Well, not really. If you have unpacked the iphone - I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be easy to return even within the 14 day window. You can return unpacked though, which is not the point of what I'm saying. Also for the benefit of the argument, change 2 days to 15 and you end up at the same place- you cannot legally return the device, User agreement has changed in ways you don't accept and you are forced to use device, for which you have paid or accept loss and buy another device. Oh and also, you cannot change OS to the alternative one for which terms might be more acceptable to you. How is this not a subject of investigation- I don't know.
You can absolutely return it within the 14 day window, even unpacked.
During the reflection period, you may open the packaging. You may try or fit the product, just like in a normal store. But you are not allowed to do more than what is needed to judge the product. For instance, you can try pants. But you cannot wear the pants for several days and then return it. If you do this anyway and the product loses value? Then the seller may charge you the damage. The seller needs to inform you of this before you buy the product.
I have sent back products within the 14 days, including smartphones that I tried and decided that I don't like it. Some sellers also extend the 14 days to 30 days.
Changing the terms later is a completely valid point though and it should be possible to reject any updated terms IMO.
Well, yes really. If it is 2 days, and you've bought it online then you can just bring it back.
ishouldnotbutk8's message was mostly a joke since your argument would work with 15 days instead of 2. And yes, customers should be protected* against altering the deal.
Especially that it is so so common now, with the wide-spread of IT. Companies just push out malicious updates and changes in terms and conditions.
* they probably already are, but not many people try to bring remote downgrade cases to courts
> The most interesting thing about the apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios is that they show the fundamental irresponsibility and recklessness of many very important AI leaders.
To me at least, it looks like a very cheap and transparent way of bragging and elevating one's self-importance. If we take a practical approach, then AI is just another tool that makes some jobs easier and more automated, which sounds about as sexy as inventing the mass-production of interchangable screws. An astonishing improvement for people who used to mill everything by hand, and absolutely critical technology for the modern world, but barely anyone has even heard of the people who made it possible.
Another aspect is the world that people like the Altmans and Musks come from. The wealthier someone is, the more detached they tend to be from the manual labor that runs the world. When your goods simply appear at your door after a few taps on an app, it's easy to forget that someone made them with their hands (especially true for high-end products), someone packed them, someone drove them to a warehouse, someone photographed and edited them, someone wrote the listing, someone packed them again, and someone eventually brought them to your door.
The entire physical world gets compressed into an app. From that perspective, it can start to seem as if the app is the world itself, and that if someone can hack the app, they can destroy the world.
I'm pretty sure the CEOs of Tesla/SpaceX, OpenAI, and any company depending on data center buildout are painfully aware of physical supply chains and manual labor scarcity right now.
Tie up European military resources and thus reduce the weaponry available to Ukraine.
This also highlights why the US/European strategy of playing chicken and focusing on "de-escalation" is fundamentally flawed: it gives adversaries the initiative and the lever for controlling the temperature. Whenever it gets too hot for them, they can dial it down, whereas the "de-escalation" camp has to dance to the tune of their adversaries.
It's the very same mistake that was made with Hitler.
The number of buttons on N95 is a hint to why it didn't see as wide adoption as the iPhone. My elderly relatives would be intimidated by that alone, afraid to press the wrong one and break something. A single-button iPhone with a touch screen that showed applications in a simple grid format fit them much better.
Jobs' genius was in understanding that the customer needed a rope that they couldn't accidentally hang themselves with, not a construction crane with a 800-page manual. He spoke about designing devices that his friends and family could use, and you can very clearly see that reflected in the products of that era.
Despite all the Apple copycats nowadays, few copy that focus on the customer.
> I think we have to distinguish between people who outright post Russian propaganda like Scott Ritter and people like Greenwald and Mearsheimer who say the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and was provoked.
The Russian government literally finances Mearsheimer's books. It's written on the title page. Doesn't get any closer to government propaganda than that.
Valdai financing in 2023 does look bad. But his 2015 talk "Why Ukraine is the West's fault" does not appear to have any financing and says the same already.
In 1993 he advocated for Ukraine to keep nuclear weapons:
I found the debate with Sikorski very illuminating. Sikorski is the foreign minister of Poland, with a long and distinguished career in the US (scholar) and EU (MEP) in addition to Poland. He's been in the dirt too, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an on-location reporter in the 1980s. During the debate, Mearsheimer tried to lecture him about things that went on at diplomatic gatherings where Sikorski was present (and led a delegation) and Mearsheimer was not.
He's a total hack and his brand of "realism" has nothing to do with reality. Dude can't even read Russian, yet thinks he's an expert on Russia. The only reason we're discussing him here right now is because Russian troll army has been promoting him hard; like most charlatans, he has the appearance of someone who knows what they're talking about.
