521–530 of 599 posts
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Courts don’t make decisions on whether executive rules are told or bad, serve consumers or not. The main oversight they have is ensuring compliance with procedural rules and statutory technicalities.
Upon plain inspection, this is untrue.
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I'm asking about your personal opinion: in Griswold v. Connecticut should the Supreme Court have upheld states right to ban access to all contraceptives, including condoms?
Griswold found a person has a right to decide, together with their doctor, what course of medical treatment is best for their particular needs. Do you support that right at all beyond contraception (and abortion)? For example, do you support my doctor's right to prescribe to me all the pain medication that he and I think is appropriate for my painful, terminal disease? Or to prescribe me LSD or other hallucinogens to…
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“The law” as most people understand it allows the government to regulate the sale and use of medical products. There’s a libertarian reading of the constitution under which Griswold makes sense. But under it, the FDA is probably unconstitutional.
Thanks for saying more concisely what I was trying to convey here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44514202
From the article >"While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing, the procedural deficiencies of the Commission's rulemaking process are fatal here," As with a lot of judge rulings, and what they're always supposed to do, they ruled on what the actual law is and not just on what sounds good. >The FTC is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis wh…
If this $100 million in impact rule is the reason for the judgement, wouldn't that suggest that a scam that takes in more than $100 million would be protected? That's essentially what these businesses are doing. They're taking money from people who either don't want their product, or didn't realize that they'd be charged continuously. Just yesterday I cancelled a service, they made it very simple, until I read the ve…
No.
The $100 million rule doesn't say that things with more than $100 million in impact cannot be regulated. It just says that more analysis is required when regulating such things.
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Is your entire position that government doesn't work so we should get rid of it? Or do you have proposals for actual ways to improve it?
No, that is not my position. I don’t know where you got that from. My position is advocating for healthy, much-deserved skepticism of the current judicial system. More specifically, I am saying that an appeal to some alleged neutrality/objectivity judges are supposed to maintain when carrying out their duty is particularly flimsy in 2025.
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It’s a pro business anti consumer supreme court which knows it’d be dangerous to appear that way. Government and court will hamstring their ability to help consumers. My favorite comment on HN was some law student saying his prof said “Scalia is the most complicated supreme court member whose views are always unpredictable” and the commenter said “he’s just a corporate hack who always votes for corporations and backs…
>> It’s a pro business anti consumer supreme court Maybe? But this wasn't the supreme court: "...was vacated by the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...
Case was decided by Loken (GHW Bush), Erickson (Trump), and Kobes (Trump).
What consumer does this serve at all? What citizen does this serve at all? This only serves to allow firms to erect effort barriers to keep rent seeking fro their customers. The "gotcha" that the Khan FTC didn't "follow the rules making process" is parallel construction.
The standard capitalist response would be, it serves the consumer of a service who wouldn't be willing to pay more for the additional guarantee of click-to-cancel. It doesn't seem that farfetched to me to imagine two sites offering equivalent services, one at $5/month and the other at $6/month, with the only difference being the $6/month site offers click to cancel. This dollar price difference is often the differenc…
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The standard capitalist response would be, it serves the consumer of a service who wouldn't be willing to pay more for the additional guarantee of click-to-cancel. It doesn't seem that farfetched to me to imagine two sites offering equivalent services, one at $5/month and the other at $6/month, with the only difference being the $6/month site offers click to cancel. This dollar price difference is often the differenc…
That wouldn't be the standard capitalist response. After all, you still have the option to spend your money in stupid ways, the ease of cancelling is not related to that. A more standard capitalist response is that this is a market inefficiency. You're spending $20 on the gym, you're not using that service, and so presumably a humble cake maker is missing out on that $20.
Options provide value to the purchaser even when they are not exercised. It is a common but grave error to model options the same way one would model a simpler pay-per-usage style service for that reason. We might as well start telling people they can't buy monthly bus passes if they don't use them every day.
I've used a learning platform called Brilliant in the past. The cancellation process was so convoluted that it was impossible to cancel the account. Dark patterns and confusing language. They refused to refund me and after I thought I'd cancelled and I had to run a charge back from my bank. This is nefarious behaviour on their part and consumers need to be protected from it.