My friend owns 15+ apartment buildings in "not so desirable" neighborhoods. He deals with a lot of tenants who don't pay rent and eventually he has to evict them.

3 months ago he was evicting someone for not paying rent for 12+ months, and a week before the police were going to help get the tenant out of the apartment, his employer stepped in and paid the landlord his back-rent in full.

The tenant was employed at a local roofing company. Apparently he was a good roofer, and the owner of the company didn't want to see the worker homeless, so he stepped in and paid a year of the guy's back rent. (And here's the twist... after his employer stepped in and settled his back rent, the tenant still refuses to pay rent, and will be evicted again 6-9 months from now)

Maybe debt collectors have had similar luck as the landlord in this story, but that's probably a secondary motivation. Primary motivation for the debt collector is intimidation. Debt collection agencies are ruthless in all ways imaginable.

Because nearly nothing in the world works on the level of individually self-serving, containerized ideas which have direct one-to-one causes and effects.

As an exercise, instead imagine these companies operating on high latency, realtime digital signal graphs running at low sample rates.

Say one of those companies' graphs needs to operate on an incoming stream of 10,000 samples. The company obviously desires the highest frequencies to pass into the "payment received" output.

So they add an "anger-the-boss" filter into the signal chain.

There aren't just direct consequences here-- each change causes a rippling effect for the consequent samples. And that rippling effect clearly changes the behavior of some consequent victims. For example, if victims already heard about these nasty tactics and they want to keep their current job, they might decide to pay if those tactics are still being used.

It probably doesn't get the optimal output for the company. But the article talks about how a 1% change in payment rates can be the difference between success and bankruptcy. Like most realtime systems, they don't have the luxury of screwing around with potentially better outcomes if it ever means missing deadlines for paying the company's bills.

You'd probably drive yourself crazy thinking of all human affairs as low-latency DSP graphs. But I would propose doing the exercise however long it takes to get rid of the pattern of reflexively approaching any new social puzzle by positing a perfectly self-interested and self-contained individual sample.

It might increase the chances that when you get another job you will agree to start making payments on the debt so that they won't get you fired from that job too.

The bureaucracy will drag out any separation action for months; like at a minimum it will include a series of formal counseling statements by your first-line supervisor and commander, visits to Trial Defense Services, and mental and physical health assessments that take weeks to schedule.

Even in cases of actual criminal conduct, the MPs are very rarely involved. A first-line supervisor NCO would handle the task of escorting the person to their appointments and pulling guard duty if there were some restrictions in place (also rare).

Is there more to these stories?

I do see the occasional person bringing their SO to the Navy and Marine balls.

Finding consumer lawyers willing to take FDCPA cases is tough.

Lovely folks there, I fear the day they get bought up and turn bad.

Huh. Interesting; was totally unaware that was a thing.

Some places seem to go further:

> Singapore, Taiwan, India, and Mainland China criminalize refusal of financial or emotional support for one's elderly parents

Emotional support! Idea for Chinese sitcom; awful couple make life difficult for their adult children, on the basis that the children are legally required to be nice to them.

“You have to pay your parent’s posthumous debts” still seems like a hell of a leap from “you have to take care of your parents”, tho. I’m very surprised more states haven’t repealed these (looks like about half of US states have one, though it’s not clear how active they are).

The book she mentions is pretty old, but the situation with her mother she mentions is current.

That sounds like an interesting story...

I have no particular opinion on that question but, having read the original patio11 post, virtually 90% of this one is just paraphrasing of its contents.

yes

Wrong on both counts.

The whole sold-in-bulk thing I could see being 'remedied' by having some sort of federal clearinghouse that each item of debt has to pass through. Though, that'd probably get fought tooth and nail so money-men can pull subprime-shenanigans.

He happened to have all the original paperwork on file and it proved they hadn't followed the required legal procedures.

Trying to forge an essential document wasn't going to help their case.

I've heard from a number of people who work for banks, lenders, and insurers that record keeping is a complete mess, and a certain amount of unlawful creative improvisation isn't unusual.

So... they may claim to have proof, but there's a reasonable chance that if it's examined closely and/or all original correspondence is kept, they don't.

This seems to be worse in the US where debts are traded and retraded and the original paperwork may be long gone.

I serve discovery thinking they’ll never be able to respond, they do.

I’d like to know the deciding factor for sue or sell.

The score almost means nothing with them present.

Right — this “optional” description really only means anything after the borrower has nuked their credit for many years.

You must be appaled by the existence of the global bonds market then.

Thank you.