If you see government as a way to enhance the ability of the owner class to enrich themselves, it makes perfect sense.
It seems like you're looking to fight on the internet - would you consider a different activity instead?
No I actually think it's important for people to square views like "government is a way to enrich the owner class" with actual reality, such as the fact that the government when administered by a different party did the exact opposite.
It's better to think about it in terms of "people who choose to pursue positions of power to benefit themselves financially while cosplaying as wanting to help the average person".
Further having 100m at 40 doesn’t suddenly bring the kind of social connections that going to the right schools and the right parties would. At the extremes, the average lottery winner is surrounded by people asking for help, the average Fortune 500 CEO’s social circle aren’t. So if they suddenly fall on hard times the lottery winner is stuck but that CEO may very well claw their way back.
It’s still possible for poor people to succeed and 3rd+ generation wealth to fail, but the odds are wildly different.
This is not so when it comes to the poor. Once in power they are no longer poor so the incentive to fix any issue related to this almost entirely evaporates.
There now it’s both. They want to own agency if the idea of owning stuff is too gauche for modern audiences.
A $200k NW individual gets 2x cost and $2k gain.
A $3M NW individual gets 2x cost and $30k gain.
A $6B NW individual gets 1x cost and $60M gain.
A $400B NW individual gets 1x cost and $4B gain.
If it wasn't obvious, these numbers correspond to the Median American, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. People whining about focus on ownership and complaining that all politicians are bad are drawing this equivalence across 3-6 orders of magnitude of incentive to do evil.
In contrast, I argue that incentives matter and that high NW individuals in politics have uniquely misaligned incentives. The focus on ownership doesn't just matter, it matters more than it ever did before.
I guess you get the government you vote for.
What a lazy comment. I did not get what I voted for. Just because someone wins an election does not mean that everyone voted for the winner. This is not North Korea or Russia. There are a lot of people that absolutely did not get what they voted for.
That said, I don't believe in focusing on class-based politics in this day and age; the Supreme Court has made it clear that money is permissible to influence election outcomes and that can and does drive these sorts of structural shifts in politics to allow for the ultra-wealthy to massively influence political outcomes in our country.
TL;DR: I would tell someone that being under an oligarchy may be true (I cannot be certain as I'm not a political scientist), but there are other far more important issues TO THE GENERAL ELECTORATE that resonate better and should be the focus of future candidate messaging in order to win the election.
That being said, there was no contest post Biden drop out, although there was a party alignment
If we're being pedantic (which we absolutely are at this point), "you" is always plural, and plurality is sometimes used to denote formality or respect for a singular subject (analogous to vous in French, or Sie in Germanic languages). It just so happens that we exclusively use the formal/respectful version in English these days.
The only truly singular singular second person pronoun in English is thou, which was the familiar form (although now because it is so archaic people ironically interpret it as more formal).
It also explains why blue collar Americans vote for tax breaks for billionaires and union busting legislation.
Services have been making it hard to cancel subscriptions for many years, under many parties and administrations. Many things are Trump's fault, this is not one of them.
It seems like this was pushed off to give businesses more time to comply.
Many kinds of businesses have subscriptions, each with a different situation. Some small businesses don't even have a programmer.
Requiring a phone call is not always (although often is) to make it difficult to cancel. Often it's because a company doesn't have the proper infrastructure for the frontend.
So I think it's reasonable that they are giving companies some time.
In the end, I hope that on July 14th this goes through, it will be a big win for consumers.
EDIT: My answer didn't fully address the question, so let me add: I don't think is the result of Trump trying to be friends with billionaires for their money. I understand why it seems that way - because he literally does that. But this doesn't seem special or extraordinary. Enforcement of laws gets pushed off all the time.
The Biden admin had put the May 14 deadline for certain things even though the rule as a whole went into effect in Jan 2025. Trump's commish is defending that by another 60 days.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/negative-option...
