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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Oh man, seriously, regulations are the only thing keeping people safe or it would be junk fees all the way down. Take wireless phone service in the US right now, the main carriers say you have a rate plan of x, but then they tack on all the taxes and fees they have to pay and pass them onto you, saying they’re taxes you have to pay. The price also then varies depending on where you live, in some places the “taxes and fees” can add $15-20/month to a single phone line. Nowhere near the advertised price.

    Now, once or twice a year, they also add on new made up “fees” whenever their quarters aren’t looking as profitable as they expect, so you’ll see another $5/month or $7/month charge tacked on.

    Then they don’t let you pay your bill with a credit card if you want an “autopay discount” - a discount that used to exist for carriers to encourage people to stop using paper billing.

    More and more people are switching to paper billing and mailing in checks just to make those companies have to waste more money/resources for being so dickish.

    If they were regulated, they’d be forced to just have a flat price, you could pay with any money, and they’d still be profitable, and the bill would be less confusing.



  • Talk about false advertising. Tried to order contact lenses on Lens dot com the other day for someone. Advertised price with rebate seemed reasonable. Create account, (as they require that to proceed) go on about choosing options and filling in info.

    Only at the last order page, do they tack on $250 of “taxes and fees” (even though it’s a medical device so it’s not taxed) and then try to explain away in an info widget that taxes are “stuff we may be charged but we’re just making up this bullshit number.” Oh, and they charge shipping.

    1800contacts did not do either of these things. LensDirect seemed equally non-bullshit but their prices were a bit higher.

    How many people get scammed by the “taxes and fees” field figuring, “welp, I guess that’s just the price of America.”?

    Edit: de-hyperlinking the lens site, they don’t deserve any clicks, only hate.








  • But they choose to not. One of those cake and eat it too scenarios.

    A territory like them is eligible for Federal money from various programs, while not having to pay Federal income tax. If they became a state, they’d then have to pay income tax, lose benefit of the free program money, but be allowed to vote.

    If you don’t want to fully commit to the whole package and are milking the advantages of being a territory, should you really get a right to choose how the package that is being taxed and giving you free money is steered?

    (Oversimplification, of course.)

    If I were a member of a territory, I don’t really know where my thoughts would land.

    However, as one that is taxed, it seems that allowing the untaxed to choose our taxed destiny would be disingenuous.






  • They will likely revamp the process. The problem is, once the ballot is counted, the vote is separated from the voter, so there’s no link to who the person was and who they voted for.

    It’s a process meant for privacy. That someone was able to accurately forge signatures enough to pass verification (which is handled by trained humans) is a bit on the “this was creepy/planned” side, which is likely how the outlier event happened.

    America isn’t there yet, but cryptographic hashes anonymizing but connecting a vote to a voter, so the vote could be anonymously recalled for an attack like this would likely be the best privacy-preserving process.