[Karunamon]

You seem to know an awful lot about my worldview based on nothing more than a statement of the completely true fact that these wounds are almost entirely self-inflicted.

"Minefield"? "Don't spend money you don't have available to spend, otherwise bad things will happen" is a principle that most people are taught as children.

You seem to conflate the ideas of personal responsibility and the idea of deserving whatever gets thrown your way. We can talk about how crappy the idea of overdraft fees are all day long, but at the end of the day, it comes down to "doctor, it hurts when I do this", the response to which is "don't do that, then." The mechanism of the pain might be the result of a bad actor, but it's still your fault for inflicting it in the first place.

[danharaj]

Again, this sort of reasoning allows every institution to open the doors to maximize the chance that vulnerable people fail in order to capitalize on it. There are many, many, many more traps in the world than overdraft fees for vulnerable people to account for.

Governments, banks, employers, etc. are all hostile towards people.

Every detail you have to track in order to not get fucked is a liability The silence on your part on what responsibility our institutions have for the people they serve is deafening. What you don't say tells me as much about your worldview as what you did say. It's all boring as hell, trust me.

[Karunamon]

A detail such as "don't spend money you don't have"? Violating that principle will get you into trouble in ways that go far beyond checking accounts.

Are gun manufacturers to blame as some part of power structure when you point it at your foot and pull the trigger? If not, why?

[danharaj]

One would think a bank account were an instrument for storing and retrieving one's own money. Banks opted in customers to a system that would allow them to extract fees from people who work with low account balances. They exist.

Furthermore, if you look around this post's comments you'll notice that banks do far more than just charge for overdrafting. They specifically optimize for extracting such fees and behave in an adversarial way. It is often difficult to know what balance one actually has unless one does all their accounting by hand. This is a ridiculous cognitive burden that people with ample account balances do not have to work with. Every institution acts adversarially in this way, because institutions operate to maximize their power as much as they can.

It is not ridiculous to think that human institutions should be structured to serve people, not exploit them.

> Are gun manufacturers to blame as some part of power structure when you point it at your foot and pull the trigger? If not, why?

This is a stupid analogy. A better analogy would be, say, if you tried to withdraw money from your bank account, and if you overdraw, instead of rejecting the transaction, the ATM shoots you in the face.

It doesn't even fucking matter. The point is that some humans with a lot of power optimize the extraction of resources from lots of humans with very little power. You think that's ok and that a society structured around humans being hostile and exploitive towards each other is a good thing, and I think that's objectionable.

[Karunamon]

It is often difficult to know what balance one actually has unless one does all their accounting by hand.

This is absolutely not the fault of anyone but the account holder - even the most honest and pro-consumer bank out there will have issues with this just due to the way finance works.

Example - say you buy a pizza on delivery with your debit card. The card gets "authorized" right then and there (but the money hasn't gone), and your bank will show a difference between ledger balance and available balance. Now assume you wrote a tip on the receipt, and now the discrepancy further grows. Your bank shows you have sort-of balance-pizzaa, but it's actually balance-pizza and an invisible tip until the pizza join runs the batch hours or days later.

The responsible person will know how much money they have, and deduct pizza-tip from their ledger the moment they pay it - no ifs ands or buts.

You think that's ok

Never said that. Again, you seem to think it's impossible to believe that banks are bastards and simultaneously believe that people often act counter to their own best interests.