> With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody.
Prepaid credit cards tend to be a very common fraud vector (very similar to gift card scams).
For chargebacks, the merchant has to pay at least a $15 fee on every chargeback, regardless of the outcome of the result. It's why many merchants prefer for you to contact them and ask for a refund rather than going through the chargeback process. For small purchases, merchants tend to just refund rather than dealing with an angry customer that's going to charge back.
On the other hand, prepaid credit cards seem to be one of the only ways to prevent merchants from "running up" the charges on a customers account. Sure, a customer can go through the dispute process but it's quite a hassle. Just "limiting the amount of money you place on the table" is quite effective. Giving a merchant your credit card with say a $5,000 or more available balance seems like insanity, like laying out 50 of $100 bills on the table: "here, go ahead, can I trust you to take only what you should" ? I would pay extra to have a VISA or MC credit card that only offers say a $200 limit, just for dubious situations, but again, providers have a "conflict of interest" in that they only make their "cut" when the charges go through, so the more and the larger the charges - - the more "cut" they obtain.
A prepaid card doesn't prevent you from being liable for a bill. This is like how leaving your wallet at home when you visit a resteraunt doesn't entitle you to free food because they don't charge you up front.
No but it significantly raises the effort for collecting said money. The company would need to have a strong case (that they need to be able to defend in court if necessary) to do it.
No scummy company relying on dark patterns/etc to charge the customer without their consent will dare potentially airing this dirty laundry in front of a judge.
I consider it immoral to dodge paying bills just because you can get away with it. This is like saying it's okay to shoplift because a store may not think it's worth it to go through the legal process to come after you.
I adjust my morals to match those of the entity I'm dealing with. I have no problems "stealing" from a company who is trying to steal money from me by sneaking in unexpected charges.
Nextgrid hit the nail on the head. If you are being an honest customer, but a company is attempting to "blackmail" you into paying bogus or "run up" charges like Google Adwords, which multiple reports indicate they are more than 70% bot generated hits, you can sue them in your local jurisdiction, here we have justice of the peace, small claims, force the big corp to hire local counsel.
Do they want to take it higher ? Taunt them with "dumping discovery on them", otherwise known as a far reaching motion for discovery, they'll be forced to deliver a tractor trailer load of paper . . .
With all due respect, historically, the guy with the greenbacks holds the upper hand in any deal. Many abide by the rule: “The customer is always right”.
Internet merchants often with unrealistic low pricing to “bait you” are attempting to sway the balance in their favor by cutting corners, eliminating posting a telephone number answered promptly by a live human being, too often sending out “one way” do-not-reply emails, which is shameful. Recently I encountered a tactic whereby a large corporate health care company would ONLY discuss matters over a phone call, so unless you were recording the conversation (and provide proper legal notice of such at beginning of call) there was no record of the conversation (now internet providers like Spectrum are doing the same). In fact, they were attempting to force me to sign a 30+ page contract full of legalese and “boilerplate” in their doscusign pdf format which coincidentally disallows one from modifying or typing in any disclaimers within the signature line. They refused over multiple communications to respond to several of my questions regarding costs and any future billing. I finally just stonewalled them by saying I would only communicate via email so there would be a written record.
I can regularly obtain a live human on the phone with Amazon and have always received a favorable response - - - obviously Amazon values their reputation. I personally will not do business with any company that fails to provide a telephone number answered promptly by a live human.
Often I buy locally from brick and mortar shops with return policies in the event the product doesn't hold up to expectations. The somewhat higher prices I pay at brick and mortar are just “added insurance” that doesn't even compare to the serious disappointment or anger one experiences from some internet purchases where the seller sent a fake or missing GPU card, or the item coming from China has no reasonable cost of shipping it back “hoping” for a refund, or even a US merchant who refuses to honor a valid return. Now that memory prices have exploded, I expect to see even more of these fake or missing GPU shipments from online sellers.
Having been a former cc merchant, I know that any merchant that receives a chargeback will suffer at least a $35 hit, plus more on the time and effort to respond and fight the chargeback, indeed I encourage all buyers to challenge any that we discover dishonest. Merchants getting enough chargebacks will suffer the company providing the merchant account cancelling their business merchant account, often the merchants are are then “blacklisted” in the cc industry.
