One thing I didn't truly appreciate until my wife and I consolidated our spending and had children - having nearly every expense flow through a credit card puts total spending into perspective without having to look through bank statements or keep up a spreadsheet. Getting a $10k bill when you're expecting $8k (or a $30k bill when you're expecting $20k) can be a pretty jarring event and is a built-in monthly touch point to review budgeting and spending.
It wouldn't be quite the same impact spread out over 5 cards paid out of multiple checking accounts with slightly different billing cycles.
> One thing I didn't truly appreciate until my wife and I consolidated our spending and had children - having nearly every expense flow through a credit card puts total spending into perspective without having to look through bank statements or keep up a spreadsheet.
This can work amazingly well for some folks. And can be a spiral of debt for others. This is generally good advice if you can and do actually pay off your credit cards every month. This gets quickly out of control as soon as you don't or won't for one reason or another.
Maybe I just don't use it enough but I can really only remember one time in the last ~15 years that I've tried to use my Discover card and been told they don't take Discover. I wonder if there's a geographical component, or if certain industries are less likely to take anything other than Visa/MC?
There is a geographic component. Outside the U.S. acceptance of Discover is not nearly as universal as in the U.S. So much so that in the letter that accompanied the new Discover debit cards they sent out, they had something to the effect of “maybe you should bring a backup card” if you were planning on using it internationally.
They might, and it's good they do, but they're not legally required to in quite the same way that they are with credit cards. If someone pulls $10k out of your BofA account, they're completely within their rights to do basically nothing about it.
Does traveling through time to kill Hitler constitute murder though? If you kill him in 1943 I think most people would say it's not, the crimes that already been committed that make his death justifiable. What's the difference if you know what's going to happen and just do it when he's in high school? Or putting him in a unit in WW1 so he's killed in battle?
I think most people who have spent time with this particular thought experiment conclude that if you are killing Hitler with complete knowledge of what he will do in the future, it's not murder.
This isn't arguing about whether or not murder is wrong, it's arguing about whether or not a particular act constitutes murder. Two people who vehemently agree murder is wrong, and who both view it as an inviolable moral absolute, could disagree on whether something is murder or not.
How many people without some form of psychopathy would genuinely disagree with the statement "murder is wrong?"
Not many but the trouble is murder kind of means killing people in a way which is wrong so saying "murder is wrong" doesn't have much information content. It's almost like saying "wrong things are wrong".
By definition if you're using the word "considered" you're making some claim that slavery is objectively bad. You can't simultaneously say that morality changes, that what is right and wrong changes, and then say "slavery though is bad objectively it's just people in the 1700s didn't consider it as bad as it is."
Don't you see how that seems at best incredibly inconsistent, and at worst intentionally disingenuous? (For the record I think 99% of people when they use a point like this just haven't spent enough time thinking through the implications of what it means)
I was explicitly trying to avoid making a personal judgment over the matter on the posts. I do have a negative opinion about it, but that was not of importance.
I don't know for sure how people considered slavery 200 years ago, I haven't studied enough history, but the slavery that is more commonly known as slavery was legal. That implies that at least more people accepted that than nowadays.
Nowadays that kind of slavery is frowned upon on at least on the first world.
Modern day slavery has plenty of aspects, and some of them are not considered bad by some part of the population, or not considered a modern iteration of slavery. Working full time for a job that doesn't pay you enough to survive and needing subsidies, not having enough time or energy to look for something better, is IMHO bad and slavery, while for lots of people it is the result of being a lazy person that needs to work more.
Is that situation bad? According to me, yes. According to some economical gurus, no.
Is that situation objectively bad? That is a question I am not answering, as, for me, there's no objective truth for most things.
Perhaps that statement could be read to imply the existence of an objective moral status, but I don't think societal "consideration" does in general. Does this statement? "200 years ago slavery was considered moral; now slavery is considered immoral."
I don't think it implies either is objectively correct, and perhaps this was the intended meaning of the original statement. It might appear to put weight on current attitudes, but perhaps only because we live in the present.
I think your right the statement in and of itself doesn't imply any morality. My issue was with these two sentences in close proximity:
> 200 years ago slavery was more extended and accepted than today...Morality changes, what is right and wrong changes.
In the context of the comment that's replying to (arguing for an objective, and if I can read between the lines a bit, unchanging moral truth) even if it's not explicitly arguing that slavery 200 years ago was fine, it is at least arguing that under some specific mix of time and circumstance you could arrive in a situation where enslaving someone is morally just.
As if I needed another reason not to hire people coming from Epic.
For a company as financially focused as Epic it's surprising to me they'll pay the offshored devs for simply submitting code even if it doesn't work and needs to be rewritten.
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