For me: Cancelling paid subscriptions should be as easy as subscribing. I hate the fact that they actively hide the unsubscribe option or that you sometimes should have to write an e-mail if you want to unsubscribe.
Pretty much any tax avoidance loopholes. The more money I have the more I see how ridiculously skewed in favor of the rich everything is. My income is taxed at a lower rate than my capital gains, meaning that not only did I make several thousand dollars last year on stock sales I did literally nothing to earn, but I paid very little on taxes for it. There is also a scheme a friend of mine uses to reduce his tax burden even more by recording losses that only exist on paper by swapping between essentially equivalent assets. The system is designed to punish poor people for being poor and reward rich people for being rich.
A popular scheme I have seen is:
Owner registered and de-facto runs an incorporated Company. Company employs Owner and pays them a small salary (down to state minimum wage even), so Owner minimizes the income tax they pay.
The car Owner drives is owned by the Company for “business purposes”, which allows the car to be operated within 50 miles of the Company (and farther with supplemental insurance). Company counts the car purchase/lease, maintenance, gas as expenses, bringing down the bottom line.
Flights, travel, meals could be paid by the Company, as long as it’s tangentially “business related”.
The house Owner lives in (or several houses for the family) is owned by the Company and is rented to Owner for very cheap, so Company pays the taxes, maintenance, etc, breaking even, or taking a loss on this house. Again, this brings down the company’s bottom line.
Somehow, purchases for a Company can be exempt from sales taxes, too.
In the end, on paper, the Company is barely making any profit, but the Owner might be enjoying a nice car, nice house, and vacations. All for “business purposes” of course. While you pay taxes on your income and purchases like an idiot
It gets worse. CEOs take out zero interest, or exteremly low interest loans on corporate assets. They then use the money tax free.
I will say a lot of what you’ve discussed here is actually illegal but very rarely enforced. Pretty much every small business owner I know is pulling shit like this but it’s basically never enforced even though it’s illegal fraud.
That actually is illegal.
What surprisingly is legal: dating a 14yo.
Weird country.
Which one?
No
stealing food from the grocery store
Damn, where you live at where this is legal because shit is about to get ROUGH where I’m at and I’m trying to get free groceries.
They write in Finnish in other comments, but I don’t seem to be able to confirm or deny the law there, at least not with a quick search.
I did find an article that suggested that it’s been ruled legal in Italy, but only if you’re homeless and hungry. I can imagine that if you tried it and had any assets whatsoever, they’d find a way to put a lien on those assets rather than let you get away with it.
Corporations that don’t pay taxes being allowed to make millions in profit while their employees qualify for welfare because they pay them so little.
They should just make it so that whatever they announce as their “earnings” to their stockholders should also be the amount that they are taxed for.
What’s worse is those same organisations get corporate welfare (tax breaks) but fight tooth and nail to prevent their workers from getting it.
Using multiple free trials.
I’ve been paying .99 cents a month for Hulu for 4 years straight because I just use a new email every Black Friday.
Do you have to change your payment method every time as well?
No. I always use the same Paypal.
My car insurance goes up as my car loses value. Years ago you could choose to only insure it up to a certain amount. My kids drove an older car and i designated $10k in insurance for it. That cut the insurance price to about 60%. Texas no longer allows that.
Huh that’s weird. My parents bought new cars and their car insurance basically doubled. Equal-tier vehicles to their older ones, but new.
If the car that totals at $50k costs you $100/mo, that doesn’t drop to $90/mo when the car’s value drops to $45k. It stays the same or goes up.
That is not universal at all. There are so many factors at play. I’m sure it happens but again, not universal.
Isn’t most of the insurance for liability? I can see a logic where older cars are less safe, and thus accidents are more likely and would cost more, hence the higher costs. But I’m just guessing.
Collision insurance, the kind that pays for damage to the policy holder’s car in the event of a crash caused by the policy holder or an authorized driver of their car often more than doubles the overall cost of insurance. Collision insurance is usually optional when there’s not a loan.
Your car may lose value, but the cost to repair goes up. Hence the insurance increases. Also the likelihood of a total loss goes up as well.