Mearsheimer says that there's no evidence Putin had imperial ambitions before 24 Feb 2022; that the war has forced him into this. Some of the closest people to Putin say that he told them fucking 20 years ago what he was going to do with Ukraine.
Mearsheimer is weird. His book "Israel lobby and US foreign policy" is outstanding. But when he speaks about many other things it feels like he's improvising all the time.
It was Berlin and not Tokyo, I believe. Germany kept producing newsreels until the very end. Many of them are now on Youtube, a very interesting watch on how to frame things positively.
> the people who were fooled in the past often were not fools themselves.
I think this can't be said enough. Propaganda's greatest weapon is making you think you are immune to it. Maybe some, but so much is propaganda. We all fall for propaganda (and ads), constantly
Being fooled doesn't make you a fool. But being unwilling to change your mind does. Being unable to admit you don't know or don't have enough information to make a strong opinion makes you a fool too.
Propaganda wants to take shortcuts, to simplify things. To trivialize. "It's so easy, you just..." because the fool is the person who already knows, the person who has nothing to learn, the person who thinks they're better than everybody else.
In the past, there were not the avenues of finding alternate sources for news. While those avenues are present today, it also allows for additional sources for propaganda. So are we any better today or not???
Not. A thousand cable channels all licensed by a government, is much the same as five broadcast channels licensed by the same government.
A million YouTubers grinding The Algorithm while secretly sponsored by various world governments, isn't much different to a thousand well-placed gossipers secretly sponsored by various world governments.
Because while Russia was in a way stronger position than western media was portraying, they don't have an infinite capacity for pain.
They would absolutely love to not be sending their kids to die and selling natural resources to whomever again and traveling around the globe without sanctions.
The concessions they would have accepted at the beginning were less. However, now that they've lost so many men and risked their regime on it, they can't simply accept the same deal.
This is why the incentives that wars create are so terrible, especially for authoritarian regimes, even if they're at fault.
If Russia does not have "an infinite capacity for pain", then it does not sound like an unwinnable war. Ukraine estimates that they need to inflict at least 50 000 casualties a month to break the backbone of Russian military. The latest surge has brought it to 42 000 a month, up from 30 000 earlier this year. This already exceeds recruitment and training capacity.
Who are those who would love not to send their kids to die, sell resources and travel the world? Putin? His children already live a pampered life in palaces and he himself is probably the richest man in the world, currently on a trip to India. The rest don't matter. Even the head of security services Patrushev, historically the second most powerful man in the country, is scared of Putin like a schoolboy and fumbles words before him. That has been one of the most shocking revelations since the war began: that oligarchs, security services, nor anyone else can put out even the slightest opposition. The whole country dances to Putin's whims. His only real opponent is time.
And Putin doesn't give a shit about Donbas. The aim is to restore the world that birthed him, the USSR at its peak. Russia has not backed one one inch from the 2021 ultimatum to return to the European political order of the 1980s. Any concession only confirms that attacking Ukraine was a viable strategy, that piece by piece he can claw his way closer to that goal.
Military specialists from Northern Europe estimate that Russia would be in position to attack the Baltics and Poland (and have a reasonable chance of succeeding, especially if "realists" are at the helm in Western Europe and the USA) no more than 6 months after the war with Ukraine ends.
Wow, clueless. You entirely miss the point of the war.
Putin sees the mere existence of a successful Ukraine's as an existential threat. Putin initially got elected on promises that included becoming an advanced Western-style economy. He abandoned that to crony oligarchism, stripping the country for parts. Now, he and the Russian people see former Soviet state Ukraine actually becoming successful, well-off, and aspiring to EU membership. THAT can not be tolerated, because it would give Russian people the idea that they should have the same, and create a likely revolution at home.
So Putin's goal is to wipe Ukraine not only off the map, but off the consciousness of everyone in the world as Ukrainians as a people
Putin will stop until either 1) he achieves this goal, or 2) he is forced to stop.
THAT is the reality.
Thinking that Putin would somehow have accepted lesser sanctions earlier, and that he would have actually respected your new peace plan when he has never respected any other is to be played for a fool.
Allowing 1) to happen is unacceptable. Note the Ukrainians who are directly suffering the daily assaults can think as well as you can of the "realpolitik solution", and they reject it, because they know it is absolutely stupid, and leads only to rape, torture, and death — theirs, personally.
Making 2) happen is the only course of action. Ukrainians will follow it until they cannot.
If you want to stop the suffering, then accelerate Russia's exit. Garry Kasparov articulated a fine plan days ago [0]:
1: Provide complete protection of Ukrainian airspace
2: Immediately send Ukraine all the weapons it needs; no delay
3: Enforce existing sanctions. To this I add including seizing Russian and Iranian shadow fleet vessels
4: Cessation of diplomatic affairs with Russia
5: Seize Russian sovereign funds immediately and use them to power the war effort in Ukraine
This would be a start. Ukraine continuing its "long-range sanctions" is already bringing the Russian state coffers to rapid decline and looming budget crisis. Continuing it longer will force Putin's hand.