If a bunch of elected officials wrote letters to execs and a couple of NYT articles were written about the issue, Visa/Mastercard might be motivated to help.
It's maybe comforting to think "oh, people just don't want to call, they'd rather eat the fees" when this is way over simplifying the problem and giving way too much credit to sites that operate this way.
Try to call comcast and actually speak to a customer service representative. Try it. I dare you. I bought a new modem last year and simply needed to provision it on the service. I got caught in bot limbo so long my only recourse was to scream 'cancel my account!' over and over until I actually got a human on the line. I'm sure that will be automated away at some point too.
They could do so much more. We still don't even have chip and pin in the US. They seem to think that the current levels of fraud loss are cheaper than the business lost from stopping it.
How exactly are they suffering?
Now if a bank or card came along and provided the same (and maybe easy subscription management in general) they can have all my subscription revenue.
No consumer business can operate without access to those card networks.
With no consideration given to how consumers may be harmed by non-enforcement meanwhile.
Banks used to have (maybe have again, as the CFPB is now a husk) broad latitude to resequence transactions posted to your account, so instead of you thinking you'd have one overdraft in the example, $500 down to $400, then once into the negative, -$200, and one overdraft fee, the bank could post them so it was $500 to -$100, an overdraft, then all 5 small transactions were also overdrafts, allowing them to charge 6 overdraft fees.
In December 2024, the CFPB announced a proposed rule to cap overdraft fees for banks with over $10B in assets at $5 (OR treat the fee like a loan) and add additional regulations to avoid resequencing. On May 9th, last Friday, the president signed the resolution [1] to overturn the pending CFPB regulations, saving us from "unlawful government price caps" (ABA President Rob Nichols) and "harmed the very consumers the CFPB is supposed to protect" (Sen. Tim Scott, R, Banking Committee Chair).
Comparing it to a loan, e.g. a credit card, usual effective overdraft fees are something like 16,000% APY [2] ($35 charged to the average $26 overdraft, repaid in a few days). Those with poor finances often might use a debit card instead of a credit card, which they might not have access to. It's a cruel joke that those with a bit more financial privilege can pay for things via CC without having the money for ~30+ days (statement close + payment due date) for 0%, or if they let the debt ride, "only" 40% APY. Not 16,000% APY.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/your-money/customers-can-...
[1]: https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2025/05/with-trump-signing-re...
[2]: https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_overdraft...
If your credit is really good, it can be much lower than that. I haven't seen an interest rate even close to that high since I was in my early 20s.
Like, it should make no difference to the bank if I make N transactions each for amount S, or the other way around. Money is fungible, people!
Disable the easy sign-up button and force customers to call to sign up.
Seems like no burden at all to implement.
Of course, like everybody else, I block ads. Although, when I didn’t I didn’t click on the things anyway.
I dunno. For a while I felt bad consuming stuff without paying. But in the end, the internet has become so hostile and manipulative, I guess… I’m just going to wait it out. Eventually hopefully it will all collapse and a viable business model will be discovered.
Any request for your own private data will then come with datetime stamps and source origins for every piece of data they have of you.
Thereby allowing you to cut off at the source and request deletion, which they must then propagate upstream or risk a fine per data point.
But they're not required to give it to you, and they won't.
That leaves a lot of room for the "Cancel" option to be buried in an obscure hard to find part of the website. I'd have hoped there was a requirement for it to be as prominent and as easy to find as the "Subscribe" option (and maybe there is, just not mentioned in this piece?)
I personally don't want that. Click to cancel? Sure. But perfectly symmetrical is not something I need and in many cases not something I want.
Yes, since the alternative is what you have now: impossible to find and if you find it highly annoying. Even if you have the law which says "canceling must be as easy as subscribing" like where I live it still isn't even close due to efforts of government creating a law but failing (by design) to fund the agency tasked with keeping the companies in check.
