The median income in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles is higher than $83K. At least I hope it is.

>This is irritating AF even though I have the money in the bank because I get a percentage back.

The percentage you get back is a small part of what goes into the costs that the credit card industry charges consumers and merchants.

If no credit cards offered any kinds of rewards, the credit card companies could lower consumer and merchant fees and interest rates and still make the same amount of money.

Pretty much yes.

People buying essentials on credit has been around for a very long time.

It's never a place you want to be, but it beats starving or freezing to death.

>Leave them there permanently but give them a way to access TikTok so that they can live cover from the scene to other disbelievers.

Like Stanley Kubrick did in 1969, but without TikTok. Authenticity for the win.

is the heart of a planet-destroying weapon system.

Other countries aren't putting US-registered SIM cards on their daily missile attacks.

Because Virgo sounded too much like Virgin Galactic and Cancer sounded exactly like "DO NOT WANT."

At least in some places, phone numbers have to be re-used after only a few months of non-use because of demand.

"Short, easy to remember" email addresses are also scarce, but you don't need a "short, easy to remember" email address to function in society. Most people do need a phone number.

I'm not feeling any sympathy for either Disney or Google on this one.

For the viewers caught in the middle, yes, but for the giga-corps, not so much.

The ads I get when I load up this submission's page and turn off my ad-blocker are, you guessed it, ads for AI products and services. Sigh.

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

It's a hard, if not impossible problem to solve for 100% of people 100% of the time.

On the other hand, if society is willing to live with "you will probably have to show ID if you seem anywhere close to the age limit" then the problem becomes a lot easier.

If the age limit is 12 and you have a 4-digit Slashdot ID, it's pretty safe to say either you are over 12 or the ID wasn't yours when it was created.

Likewise, if your overall "user behavior" is has been consistent with that of someone well over 25 for several years, the odds of you being under 18 are pretty slim.

As a real-world analog, most stores where I live demand ID to buy age-18-restricted products if you LOOK under 30.

It will cost the government more to process the return.

If everyone did this and they made it clear to their representatives WHY they were doing it this way, it might "move the needle."