I agree the EU actually stepping up and entering the war in a serious way would tilt everything in Ukraine's favor.
The problem is they just won't. The most important members of the EU (Germany and France) are in shambles domestically and turning far right. Both have little desire to stick their necks out to support Ukraine any further and are likely turning the opposite direction.
Also, Russia has nukes. Nobody wants to provoke that any more than necessary. If Europe weren't a feckless, fragmented military vacuum things might be different, but nothing about that appears to be changing any time soon.
You still insist on overlooking the fundamental truths:
1) If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends.
2) If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.
Whether or not the EU steps up and helps, whether or not Russia uses nukes (another entire discussion), this is still the fundamental fact of the matter.
The Ukrainians know this, and that is why they must, and they will, fight to the end.
It is easy to sacrifice the land and lives of others.
Would you willingly surrender YOUR OWN city/sat/country to Putin's under those plans; do you have children and do you know what happens to captured children, particularly girls? (serious question)
You resolve it the same way you handle in-store cash purchases of products that turn out to be faulty.
There is no reason why fraud and contract violation must be handled by unelected and unaccountable payment processor, when the government has already set up a consumer protection system for disputes related to cash payments. The payment processor is best left as a dumb pipe that does what parties and (in case of disputes) courts tell it to do.
Here, this is standardized, and if a local subscription service provider wants to pull money from my account I explicitly grant them permission to do that, which I can revoke at a later point.
You have to consider the interest of the involved parties rather than the efficiency of a system.
Making a purchase is (still) voluntary for the customer.
For everyday purchases at physical stores, cards are convenient. You just swipe and maybe put your PIN. But other digital payment methods or cash can be just as convenient. You're never going to chargeback a coffee, a sandwich, or your groceries.
But for distance purchases such as online shopping, hotel bookings, flight reservations and such, trust is the most important factor, not convenience. Cards have fraud protection. Other payment systems do not. These "unelected and unaccountable" people can actually help you if you've been the victim of wire fraud. Much faster and much less of a hassle than going through the courts. And if they don't help you, you haven't in any way, shape or form abstained from your right to justice through a court of law.
If customers can have that security and ease of mind, then they are much more likely to make a distance purchase. Which means that the vendor can sell their product. If the customer can't have that ease of mind, then the vendor will not make a sale.
So vendors who want to make sales will gladly accept cards. Anybody foolish enough to try to sell without making it easy for the customer to pay in their preferred way will go out of business.
Another point worth mentioning is that cards work instantly across pretty much all currencies in the world. You can go from anywhere to anywhere and pay with your card and currency exchange is done automatically. And in the past 10 years, cards have given very good exchange rates.
This is only in US and it is needed in US, because US has very limited consumer rights regulation. EU has much stronger consumer rights (mandatory 14-day return windows for any reason, easy cancellation for subscriptions, mandatory 2-year warranties).
So the things that the (private) credit-card companies protect you from in US (via chargeback support and fraud detection) are things that laws protect you from in EU.
What you're writing is not true. The fraud protection is world wide, not US only.
The chargeback fraud protection of Visa and MasterCard is on top of every and any other consumer protections. It is not instead of other consumer protections.
This is extremely important, because if you as a customer are the victim of fraud, getting your money back from Visa or MasterCard is much faster and more convenient than making a police report, going to the courts, etc. And it is a very strong deterrent against fraudulent behaviour by vendors. If they keep defrauding people, they get kicked out of the card network.
Failing to get your money back through Visa or Mastercard, does not mean that you have waived any of your other legal consumer rights. If that method doesn't work, you can continue through the police and courts.
> The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers.
That depends heavily on the kind of site you're hosting there.
I have a small site on Cloudflare that lists a brief introduction of a sawmill, its operating hours and contacts, and a map that advises which roads to take to reach it. Everything's public already. There's some very modest value in tracking who visits the site, but with popular operating systems leaking like a sieve on the client side, that fight was lost a long time ago.
It's free hosting. Push to github and changes to the website appear in 30 seconds. Even the build step for the static site is handled by Cloudflare.
And I'm satisfied with Cloudflare's explanation to the free hosting: the more sites are on Cloudflare, the more are ISPs interested in having good connections to Cloudflare. Makes sense.
Unfortunately my proposal to set up a K8s cluster to host 5 HTML pages and a dozen jpegs was not approved, so I had to make some compromises this time.
Some minor exclusions apply, eg hygiene products can't be returned after they've been opened.
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