ABSOLUTELY YES
[Cancel] [USD 12.99/mo billed on the 20th]I wouldn't, I would like some form of confirmation before buying a subscription. I don't see the problem in a unsubscribe function having a symmetrical confirmation in any service that doesn't try to trick me into a subscription. And actually, even more so for services that try to trick me...
Click to settings Click to cancel Click to confirm cancel
Usually signing up takes more effort than that! I didn't even have to type anything.
Yes.
1. Login
2. Go to your account page.
3. That should have a link to billing management.
4. Somewhere on the billing management screen there should be some easy to figure out way to cancel.
Details will vary but in general cancelling logically makes the most sense as part of payment management, so it belongs where other payment management goes such as adding or updating a credit card.
If the site wants to it would be fine to have a separate subscription management section that is linked to on the account page parallel to billing management. That might make sense if it is a service where there are options users can add to or remove from subscriptions.
For example a streaming service might have separate paid options such as higher video resolution, more simultaneous streams allowed, removing ads, and adding specialized content (e.g., porn, foreign language videos).
That wouldn't really belong under billing so putting it in a separate subscription management section would be better, and then cancelling would best fit there too. Billing management would then just be managing your payment methods.
https://www.swlaw.com/publication/ftc-click-to-cancel-rule/#...
I’ve put off joining a gym for years because I don’t want the hassle of I want to cancel.
Also I never do free trials assuming they’ll be hard to cancel.
I'm definitely in the newer-touch-something-if-it-seems-hard-to-cancel camp. How do you measure that I didn't sign up?
It seems (to me) as if such behaviors were stamped out more rapidly not only would fewer customers be affected, there would be less incentive to try the scam(ish) behaviors in the first place.
But I get it now: when Biden directs the FTC to act, it's considered legitimate use of executive power. When Trump directs an agency not to act, it's authoritarian overreach.
I first spoke with a customer service agent whose accent I couldn't understand very well. I have him ALL my account information. He mumbled something about being unable to forward me to the actual customer service agent (then what is your role, dude?), then came back on and said he couldn't forward me and so I would have to call them myself.
He gave me the same number I had already called. I pointed this out to him and he gave me some other number, which is where I'm listening to on-hold music now.
Right now the on-hold music is interrupted to sell me shit.
But frustratingly, the AT&T website appeared to allow you to replace your current (auto-pay) billing method with some other billing method, but I didn't see any way to remove all current billing methods, which makes just stopping paying nigh impossible. :-(
To hear these horror stories how hard it is to cancel a service in the US makes me wonder how the Americans put up with this.
We all know that there are other countries where far, far worse abuses of power take place, but I've wondered if the U.S. might be at some really unfortunate nexus of strong contract law enforcement + particularly poor consumer protections that leads to these particularly madding subscription cancellation-type services discussed in this thread.
Add in the random percentage increase in price when you try to buy something in a store from hidden taxes.
Also add the culture of tipping, rather than paying staff.
There's people who like this who will never benefit at all, does anyone know why?
I don't get it. Then again I don't get the appeal of tearing the wings off of flies either.
Could you explain what you’re referring to? Isn’t the FTC trying to make it better (with key staff getting fired as they try)?
lenerdenator•5h ago
And lo, I was right. You exist as an annuity to a shareholder. Nothing else.
jfengel•4h ago
micromacrofoot•4h ago
* Truth in Lending Act
* Fair Credit Reporting Act
* Fair Debt Collection Practices Act
* Equal Credit Opportunity Act
* Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act
* Home Mortgage Disclosure Act
* Consumer Financial Protection Act
The CFPB was one of the most effective agencies for consumers
triceratops•3h ago
ars•54m ago
micromacrofoot•34m ago
A lot of people don't realize how many current credit card regulations didn't exist 20 years ago. For example: you'd have to manually figure out how much interest was costing you and now they have to print it right on the statements.
They've helped rein in some of the most predatory industries out there in numerous ways.
buzzerbetrayed•3h ago
MOARDONGZPLZ•3h ago