Liabilities and expenses have likely grown in the last 18 months. IA may have gained some additional donations, but a lot of people are turned off by Kahle's doubling down on courtroom fights with copyright owners, even if he takes $0 in salary.
No organization can keep this up unless there is an ace in its back pocket.
> Days before the settlement was announced, record labels had indicated that everyone but the Internet Archive and its founder, Brewster Kahle, had agreed to sign a joint settlement
Does IA have an independent board of directors? If so, why is the board and its members never mentioned in the copyright lawsuits? Most other organizations (nonprofit and corporate) with independent boards would be heavily involved in any major litigation and issuing statements as developments warrant.
I don't see that here - the IA blog post is by a director of library services. The about page (https://blog.archive.org/about/) mentions nothing about a board.
IA has a board page. My guess is the other members are independent in the sense they have don’t have material financial ties. However, you can draw your own conclusions as to whether they would ever tell management “no.”
The issue is that nonprofits don’t have shareholders that can hold boards accountable. As seen w/ OpenAI, sometimes big donors can bully (or eject) the board, and that probably needs to happen with IA.
> What I don’t understand is why some people can’t just reach out and request it — instead of going straight to a chargeback.
Customers don't want to "reach out" if it means hunting deep in their account settings to find the cancel button, or calling a number which may or may not lead them through an endless phone tree to waste 5 minutes talking with someone on the retention team reading from a script.
People don't remember they signed up.
They can't remember how to log in from a different device to cancel.
It's easier to use their credit card app to dispute the charge.
The company name is different than the product name - even a slight difference may indicate a scam, like all of these highway toll scams using a slightly different domain name.
A worker or family member signed up using someone else's card, and that person has no idea what the charge is for.
People expected one thing from your SaaS product, and got something else that they are not willing to pay for.
They rarely check or read their email.
Your account reminders are going straight to spam.
The communications around the product, pricing, or requirements was lacking.
What I don't understand is why my banking app does not show a "cancel subscription" button with the payment.
When I click that button, the recurring payment is automatically canceled, and the SaaS company can check that and know that I unsubscribed. Or something along these lines.
There is already a power-asymmetry between consumers and companies. This should not extend to unsubscribing. Here, the consumer should have all the power.
The reason isn't technical. This isn't implemented because the entire card-processing ecosystem is hooked on the chargeback fees (min $15 to $100). It starts becoming a lucrative revenue stream for Visa/Mastercard/Stripe/Adyen/WorldPay/Fiserv and the entire ecosystem.
Merchant's end up getting the short end of the stick in most cases.
Thats how it works in India. All authorized repeating charges ("mandates") are listed on a portal maintained by the card issuer. you can go in anytime and simply cancel the mandate from there. This is mandatory under banking regulations.
Credit cards are also required to be "tokenized" when stored at a merchant or payment aggregator - the user authorizes the bank to allow the merchant or the aggregator to "store" the card details for use later, and the bank then issues a card token, tied to the specific merchant/aggregator. They are not allowed to store the original card info at all - just this token. This makes the token not worth stealing, as it can be only used by that merchant, and is trivial to de-auth if needed, with or without merchant cooperation.
Banks are barely running on a modern stack, let alone doing anything userful within banking, and you want them to build an api to cancel an outside service? :)?
Neobanks definitely have this feature. For example Revolut. There’s a “Block future payments” button, and once you click it, no more charges from that merchant will go through.
The requested feature is more like list-unsubscribe headers for mailing lists[1]. Instead of categorizing the mail as spam (blocking) you send a clean unsubscribe back to the sender.
How would this be tooled? A chargeback, a deep link to the cancel page, an API connection between bank and subscription?
Chargeback is easy because it's under the card co's control. Deep link would require knowing the cancel page of every sub, plus handling auth factors. API connection would two way integration, with scoped auth between every bank and every service. Hopefully managed by an SI or aggregator, but the business model sounds hard (the bank doesn't mind the chargeback, the SaaS doesn't want the cancelation, so who pays?)
Visa/MasterCard/Amex already support such a facility in India due to RBI requirements. Doesn't seem too difficult to adapt similar functionality for other countries too, if the regulations are updated to require it.
