> Both bills passed the House with broad bipartisan support. If the legislation is agreed to by the state Senate and signed by Gov Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania would join several other states that have moved to create such laws over the past year since the FTC began working on its now-defunct rule.
> New York, California, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Virginia have all enacted state-level policies that include provisions similar to Ciresi and Borowski’s bills.
If you live in a state that has not passed such legislation, I would encourage you to hound your reps until they do. 45 states to go.
I don’t even know what the alternative would be apart from doing nothing. Making it more of a pain for consumers to cancel is zero sum on first order analysis (if I lose a dollar because I can’t cancel the company gets a dollar) but at a second order makes our economy less dynamic by entrenching incumbent companies and making it harder for consumers to allocate their money towards better alternatives.
If a company can trap your money in a labyrinth of process they don’t have to compete on quality or price. Simple as that.
It's not a good thing to cheer rules being broken when you like the reason.
The stuff based on vague technicalities that result in something you agree with isn’t memorable, so it’s the vague technicalities you disagree with that’s memorable.
I get that process needs to be followed but this is allowing unnecessary gamesmanship.
This keeps coming up because Trump tries to act like a dictator and just order things to be the way he wants, and it doesn't work that way. There are procedures that the Federal government has to follow; it can't just ignore them and get things done right now. And in fact, the government being forced to follow procedure is a very good thing, even if it's something we want the government to do. It's one of the things standing between where we are and a dictatorship.
It appears that they make their decision, and then justify it. That may not actually be the case -- but if it isn't, the outcome is indistinguishable.
It's true that they're not always favoring the President. But he is increasingly concentrating his power, and it favors him more and more.
> But as the case advanced, [the request in dispute] was referenced by her attorneys when lawyers for the state of Colorado pressed Smith on whether she had sufficient grounds to sue.
> "I was incredibly surprised given the fact that I've been happily married to a woman for the last 15 years," said Stewart, who declined to give his last name for fear of harassment and threats.
> Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Friday called the lawsuit a "made up case" because Smith wasn't offering wedding website services when the suit was filed.
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/01/1185632827/web-designer-supre...
See also: a patchwork of privacy laws[0] that are vastly harder to comply with than a national level GDPR-style law would be.
[0] https://pro.bloomberglaw.com/insights/privacy/state-privacy-...
Rare red state w.
For example, our state constitution prohibits products being sold in containers which misrepresent the amount of their contents (albeit, it still happens).
Conversely, we also founded the pay-day-loan industry, which is just disgraceful (about a dozen states have banned entirely). Only passed because Allan Jones ("father of payday loans") donated $30,000 to PACs in the mid-90s.
I'm currently looking for greener pastures, up-to-and-including expatriation. This state overall has politicians' heads so far up their own...
https://hiring.cafe/ might be of help, no affiliation, just want to help everyone who wants out get out. Same with https://old.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/ on the expat front.
State's rights is just about always the best way to go. It's nice to see the power being returned to the people.
Click to cancel is popular among the people. It was blocked despite this. If the people had power (as opposed to lobbyists, or big business), this would had passed federally.
How could this already be passed in CA? Does CA not have gerrymandering, appointed judges, and lobbyists?
Generally agreed. I live in Canada and think we would be much better off if we pushed more legislation away from the feds and to the provinces. The needs/wants of Alberta/Saskatchewan is much different than Quebec for example.
Gun control is a major divisive issue in Canada as gun control is 100% at the federal level, but the preferences of how it is handles varies hugely between provinces, so much so that some provinces are threatening to not enforce the federal laws.
Im fine with the feds managing border enforcement, immigration, and military — and collecting taxes to fund those programs — but other than that they should leave to the provinces.
The other alternative is that everyone is subject to the mob rule of the major population centers which have much different needs/wants then those outside of the centers. Why not just give the population centers what they want and those in rural areas what they want?
Also consider that huge amounts of illegal guns cross the Canadian federal border, despite there being border control.