The insurance will never pay more than the value of the car, so if the repair cost goes too high they’ll just declare it a total loss and pay the “fair market value” of the car. And yes, a total loss is more likely, but that doesn’t mean the insurance pays more, on the contrary, they use that to pay less.
In the US, unsubscribing from email spam is legally required to be easy under the CAN-SPAM act. For paid subscription services, I believe they also are required to be as easy to leave as they are to join in the EU and California.
Somewhat related, many dark patterns are treated like fraud.
the CAN-SPAM act
I once wrote a community college paper for my friend in exchange for some work on my car. He had to write a paper on the CAN-SPAM act.
I did the assignment, covered all the requirements, explained it and whatnot. I then wrote a SECOND paper, appended to the end of the first. This second paper also met the length requirements, but was a parody. About the Hormel meat product, Spam. In cans. Can-Spam. I was very proud of it. It was funny.
I kept asking my friend if he ever got feedback from the professor. He never did. It was then that I learned professors often don’t read papers like this, they just assign them to get students to read and practice writing. It made me sad.
I’ve seen a few memes where people go to the canned spam on social media, report their posts: reason: It’s spam
Taking a penny instead of leaving a penny.
What would everyone be leaving them for then?
Entrapment mostly.
Biden administration was working on making that unsubscribe bullshit illegal last year. But then Trump so those tactics will probably be mandatory pretty soon…
I thought that happened? I’ve noticed unsubscribing is generally like 2 clicks now. I almost always see a link at the bottom of emails.
Click to Cancel was put in as a rule, but it requires active enforcement. It also had a 180 day grace period from last October, so it hasn’t even gone into effect yet.
I think email unsubscribe was an existing requirement from a few years ago. Biden’s thing was about unsubscribing from paid services, like Netflix.
Ahh misunderstood
The FTC under Biden was actually craking down on that. It was called the “Click to Cancel” rule, but that was literally a month before the election. :/
Lina Khan was a perhaps once in a lifetime bureaucrat doing good for the people at a rapid pace on normal government timelines and now she’ll probably never get that job or a better one again.
Dating sites besieging their users with bots and fake profiles.
torrenting Wikipedia
oh and crypto mining, like ur actually printing money, how tf is that legal
Why would you torrent Wikipedia?
torrenting is faster than usual downloading, its actually an incredible technology. i dont know the exact percentage of how much faster, but it makes sense that it would be because it puts less load on the server with the file because everyone downloading it is also sending it to each other
Torrenting can be faster than normal downloads. A file server with a fast connection that’s not overloaded can easily be faster than a P2P download that doesn’t have very many peers, or the peers all have slow connections. There’s no fixed percentage speed boost that you get, because sometimes you don’t.
That said, for things like Linux ISOs or archives of stuff that people just keep seeding forever but aren’t hosted on fast file servers (if at all), it’s great and typically the bottleneck is your own connection.
You’re printing the promise of money using your actual money to pay an increased electric bill. Assuming you don’t get scammed, forget your pass, lose your key, etc.
Also destroying the planet for literally no reason (particularly PoW coins like Bitcoin) because difficulty is completely artificial. It’s what makes mining so absurd - the more miners, the more power/silicon wasted, but the output is exactly the same because the release rate is set. More adoption = less efficiency. It’s completely back asswards.
Also destroying the planet for literally no reason
Not necessarily.
Solar has a problem where, if you install enough capacity to meet demand during short, overcast winter days, you have twice the capacity you need in spring or autumn, and 4 times as much capacity as you need during long, clear summer days.
That excess production tanks the value of the power produced. Itnis already regularly driving power prices negative, making it impossible to recoup the value of your installation. Since it’s cheaper for you to just buy electricity on the market than to install solar, you don’t install solar. Nobody does. Solar installation never expands enough to meet winter demand.
Unless we can monetize that cheap summer power. If we have some way of profitably consuming that excess power, we have every reason to maximize solar rollout.
Crypto can do that just as well as anything else.
yeah well unfortunately techno bro fascists/crypto bros aren’t exactly the most progressive minds, and let me tell you: they are fucking hostile to renewables.
