Back in the day charging interest was a crime. Things change.
Are credit cards a good or bad invention?
Submitted 9 hours ago by 
Sunshine@piefed.ca to ask@piefed.social
Comments
beejboytyson@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
begrudgedcarfolk@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
Bad, it’s another way to steal from the poor through excessive usury.
threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
Well, if the alternative is carrying cash around… yeah, I’d say they’re a great invention.
Squizzy@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
How is that the alternative? Its a credit card, the alternarive is definitively not having money to carry arond.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 8 hours ago
Imagine how many more things we could build if we didnt have to process every transaction.
JelleWho@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Good for you? Or good for the market?
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago Eh, in an ideal world, they could be fine. It’s just a way of deferring goods/services to a future time in exchange for present needs.
Alas, this is not an ideal world, and debt fucks people harder than a methed out porn star.
Thing is, in the same capitalist hellscape that makes them so ugly, they become a necessity, and the purest form of evil
Oka@sopuli.xyz 5 hours ago
Ive never had a credit card, but I do have overdraft credit (if I overspend, an amount is taken from the line of credit to cover the cost, I pay it back the same month for about 0.20% processing fee, or $25 monthly payments). This prevents my bank from charging a 90$ convenience fee when I overdraft on each transaction. Ive never accrued interest to this point.
That said, rather than have a credit card, I just won’t buy something, simple as that. Ive grown up having no money, I know what its like to not be able to pay for something important. Borrowing money is always bad.
- Sunshine@piefed.ca 9 hours ago
They have increased prices by at least 2% and may make one spend too much money.
i think the concept of making money digital and paying by card is brilliant. In the digital age, cryptocurrencies would have been nicer (peer to peer, decentralised, etc.) but those have unfortunately been hijacked by investor bros and black market dealers.
However, credit cards are controlled by just two American companies, MasterCard and Visa (the latter constantly confused with visas, as in the travel kind), and American Express if you count that. UnionPay is Chinese state-owned and also very big, but it is mostly used in the Asia-Pacific (not very common in Western markets)
Each of those companies, because of the lack of any real competitors, have policies that are favourable to business execs, not the users, and it’s also a bit of a security risk given that all payments through credit card go through these giant companies (who could be compromised from many parties, whether that’s foreign governments or malicious hacker groups)
Most people don’t have a wide understanding of credit (likely intentionally by the companies to push people to overspend), I barely do, and that benefits them, not us