The sex crimes stuff is so they can detain LGBTQ youth and issue them whatever the yellow badge equivalent will be.

Well, but they did it the right way.

None. All 4 Democrats on the committee voted in favor. It wasn’t a floor vote, it was an amendment to a crypto bill in committee.

His main priority is establishing that the US elections are a sham being manipulated by the Left, so that his administration can step in and take appropriate measures to ensure the security of future elections as things go forward towards the midterms.

It’s entirely reasonable to both support EMTs or 911 dispatchers or firefighters, and to not support ICE. These aren’t conflicting ideas, they just happen to be multiple separate things all lumped together in order to make you think they all go together.

Similarly, you can believe that some police actions are acceptable, and others (arguably most, or at least far too many in our current system) are not. If a guy is stabbing his ex to death across the street, then there needs to be some intervention from some form of law enforcement. That’s not really in question. Standing on a man’s neck for 9 minutes is obviously an entirely different thing. That’s also not in question by anyone reasonable.

Well… as the article pretty explicitly mentions, they would normally have staged resources at a nearer location so that their response could be more rapid, but Noem’s new rules hampered them by being overly burdensome. And Texan crews were already operating.

Not the OP, but I think your comments are being interpreted as allegations of OP’s positions on things that are based on assumptions you’ve made based on the original comment, but aren’t necessarily based on the contents itself.

Calling someone a spiteful, spineless, pathetic racist isn’t exactly a fabulous way to begin a meaningful engagement. Instead, you’re both talking past one another because you’re not operating from any sort of common basis.

This is one of those things where context being broken down affects a lot. If you ask only GenZ, they respond more like 15% bi, and millennials is somewhere in the ballpark of 5%. I’d be willing to bet the responses used to make the OP are similarly skewed by demographic for the obvious reasons.

Credit card companies (Visa, Discover, MasterCard, AMEX) make their money through transaction fees. They make their money when you spend money using the card, regardless of any debts involved.

The banks that issue cards are a different matter. They also make some money when you use the card (some of which goes towards those credit card rewards you get, which is how they can do stuff like offer % back) but mostly they make money by letting you spend just enough money so as to be perpetually in debt. Your bank wants you to carry a balance. They want you to be paying them tens of percentage points of interest each year. The credit limit they give you isn’t the amount they want you to spend in one purchase, it’s calculated to be the maximum amount you can afford the running payments on, which will do nothing to touch the principal.

Sure, you can discharge the debt if you go bankrupt, but consider as well that your bank has a couple of other advantages. First, they get to see all your spending. They know how you’re spending your money, where, when. They also usually get to see your other information. They know how much money comes into your balance accounts each month, they know how much your rent/mortgage costs, they know how much money is coming in from Venmo when you borrow from family to cover debts you can’t pay, how much money you spend on food delivery apps, how much of an emergency fund you keep. They know how much money you’re spending on things that you don’t have to be, which is money you could be giving them instead, if it becomes a running balance. And at 25% interest, they only need this scheme to work for 4 years before they make as much money as they’d lose if you default on your entire balance. Plus, when you do have money in the bank, they get to use that money for other things while it’s with them. If you have a $100,000 credit limit, odds are pretty good you have an account with them holding a few tens of thousands of dollars. They get to use most of that until you ask for it back.

For the free (no-interest) versions, it’s a bullshit legal loophole in the US credit laws, or at least it was a few years ago. May have been more strongly codified since, though I bet almost nobody who could close it realizes the gap is there. The whole scheme is out of Australia, but I have no idea what their legal setup is.

The US requirements are basically:

• You can’t charge fees to host the plan
• You can’t charge % late fees, only fixed
• You can’t have more than 4 installments, meaning no more than 5 payments if you include an optional down payment
• You must not deny customers for means-based items, or using credit data. You can give them an effectively meaningless approval value though.

You as a customer pay late fees if you miss a payment, but they make most of their money by charging the merchant a higher transaction fee. So, it’s theoretically free for the customer, meaning it can fit into the loophole. Legally it isn’t a credit product.

The TL;DR is “because the law is full of holes and bullshit, and if it’s making people money then it’s not likely to change”

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“Base” is the number of distinct integers you have in play. In Base 10, there are ten of them. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. You can think of the numeric representation 10 as “1 ten, and 0 ones.”

In Base 2 (binary) the only two digits available are 0 and 1. The first four binary numbers are 0, 1, 10, 11, which represent zero, one, two, and three. In Base 2, “10” means “1 two, and 0 ones.” But, “Base 2” can’t be written in binary, there’s no concept of 2! Indeed, the way we reflect two in binary is 10. Which means, when we’re talking in binary, “Base 2” is written as “Base 10.”

This holds true for EVERY base. In Base 4, we have the digits 0, 1, 2, and 3. So if we want a value of four, we need to write it as 10. “1 four, 0 ones”. So, when we’re talking in Base 4, the way to say “Base 4” is ALSO by saying “Base 10”!

The trick behind it is that numbers written don’t have context-free meaning. You can’t communicate what “10” means without knowing how many distinct digits your conversational partner is working with. Most people have centralized on base 10, but there’s no inherent advantage to doing things that way. Indeed, it’s kind of awkward in lots of ways. Consider Base 12 (the digits of which are most often 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, as an aside). In Base 12, you can easily divide your base numbers by 1, 2, 3, 4. That’s SUPER handy, since we obviously break things up into groups of 3 and 4 pretty often in our daily lives, but that’s pretty painful in Base 10 because you immediately run into the need for fractions.

Pretty sure it’s Make America Horrible Again