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.

> because we've been literally removing that from the curriculum in schools

Do you have any actual evidence of this or is this just more parroting of vibes based history?

Most of the people I know who say things like "School didn't teach me X" were just not paying attention. Turns out, if your society doesn't care about or value education, kids aren't going to pay attention.

Like, some states definitely have mediocre education in a lot of ways, but people will say shit like "Why didn't school teach me how to balance a checkbook" as if school didn't teach them basic arithmetic and the ability to read a single paper of instructions included in your checkbook by middle school.

Or you have people saying "Why didn't school teach me how to understand a loan" as if they didn't learn algebra and how to plug a couple numbers into a calculator right next to me in class.

The "vibes" are that the US government has been cutting funding from education since the 80's. I feel this is very well established, but if you really want a source I can fish up a few charts. As a fun fact, today we still spend about as much per student as we did in the 80's for university. The main difference is that funding cratered, so colleges need to make up for that out of pocket.

>people will say shit like "Why didn't school teach me how to balance a checkbook" as if school didn't teach them basic arithmetic and the ability to read a single paper of instructions included in your checkbook by middle school.

Not sure I agree with this interpretation. It's like responding to "why didn't they teach CS" with "well they taught you discrete math and binary". Specialized instruction on applied mathematics is well worth pursuing. It's arguably the big reason Al many students end up thinking "I'm bad at math". They get no context on what it's really used for.

https://www.cato.org/blog/new-k-12-productivity-chart It's hard to believe that education is getting less funding. There seems to be a perception that spending more money on education will result in smarter students or higher test scores but that doesn't seem to be the case. Obviously if you spend $0 on education results will suffer, but there's a point of diminishing returns where $1 more in spending doesn't seem to have any impact on key metrics

How much we spend on school systems is not a meaningful indicator of how much we spend on education.

American teacher income has barely tracked inflation over the past 30 years, and it sure as shit didn't start high in the 90s. Teachers still have to buy their own supplies, still rely on old material, and still basically can't afford to live.

Gee, why is it so hard to get good teachers into the American school system when someone who is able to go through 4-6 years of college and is smart enough to manage and teach a room full of 30 kids can do pretty much anything else and make way more money? The money isn't going to education.

So where's the money going?