So if you want to not be detected as underaged, search for and watch adult content.

This might not work out as they planned.

New Jersey has Camden, whose unofficial motto is "Worse than Detroit", but it's so depopulated it's not considered in many surveys.

Anyway, I suspect this "manufacturing academy" will run a year or two or three, not do much of anything, then be shut down with Apple writing off the loss as well worth it for the goodwill with the government.

It's worse than that. When anyone talks "productivity growth" they are literally talking output per capita.

No, labor productivity is output per person-hour worked.

Fortunately low clouds have been measured to have a net cooling effect.

And that's supposed to be the rule (with some specific exceptions for allied nationals in some cases). I've had to do work on a government cloud, and question one was "Are you a US citizen physically located in the US". I'm not sure what (or if) Microsoft was thinking.

The problem with this idea is that 39% of the transaction volume and probably about a third of active accounts are "transactors". The credit card companies lose money on these people, and yet they keep trying to attract more of them? It doesn't make sense; the credit card companies are not trying to lose money. More likely that report is simply wrong. Here's another report showing a small but positive profit for transactors (and less risk).

If credit card companies were losing money on transactors, they would discourage them. No-fee cards wouldn't have rewards programs, or wouldn't exist at all. There was some talk of this happening a while ago (maybe around the time of the GFC), but it never came to pass. Obvious conclusion is credit card companies are making money on transactors, -- not as much as on revolvers, but it's safer income.

It's annoying but it's true. If you don't have a history of borrowing and paying back debt, you're a higher risk to not pay back new debt than if you do. Fortunately, this has been well known for decades, so if you are financially responsible you can simply use credit cards (paid off within the grace period -- you don't need to carry a balance) to build a credit history.

The usual objection to this is the credit card becomes a temptation to overspend. Well, yes, but that's part of the reason lenders find extending credit to those with little to no credit history to be risky. If you're only financially responsible when you don't have credit available, that's a problem for lenders.

But that someone with no credit is worse off than "someone who uses their entire pay cheque to service last months debt so they are forced to put next month's expenses and rent on more debt" probably isn't true, at least not if that keeps up. Such a person will quickly end up with high credit utilization (which does worsen their credit score) and high debt-to-income ratio (which does not, but is considered in mortgage and auto lending) and will also find it difficult to get a loan, especially at reasonable terms.

tl;dr (at least in the US; you said 'cheque' so maybe you're not) -- get credit cards as soon as you can, use them for stuff you'd buy anyway and pay them off within the grace period, and don't worry about credit otherwise most of the time.

Those credit lines are, practically a trap. If you were to start carrying say $50k or $75K worth of debt, even w/ zero late payments you'd see your FICO score drop considerably because your "credit utilization" (fraction of available credit) has gone up.

That's not a trap at all, because if he didn't have all that unused credit, his "credit utilization" would be high even if he carried little debt.

i know they're ubiquitous in the US and very convenient, but if you really stand back to look at how they operate (esp. over the past 20 -30 years) the whole system is largely paid for by people in some level of money trouble (interest mostly but also late fees). The transaction fees and annual fees are mainly paying for the "rewards".

If that were the case, the credit card companies try to get rid of convenience users (who don't carry a balance). They would eliminate grace periods, reduce credit limits, stop offering new cards to them, and add annual fees. They don't do this; they're clearly very interested in keeping the convenience users. Which implied they're making money from them.

With credit cards, fraud protection by US law covers the entire fraudulent transaction -- the bank is on the hook, not you, provided you report the fraud in a timely manner. With debit cards, the law allows up to $50 to be your problem even if you report it immediately. Some banks do provide "zero-liability" protection which covers all of it, but not all do. But even there, because the money comes directly out of your account, you're out the money until you report the fraud and the bank investigates. With credit card fraud, you lose nothing even temporarily, except some credit line.

Captain Obvious here, noting that this isn't "social credit", this is regular "credit", also known as financial credit.

If only they hadn't fired the cowboy coder who suggested hardcoding in the form of a "bridge out" sign on a concrete barrier.

Nobody wants to go back to using a sextant stuck through of a hole in the cockpit. It wasn't very accurate. The more accurate methods used over land require artificial external references (LORAN and later VOR)

I imagine flying over particularly active areas of the earth's crust (volcanos, subduction zones) will also affect accuracy. Still, absolute navigation at that accuracy without artificial references is really good.

When I buy shit from Amazon, does Amazon also charge me for the increased infrastructure expenses required to deliver the stuff to me? Warehouses, drivers, trucks, all that?

No, of course not, that's something they figure into the price in the first place.

I would wager the political environment is more friendly in Dallas.