They're doing this by purchasing this debt for $18M (less than 1% of nominal value). But this means they're not buying *good* debt for people who are making payments - or were ever likely to.
Much like John Oliver's stunt a while back, they're buying junk debt and essentially throwing away money. The only winner is a bottom-feeding collections agency who gets to offload some worthless leads.
The thing is, unpaid debt is a big deal for a while, but if the debtor can't be forced to pay for several years, it becomes nearly worthless. The statute of limitations for legal enforcement is around 3-6 years in most states. After that, the records get passed around from one ephemeral, bottom-feeding collections agency to another. The agencies occasionally send junk mail or try to make phone calls, hoping to find a sucker who'd make it worth their time. After a while, they give up.
So yes, you can buy that debt, but you're not making the world a whole lot better. You're spending more than the collection agencies were ever expecting to see.
"I used to write a lot about crypto. The reason I liked writing about crypto is that it seemed to be rediscovering all of regular finance from first principles, quickly, in public. It was a fabulous laboratory for understanding financial structures. If you wanted a public demonstration of why, I don’t know, infinitely leveraged shadow banks were bad, you could wait 20 minutes and crypto would give you one."
I made the same point before: the most interesting part of the phenomenon wasn't that it's necessarily good or bad, that it's energy-hungry or not - but that you're getting an empirical validation of many of the crusty old principles of "classical" finance. Funnily, delivered to you by the folks who rejected all that dogma in the first place.
I hate Elf on the Shelf. I think it teaches children that it's OK to live under constant surveillance. Why not come up with a more benign explanation, such as that Santa buys behavioral information from an online data broker?
I know that many folks on Mastodon grew up in the internet era and might be wondering how our lives looked before. I scribbled down some notes:
1) We had what we called "friends" - a concept somewhat similar to Instagram followers. The most notable difference was the absence of the "like" button, so you had to converse every now and then.
2) We had no streamlined and searchable archives of everything people had ever said, so canceling an acquittance was fairly difficult. You sometimes had to tolerate people with different views.
3) We had news delivered to our doorsteps, but you had to work with as little as 1-2 rage-inducing articles per day. The headline tech was lacking too, so you often had to read the entire piece before making up your mind.
4) Shopping was really inefficient. You had to go to a mall to buy clothing instead of having it trucked to your doorstep and then returning it when it doesn't fit. You were limited to maybe a hundred brands, and today's classics - such as TUBVECHI, STREBITQ, or VIGRUEZ - were nowhere to be found.
5) We had no smartphones, so you navigated the city using a sextant. Meetings were arranged under a full moon, but that posed challenges due to werewolves.
Know your hardwood furniture! Beware of cheap melamine particleboard. Always ask for premium MDF, which holds up much better to normal household use, lasting up to several weeks.
One of the coolest toys I had as a kid was an "electronic projects lab" that had a bunch of components mounted on a plastic board and connected to spring terminals that could be patched together with wire.
(I attached a photo of a similar product; mine was a knock-off made in Czechoslovakia.)
Anyway - the coolest part of this was that it came with a book containing schematics for several hundred (non-trivial!) projects you could assemble right away. Just everything you need in one place, invaluable especially in the days before the internet.
A bit over 10 years ago, I wanted to give my kids the same experience, so I went with Snap Circuits - but honestly, it felt like inferior tech. Fewer components, harder to put together and keep together - and to add insult to injury, the included pamphlet mostly offered endless riffs on the same idea ("get this IC block to make siren sound A", "get this IC block make siren sound B", you get the drift).
A decade ago, you could still buy spring-terminal kits from Elenco, Ramsey, and some other brands, so I later did that. But now, looks like Snap Circuits killed them all off?
A bit of a bummer... breadboards are fine, but again, there's value in having all the parts and well-thought-out projects ideas in one place.
Are you disappointed with the quality of your online interactions? The culprit are the transistors in your computer, well-known for having a robotic, tinny signal quality.
I've been gradually replacing mine with vacuum tubes. My social media experiences are now much crisper and show significantly improved tonality.