Story: I was sitting in magistrate’s court one morning, waiting for my gardener’s case to come up, and a bank was trying to collect on a series of unpaid credit card bills. One after the other.

One fellow had gotten a credit card, very quickly maxed out its $6,000 limit and wasn’t making any payments. Although he had a house and a job, and a car, he complained of being a poor man and how a $6,000 debt was beyond his ability to pay.

As a compromise, the magistrate approved a plan for him to repay the credit card bill at $5 a month. Even without interest, at that rate it would take him 100 years to pay that off. But everybody seemed to think this was just a perfect solution. SMH.

I agree with your comments on a bankruptcy process, and I believe that unlawful interest charges should be prosecuted.

However, this problem of not meeting obligations shows up in *many* transactions that have nothing to do with bank loans. It is not uncommon to see a woman with a fresh $300 hairdo crying that she can’t pay her electric bill. Or a student wearing all the latest hip-hop gear, and $200 Nikes, cry that he/she cannot pay their tuition bill. This goes beyond mortgages, my friend ...

$500,000,000 in bad mortgage loans to be simply written off in a nation of just 400,000 people. Shocking. Just ... shocking. What is it about Bahamians, this idea that a loan or other debt can be just forgotten the day after you’ve spent the money?

Look on the bright side — we can market a Bahamian vacation as a “nostalgia tour,” to a time and place before people had vexing modern stuff like electricity! We’ll make a killing! We can sell all them tourist lotsa candles, and rides on rented mules!

Agree with my colleagues above: Everybody keeps referring to this as an “incident.” It is not an “incident.” A fender-bender is an “incident” — this is a f*cking PLAGUE and should be referred to as such. Shooting up women and children over some sort of street-grudge? That is not an “incident.” It’s a plague.

My reference was mainly to your pit bull comparison. But, actually, yes ... unlike sharks, lionfish will hang out on the same piece of reef for weeks on end. I’ve speared them and eaten them ... they are easy to hunt and very tasty. Sharks have always been with us, the lionfish have not. And, respectfully, despite this recent tragedy, shark attacks remain very rare and there is no evidence they are threatening tourism.

A. Lion fish are an invasive species from Asia. They destroy the native fish population.
B. You can identify an individual pit bull that has mauled a person, but you cannot track down the individual shark in the water that mauled a swimmer. The two situations are not comparable.

BTC is getting *killed* by their competitors, so naturally the response is to go on strike. Brilliant.

Bold proposal: Throw a few politicians in the water off the West End, to distract the sharks away from the tourist areas to the east. It would “kill two birds with one stone,” so to speak.

Tribune Business Editor Neil Hartnell (TBENH) should pay a certified technician (CT) to remove the parentheses keys (PK) from his computer keyboard (CK).

Really, Neil ... you only use those when you absolutely have to (AHT). They make stories really hard to read (RHTR).

You’re welcome.