In the US, checks are much worse than paying with a credit or debit card. It is much cheaper for a merchant to take checks than either type of card, so that is why they're usually used.

Also, the person in question might be very poor / bad with money and unable to get a credit or debit card.

Because it's pending exposure.

Now if you found a way to turn around and earn interest or earn extra with that money...now you're cooking with gas. Just make sure the earnings are worth the relative risk, and that you hedge against that risk.

Yeah, my boss expects that. He's been at the same company for almost 20 years, since the department was created.

He also gave me a 3% raise this year. It's nice to get cost of living, but why would I try to invest in a workplace where I know I'll be able to make more and more elsewhere every year.

Hey, I'd just use VPN anyways. I sure as shit didn't trust spectrum not to sell my data.

Because Facebook is the posterchild for anticompetitive evil corporations.

They're doing this because it will help them monopolize more content or more users. By nature, that will be harmful to the fediverse.

Its Texas lol. Our government prides itself on having no empathy or compassion whatsoever.

See the list of executed juvenile offenders before the federal government made it illegal:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_juveniles_in_the_United_States

Or the time the state was in contempt of court for years because they didn't want to revise the excessively cruel CPS system.

You should understand what they are on a fundamental level. Otherwise someone will say "we need to fix the mentally unwell kids shooting up schools problem" and everyone will jump on board to make lightsabers and airsoft illegal.

I don't know about the underlying technology, but every client I've used for the past couple decades supported groups.

However, they absolutely sucked. There was no way to leave. Unless someone made a new group without you and everyone used that, you'd keep getting messages.

It is, but android Roms with good privacy features are relatively few and far between.

I agree. I've been listening to behind the bastards a lot, and the host is basically a pretty radical dude in favor of maximizing personal and civic freedoms and social safety nets.

At this point I feel like we should be called the neo-libroanarchists or something. It seems like every political faction in the US is trying to restrict something just because.

Iirc it was mostly a stupid driver with improper tires on terrain that didn't quite look as bad as it actually was.

The cybertruck doesn't have differentials at all, so it shouldn't need locking diff's.

The entire point of having differentials is to make sure the power from the engine isn't being misdirected to a wheel with no traction, but the cybertruck has independent motors for each wheel.

Yes. We shoot people for accelerating from a stoplight too fast here.

The difference between the two largely becomes academic after a certain point. Impoverished masses toiling in exchange for minimal benefits so that an oligarchy can strip the nation's economy dry.

It's almost like we can't blindly trust people in power or something.

Honestly I just keep mine on airplane mode. Calibre was always a much better management tool, and libgen isn't nearly as creepy.

I don't know about stigma, but the whole family is just vaguely dysfunctional. We can't really spend any time together for more than a couple of hours before someone starts a fight, generally (but not always) on accident.

I can't listen to it right now, but the issue with characters like Aunt Jemima is that they were just racist stereotypes given a name and slapped on a box.

I think a good analogy for this situation would be a themed chain where an AI pretends to be a comedic racist caricature.

I don't think any human has sent an SMS message deliberately for about 12 years!

sweats nervously in American

The car I'm interested in holds its value very well, so the lifetime cost is lower if I buy new. I'm also planning on being slightly less poor before buying it.

And regarding the "fired at will" thing, we don't deal with it. We just kind of hope. I'm a little bit tistic, so I've been fired several times for not engaging in the proper amount of small talk. You get another job and move on.

Yes, but it is a problem when we discuss these things. Most people are in favor of banning "assault-style weapons", but people's conceptions of what that means vary wildly.

This is just like asking if people support educating kids. Everyone wants their kids to be educated, but some want their kids taught that the earth is 6,000 years old and that climate change isn't real, and others want them taught the history of systematic oppression in America.

As for the actual bans, I'm not aware of any " assault-style weapons" bans that didn't ban something stupid because it looks scary. Many have included magazine capacity restrictions, which you can definitely make an argument for, but also regulated something stupid, like pistol grips on rifles.

Those definitions tend to be inconsistent and strange though. They often concern themselves with things like pistol grips vs thumbhole stocks, which only impact the ergonomics and the appearance of a firearm, not the function.

And even a barrel size limit is a strange thing to regulate. Short barreled rifles are not inherently more dangerous than regular size rifles. The only reason they are regulated today is as a holdover from a piece of legislation that would have banned handguns.