After reading a bunch of comments about people using electronics in this post, I had initially pictured “jumpers” as either “jumper cables”, the things people use to boost car batteries with, or small plastic coated pieces of metal or wires that can be placed over exposed pins on circuit boards to connect them (e.g to enable some behaviour). Generally I’d only assume this meaning in a discussion about electronics, though.

(I’m not the person that you replied to, and I knew that jumper means sweater or jacket or something in British (and possibly Australian?) English.)

And now that I think about it, most of my clothing gets worn after a few years, at least on the elbows.

I like how Mastodon lets you post links to things like your personal website or GitHub, and show a “verified” check next to them if you add something to your site/github to indicate that you’re the owner.

I don’t really use Bluesky but I like how they let you use your domain name as a username.

It probably rules out bots but I assume propaganda/troll farms could still do this.

Another thing I was thinking of is if there could be separate moderation lists that people could subscribe to. Maybe one basic one for “obviously spam”, but others for people who are suspected of being bots. I’m sure there would be abuse and echo chambers, but if anyone can create and many people can contribute to a list, people could just go with whatever list they prefer, perhaps looking at the blocked content itself to see if the list is implemented well.

I think some people used Reddit enhancement suite to tag users that they interact with. I like that idea but have never gone to the effort, and don’t usually read usernames enough to remember people. So a crowdsourced version of that might work.

TL;DR: how could you ever trust anyone to define a social credit score based on actions/words? And how can you offer debt without having something like a (better implemented) credit score?

I think I understand where you are coming from, assigning people a “worth” based on something financial is messed up. Ideally there would be some way to instead reward people for good things like being polite to people, and not littering. And possibly to penalize people for engaging in bad behaviour.

But even if I trusted the current government to implement this with the right goals, I would never trust future governments not to abuse this system. I don’t think I’d really trust any sort of group to do this right. I’m already disappointed enough with our current democracy (in Canada) for not getting rid of first-pass-the-post, and I’m skeptical that much will change with interprovincial trade barriers (why not sooner?).

But the idea of a better implemented credit score to track only severe abuse of debt doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to me. Obviously the current system is messed up and has major problems, but I feel like it could plausibly be fixed and done in a reasonable way. I think debt to buy a house (and maybe sometimes a car) is generally a good option to have. And I don’t know how you could offer this without tracking people who don’t pay. (Though maybe I’m wrong, maybe just going based off of income history is enough.)

But yes, the current system is ridiculous. People should be rewarded for never needing debt, not disqualified from getting future debt without notice. And it should be much easier to track and fix problems on our credit score. And things like cell phone bills don’t seem worth being affiliated with credit bureaus. I think most people would be better suited to prepaid plans if they were options. And I feel like financing phones is a really bad thing, people don’t realize how expensive they are. I’d rather if all my utility bills just collected some deposit instead of potentially being able to ruin my credit if a bill gets lost in the mail after I moved out. (But this could be too expensive for a lot of people, so again the credit score seems to have a purpose).

If this is it then OP should just offer to get coffee to-go and go for a walk or sit in a nearby park, perhaps with a playground. Then they wouldn’t have to worry about bothering others. A coffee shop seems like a boring place for a 3 year old.

My assumption is that there is a chance (not sure how large) that kids could be restless and need constant attention, and then it would suck for OP and is a bit much to expect someone you barely know to meet up just for that.

But I think there’s a chance that the young one will just sleep, and the older one could occupy themselves at the playground or even with a tablet or something. Then it should only be a minor hassle for the OP.

Maybe OP could just ask the person if they think they’ll be able to actually talk or if the kids will need constant attention.