Same thing with bear spray, illegal to carry in most cases but anyone over the age of 18 can get it because it has real legitimate uses.
It works as well as having a peeing section in the pool
If you want to continue the pool analogy, many pools don’t let you bring in pool noodles and other floating objects into the lap swimming lane. That doesn’t mean you ban pool noodles, it means you kick people out who don’t follow the rules.
If someone possesses an object they are not allowed to have in a certain place they should be punished, the real problem is that Canada has a deteriorated rule of law where those who breaks the laws of the country are not stopped.
each province still has cities, so you arent getting away having cities dominate. instead, i think cities should be provinces to themselves, same as seattle and portland should both be states in the US. the rural albertans can take care of themselves without taxing calgary and edmonton.
I agree that the current trend in government is that feds are getting more power in Canada, but I dont think it is a good thing as now the entire country has to live under the rule of like 3 cities.
State and local laws should be addressing state and local issues. The pros and cons of a click-to-cancel law don't change from state to state.
You're missing an important reason why regulating at the state level first is a good idea: because it allows you to test the implementation with a small fraction of citizens before rolling it out.
Yes, basically everyone wants click-to-cancel, but actually writing good regulation is hard. Ideally, what would happen is that a few states would try things in different ways, and then when they figure out the best implementation, the federal government would pick up that implementation.
It’s as if I wrote code to process data in a certain way, write it for an old mainframe and to process a specific set of data. There’s not a ton of generalizability to other data, and how you implement the code on other systems will impact the outcome. Especially because there are few objective measurements to evaluate the success of legislation
But still in many cases I think a less-than-perfect law is better than none.
The question: will companies segregate their customers? Everyone gets to click-to-cancel or is there now a dedicated code path just for the lucky few?
We are only here because so many businesses made it a burden to cancel, so I know how I would bet.
The answer to that is that companies will use geofencing to restrict click-to-cancel to only the states that pass such laws. We've already seen this happen on a national level, when Apple segregated the EU and the rest of the world on the topic of sideloading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_and_States%27_Rights
https://web.archive.org/web/20180427082228/http://www.civilw...
https://news.wttw.com/2022/07/14/states-rights-supreme-court...
This is simply history. Calling it absurdism indicates a lack of historical knowledge. https://xkcd.com/1053/
Historically, it was slavery. Now it’s immigration, reproductive rights, etc. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. It’s always about control exceeding genuine governance. Maybe that'll change, but until evidence and outcomes demonstrate otherwise, "the purpose of the system is what it does."
Can you provide an example of such evidence?
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/repu... | https://archive.is/2022.07.18-235856/https://www.theatlantic...
The issue was that it was not a law in the first place but rather court ruling.
It's a disservice to associate a fundamental characteristic of our structure of government with one particularly egregiously unpopular use of it, or to wholesale dismiss it because it tends to be associated with things a lot of people find unpopular. That's rather the point. Arizona or New Mexico can tell off Nevada, who can tell off Utah, or Maryland that how they (Utah/Maryland) do things doesn't fly here.
If you've never been a State hopper, it doesn't quite click, but once you've traveled the U.S. and lived in several different regions for long enough periods of time, it clicks. Not all States are the same, and that's okay.
In particular, states shouldn’t have the right to restrict travel. If the slaves had free travel they would just leave for northern states. If people are able to leave to other states (even if it means rebuilding their life), plenty of bad state laws are OK because those affected will do so.
“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” -― David Frum
In 2018, voters passed the Better Boundaries ballot initiative, requiring our legislature to adopt non-gerrymandered congressional maps. In 2020, the legislature passed a law that effectively ignored the results of the initiative, and they drew even more gerrymandered maps after the census.
We sued the state, and last summer our Supreme Court unanimously agreed that, per the state constitution, the legislature does not have the power to unilaterally gut laws passed by ballot initiative after the fact.