> How would this be tooled? A chargeback, a deep link to the cancel page, an API connection between bank and subscription?
I'd be happy to just have the ability to easily ask the credit card company block further payments with no actual notification to the business besides that the monthly charges stop going through. If you want to be fancy about it, creat a custom industry standard declination reason for that use case.
Considering they are placing the charges in the first place, it would seem like it would just need to be a response code, not a convoluted network of extensive new development like you suggest.
Integrations are usually one-way (merchant calls bank API), but it's not beyond the bounds of practicality to keep a handle on whatever UID was assigned to the recurring payment in the first place, then send the merchant "by the way this subscription UID requested user cancellation".
Yet the majority of businesses use dark patterns to avoid cancellations because it's hugely profitable to do so. Chargebacks are expensive, but the truth is that the majority of customers never leverage it, and often just endure years of paying for products they don't use. Maybe they tried to cancel to find that while they could sign up in seconds online, cancelling invariably requires a call (to a number that, wouldn't you believe it, has higher than normal call volumes!) into some maze of retention garbage.
What a world we would be if companies didn't want to bill customers that don't use their product. Imagine if companies automatically paused billing if you stopped using their product? Panacea.
Apple is a hugely greedy company, but it's one thing I like about subscribing to things in there -- I can cancel at any time with minimal effort.
As I mentioned in the article, this is extremely rare for us, but it has happened a couple of times. And that’s where I start having questions and frustration about the process itself.
It constrains liquidated damages to a reasonable figure. But it doesn’t prevent them. As for selling a debt to a collector, that seems perfectly reasonable, particularly if the customer made no effort to cancel.
I am acutely aware that it constrains liquidated damages to a reasonable figure. Conveyance to a collector is, of course, customary in the trade.
The problem is that a “punitive” amount of liquidated damages is neither reasonable, nor would it typically be found to have been the product of an actual estimate of the damages. See, 356 cmt. a.
If you didn’t say “punitive” in the LD provision, you’d have the “reasonable estimate” conversation but GP straight up called it a punitive clause, which is not going to fly (in many jurisdictions, ianyl, etc. etc.)
> a “punitive” amount of liquidated damages is neither reasonable, nor would it typically be found to have been the product of an actual estimate of the damages
Would note that the Restatement isn’t law, but an influential guideline. As long as the punitive terms are clearly agreed to, they ought to be able to fly. (Particularly if made in exchange for money, e.g. pay a premium to opt out of punitive cancellation.)
> the result are chargebacks it just means things cost more in general
shrug. That's just the way it works.
Make it easier to unsubscribe than doing a chargeback. Your competitors who do that will have a lower cost and be able to undercut you and you'll go out of business.
> Make it easier to unsubscribe than doing a chargeback. Your competitors who do that will have a lower cost and be able to undercut you and you'll go out of business.
How do you know people aren't already doing so? It's not about the competitors but the industry in general.
Have you not read the post I was replying to?
I quote:
> People don't remember they signed up.
> They can't remember how to log in from a different device to cancel.
> It's easier to use their credit card app to dispute the charge.
> The company name is different than the product name
> A worker or family member signed up using someone else's card
> People expected one thing from your SaaS product
> They rarely check or read their email
Sure there were other points, but more than 50% of the list is about the customer having their own problems. It's like having a bad actor in the system making it worse for everyone.
Exactly. This is what I want all my subscriptions to do.
In UPI (I know I know...) there is an autopay system. Your single UPI app has a single page with all your subscriptions. You can cancel or do whatever there and it's all handled in one place. My openai, streaming services, youtube premium, amazon prime, everything is on there. It gives me notifications before a charge is about to occur. No dark patterns.
This is the standard I expect.
Since credit cards don't provide a centralised thing like that, it's up to the SaaS provider to give the equivalent experience.
Cancelling should be _exactly_ as easy as signing up. If that means your MAU doesn't increase as fast, maybe you have a shit product. Case in point: amazon prime can have cancel buttons littered all across every page and I'm still not gonna cancel it.
Here's the simplest implementation:
Few days before and on the day of charging, some infobox on the app's most attention-requiring screen, and an email telling me I'm gonna be charged. In all those communications, the main CTA should be a cancel button, that without further ado, let's me confirm and cancel the thing.
