FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

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., credit can buy time in the nearly literal sense, you can do an hour's work in half an hour because the money facilitates it, meaning you can now make more money. If instead of investing in work you're spending on play, then you end up with a time deficit.

or, e.g. you can buy 3 franchises in 3 months instead of 3 years (i.e. income from the 1 franchise), trading credit for time to make more money, instead of burning it. It'd have been nice had they taught me this in school.

> the average person is using

The "average person" is told from birth to consume as many things and experiences as possible as it if was the only thing that could give their life a meaning. The entire system is based on growth and consumption, I have a hard time blaming "the average person"

I acknowledge that such telling exists, but there is still responsibility for people choosing to listen to it. Skepticism is vital. Beyond being skeptical of what you see, it is wild to me that we don't have approximately everyone blocking all ads, cable news, most social feeds, and other such transparently manipulative shit. Advertisement especially is literally industrialized and research-based psychological manipulation to make people do things that make no sense (see what Alfred Sloan did to GM, for an early example) — it's toxic and should be absolutely avoided.

People aren't going to learn to be skeptical or think critically because we've been literally removing that from the curriculum in schools. How can someone be skeptical of something if they don't even know how to be skeptical?

Social media runs rampant with a form of skepticism, but I would call that closer to paranoia than critical thinking, and I don't think it's really being helpful in the same way.

I see this as directly correlated with the gradual denigration of liberal arts education, a core tenet of which is critical thinking.

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 arts education. But popular denigration is inevitable when people see hypocritical academics casting aside true liberal thinking and using their platform to promote pernicious ideologies.

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 loss of trust in institutions, but if it weren't for RFK, I would still trust them more than some random skeptic covid. Now, I don't trust the FDA anymore, how ironic.

In Southern California, surfers were arrested for surfing on an empty beach. Parks were closed. This was hailed as a safety measure. I suspect these sorts of policies are what GP was talking about, rather than vaccines or masking.