If I were in the BNPL sector, I'd be suing the shit out of FICO et al for penalizing BNPL customers. Regardless of what one might think about these services, they're perfectly legal and, if used in a responsible manner, perfectly valid; so long as the customer is paying their installments on time, there shouldn't be a problem. It could be a matter of preference to conventional loans and/or straight credit cards. If someone wants to ban BNPL for being predatory, they should do it through the legal system, rather than the ass-backwards approach of destroying BNPL customers' credit scores in hopes that everyone will abandon ship and shut down BNPL as a consequence.

On a more cynical note, I strongly suspect the old guard is attacking BNPL not because they're worried about the risk profiles of their customers or that their customers are being take advantage of (ethics? what's that?), but because they don't want the competition.

is a possible carcinogen, but almost certain to cause irritation. Is the aim to trigger an immune response for predictable biodegradability?

It's great that this could make concrete manufacturing a net neutral process as far as CO2 is concerned. On the other hand, this does nothing to address the incredible amount of water needed to produce concrete (not to mention soil erosion/runoff issues due to its lack of porosity, or the heat island effect, once it's in situ). However clever this is, and however much an improvement on existing processes, a world heading towards increasing water scarcity and extreme weather events (heat, flooding) does not need more concrete.

this would be a good time. States' rights mean less and less in this country (and the rights of US territories even less so).

We'll extort you with fees, utilize any balance you might have with us as liquidity, and in many cases not even provide a vehicle for the FDIC to insure your money, but don't you dare call us a bank. Meanwhile, the convenience of these platforms has altered traditional banking in such a way that they've eroded the basic services that we've taken for granted (e.g. cash and check handling, decent customer service); not to be outdone, these traditional banks are basing more and more of their total revenue on customer fees. More than just being classified as banks for tax purposes, these companies need to be regulated like banks. Their fees need to be dictated by more than just the free market because their fee schedules are changing industry standards across the board.

We've gone from foremen busting would-be unionizers and looking over the shoulder over every worker on the factory floor to this, the technological equivalent. The "productivity" initiatives need to end.

for other types of gig economy jobs, where workers work exclusively for an agency and are paid based on a contract basis, yet engage with the agency in the same way that an employee would (e.g. fielding emails, being on call, being required to do perform quality control). The key, key difference is that these "contractors" have little to no recourse as far as setting the amount they're paid (agencies refer to workers being able to choose whatever they want, when in reality there is a non-negotiable ceiling on their rate, and workers have to choose between a rock and a hard place if they want to earn anything), and any work done outside of the scope of the job (emails, edits, familiarizing themselves with internal policies, etc) is absolutely unpaid.

That's the real deviation for me. As a software contractor, I would agree on a rate with a client and all communication would either be baked into that contract or spread out into a retainer. Thus, I would always be on the clock. I could negotiate every aspect of that. Gig economy workers? Not a chance.

I wrote an essay about my experience with audio transcription work, which I did out of desperation between jobs: Gig Economy Transcriptionists: Today’s Secretaries at Yesterday’s Wages.