FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

From my small company experience, this is more likely incompetence than maliciousness. Spreadsheets get passed around and remerged back into the blob. Mind you, I don't mean to excuse this behavior. Just to understand it. And of course, unsubscribe processes will be near the bottom of anyone's priority list until the complaints and threats begin to mount.

It really needs to be made a mandatory header or something like that.

I've noticed that many email providers (e.g. GMail, Apple Mail) will actually show an "Unsubscribe" button for some emails, but not all. I wonder if it just heuristics, or there's actually some existing mechanism that is used to communicate it.

> "Nationally, extreme partisan bias in congressional maps gave Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for most of last decade."

The Brennan Center is a left-wing think tank. They're basically describing the thing I already mentioned in partisan terms:

> "Cracking and packing can often result in regularly shaped districts that look appealing to the eye but nonetheless skew heavily in favor of one party."

> "Because of residential segregation, it is much easier for map drawers to pack or crack communities of color to achieve maximum political advantage."

In other words, if the geography is such that there are areas where one party is highly dominant (i.e. urban areas) and other areas where the other party is slightly dominant (suburbs) then if you draw districts in a natural way the second party gets proportionally more seats because they win a larger number of districts by a smaller margin. They're essentially complaining that those states didn't gerrymander the districts to favor the Democrats to offset the natural advantage of Republicans in the existing geographic population distribution.

But Congress isn't intended to use proportional representation and gerrymandering to force the number of party seats to match the popular vote is just disenfranchising people in a different way by ignoring the effect that has on the behavior of individual representatives. For example, what they're proposing would be a de facto ban on majority-black districts because one district which is 60% black and votes 65% for Democrats and another that votes 55% for Republicans would result in fewer seats for Democrats than two districts that are 30% black and both vote 55% for Democrats. And both of the Democrats in the latter districts would have to move to the right because they'd otherwise both be at risk of a Republican picking off enough moderates to flip the district.

> It was in place for a decade when Citizens was decided and the only thing it prevented was billionaires and corporations spending unlimited amounts of money on electioneering.

It required them to spend the money in different ways, which mostly lock out smaller companies, meanwhile conglomerates buying news networks has been a thing the whole time.

> (Media companies love it: they get more spending on ads).

Political ads are ~1% of all ad spending and much of even that money goes to the likes of Google and Facebook. Meanwhile it means non-media companies that want to air a political message can do it directly instead of having to do so indirectly by allocating more of the other 99% of ad spending to traditional media companies to curry favor and provide leverage to get favorable coverage.

It also dilutes the power of media companies, because the media company is not going to air coverage contrary to their own political interests no matter how much you run non-political ads with them, whereas someone who has a contrary interest can now run ads on social media.

> Before and after McCain-Feingold media companies by law aren't allowed to refuse any political ad

But it prohibited most entities that wanted to run those ads from doing it.

Suppose Comcast and AT&T don't like network neutrality and Amazon does. So Comcast buys MSNBC and AT&T buys CNN, gears them even more to viewers in the party that had been advocating it, but suppresses advocacy of the issue they're on the other side of to shut off support. Should Amazon now buy their own network? Is that better than letting them run Facebook ads? What if the EFF or some non-teracorp like Digital Ocean support network neutrality, but can't afford to buy a major network?

>I don't really see putting important links in the footer as anti-pattern. For my entire internet life, many important links were put into the footer of a webpage. Careers, About Us, Contact Us, Locations, Citations, etc. They are expected to be there.

Yes, because after a century of public relations and marketing you expect fine print to be in these locations because you have been marketed to from infancy, which has made you apparently, forget that today's dark pattern creators stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them, and the fact that you expect that stuff to be there is because your worldview has been successfully engineered. Important links under the fold, aka the first page are there to be overlooked. What they want from YOU is top of the page.

>Most emails I get aren't long enough to scroll anyway.

Careful with that kind of thinking, marketing works on everybody. A seed is planted, by appealing to emotional arguments. If it takes root, then your worldview starts to change, via rationalization. The smarter you are, the better and more subtle your rationalizations and better it works.

This project of social engineering was given to a guy named Edwin Bernays, who wrote several very plain and easy to read books on how he was going to do this project. First one was "The Engineering of Consent."

You could use your engagement to live a live infused with your values, as a beacon to other like minded people, or people who were unaware they were like minded, until they saw your light in their tunnel.