651–660 of 793 posts
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Everyone should be educated to never give their number or email to a political campaign of any sort.
How do you propose political engagement could work if nobody were willing to provide contact details?
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Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent. The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Ev…
You know a startup is floundering when they have to invent new email lists to "accidentally" subscribe you to despite telling them in the past you want to be unsubscribed from everything.
I had to call them (!) since they didn’t even include an unsubscribe option as I was a customer (!!) and have the CSR delete my email address from their records — because apparently this happens routinely.
Companies routinely break the law in small ways at scale — and they should get the RICO hammer dropped on them for doing so.
My workaround to this has been to email the company telling them I want to cancel. Once I either don't get a reply, or get a reply saying "just call us and we'll cancel!", I dispute the next charge with American Express and have the email record of trying to cancel. I believe they also offer a "stop allowing charges by this merchant" feature that cuts off future charges.
Although in practice I don't think it will be an issue, in theory issuing a chargeback on your credit card does not release you from any financial obligations you agreed to with a contract. And if that contract specifies that you must "call to cancel" I don't think "I emailed" will hold up in court (but IANAL). Of course with this FCC ruling that could very well not be the case, but in any case always be wary of issu…
a) be worth fighting for in court; and,
b) be of a nature the news won’t murder the company over the lawsuit.
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What I have noticed companies do is resume emails after a year or so. They probably think people would forget about unsubscribing them after a year, and for the most part they are right. If I catch any of these email lists not respecting my unsubscribing, I immediately mark them as "spam". Gmail then doesn't send them to my inbox anymore. I don't think just one person marking them as spam hurts them, but at least I f…
I've started replying to the emails when I unsubscribe. Just gibberish or the word "unsubscribe" or something. That way if they email me again I can complain to them with the exact date that I unsubscribed. I feel like I'm turning into a grouchy old man, but I've caught more than a few companies this way over the years and it brings me joy when I do.
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Gerrymandering is entirely bipartisan: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/redistricting-ma... https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-california-gerryman... There is three times as much outside money going to the Democratic candidate for the Presidency as the Republican one: https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_candidate
You may have misread "first and worst". Democrats eventually follow suit, but the cherry picked example of CA doesn't account for the partisan overrepresention of Republicans in gerrymandrered congressional districts. It's not even close on a national level. For Super PACs: again this is from Citizens United which was pushed by Republicans and confirmed by an activist Republican Supreme Court. They own that 100 perce…
California by itself accounts for more than 10% of the electorate and it's not a cherry picked example, it's what generally happens when a state is under one-party control. I provided links for California and New York because they're the two largest blue states by population.
> overrepresention of Republicans
That is what tends to happen in ungerrymandered districts because of the population distribution. Urban areas lean heavily for Democrats whereas suburban areas have a small Republican advantage, so if you draw ordinary natural district boundaries you end up with a smaller number of safe Democratic urban districts and a larger number of tight suburban districts that lean slightly red. To get something else you have to draw meandering lines that try to rope slices of the urban population into the same districts as the suburbs.
And yet, in the last decade no party has had more seats in Congress without getting more of the vote.
> this is from Citizens United
That was just the case that made it to the court, and it was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower.
Or worse, tolerate corporate mass media and prohibit anything else, which was effectively the status quo before and the reason you see so much criticism of Citizens United from the legacy media.
Previously if you wanted to convince people of something you had to buy product advertising from a legacy media company to get enough financial leverage to pressure them to emit favorable media coverage, or buy them outright like with Comcast and MSNBC. Now that anyone can buy political advertising directly they have less need to indirectly bribe those media companies anymore and the media companies hate it. Meanwhile the actual effect is that you can now buy a political ad without having enough money to buy the network itself.
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Chevron deference wasn't created by Congress, it was created by SCOTUS to begin with. It was an interpretive rule that essentially said the courts should favor the interpretation of the executive branch over that of members of the public wanting to challenge it. Under both the previous and current rule, if Congress doesn't like the resulting interpretation they can pass a new bill. The main difference is that now une…
> Chevron deference wasn't created by Congress Yeah, but they could've overturned it if they didn't like it. > The main difference is that now unelected judges decide how to interpret the law instead of unelected administrative officials. But that's what judges do. This is a huge difference you kinda skip over. Should the policies and regulations of 100s of industries be decided by: 1. People who are only familiar wi…
The question is if they could've passed it to begin with. There is nothing in the constitution giving Congress the power to delegate its lawmaking authority to the executive branch, much less deprive the courts of their interpretive role.
> Should the policies and regulations of 100s of industries be decided by:
> 1. People who are only familiar with court proceedings 2. Experts in those industries with experience in those industries
The first one is actually better, because it makes it harder for the industry to capture the decisionmakers. Meanwhile the experts are still in the court, they just have to argue their case before the judge instead of having the parties argue their case before the "experts" with a sack of cash.
When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the…
Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent. The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Ev…
As usual, I know it's trendy to say on HN the EU is killing innovation with all the regulations, and there is truth to that, but there is also great customer protection, which seems constantly violated in the US.
So yes, in the US, companies can flourish, but it seems the consumers are second-class citizens compared to companies.
That's why it's nice to have both: eventually, EU regulations leak out to the rest of the world, and the US innovations reach us.
We pay the price by having a weaker economy, they pay the price by having less dignity in their life, but there is eventually balance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent. The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Ev…
What I have noticed companies do is resume emails after a year or so. They probably think people would forget about unsubscribing them after a year, and for the most part they are right. If I catch any of these email lists not respecting my unsubscribing, I immediately mark them as "spam". Gmail then doesn't send them to my inbox anymore. I don't think just one person marking them as spam hurts them, but at least I f…
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The real problem here is that the banks make the rules and they like rules that allow them to covertly screw everyone. What you really want is a system where a customer who issues a chargeback that isn't disputed gets the money back, but the merchant also doesn't get a chargeback fee because there is no dispute. And then if there is a dispute (and the customer still wants to do the chargeback), the chargeback fee is…
> you do a chargeback, the merchant gets … a chargeback fee … But the merchants respond by banning customers who do this If I've had to do a chargeback, I'm highly unlikely to want to spend further money with that company in future, so they can "ban" me all they like.
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> before taxes Now they just need to fix that part.
Right up front: I agree. But, implementing this will be an absolute PITA because so many other things are systemically broken. Case in point: cost breakdown from the invoice of an online order a few months ago (with the dollar amounts removed): > Subtotal > Shipping (Economy) > Tax (Solano County Tax 0.25%) > Tax (Vacaville City Tax 0.75%) > Tax (Solano County District Tax Sp 0.125%) > Tax (Solano Co Local Tax Sl 1.0…
Short of that, ban sales taxes levied by local governments; only allow states to levy them. It's easy enough to figure out which state someone is in.