I don't have faith in the system working as advertised. The credit agencies are prone to dataleaks and false information. HOWEVER, if they have the correct information on you, the outcome should not be a surprise. Again, they aren't out to get you, they are just of questionable competence.

I did literally that and had high 700s by my early 20s. I'm sorry things aren't working well for you, but something else is wrong. I'd suggest checking ALL THREE of the agencies and make sure there's nothing wrong with your report or reported missed payments.

You can be rejected for a very low score in and of itself. A credit report isn't a criminal record. It won't have "possible financial fraud" on it. But it may have a history of credit defaults.

You don't need to do that. Simply paying off 1-2 credit cards in full every month while keeping your utilization low for ~5 years will get you into the high 700s, which is all you need for any practical purpose.

Auto insurance has found there is a statistical correlation between credit and driving records. It's unfortunate, because it's another example of "it's expensive to be poor." While credit scores don't always reflect wealth/poverty, there's a high correlation between low scores and poverty.

And you'd be wrong. They may have the technical ability to take out a $45k unsecured loan, but they also have a long history of not doing so. Banks are in the business of lending money and they have data over hundreds of thousands of loans. Statistically, the one with the lower utilization has a better chance of paying you back.

Payment history is in fact the #1 factor. However, it's not that the person with "less debt" is more of a liability. The metric of credit utilization is the amount of credit you have access to but do not use. Low credit utilization means you have less likelihood of default because you have other credit you can access. Imagine two scenarios:

Borrower 1: Has $50,000 credit limit card but never uses more than $5,000 of it. At a minimum, borrower 1 has access to $45,000 if they need it.
Borrower 2: Has $5,000 limit credit card and uses $2,500 on a regular basis. Borrower 2 only has access to $2,500 of borrowed funds.

Suppose you want to lend these borrowers money to buy a car. Which do you think is more likely to be unable to make the car payment? If Borrower 2 loses their job, they may not have access to credit to fund their living expenses. They may decide to default on the car note to buy groceries. Borrower 1 could simply put their expenses on the credit card. If I'm a car lender, I don't care that Borrower 2 may be racking up credit card interest at 29% as long as they are paying me.

Besides that, someone who HAS credit but doesn't use much of it shows that they have restraint. They don't immediately spend every dollar they have access to.

Many employers use credit scores as part of their background checking. A low score could get you rejected on the theory that if you are bad at managing your own money you may be bad with the company's money.

Sounds like you are salty because you aren't getting the score you want. They aren't out to get you. They are in the business of analyzing the risk of debtors and have no incentive to misidentify risk.

There are certainly reasons to be frustrated with the credit reporting system. They keep and distribute a ton of your personal information and seem to be hit by data breaches on an annual basis.

The components of a credit score aren't some state secret. FICO publishes a helpful infographic. I agree they are overused, but you shouldn't have to wonder why have a given score. If you've truly kept your utilization low and paid all bills on time, you should double check there hasn't been some identity theft.

https://www.myfico.com/credit-...

I actually hit 850 for a while but am now lower 800s after paying off my mortgage. Anything over high 700s doesn't make a practical difference.

Business Insider is already a content mill. I suspect that "allowing" AI will become a de facto requiring its use because there will be productivity requirements that would be impossible without it.

The problem is the number of scripted shows doesn't tell us much about the number of quality scripted shows, and quality is in the eye of the beholder. TV has continued to adapt over the years, and people have different preferences. There was:

1) The original "golden age" in the 1950s when TV was just starting up. Because there were only a small number of channels and because everything had to be of general interest, these were relatively high effort productions but were unable to take any real risks. It tended to be more "light entertainment" than anything serious.

2) The 60s-70s was the dawn of color and the beginning to diversify into some level of special interest. But the increase in volume meant production values were typically far below film.

3) The 80-90s was when cable started to seriously challenge broadcast and TV became a mature medium. A lot of TV was pretty vapid dreck. The insipid laugh tracks and tired gags. But there's still a lot of nostalgia for the sitcoms of that era. Nobody was yet trying for a cinematic experience in TV.

4) 00s-2010s was the beginning of "prestige" TV (in part as a reaction to cheaply produced "reality" TV). Cable and early streaming produced shows like the Sopranos (cable) and House of Cards/Breaking Bad (streaming) that had dramatic ambitions and production quality of feature film. That era isn't fully over, but the streaming wars have caused the sheer volume of prestige TV to hit its limits.

5) 2020s-present has been defined by the rise of youtubers and the streaming wars.

The general arc has been more and more segmentation in entertainment. Early TV entertainment had to appeal to the widest possible audience because there were only 2-3 choices of what to watch. Today, there's content for every conceivable niche and it's available at any time of day or night (no competition for timeslots anymore). This is great if you want content tailored to your specific interest, but it can make it hard to break through as something intended for a general audience. With AI, we could envision a world where media is created specifically for you individually and the number of "shows" becomes infinite.

Producers have power, but they are not omnipotent. Individuals still have a lot of choice in their energy use. You can drive an EV or not at all. In many places you can choose to buy 100% renewable or install rooftop solar and make your own electricity. You can use a heat pump instead of gas/oil heating. Fossil fuel producers won't emit if people don't buy their products.

It costs close the same for the school to teach a class of 30 students as a class of 20 students. If the school gets $10,000 per student, it has $300k for a class or $200k. There are economies of scale. It's why public schools are so militant about attendance - they lose money if they lose kids/attendance. Especially in rural areas where a local public school is already barely viable, the vouchers may lead to their closing. The only options for those parents may be religious academies (of a religion they may not belong to) or online schools of questionable quality. That's why the main opposition in Texas was actually from rural Republican districts.

If public schools are "overcrowded" then that's due to a funding deficit or mismanagement. It's not an inherent quality of public schools. I can say that my children's elementary school is not overcrowded. It is excellent, and considerably higher quality than the religiously affiliated preschool they attended.

The tax cut comes in a rebate. If you were already spending $20k/yr for your kids to attend private school, and they pass vouchers, you now effectively receive a $10k tax rebate. It makes plenty of sense to pay property taxes regardless of whether your kids attend school. I also pay taxes for roads I don't drive on, courthouses I don't use, and firefighters I don't call. Education is a public good. Even if I've never needed to call the fire department, I benefit from it existing. Even if you never send kids to public school, you benefit from having a literate population and workforce.

Even $2k would be well beyond what a truly poor family could shell out as a difference. Besides, there are places like Arizona that do have a well-established voucher market and the impact on student achievement has been poor. What has happened is that private schools of questionable quality (often in strip malls and the like) have sprung up to hoover up that money. Moreover, private schools typically lack the same accountability for student progress as publics.

Early studies on vouchers showed improvement for the kids who left because those studies looked at small pilot programs. The only kids who were leaving were from more motivated and better off families. But in places where it has been implemented statewide, the impact on achievement has been quite poor. The money tends to go to families that would go private anyways makes it just a tax cut and schools of questionable quality. Then, public schools lose economies of scale and end up in a funding death spiral. The end result is wealthy families get a tax cut and poor families are forced to choose between an underfunded public or a poor quality private.

The high performing private schools typically cost multiples of the best public schools. The highest private school in my town costs over $30,000 a year. Vouchers in my state are capped at $10,000. No "poor kid" is making up that $20,000 difference with a voucher. There are schools that you can attend for $10k, but they are typically worse than the average public school.