Anything even one step more complicated is a dark pattern.
Someone downthread mentioned - what if they want to change their subscription level instead of cancelling? In that case, two CTAs: change plan, and cancel. Both equally sized and right next to each other with good color contrast - important! None of that greyed out cancel button bullshit.
I don't want to be messing around with "forget my password", or having to remember what email I set up for it.
> some infobox on the app's most attention-requiring screen, and an email telling me I'm gonna be charged
Nope, I no longer log in (because your app was crap, or because I accomplished my goal). Fine I lost $10
If I log in every day or two chances are I want to keep it going. It has to be an out-of-band communication with the ability to cancel in a frictionless way, which means no account hijinks
> Pioneer stood out with a nice look from outside, and cost-cutting low quality work inside.
That seems to be the standard among many appliance manufacturers these days. Slick as hell on the outside, junk/buggy electronics on the inside that may not be repairable 10 years from now, either because the part is no longer made/supported, or the expertise doesn't exist. We had an LG refrigerator that failed under warranty, and the designated local repair specialist never answered the phone.
What I really can't stand is inefficient cost-cutting.
Nvidia, Apple, Sony and Microsoft have all at one point (or maybe still do) use ridiculously cheap solder. This only saves them fractions of a cent on $300 devices. Every few years this leads to a device that will have it's solder crack from heat stress. This usually happens well outside the warranty window, and the manufacturer will swiftly give their customers the finger. Microsoft was the exception with the Red Ring of Death getting fixed outside of warranty. PS3 with the Yellow Light of Death? Sony gives you the finger. Nvidia card cooked or MacBook borked? Here's where you can buy our new model.
Another one is the proximity sensor on phones. On midrange models, these have been replaced by a "virtual proximity sensor". Saves Samsung or whoever maybe a couple of cents, seriously degrades your user experience.
There's hundreds of these things across all industries. Its a pretty clear symptom of the fact that businesses are no longer primarily interested in their customers, but rather their shareholders.
It's super cheap to copy the look of higher end equipment, materials might cost more (metal vs plastic) but that's baked into the unit cost. Actually making the thing work well requires paying for good engineers to do the upfront design work. If you can just buy a design for cheap from some Chinese whitebox firm, your initial investment in the product is very low.
For 15% of women and 12% of men Social Security is the only source of cash in old age owing to a number of factors: low-paying jobs, poor saving habits, divorce, caregiving for relatives, medical bankruptcy, etc.
Young people have all those same cash flow issues, but are also our future (if they have kids). In terms of who to subsidize, it should be the youngs, not the olds.
Young people aren't going to be able to afford a child with a couple percent payroll tax cut. They need healthcare, time off of work, and a decent school to send their child to.
If we cut Social Security young people aren't gonna be able to have children because they're gonna have to spend more time and money taking care of their parents. Social safety nets make it easier for people to live a comfortable life.
Social Security would be completely solvent if we didn't make poor people pay to support other poor people, and instead tax rich people for it. It's built on a regressive tax, and the wealthy don't pay jack shit.
> Let's not make poor youngs (nearly all of them) pay for olds (rich or poor).
The problem is, this implies that whatever system you're advocating for must force people to prove that they're poor. These requirements don't come out of the sky and get magically enacted by some fairy, they're gonna be an active by bureaucratic process. That's a non-starter because then the system isn't universal anymore. It only serves people that are able to reach that bar. The poorest and most destitute among us, lack the ability to produce documentation. Many are disabled, uneducated, destitute, have dementia, or any number of other problems that affect the people who need help the most.
It should be easy for anyone who's paid into Social Security to get their benefits back out of Social Security. They shouldn't need to prove anything else.
The easiest situation is to just force people who make more than $176,100 to pay their fair share.
I use Preview for signature annotation, joining PDFs, deleting pages, etc. but in some cases it messes up fillable PDFs - fields aren't aligned properly, or certain math functions won't work.
> The one exception would be if I had a long layover.
That's what I did for a day-long layover in Istanbul. I took a short self-guided tour of the city via tram, then returned to the airport in the evening and paid for the lounge until my 1 am flight. It was like 20 Euros, absolutely worth it (this lounge had a shower).
