It drives me crazy that people think credit card points are “free” benefits. You’re just getting your own money back! If you get 2% cash back or whatever, it’s obviously only possible because they’re charging merchants more than 2%, raising prices for everyone. It’s basically a hidden tax on everyone.
What’s worse is that it’s a regressive tax. The better credit cards with more benefits are available to the rich, not the poor. But the elevated prices are paid by everyone.
I’m in favour of more regulation of big corporations, especially for financial services, so I’m not ready to dismiss this move as “complete nonsense”.
Apple/Google Pay is an additional intermediary that allows you to pay for things on your devices using your credit card. They charge fees over and above the credit cards, and have power over their respective digital platforms — for example, where and when you can easily use the service.
Now you might counter that they both happen to be pretty fair about that. They haven’t been using their power to unfairly exclude merchants or credit cards, and maybe their fees are fair. I don’t personally know. But the fact that they have the power to not be fair is evidence to me that there is something to be regulated there, independent of regulation of credit card companies.
That’s a good point. There are (at least) two vowel sounds written with a letter “i”. A short sound like in “fin” and a diphthong like in “fine”. All the examples are the short sound, not the diphthong. So the rule described above probably only applies to the short sound.
I actually think that funding border security helps Biden politically.
Agreed. It’s a vicious feedback loop. Failing institutions leads to lack of public support for those institutions, which leads to even worse institutions. I think it’s still possible to get out of this nose dive, but I’m concerned.
Am I the only one experiencing little 1-2 second jitters? It’s as if it skips where an ad should be. I still don’t see an ad though.
A concerning way to read this is that trust in institutions, not just religion but all of our institutions, is falling amongst the younger generation. But the best functioning societies enjoy high trust in their institutions. I am genuinely concerned about the falling levels of social cohesion.
They just had an election and the government flipped from centre-left to centre-right. It could just be the classic conservative “our position is whatever is the opposite of the left!”
To say “they’re all trash” is to minimize the horrible behavior as commonplace, and the party committing it as not especially worthy of scorn. For example: “Germany shouldn’t have committed genocide, but what country hasn’t committed genocide?” This is a statement that minimizes the seriousness of genocide. It is a shitty thing to say.
Speaking of gaslighting! “Who hasn’t done x” is a construction whose only purpose is to minimize how horrible x is.
The average annual income in India is apparently 2 lakhs, so 21 lakhs is definitely significant. After accounting for purchasing power parity, I’d reckon it “feels like” hundreds of thousands USD.
The video is not addressing the specific argument in the article. The main argument in the article is that the interest in tradwives is harming men’s ability to function in the real dating world. That seems plausible to me. There are probably not that many women who are into being tradwives so it’s an outrageous expectation to normalize.
The video doesn’t address that thesis at all. It’s making more of a libertarian argument: “tradwives aren’t hurting anyone so leave them alone.” But even if women should be allowed to be tradwives, that says nothing about whether men and other women are harmed by the promotion of these regressive gender norms. At one point, the video shows a ton of examples of men wishing violence on tradwife women, for e.g. not having dinner done on time. Somehow, this YouTuber still doesn’t see how promoting this view of a women’s place is harmful.