And before you start lecturing me about how it’s about the tech or whatever, let me also tell you: I was mining literally over a decade ago. I know what crypto is, I know what mining is, and I know how this shit works. It is concretely unsustainable and back asswards, as I said. It will not be what the evangelists tell you. It’s been 15 years. It’s a casino, it’s a desperate attempt at getting rich because people are losing faith in traditional economic mobility (rightfully so).
Remember when everyone was all about Argentina’s grand experiment? Fucking crickets now.
The issue is monetizing the excess power produced by adequately-sized solar facilities for 9 months out of the year. Getting enough people to point giant lasers into space would solve the overcapacity problem that comes with solar generation outside of the tropics. Crypto has a slightly higher ROI.
Desalination, fischer-tropsch synfuel production, hydrogen electrolysis, demand-shaping of conventional industries like steel production and aluminum smelting, widespread adoption of electrified parking garages are some other options. Even other maligned, power-hungry technologies like AI can address the overproduction problems of solar better than conventional grid-scale storage solutions.
Man it’s amazing how every 5 years there’s a new solution that doesn’t solve it.
You having a bad day? What can I do to make your life better?
Fair enough. I was flippant with you, turnabout is fair play.
Anyway, I just think ultimately this whole enterprise doesn’t make sense so long as the majority of cryptos depend on a system that requires more and more computing power the more people get involved. The math is simple here to me, you disagree.
Have a good one
It’s because crypto isn’t actually money. It’s just something somebody might give you money for.
In theory, you can walk to your nearest forest and collect pine cones and then sell them to people.
That’s about the same as crypto, only pine cones are actually useful.
Fiat currency like the US dollar is just as intrinsically worthless. It has value only because people accept that it does, they trade with it, and it has legal status as tender “for all debts, public and private”.
People trade bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for goods all the time, without converting it to USD or anything first. I mean, yeah, usually the thing they’re buying is drugs or something but it’s the same as handing your local dealer a $20 bill.
Hey now. In harsh3466 land only I have the authority to mint pinecones!
I mean, artisanal gold mining is still a huge thing in certain less-than-awesome areas. The basic way gold works is what inspired it.
I don’t know how this works in the US, but where I live after a year subscription (let’s say for your internet provider or something). They can only renew per month. So if the year subscription is over you can cancel any service every month and they can’t hit you with any fees.
Back in the day if you’d forgot to cancel your plan you’d be stuck with them for another year. It sucked!
Companies changing the terms of their contracts on you.
Yes, but - in many of those contracts (particularly end-user license agreements) you agreed to them changing the terms of the contract. You also have an “out” - not using the product any more.
You’re right though: it’s slimy. Anything slimy thing can be put into a contract!
Source: I’m not a lawyer, but worked in an office with a lot of them, and worked with software license agreements in particular.
I’m so curious now. Do you know how those apply? I mean, can they change the terms on you without notice or is that notice legally required? And say they want to feed all your data of however many years to AI. If you accidentally use it once, do they get permission for everything? What if you agree only because you want to delete your data?
I have so many questions. lol
You usually get an email saying something is changing. Problem is, you’ve already paid and if it’s a material change, now you have to agree to continue using your property. Sometimes you don’t get a notice and it’s a “software update” that now pushes ads onto a product you bought and are now shit outta luck since you can’t return it. Samsung and Roku are bad for this.
Samsung and Roku are bad for this.
You’re buying the hardware; they provide the software as a service. Oh, sure, no agreeing to a unilateral change of conditions on the software means that your hardware is rendered worthless, but still… And yeah, that’s pretty much the way that actually works.
IP law can start getting pretty strange.
Voting/speaking against fascism
Yet…It’s not illegal yet.
I like that growth mindset!
Fun fact: There’s technically a right to free speech in the constitution of the People’s Republic of China. But we all know how that goes.
Just like with any rule in any society; without enforcement, they are nothing but merely the words of people. ahem USA ahem
Which is the reason the right to bear arms is the second amendment.
The founding fathers anticipated and understood that without the ability to defend it, the right to free speech only exists while the population and propaganda are in agreement.