I've taken the freebie lounge access on those rare occasions I have a business class ticket, but only if there is no line. If it's a zoo, what's the point? I can sit in one of the empty gate areas with no one around me until it's time to get on the plane.
Traffic enforcement, which used to correct some bad driving, has basically evaporated in many parts of the U.S. This has been a long-term trend.
A friend who's a cop told me that only when their department got specific state grants would they set up stings of drivers driving in a pedestrian walkway while someone was crossing the street. Here's an example of one such grant program, which is actually funded by the federal government: https://www.mass.gov/doc/ffy26-municipal-road-safety-grant-a...
Crosswalk Decoy Operations: These operations may involve a plainclothes officer acting as a civilian pedestrian and a uniformed officer making stops OR involve a uniformed officer serving as a spotter to observe and relay violations to an officer making stops. ... All Pedestrian and Bicyclist enforcement must be conducted during overtime shifts, meaning grant-funded activity occurs during hours over and above any regular full-time/part-time schedule.
At other times, he said he would only pull someone over if they were doing something batshit crazy and they happened to be behind the vehicle where it was easy to pull them over. Minor stuff and speeding they would rarely ticket.
The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost.
Years ago New York used to calculate if you were speeding the NY State Thruway based on the time between toll booths. They cancelled this program for some reason.
Although more recently, the New York State Police have speed cameras set up in a few highway work zones, which is effective (double fines applicable, see https://wnyt.com/top-stories/where-are-automated-speed-camer...) but it still requires a person driving a car to set up the gear.
I grew up in a Texas city, lived abroad for over a decade, and recently moved back to the same city because my girlfriend randomly got a job here.
The number of people who run red lights is giving me culture shock. You have to sit and wait at your own green light because 1-3 vehicles are still running their red light, and it's every time.
As a teen, I saw cops everywhere camping out for traffic violations. I got a few tickets myself for tiny infractions that don't compare to running a red light.
Of course, the icing on the cake is that Texas outlawed red light cameras in court.
I’m in Chicagoland and can report the same. The cops aren’t doing anything. Interestingly, it seems crime is going down while they do nothing. This leads me to believe we don’t actually need huge police forces.
I'm in Chicagoland too, and they're doing basically what they've always done: issue tickets --- automatically, now, as well as manually. What difference are you seeing?
Anecdotally, I have not seen a car pulled over on LSD south of the loop in _years_. That used to be common (my first year in Chicago I got 2 tickets there and don’t think of myself as particularly speedy).
I’ve not seen a single person pulled over in my neighborhood in the same time, another activity that was common.
Meanwhile traffic behavior has reached staggeringly wild levels.
My impression, which is certainly not backed with data, is that CPD no longer polices traffic violations. My cynical view is that it’s a work slow down in protest over all the trouble they’ve gotten in for pretextual stops.
I've been pulled over in Chicago within the last couple months, for whatever that's worth. In Oak Park, this is a hotbutton issue, the belief that since COVID traffic enforcement is sharply down, and, apparently, by the numbers, it isn't.
When I looked into the stats for cpd it was a mess. They got in trouble for monkeying with the stats, so they are already suspicious.
But by their numbers stop rates went way up for the 10 years between 2014-2024. But that was during the period when traffic stops were a primary strategy for crime prevention, that is the pretextual stops they got in trouble for.
Sadly, there was no checkbox for the officer to mark if it was a pretextual stop or not for study purposes.
I could probably isolate by stop location to some degree if I really wanted to do some digging. Maybe I can nerdsnipe ‘chaps into doing it for me.
Essentially the same as kasey_junk -- they're missing from the roads entirely. I frequently am in the areas of Lombard & Aurora for work, and I haven't seen a cop on the side of the road with someone pulled over in what feels like years.
I do see the insane driving. People going fast and weaving is the tip of the iceberg. Regularly now I see people using left turn lanes in intersections to pass people on the left and cut them off mid-intersection. Regularly I see people utterly spaced out on their phones, nearly stopped in the middle of the road -- these folks present a unique danger if you're doing the speed limit and not paying really close attention. But just generally, I think "good driving" went out of style during COVID, when a huge swath of people stopped driving.
