A new rule proposed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would ban the sneaky fees some companies slap onto their services at checkout time. Thanks to these junk fees, which have crept into the process of everything from buying concert tickets to booking vacation rentals, the prices consumers initially see are often nowhere near what they end up paying.
The Biden administration has been putting pressure on companies like Ticketmaster and Airbnb to improve their ways, and both recently committed to providing more transparency about their extra charges. The FTC wants to take things a step further by banning the common deceptive tactics altogether. The proposed rule targets both hidden, mandatory fees that aren’t properly disclosed upfront and ambiguous “bogus fees” that leave consumers unsure of what it is they actually had to pay more for.
These practices are misleading, with companies often resorting to “bait-and-switch pricing and misrepresenting the nature and purpose of fees,” the FTC argues in the proposal notice. Under the proposed rule, businesses would have to include these additional fees in their advertised prices, explain what each fee is for and let customers know if any of it is refundable.
The FTC took comments from the public last year to assess the impact of junk fees and ultimately gathered over 12,000 responses to shape its proposal. It’s now opening up comments for 60 days so consumers can weigh in on the rule it’s put forth. “By hiding the total price, these junk fees make it harder for consumers to shop for the best product or service and punish businesses who are honest upfront,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. The proposed rule would "save people money and time, and make our markets more fair and competitive.”
Which do you prefer to shop for, gas or hotel rooms?
Gas is always advertised with the tax built into the price. Every sign you see is the full price. When you look at online gas apps including Gas Buddy or even Google Maps, you’re seeing the full, final price.
Hotels advise one price on shopping sites and then you pay a much higher price once all the taxes are included. Can you look up the taxes in advance? Sure. Assuming you know to look for local sales tax, and county lodging tax, and the city entertainment tax. But why is that necessary? Why is it helpful to you as the consumer? Do you think the retailer doesn’t know the total price in advance?
Can you look up the taxes in advance? Sure. Assuming you know to look for local sales tax, and county lodging tax, and the city entertainment tax. But why is that necessary? Why is it helpful to you as the consumer? Do you think the retailer doesn’t know the total price in advance?
Exactly. There’s no reason any of that shouldn’t be included in the advertised price. I’ll never understand people who want to go to bat for practices that are at best asinine, and at worst, deliberately misleading because they place the burden of determining the final price on the consumer before reaching the “checkout” section.
Idk, it makes sense to me. ISPs, utilities, cell phone providers are all guilty of this. I don’t want to read fine print for these sorts of transactions.
Admittedly their fees are blatant because Uncle Sam basically handed them the whole market in the 2010s, when they were allowed to merge with Live Nation.
The argument the idiots use is “We want to see government theft!” instead of just having a line item at the end of your receipt showing tax collected and the breakdown. It’s not like we don’t have toiletpaper roll length receipts already.
The kicker is we already do the “price at point of sale including taxes” thing at gas stations. If it’s $3.09 or whatever per gallon, that’s including state and federal sales tax.
We already see the line item thing on most receipts anyway. We basically do everything except roll the sales tax into the sticker price.
that would very much wreak havoc with caching since you basically can’t cache pricing including sales tax as it depends on your very specific location.
of course, for things like event tickets, it’s the venue’s location that matters for tax, so it works out to be a non-issue.
Fair, I admittedly don’t know how one would implement it, but the sales tax data is being used by their clients for something.
Looking into it further, some states, according to Shopify’s FAQ on the topic, have different rules with regards to destination-sourced vs origin-sourced sales. 🤷♂️
Maybe you could do more localized caching. Localities with different sales tax are finite and few. Cache pages based on those localities and then serve pages based on the IP of the client. It’s not ideal or as optimal, but it’s not that unreasonable in my mind. If it became the norm we’d build the infrastructure to sustain it.
Companies have no problem doing it to comply with EU regulations which require tax to be included, so I see no technical reason why they couldnt figure it out for the US.
It’s an imperfect solution. VPNs are an issue - and even if you don’t use a VPN, the API only knows the location of the ISP’s servers - which can be in a different state.