Chargebacks or disputes will lock your account, so definitely stay away from that path.
But just closing the bank account will stop auto billing (it's considered a decline). So if you closed the account, it would just stop paying for whatever it is, and then cloud may lock the gcp account until it's paid. (I'm not 100% sure what cloud does with unpaid invoices).
You've never tried to free-range raise your kids then. Some friends in our neighborhood had the police called on them for riding their bikes around the block, and the cops followed the kids back to their front door and then talked with the parents.
The problem is that proper legislation is a balance of interests and working through the details of the policy. If you put "abortion" on the ballot, what would that mean? There are a ton of different possible policies on what is or is not permissible.
The main thing the Swiss have that Americans don't are referendums that can seriously challenge federal action. And then there are the state versions of that. And they don't have to wait for "the cycle". Or have results made null by arbitrary veto powers.
Sure, but who is going to be elected who would do that?
And as has been quite apparent, since the most folks will do is peacefully protest if outside the voting system - and be ignored - how else is it going to change?
And if either of those were working, we wouldn’t be complaining about this online anyway eh?
I highly doubt the US system can be fixed peacefully. I really wish it were, since the US affects a lot of the rest of the world (including where I live).
True but that is a function of ignorance too. There are plenty of good features in Gmail that are off by default, like undo / delayed send and keyboard shortcuts.
"Enable delay send - Allows you to undo sending emails for 5 minutes", I'd argue that a lot of people would enable that pretty fast.
Keyboard shortcuts probably would work like I'd expect, people like me would go "Hell no, no keyboard shortcuts in browser application EVER", and power users would opt into that in an instant.
I'm confused. Doesn't gmail offer an 'undo' for send by default ? At least for the last 5 years ? It's in General settings "Undo Send" and can be set up to 30 seconds ?
I really wished they would also let you disable those very annoying modal popups announcing yet-another-chatbot-integration twice a week: My company is already paying for your product, just let me do my work ffs...
And this is generically true and always has been about every aspect of GMail?
What would you suggest people do. Self-host?
I'm just trying to understand why you posted this. It's generically true. Any company can change anything at any point. May as well just pack it up boys.
> I'm just trying to understand why you posted this. It's generically true. Any company can change anything at any point. May as well just pack it up boys.
Yes, any SaaS can change any feature at any time. Some companies have different motives though. We're not paying for GMail. When customers pay a monthly subscription and can cancel at any time, you usually want to keep them happy.
The internal motives are also different. Are employees promoted for just launching stuff? Are they running out of helpful features to launch?
> And this is generically true and always has been about every aspect of GMail?
In principle, but look at all the ways Gmail bends over backwards to keep ancient UI preferences working. You can configure it for different inbox presentations, different densities, snippets or not, images displayed or not, UI icons or text, you can disable and enable threading, you can put chat and meet on one side or not, you can have keyboard shortcuts or not, you can remap all the keyboard shortcuts if you use them, etc etc etc.
You can't self-host these days -- your emails will get stuck in every kind of spam filter there is, and you'll always have cause to wonder if your emails are received by their intended recipients, or lost to the abyss.
You've got to use either Gmail, Microsoft, Protonmail, etc. I don't love them, but Proton is probably the best of a bad bunch.
> You can't self-host these days -- your emails will get stuck in every kind of spam filter there is, and you'll always have cause to wonder if your emails are received by their intended recipients, or lost to the abyss.
this is not true unless you end up on an IP previously abused
if you don't want to take on the risk at all, there's email services for pennies / thousand emails
Well, they're off by default in the countries mentioned in the top-level comment because they're legally required to be opt-in there (the implementation rather than the feature of course, but it couldn't really be otherwise).
I suppose, to your point, Google doesn't have to make it optional in other countries... But that discrepancy would seem to have a lot of downside (maintenance, optics, docs) for little upside (...force adoption against the will of users who would go out of their way to opt out of they could?).
https://www.hyrumslaw.com/
> With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.