It’s a combination of factors. Having debt itself isn’t as important as payment history, age of accounts, etc. Credit card debt is probably the opposite of helpful; paying off a card every month in full for a long time is much more useful.

Always worth posting this classic.

Considering how many Americans have crippling credit card debt, especially poor people, would that be worse? I’m sure they’d still offer those credit builder cards with low limits that you have to deposit collateral for the limit.

The merchant is charged the fee, not you directly as the cardholder. It’s already figured into the price if they accept cards.

Also look. If many Americans saw a tomato slice on their burger that was not perfectly round but instead very irregular with lots of divots and varying shades of red, orange, and yellow, they’d bring it to the counter and say they got a rotten tomato.

A local supermarket some years ago put heirloom tomatoes right next to regular tomatoes for basically the same price one summer. They stopped selling heirloom tomatoes after that year because hardly anyone bought them. I did. They were incredible.

Both FFTA games are great!

A classic dick of Theseus dilemma.

The major reason given is that taxes vary so much in the US by location that it would be onerous for businesses with locations in different areas to print different price tags and advertise prices broadly.

It’s even an issue online because, until you enter your address, the online retailer has no clue what your tax rate will be, and they have to assess tax based on the purchaser’s location. Postal code isn’t always enough, as they can be shared by different cities with different tax rates.

Some areas also vary tax by date (tax free holidays), though I don’t think consumers would care if their total ended up being cheaper than they thought.

A national standard VAT would be the only way businesses might start including tax in price, but there’s no way to do that without a constitutional amendment. States have the power to tax, and they’re not going to stop now even if they receive VAT revenues.

I’ve never played a game where aim assist was done well enough for me. It’s either too little or too much. That is probably me though.

It’s not all of us ☹️

Definitely agree. I used to be a KB/m only person, but have changed my opinion since using a controller for a while out of necessity. Some games are simply better with a controller.

Some are much worse. FPS will never translate well to controller for me. No idea how CoD people play on console. It feels like trying to throw a ball with someone else’s hand by manipulating their elbow.

I got very randomly bumped up to first class on a transatlantic flight for business. I do not travel much for business, especially internationally. So, I definitely should not have had priority over more regular accounts. I have to assume I just got lucky, and that flight happened to have no frequent flyers.

It was an eye opening experience. I got to hang out in a secret lounge. When my flight was ready to board, multiple staff escorted us to the gate. When we landed, we took a private van to a secret side entrance, which had its own first class only passport check. We were brought to another secret first class lounge through hidden back hallways to wait for our connections. The lounge looked down over the terminal, and the exit was a nondescript door you’d assume was a maintenance entrance.

Being around that level of service and the other people in first class, it’s clear the wealthy live in another world. I looked up how much that ticket normally goes for after, and full price is for many people a yearly salary. It was nice, but it seems like a crazy way to divide resources.

It was part of the 2022-2026 collective bargaining agreement. I wouldn’t expect it to ever go away, since it effectively created another high-pay player for NL teams.

The solutions here don’t seem to really be solutions in my opinion, especially the third one. It’s like if the problem a patent solves was “being able to individually package sandwiches on a conveyor belt” and the solution was “have a machine that recognizes where one sandwich ends and another begins so it can stop and start packaging appropriately.” Like, no kidding, but how?

A Canadian I used to know told me their family would have some cheaper items in the back seat that they’d declare and hide the more expensive stuff. Apparently it did work.

Reading that article is a serious indictment of economic literacy in the United States. People don’t understand what role the president plays in the economy, what causes inflation, or how and why interest rates change. They draw really superficial causal links and don’t think about it after that; it’s fact to them.

It’s reasons like this education may be the single most critical issue, since we can’t make progress on the climate or anything else if the population is incapable of critical thinking. I hate to say it like this because it feels patronizing, but Jesus fucking Christ.

It takes a lot of the magic out of it. I’m sure a bit of this is rose-colored glasses, but it was a really neat experience as a kid. The entire neighborhood was out in the streets, people got to know their neighbors, and you felt like you were part of something. These days​, it feels spooky due to how empty it is besides cars.

Yeah, in my area trunk or treat is the main reason for no trick or treaters these days. It’s a very urban area, so getting a lot of candy on foot would be easy, but walking around a parking lot is way quicker. It seems to be what most parents prefer also, so I think it’s here to stay.

Then it’s not a binary system. It’s a system with two extremely dominant members. Those are different things. You can be more binary in specific contexts e.g., gametes and egg vs sperm.

I’d be very cautious about the healthy description in reference to intersex people. I don’t believe you are trying to say anything nefarious, but there’s a reason it shows up in eugenics arguments.

I didn’t say sex was a spectrum, though perhaps someone else you were speaking with did. I wouldn’t use spectrum for sex, since there are multiple differentiating factors with differing measures.

I’m not quite certain the point you are making here. Is the implication that because humans typically have two hands, those that do not are not a group that can be described? Or that they can be, but only should be as the product of developmental errors?

We don’t generally, where we know exceptions exist, refuse to acknowledge their existence. Saying sex is a binary is saying there are only males and only females. That’s literally what binary means. Like binary notation either uses 0 or 1. If it was possible for sometimes to have a 2, it wouldn’t be binary anymore. That’s a different thing.

This is especially true for something like sex that is based on a grouping of traits, genes, expressions, etc. which are not universally 0 or 1. Sure, we generally agree on a category when some are different, but there’s some points where it’s not so stark. Hence, the binary fails because there can be overlap and grey.

Nobody is saying we have to stop using male and female to describe sex in most cases, especially in a medical setting. But if you had a child born intersex, and the doctor turned to you and said, “Nah, my gut says male. Nothing will be different,” you’d probably ask for a second opinion.