So the legislature haphazardly put together their own ballot initiative that would have amended our constitution to give them the authority to ignore the results of ballot initiatives. This was put on our ballots, but our Supreme Court came through unanimously again, saying that the text of the initiative was grossly misleading and that they did not meet the constitutional requirement to notify the electorate far enough in advance of election day. This initiative was on our ballots as they had already been printed, but the results were not counted per the Supreme Court's order.
My state government is still fighting tooth and nail to kill Better Boundaries before the 2026 election. None of these lawmakers give a single shit about the will of the people.
So now when the voters want something they no longer put a law on the ballot, they put a Missouri amendment on the ballot. Those can't just be overwritten by a legislature law, those must either be found unconstitutional or canceled out by another amendment.
It's a fun game the voters of Missouri and their representatives have created for themselves.
What possible good faith reason could there be for exempting gyms?
I changed my home address to California, and shortly after, a new "Cancel Subscription" button appeared on the PI website, which worked great.
I am happy to see states still pushing forward. But it’s just so disappointing how much is being taken away for everyone.
Who do you think lobbies against a federal-level pro-consumer bill? Hint: it's not the consumers.
The risk of a huge patchwork of not-completely-overlapping state level bills is one of the few checks consumers have against federal-level regulatory capture: if it's between a single set of federal-level rules vs. a patchwork of state-by-state rules, the profitable move becomes "okay, lets just let them have the federal-level rules."
The failure modes, of course, are:
- a completely-defanged federal rule which is worse than no rule (right-to-repair has continued to suffer this)
- further consolidation: if it's expensive to do business in multiple states, only the companies with the deepest pockets can continue to grow
Personally, though, my money is still on a growing patchwork of state laws will eventually necessitate a good-enough federal law.
Any company which makes entry easy and exit difficult will not have my money. The more difficult the exit, the harder I will try to escape, even if I like their product/service.
I feel there is a whole cadre of consumer tech that is defensive against corporate taxes/tolls on our time. Eg: auto phone tree navigator, only allowing calls from double opted in contacts etc.
That should be illegal as well. If people stop paying for a continual service, like a streaming service or a magazine, then the service should just stop; companies shouldn't be able to accrue credit and continue seeking payment, just cancel the service and be done.
If something like a magazine wants a year payment upfront, then let them charge for a full year before the first magazine is delivered.
A related thing is, with Revolut you have disposable cards that are only possible to charge a single time. Unfortunately I have had a bad time trying to use disposable cards. One time I tried it the merchant did a single reversible charge for like a dollar to verify the card and then they couldn’t charge the actual amount so the purchase failed. Another time for a subscription service (I wanted to try their free 30 day trial without forgetting to cancel in time) they apparently got metadata telling them the card was disposable and they refused it so I had to use the non-disposable card number after all.
Yeah the gym cancellation thing where you have to drive to the location and sign a paper was annoying me/had to do it
Hope they do something similar with cookies where there has to be an option to say no/reject all
You can specify any expiration date for the virtual card (with at least 1 month validity). You can also set per-transaction limits on this credit card, which ensures the merchant can't charge more than the agreed amount.
[1] https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-Account-N...
[2] https://www.capitalone.com/learn-grow/money-management/what-...
This prevents payments, not charges. I’ve met two totally separate funds that buy up these claims and litigate them because killing your card doesn’t void the purchase contract. (And your liability keeps actuating so long as it’s not cancelled.)
Recently in the case of Dish Network, I tried to call to cancel service, and the wait time is 45 minutes. There's no way I am doing that. (They don't let you cancel online or via chat, calling is the only option). Instead I contacted state attorney general's office and they made Dish cancel service.
If you can prove that you made reasonable attempt to cancel service then you're off the hook. In my case Dish sent my account to collections (for the 1 month it took to cancel service) and I wrote them back that I am not paying and why. Never heard back from them after that.
If a few more states pass similar legislation, the default would be to make it as easy as possible to unsubscribe/cancel.
My bro Claude would like a word with you.