371–380 of 890 posts
I was a teen and paying for this new fangled internet myself because my parents didn't get it yet. Paying 4 months out of the year was affordable!
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It's a red-light with a speed warning and a detector - if you go over the allowed speed, it turns red, otherwise stays green forever. But we also have hidden radars which are not announced.
Sounds super dangerous though.
Of course some will still get as close to the light as they can and hammer the breaks last moment, but they'll do that at other lights too, and other unsafe things, so the danger is not caused by the light in that instance.
I had to cancel my gym membership because I was moving, and it required me to send a physical letter. I did this, but found out later that somehow I owed like 2 dollars, so they didn’t count my cancellation request because my account wasn’t up to date (should be illegal). They continued to bill me the entire membership fee, but my credit card had changed, so they sent my account to a collections agency. Right when I…
Good. The worst experience I ever had was with NY Times when I wanted to unsubscribe I had to go through multiple call/chats with a person and it was almost impossible since it was hard to get in touch with one. I am glad FTC is doing something others are afraid to do.
Anyone with access to a public library (photo ID will get you a free library card) can access eLibrary services that get updated daily. No need to pay for NYT, for WSJ, or any major national newspaper. By paying taxes, you're already paying for digital access to this media. I applaud the FTC's decision but I wish people realized there's more practical means for accessing media that is more frequently locked behind pa…
While you say it’s more practical, that’s an extremely subjective metric. For many people, spending a few bucks a month for something that works with their current workflow and saves rather than costs time is far more practical. Also, I’ve never seen a Library setup that gives access to desirable paywalled extra features like podcasts or NYT Food. I’m sure that’s quite deliberate on the NYT’s part.
I’m happy to give a few bucks a month to news orgs; in fact I wish they were nonprofits that would somehow let me pay enough more to abandon their asinine surveillance capitalism tendencies and expand free access, but I have no idea what that would look like logistically. If there was a network of newspaper-like organizations that operated like PBS and NPR, ideally with its own news wire, that would be a great start, IMO.
People having free and easy access to news from non-government-run sources (PBS and NPR are not government-run, naysayers) is a public good. I wish we could figure out how to shape the industry to reflect that.
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Not only is this not true everywhere, it can also be much more cumbersome to access. Not to mention that supporting quality journalism is probably one of the best things you can do today to make the world better.
I agree, and thats why I donate to ProPublica, which is free and doesn't use it's reporting as reputation laundering for an Opinion section that promotes billionaire profits ahead of humanity. Also, using the library is supporting journalism. The library pays for a digital license
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Fully agree. My local library system is badly funded (as in, they let a building full of books rot rather than simply move them, and the main library has been closed for several years due to roof and sewage leaks) and we have no easy option to pay for a good one.
We should have funded libraries in the infrastructure bill. A rounding error would have been enough to supercharge them.
I had to cancel my gym membership because I was moving, and it required me to send a physical letter. I did this, but found out later that somehow I owed like 2 dollars, so they didn’t count my cancellation request because my account wasn’t up to date (should be illegal). They continued to bill me the entire membership fee, but my credit card had changed, so they sent my account to a collections agency. Right when I…
That's one insanity I don't understand why companies can get away with. They can set up bureaucratic processes and even when you follow them, they "lose" your material, raise some weird objection or ignore it. Same happens with health insurances and hospitals. They ignore you whenever they feel like it but the payment and collections clock keeps ticking. I have heard it was the same in 2008 and later when people requ…
In theory, consumer hostile practices should exist at a discount so a reputable business that isn't consumer hostile should be able to offer better products/services at a higher price point and let consumers decide if they want a hostile or non-hostile market. Some may claim that consumers just want cheap above all else and the market regulates to that, hostile or not. I dismiss this and claim the issue is that a price point signal doesn't give me enough information to tell me if a business is consumer hostile or not. Paying more absolutely does not guratentee a better consumer experience, it could just be a business operating at higher margins and that seems to be the norm--a business disguised as offering higher quality products/services or better experience to justify the price point. This model seems to work just as well and captures a subset of people willing to risk paying more for a hopefully more consumer friendly experience.
The issue with all of this is, as a consumer, you can't know without trying, and are limited by anecdata of trial and error while businesses often have significantly larger pools of information and therefor leverage to work with and strategize against consumers on price points and margin padding. Reviews and that sort of shared information are already gamed with so much misinformation and disinformation that these consumer hostile strategies continue to hold well (and are legal). I can try limiting reviews to a trusted network by word of mouth so I know people aren't hustling me (mostly, for now) but that only helps when someone in my trust network has a recommendation. Often, they don't, and they too have limited selection so their anecdata is a small sample size as well, meaning a better consumer experience can exist at a better price point.
As such, I'm not sure how you resolve this asymmetry in information in free markets. Consumers almost never have leverage unless they collude together because they lack scale and information that come with the resources of owning a business. Here you have hundreds, thousands, millions of customers you can sample from and test different strategies against, optimizing for your margins. As a consumer, I don't have the resources to do this and since consumer information is largely disjoint, I'm always left at a disadvantage hoping some business won't screw me over as many frequently do.
What's worse is that if a consumer hostile business is successful enough to accumulate enough resources to play the continous rebrand/rename game, I can't possibly even build a reputation against something I consume. I'm instead encouraged to push to established businesses and further entrench the massive market share holders where we tend towards a different set of monopolistic anti-consumer strategies.
Good. The worst experience I ever had was with NY Times when I wanted to unsubscribe I had to go through multiple call/chats with a person and it was almost impossible since it was hard to get in touch with one. I am glad FTC is doing something others are afraid to do.