iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

But not too much farther and you pretty rapidly hit a point where there's no real space to free up and it just chokes the life out of the household for years with a major downgrade to all forms of QOL.

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That depends *immensely* on income bracket, because of how there's a certain level of base fixed costs to stay alive that can't really be cut further. If you're in the lower-middle, you probably have some fat that can be cut which would be enough to prevent the debt from compounding.

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An M.D. or J.D. is absolutely qualified to teach either medicine or law, and they frequently do. All terminal degrees do is demonstrate active *research*.

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Except that all of those degrees do qualify you to teach, which is the very root of the concept of "doctor."

In practice there was no difference between the two at most of the elite schools on the east coast because they already restricted entry to law school based on first having a bachelor's degree. So it was purely a naming / internal faculty politics thing, while still being a professional doctorate.

If you're in the $70,000K per annum range, that's not a crisis level event, because if you really cut expenses to the bone then you can create somewhat of a delta to pay everything down. But it doesn't take that much lower on the income ladder before there's no spare money to be found.

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You're now talking a bank account being wiped out via garnishment, which means a guaranteed missed rent payment + 25% post-tax wage garnishment + $1,800 - $3,000 in postjudgment interest per year or more, depending on the state and if the contract allows for more.

$30K is definitely not lifechanging *positive* money. I get people $30K all the time and it certainly is a nice highlight to their year, but it's not change their lives money. But a sudden $30K debt, especially if it's a judgement with collections, can absolutely be life changing.

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Will, you can't apply windfall thesis to a sudden debt because a sudden debt carries with it compounding costs in a way that a sudden windfall generally does not bring with it compounding benefits.

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In effect: assuming a relatively low-lower middling income level, as the discourse here is presuming, every single small sacrifice or product of 5-10 years of labor is gone in the space of a moment and filling that gap (including a now guaranteed missed rent payment) is much harder.

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I occasionally do collections work for my cases. I firmly believe in what I do and in ensuring that my clients are compensated for the wage theft inflicted against them. But I have zero illusions as to what my collections efforts mean for the target.

$30K in debt, if reduced to a judgment, means your bank account is wiped out (or has a fairly small amount protected, if you life in a state with a statute which imposes a minimum protected amount) followed by a 25% reduction in your post-tax take home wages.

Even if it's resolved three years later in your favor, three years operating under the shadow of basically a permanently life ruining debt (unless you go through bankruptcy, which a lot of folks won't do for pride reason and which equally has lifelong impacts) is still basically three years gone.

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The reason why a many consumer side protection statutes have fee shifting provisions is that it doesn't matter what's "actually" right until you prove it in court, and that depends entirely on you having the resources (or the government enabling contingency side work through fee shifting) to do so.

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More importantly, an erroneous debt of $500K isn't a paperwork error until you're able to prove that it was. So even if the guy was full of shit, that it in fact was just an error eventually resolved three years later for $30K, it didn't become an error until then.

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The guy at the root of things posted that it in fact was being treated as a debt by the hospital and they only waived the rest when they were convinced that there was no ability to pay.

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Well, duh, no, but figuratively speaking: "dear major company, you have sent me a bill - why and on what basis?"

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Like, Matt's original post here was specifically that a $30K debt would not be life changing, relative to lifetime income, based entirely on scholarship as to windfalls. At which point it became entirely a conversation about windfalls, with Matt defending his thesis based on windfall literature.

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Right, but this entire thread originates from the topic of a sudden $30K debt. The whole sudden flip into a debate on windfalls comes from people posting at Matt "well then give me $30K", at which point the entire context of everything changes.

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...How else is a thread of: 1. You did not have a debt, you had a paperwork error; 2. "I am apparently not allowed to speak on this because I have not experienced it"; 3. You can speak on this, it really isn't a debt, just a paperwork error, so long as you intervene Supposed to be read?

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The underlying facts - that you can do this and that it often resolves the issue - I do not dispute. The point is that these are still a huge deal, because being able to engage in that form of self-help presumes a level of sophistication, internalized agency, and confidence that many people lack.

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The entire thread is - these paperwork errors happen all the time in medical insurance, but aren't a huge deal, because all you need to do is take relatively minor action to prompt the medical provider to realize the error / communicate with the insurance company, and resolve the issue.

For the same very same reasons (households base their long term consumption based on rough approximations of what they expect to earn over the long term) a sudden windfall of $30K is not life changing, but a sudden *debt* of $30K can be very much life ruining because the buffer isn't there.

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The whole problem here is that Matt's using literature and well proven theses for *positive* windfalls to argue that the same effect happens in the inverse direction for negative income shocks.

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(To be read in combination with "what the fuck is this.")

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You're presuming that it will even cross someone's mind that they can or should do this, let alone that it will make any bit of difference.

And the whole point why it only works for windfalls is exactly because of the thesis you cite - people base their consumption on lifetime earning expectations, so lower income individuals in particular do not have the financial buffer to absorb a sudden deviation from said expectations.

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A family does not experience a -1% lifetime income gain in the same proportional way as a +1% lifetime income gain, because if you're at the pretty tight breakpoint window between hand to mouth and approximate financial stability, a sudden $30K debt could easily be 7-10 years of savings.

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Matt, your thesis only works for windfalls.

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A law school gives you a Doctorate in Jurisprudence, so the proper term for a law school grad should be doctor, which frees up the semantic space for attorney/lawyer to clearly demarcate what they actually mean: someone licensed to practice law.

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Doctors (individuals with an MD licensed to practice medicine) appropriating the term "Doctor" to specifically apply to them, instead of anyone with a doctorate, created a colossal vocabulary snarl that causes people to believe that a J.D. implies professional licensing.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 11h

It's all doctors' fault. Not joking.

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Take how comfortable you are as a college educated fairly high sophistication individual with a general expectation that an institution has to listen to you or take you seriously. Cut it by 90%. That's the baseline you need be operating off of when dealing with the experience of a lot of people.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 11h

80% of my job as a plaintiff's side wage lawyer at the start is helping people feel like there's something they can do about wage theft *in a legal environment where they are explicitly promised penalty multipliers and that their attorneys fees will be covered.*

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 11h

I think you're *massively* overestimating the degree to which people either know how to, or feel comfortable with, interfacing with these systems.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

Just setting colossal amounts of Tesla's money and engineering time on fire because no one can take the wheel away from ket addicted grandpa so long as sheep keep pouring cash into whatever he's involved with.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

99.999% chance it's real, but they only ever produce one.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

The fact that people are trying to litigate some weird trick that there's a magic word that lets you *imply* that you're licensed without actually being licensed just reiterates that the two words are the same, mean the same thing, and you can't use them to describe yourself unless you're licensed.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

The only reason attorney is even a word in American English is because we kept a bunch of weird old English words in the big divorce of 1776.

Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

A Fish Named Wanda for Tax Purposes

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

3,000 years of fantasy Ancient Egypt is all woken up at the same time 2,000 years after that period ends. So now you have 100 generations of kings, all of whom with equally valid claims to the thrones of their long dead cities and subjects and none of them are ready to be told what to do.