421–430 of 690 posts
thats interesting. I was always wondering what the hustle was, guess that was it- it was outside of the credit system
The hustle is mostly just getting merchants to eat bigger discounts in hope of selling more volume. Instead of eating ~3% interchange on a credit card, merchants eat ~6% subsidizing short-term BNPL loans.
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Most American urban areas are dominated by suburbs where it’s not practical to walk everywhere and public transit is very limited. So a car is necessary and often a car per working adult.
Yes, but why would anyone want to live on what is effectively a farm, but without the benefit of separation from other people or land (read: income) that a farm offers? That completely defies the whole reason for the density. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I question why people are doing it.
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> Societies used to understand this and put lots of limits around exploiting They still do (at least in the US). Jewish people have access to Heter Iska loans according to their religion. They do not extend this to gentiles. Humans have known for a long time usury is inherently predatory. Nobody should profit off simply having money.
And yet, the banker truly gives me value if I wish to start a business, or upgrade an existing one, and I don't have the capital to do so. I need money to make money, and am willing to pay for the privilege of using someone else's money.
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Wages for the average person (working class) typically remain stagnant while cost of living increases, particularly through inflation. I imagine minimum wage would be 25-30 bucks an hour if it did track inflation and that would only serve to keep your purchasing power constant. Credit, in this sense, is also used to solve a cash flow problem. It’s a bad sign when that credit (or Klarna Pay-in-3 style setups) is appli…
That's not true. Wages have generally outpaced inflation as long as we've measured inflation properly. Up until the early 1970s this was very palpable, since the early 1970s the delta has been much lower, wage increases have been very slightly above inflation. Why does it feel different? 1: the amount of stuff we buy has increased a lot . Anybody who owns what would be considered solidly middle class in the early 197…
Ok, do rent next. Paying rent doesn't count towards your credit score (at least it didn't a decade ago when I was getting my mortgage). And it's a glaring signal of how the system isn't built for what it claims: evaluating your ability to pay obligations on time. No, the system is built to trap people in poverty and enrich the rentier class.
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Liberal arts education leaders haven't been doing themselves any favors. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic we saw many college administrations abandon all critical thinking to enforce blind obedience and mandatory compliance with pointless and counterproductive policies around lockdowns and mandates. Scientists were condemned for daring to even discuss alternative views. I absolutely see value in classical liberal…
Million of people die in the US. In a pool of 300 million people that might be a small minority but it could be much worse. I was diabetic and still am, and was obese. I was also young. There's no telling that a viral infection would have landed me in the hospital but I do have risk factors. COVID is definitely a risk. It would be foolish not to practice at least some measure of risk control. There's definitely some…
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> What is the benefit for a consumer to use this type of loan and then pay it back on time versus using a credit card and then paying the card back on time? Slightly longer repayment time frames. (Multiple months instead of just one.)
This sounds like a consumer that does not pay the balance each month…
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That's not what your link says: The Java language allows source code to express Unicode characters in a UTF-16 encoding, and this is unaffected by the choice of UTF-8 for the default charset. Perhaps you pasted the wrong one by mistake? Not that such a change to the language for future code, even if only hypothetical, would bear any difference to this discussion anyway as legacy Java code encoded in other charsets is…
Just one sentence after the one you quoted: > However, the javac compiler is affected because it assumes that .java source files are encoded with the default charset, unless configured otherwise by the -encoding option. Interestingly, in Windows, Java programs were supposedly encoded in CP-1252 before this...? > In JDK 17 and earlier, the default charset is determined when the Java runtime starts. On macOS, it is UTF…
2. As noted in the very quote provided, said particular implementation accepts various encodings; naturally, as the language allows various encodings.
That is quite unlike the languages that specify that anything other than UTF-8 is invalid code.
Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less) However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later. At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses. i.e., credi…