And
wouldn't want to get peed on.
-
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@El_Heffe said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
Spending that produces nothing of benefit and only exists to serve the vanity and egos of the people running The Wikimedia Foundation.
Unlike the spending of C-suite execs in big corporations, and bankers, and Wall Street drones, and Manhattan inhabitants, and Las Vegas visitors, and all celebrities, and big name politicians, and oil magnates, and Arabian princes, and other world's assorted billionaires?
Yes, exactly!
-
@El_Heffe said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@levicki said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
There’s John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding
And people think Wikimedia is spending money on frivolous things...
Oh look, over there, what about him!!!! Good argument.
An old joke:
A lawyer does some work for a client and sends the client a bill for $1,000. The client accidentally sends the lawyer $2,000. Now, the lawyer is faced with an ethical dilemma -- what does he do with the extra money.(a) Keep the money and say nothing
(b) Split the money with his partnerThat, is the story of Wilkipedia.
People love Wikipedia, people use it and people are willing to throw money at it because they recognize its value. But Wikipedia (
The Wikimedia Foundation) has a problem. The money they take in far, far exceeds their actual operating costs.There are two obvious solutions to the "problem" of having too much money:
(a) Dear Wikipedia users, thanks to your tremendous generosity we have enough money to fully fund our operation for the next 8 years. Maybe longer if we're careful. Thank You. See you in 2028.
Why should they? There is always something to improve, why shouldn't you when you have more money than you strictly need? If this means providing a better service?
or
(b) Dear Wikipedia users, thanks to your generosity we have hired a staff of full time professional writers and editors. This will make Wikipedia even better by improving the quality of our content and eliminating the petty bickering and turf wars.
That goes against the ethos of Wikipedia. The moment they hire writers and editors, they are no longer impartial. Even worse, they are no longer Wikipedia. They can't really do that. And there's the issue of Wikipedia being huuuuge anyway. What do you edit? Which languages? Assuming that there is a way to edit something which is definitely impartial, do you improve English Wikipedia or do you spend money on other-language Wikipedias? It's a very political choice. If you do the former, you are making the gulf between English Wikipedia and all the other ones even vaster, and you're choosing to potentially alienate people all over the world who don't speak English. If you do the latter, you're doing something that is practically invisible to the largest single slice of your readers and you're not improving the reliability and authority of Wikipedia's top resource, and you get arseholes complaining that Wikimedia is wasting money.
But instead, they chose option number 3:
Invent new ways to spend the extra money.
Spending that produces nothing of benefit and only exists to serve the vanity and egos of the people running The Wikimedia Foundation.
Which is? I've gone back three pages to see examples of ludicrous lavish overspending, I've only seen some back of envelope rough calculations contending that Wikimedia could do what they do with 10% of their budget. Plus, the fact that Wikimedia is a not for profit doesn't have to mean that the people working there must live like monks.
-
@admiral_p said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
Why should they? There is always something to improve, why shouldn't you when you have more money than you strictly need? If this means providing a better service?
Has a question ever been more begged?
-
@boomzilla see? They can't win. Whatever they do, they are either mismanaging Wikipedia (all the money you could get, and instead you choose to sit by the river and wait until Wikipedia becomes irrelevant), or wasting money.
-
@admiral_p said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
@boomzilla see? They can't win. Whatever they do, they are either mismanaging Wikipedia (all the money you could get, and instead you choose to sit by the river and wait until Wikipedia becomes irrelevant), or wasting money.
Fuck, you have the levicki brain worm. Just stop with the fucking begging and acting like they're poor you dickhead. That's all people are saying. But now we want you to suffer, too.
-
@boomzilla for some reason you accept companies taking advantage of advantageous situations (HUMAN NATURE!) but you don't accept not for profit companies taking advantage of the fact that people will gladly donate money to them (but the way donations work is, you have to look like you deserve it, because HUMAN NATURE! Funding campaigns are sobby and whiney basically by definition). Besides, you're begging the question as much as I am. You're assuming that Wikimedia is burning money over "???".
-
@admiral_p you're full of shit. I'm upset when for profit companies misrepresent things too.
-
@admiral_p said in Fuck you, Wikipedia:
You're assuming that Wikimedia is burning money over "???".
I'm furious that they're spending all this money buying strawmen for you. I have no idea what you're talking about here because I never said that.
