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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I wouldn’t say I want more content. There’s way too much content out there. I want higher quality content. I have less free time than the games I’m interested in require. So, I’d appreciate having those limited hours be spent as well as possible.

It was pretty useful as a kid for feeding my Gameboy and Game Gear with batteries I rescued from the junk drawers of friends and family. If they were low, I knew I had to save more often to avoid losing progress if they went dead while I was playing.

Maybe if you have a super low cap, high fees, and they automatically close your position at a pretty conservative point. But that’d hardly be worth any broker’s time with that risk/reward, unless they are hosing the borrower with insane fees. Though if that’s the case, putting up collateral would be cheaper (even if you have to borrow it from somewhere).

You definitely do need money. No broker is going to let you short without collateral, and you’re going to be paying interest for the duration of your short position beside any fees/commission.

If you are a homeowner, property transaction records are public information in the US. Plenty of data brokers collate from the numerous city/county databases for those who only know your name.

Amazon literally did this with diapers.com that led to them acquiring the company and shutting it down. I’m sure they’ve done it in hundreds of other product spaces as well.

Many monopolies form by first using a dominant market position to sell at a price no competitor can afford to match. Choice has already been removed before the “competition” folds or pulls out of the market. The consequences don’t happen overnight; you feel the squeeze before the “true” monopoly emerges. Amazon isn’t going to sell at a cheaper price once their competitors go out of business out of the kindness of their hearts.

Further, high consumer price is just one form monopoly power takes. Reduced labor power, wages, and worse working conditions are other important concerns, in addition to removing product variety and innovation incentive.

The networking is most valuable. I have my career because of being contacted via LinkedIn. It’s also a good tool to monitor certain trends if you have a decent network. For instance, if you are thinking of taking a job with company A, but nobody you know of who went there lasted longer than a year, you know it’s probably not a good place to work.

I’ve never had a fruit salad with the consistency of salsa, but I see where you’re coming from. They are very close relatives.

The shareholders in question suing are a public employee retirement fund. I wouldn’t exactly consider retired sanitation workers and bureaucrats societal leeches, but to each their own I guess.

I forget the specifics and who came up with it, but: pick an amount you haven’t written before. Then, write that much without looking back. If you can set your word processor to only keep your current line visible, even better. Once you’ve written that many paragraphs or pages, do a fast edit. Use a timer so you can’t linger. Then write that much again with the same strategy. After 3-5 times, do a more thorough edit of the whole thing.

It’s not necessarily how you always want to write, but it can help getting over that initial confidence block as an exercise.

I know someone who has a similar outlook (climate change is real but science will solve it, so we don’t need to change anything). Basically anything science produces toward that end they will move the goalpost and say it’s not worth pursuing because science will fix it.

It is essentially their way of making climate change denialism seem reasonable and open-minded. I think if somebody came up with a miracle device to magically reverse everything, they’d complain it’s too costly at any price.

I’m a tad jealous of people who got to do this. My work just got busier. It was like normal except people were dying and I had all my groceries delivered.