601–610 of 845 posts
I had a similar issue with the Wall Street Journal a few years back, and despite having spent the majority of my career working on Wall Street, I’ll never buy a subscription again. I signed up for a really good deal for 6 months of digital + paper delivery, but my paper always arrived a day or two late, so before my 6 months were up I tried to cancel, but couldn’t figure out a way to do so on their website. I message…
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Interesting. I cancelled Netflix account 7 months ago and haven't used it since. A few days ago I received "Action needed: Reset your password" due to allegedly "suspicious sign-in". After changing the password and looking into the Recent activity, I couldn't see any suspicious recent login there. So I contacted the support and they said cancelled accounts are deleted after 10 months since cancellation. So now, with…
It sounds like there are two departments in Netflix working against each other. One is trying to make sure that customers have a positive experience (not paying for a service they don't use) and the other trying to retain revenue by any means necessary (sending fake security warnings to artificially trigger activity on an account).
I cancelled my Netflix subscriptions for a few months, then tried to renew and cannot because of a bug in their Credit Card process. I have phoned and tweeted and online chatted etc... Their only solutions is for me to buy gift cards, which I won't.
In the meantime, they keep sending me emails every week to beg me to try Netflix again.
So Netflix spends money to promote to me, and to answer my support requests, while they won't do a thing about their broken payment process.
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It sounds like there are two departments in Netflix working against each other. One is trying to make sure that customers have a positive experience (not paying for a service they don't use) and the other trying to retain revenue by any means necessary (sending fake security warnings to artificially trigger activity on an account).
I wish you saw more absurd situations like this in cyberpunk stories. This mixture of trying to help the consumer to boost your image and sabotaging your own consumer-friendly process to drive up revenue is what late-stage capitalism is all about.
You're right that the cyberpunk genre lacks a sufficient dose of this kind of absurdity. I think that derives in large part from its original popularizers - I'm thinking here of Gibson and Stephenson, in particular - being in such deadly earnest about everything. Gibson especially, being a literary author trafficking in genre, I think could fairly be blamed for this; Stephenson at least attempted a sense of humor in his most significant work, and sometimes even succeeded, but in his case I think it's more a flaw of worldbuilding in that the mechanisms of transition from the America of his present, to the micro-balkanized future he depicted, were insufficiently fleshed out and thus failed to capture the mounting absurdity of daily life that any such transition I think necessarily entails.
Perhaps that's a touch presentist of me, in the case of Snow Crash at least; after all, it was written in far less absurd days than these. Nonetheless, I think most who've followed have felt to some degree bound to emulate - not all, though; for example, the brilliant cyberpunk film The Fifth Element does spend deliberate effort to successfully, if briefly, depict the absurdity of life in such a dispensation.
Would that more works in the genre did the same, and in general that they would more broadly update their extrapolation of possible futures to look ahead from today, instead of from thirty or forty years ago. But that kind of work is very hard, so maybe it's not too much a surprise to see it done so rarely.
I also just canceled my NYT subscription (or, more accurate: I am in the process of doing that) and it is just terrible. I am in Germany, and basically they do not accept your cancellation via writing to the customer support, but require you to call a callcenter, which is extremly hard to reach (either they do not pick up, or the connection quality is so bad that they don't understand what you're saying). In short, I…
German law stipulates that ToS requiring a call (or letter) to cancel when you subscribed online are void (§ 309 Nr. 13 BGB limits what restrictions can be placed on the mode of communications). Cancelling via their contact form, email, or even SMS is totally fine as far as the law is concerned. I don't see how the NYT could refuse your cancellation via their contact form. Maybe nobody's bothered to sue them? (IANAL)…
Of course you could try to sue them, very propably even threatening does the job. But the idea is to have a hassle free cancellation process, and a court case is not really my idea of such a thing.
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The pandemic made me realize how much newspapers have impact on people opinions. If they keep telling a vaccine in unsafe, a big part of their readers will believe the vaccine is unsafe. If they keep telling a vaccine is safe a big part of their readers will believe the vaccine is safe. And that no matter what the reality is. I'm not american but reading NYT during the elections, I was astonished by how much NYT was…
> I was astonished by how much NYT was blaming Trump for everything The guy was calling the whole thing a hoax, I don't know what credit he should get for anything.
Firefox/Chrome users: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
For educational uses only, it helps make the news fit to print.
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I use Privacy.com for this reason and to not worry about my cards getting leaked. I create a card per-subscription and set the monthly limit to exactly the cost of the subscription. When I want to cancel, if it's not easy I just destroy the virtual card.
I'm confused how they make money, the free plan has up to 12 new cards a month which seems like a lot. Even on the lower pro plan the cashback can exceed the $10 per month you pay.
I've never been able to cancel any subscription with ease, so nowadays I always use Privacy to get temporary credit cards. When I want the subscription cancelled, I try the provider's website, if it doesn't work, I just cancel the card all together.
It only works if you didn't give them your name and address. At least in Europe some debt collection agencies will track you down and charge an enormous fee, and will leave you with a bad credit score.
how can that leave you with bad credit score if you never gave them your social security ( or equivalent) ?
Takes 5 seconds to cancel , even got a Duolingo refund after 3 months ( duolingos language education is so poor it's borderline malicious) by emailing Duolingo directly.
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Every single outlet you just listed is just as bad as the New York Times... /r/news is absolutely the worst cesspool shithole I've ever encountered on reddit, with the possible exception of /r/politics. It isn't just their rabid anti-conservative bias, which I'm more or less fine with as its pretty clear their possessed by their ideologies, but its their fascism of banning anyone who has a different opinion, while hi…
I've never heard NPR or BBC talk about how they are "fighting fascism".