My point was that, the law should leave tax inclusion in pricing as optional. There is no way to implement automatic detection cleanly, other than prompting the user to confirm their location, which is a huge annoyance - so the ‘tax inclusion’ rule would not make things better or more convenient.
The car did what it was programmed to do— unfortunately, that’s not what was best for the time. I think some kind of human override is needed for this type of situation.
But this feels more like a general car problem than anything. Car infrastructure is typically not pedestrian friendly :(
Removing pressure from her leg could have meant bleeding to death before paramedics could arrive. As horrifying as it is to have a car parked on your leg, she was stable and as safe as she could possibly be. Removing the car from her leg wouldn’t have reduced the pain - chances are it would’ve got a lot worse and I bet emergency services didn’t remove the car from her leg as soon as they arrived, they would’ve done a bunch of prep work first (especially given her drugs for the pain).
When there’s a serious accident, you stop what you’re doing and wait for help. Only act if you’re trained or if it’s very clear that something needs to be done right now (e.g. if a car is on fire and someone is inside it).
If the weight of the car stopped her from breathing it would have been a very different thing.
You are adapting your arguments to the situation.
It should be clear that no self-driving car will ever know what “the right thing” is in cases like this and it would require human interaction/intervention to resolve*. This is simply because the car would be unable to gather the necessary information about the situation.
That should not deter us from adopting self-driving, as self-driving vehicles will be the biggest boon to pedestrian safety seen since the advent of urbanization.
One could obviously imagine a future where other vehicles could contribute information about the situation so that the vehicle in question could take actions and react based on what happens around it and seeing different perspectives than its own. Interactions with robots or drones could potentially also contribute information or actively aid in the situation.
If the vehicle was intelligent enough to converse with other humans or even the human in question, or at least use human voice to gather information to aid its decision making this could also be different. But the vehicle itself will always struggle with the lack of information about what is actually going on in a situation like this.
If the weight of the car stopped her from breathing she’d be dead.
The facts of the matter are:
The car is programmed to stop and turn on its hazard lights when it detects an obstruction underneath it.
That is good policy, overall, for when a person is trapped under a vehicle
As exemplified by this situation, where moving off her leg could endanger her life
A larger narrative was attempted to be extrapolated from the smaller narrative here of a car endangering someone’s life.
However as has been described already, this car did not endanger anyone’s life any more than a human-driven car would have. In fact, given then scenario of a pedestrian literally flying into its path, it behaved optimally for that scenario. Something a human driver may not have done.
I like how you just keep on talking about what we all agree on.
Would you like to imagine how you would argue if the first sentence you wrote was true?
That’s when the interesting scenarios start showing up, including how humans are ready to grab the pitchforks when an automated system kills someone, but when humans do it 10x more it’s perfectly fine.
NO, a human driving a car and hitting another person is NOT perfectly fine.
People just didn’t make a big fuse about them because our society already have the institutions to deal with this kind of situation.
The driver would be punished according to the legal institution. If it is a deliberate murder they would go to court and be trailed.
Local media will also make sure the culprit would be punished socially. Everyone in town will know who hit our neighbor.
On the other hand, the responsibility of driver-less vehicles are not well defined yet. Is the engineer responsible? Is the programmer responsible? Is the CEO of the manufacturer responsible?
This is why these incidents receive so much outcry.
They already had preset email replies, if I recall correctly; this seems like a natural extension to that. It sounds like they’re just sending special reply emails, which hopefully is easy for other email clients to parse.
i had a lot of problems with my t7 and went through an absolutely excruciating return process. the bad service now makes me think twice about buying samsung products in general, but i had zero issues and was very happy with my samsung memory products before the t7.
i would get great read/write performance, but i think it had some bad blocks or whatever (confirmed but not apparently correctable with samsung magician) that id run into; when that would happen the drive would get a red blinkenlight, my pc would freak out, refuse to dismount the drive, unplugging/replugging was of no use, and the only temporary remedy involved a full reboot.
There’s always been a weird market for “luxury” tech that’s a gold-plated version of what everyone else has. I remember gold-plated pre-smartphone phones that went for ridiculous amounts of money; of course it becomes obsolete, it’s targeting those with money but no foresight.
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