because terroirs are protected and can kill for sport.

I'm reading what I'm reading I'm reading [the lack of evidence].

Stop it already I'm reading what I'm reading I'm reading it right here.

Children, women, healthcare workers, and many others. Medical businesses often require them. They're cheap and often for sending notices to employees. Israel continues its 80+ years of terrorism with US's support. This 80-year trend is of course literally terrorism, prohibited by Hague Conventions.

I think the only misinformation going on is coming from you.

Based on what?

A: Nothing

Cool

asas

Who the hell uses pagers these days? Are exploding fax machines next?

this website has been seized by ISIS

I eat Bugattis for breakfast

What bullshit. Trump's security do have the resources to provide him with adequate security.

That's how Ryan Routh was spotted and flushed out without Trump getting anywhere near in range of his AK-47.

You think that asking police to beat someone up isn't advocating violence?

This is what the gun lobby had done to the country. "We don't care about getting the police to put in a few kicks, because if you don't have 3 bullets in your abdomen, it's not really violent."

This article is several months old but chock full of information I did not know.

Excerpt:

The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, coined the term ‘junk fee,’ and has begun restructuring how financial markets work, removing medical debt from credit reports, fostering competition in credit cards, and examining big tech’s entrance into payments. And yet, for ideological reasons, to many bankers, Chopra is a villain running a government agency full of bureaucratic demons, whose goal is to force them to do paperwork on behalf of nebulous ‘consumers.’

So it was a weird day last month when Chopra had a room full of mortgage bankers nodding their heads in furious agreement, and even angry at their own trade association for helping a monopoly take advantage of them.

...Chopra went on stage a few hours later and discussed an increasing cost center for banks, which is the credit bureaus and FICO.

“Mortgage lenders in the U.S. increasingly face a lack of competition when it comes to accessing data and reports needed for loan origination,” he said. “In many cases, a handful of firms have cornered the market, allowing those companies to levy a tax on every mortgage application or transaction in the country.” Three firms dominate credit reporting: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. And just one company handles algorithms, the Fair Isaac Corporation, which sells the FICO score. “Mortgage lenders have shared that costs for credit reports and scores have increased,” he said. “Sometimes by 400% since 2022.”

Even if a lender thinks the customer would be a good risk, the lender has to buy a FICO score regardless. Mortgage bankers don’t carry the capital to hold the mortgages they make. Instead they make a loan, and then send it onward to the capital markets.

Mortgage bankers aren’t typical Wall Street bankers. While mortgage lending can be done by the big guys, real estate is an inherently localized industry with a clubby network of realtors, title insurers, and various other specialists in the home-buying process, so independent players have a strong foothold. There are roughly a thousand independent mortgage lending firms nationwide, and these lenders live everywhere.

Credit scoring used to cost a relatively small amount of money, but now it can be up to $60 per pull, with the price quadrupling over the last two years for no reason whatsoever. Only one out of every ten prospective customers ends up taking out a mortgage, so higher prices fronted by mortgage bankers add up. And it’s starting to be a major expense, driving some of the mortgage lenders out of the business entirely.

There were two thousand credit bureaus across the U.S. when FCRA passed. By the 1990s, due to this law and to a relaxation of antitrust, they consolidated into three main firms, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion... The credit bureaus, fostered by regulatory choices and consolidation, were the first wave of big data firms, laying the groundwork for corporations like Google and Facebook years later.

These firms aren’t just private entities, but have become key parts of governance. If you want to verify someone’s work and income, for instance, or manage unemployment insurance claims at scale, you use one of these bureaus...

Though contract terms [between the credit bureaus and FICO] are still confidential, some details have come out in an ongoing antitrust suit in Illinois by banks against FICO and the three bureaus. The claim is that the four firms are now a cartel.

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(more information and lots more detail at the link)

I laughed over these stats from replies https://x.com/stats_feed/status/1836025504597512557