These sorts of things I feel used to be addressed by the police in a very public way: you'd see that car that was weaving doing dangerous things pulled over a mile up the road as you continued on. THAT is what's changed, for me.
In Miami, there is very little enforcement and reckless driving flourishes. I used to regularly see cars doing 90, weaving, pass cops who did nothing. I've also talked to multiple cops who confirmed that they rarely enforce unless specifically doing traffic duty. Which never made sense to me, since it's a revenue stream. But however the incentives are set up, they motivate cops to do nothing, and drivers know it.
Maybe it's only one part of an overall trend in cultural rot around rule enforcement.
A woman had her dog in the cart at Costco that kept barking at people.
I joked with an employee during check-out "So anyone can bring their dog to the store these days?" and she said they stopped confronting these people because it's not worth it and makes things worse. Worse for who?
Man, I thought that was the exact type of person worth confronting in civilized society. If we can't police minor antisocial behavior, what can we confront? We wait until it's so bad that we have no choice?
The woman is going to claim it’s a service animal. There’s no real rules about service animals—-and even where there are rules, like with learning disabilities, doctors and other professionals act like whores and sell their signatures to anyone with money. It’s widespread bad parenting for generations now. How can a store fight that?
> The woman is going to claim it’s a service animal. There’s no real rules about service animals
I agree with your overall point, but there are actually rules about what types of behavior are unacceptable for service animals. Uncontrolled or disruptive barking is one of those unacceptable behaviors.
The store would be entirely within their right to warn this person and remove the owner and/or ban the “service animal”.
That said, unless you have a legal team that aggressively embraces these sorts of acts against people who abuse the service animal rules, it’s almost always more practical just to let it go. Some of these folks have significant psychological issues, and you’ve already lost once you’ve entered a conflict with an unstable person.
If you wait until it's so bad you have no choice, you usually lack the ability to enforce the rules.
When I'm in the position that I have to enforce rules, I usually provide an alternative and explain to people that they're not the problem. I spell out that problems arise when you have a dozen people breaking said rule, or when the people who come after them decide to push the limits even further. As long as they see the rules enforced consistently and equally, I rarely encounter any pushback. But until my employer got all of the staff to consistently enforce the rules, things were getting pretty nasty (threats towards staff, people doing stuff that would endager lives, etc.).
> The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost.
Ultimately, someone still has to send in a check, and if they don't, you go back to the same problem, which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant.
This isn't as much of a problem in NYC, but here in KC, unfortunately, neither the traffic stop nor the warrant are trivially safe tasks.
> Ultimately, someone still has to send in a check, and if they don't, you go back to the same problem, which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant.
Here in Argentina they if you don't pay, they just remember until you want to sell the car, or renew your license or a ¿anual? technical review of the vehicle.
You have to pay it sooner or later with late fees. It's not necesary to send a minitank to the front door of the home of the bad drivers.
Missouri has the option of yanking your license [0]
... which kinda makes it hard to drive to work to get the paycheck that you need to pay the fine, at least legally. If you get caught it's a misdemeanor [1]
> which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant.
Impounding vehicles is an option too. Like we do for parking tickets. That is routinely done without police interaction, or interaction at all with the driver.
I know in California if you ignore a red light ticket long enough they'll pull the fines (plus penalties and interest) from your state tax return.
> Years ago New York used to calculate if you were speeding the NY State Thruway based on the time between toll booths. They cancelled this program for some reason.
Did they? The only thing I knew they nailed people for was speeding through the EZPass lanes too fast.
That's because US cops and courts only care about making a profit, and cops issuing speeding tickets and minor traffic infractions don't earn money.
But something like an operating while intoxicated is big bucks, which is why some places have drivers on the road with 12 DUI convictions (tens of thousands in state profit), and now we got cops and courts from legal cannabis states arresting people for smoking 8 hours beforehand because the criteria for guilt is ill-defined but the punishments are massive because they just copied all of the harshest (read expensive) drunk driving laws.
US cops and courts don't care about guilt, they don't care about safety; over and over and over again they have shown themselves to be a profit-seeking racket. Anyone who has ever been in or had access to the the details of someone's criminal case and seen the mountains of ridiculous extra fines and fees and ways to waste money for no gain knows how ridiculous it is.
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