The complaint from the people is "it's difficult to cancel a gym membership". A metric to judge the success of a policy tackling that could be the # of complaints to consumer protection associations, authorities, politicians, or bank chargebacks.
It's such a money maker but no one complains because they either don't know it's happening or don't care enough to say something. But 1 million people with $10 in their account will generate $1,000/day in free money for the holder.
Deposit accounts at most banks pay you less than that, so it's unclear why you'd want gift cards to pay that much. Not to mention that turning gift cards into essentially bank accounts is going to create even more issues. Remember how we have to remind people how paypal isn't a bank? Or how would you calculate income taxes from the interest?
Sell a product for $7 but only allow "recharge" in $5 increments. It pretty much guarantees that you will have tons of accounts with random dollar amounts laying around in them, never to be used. Even for regular gift cards, the counter party would be beholden to honoring them at their full value, as they should.
Besides, nothing it stopping you from rolling monthly treasuries and using those as a bank. Something people with enough money to exploit this proposed "gift card bank" would almost surely already be aware of.
I believe the real scheme is how many gift cards never get redeemed at all.
I would have thought the intention with such regulation as proposed by the original commenter would be that apps specifically stop offering such functionality?
If giving/receiving cash wasn't already illegal or socially unacceptable, gift card issuers would have started lobbying for that yesterday.
Other than that original use case, many people use them as a form of poorly functional digital cash (since it's not fungible across issuers) that really ought to exist natively in a currency these days.
Income taxes are easy. 1099-INT. Your bank gives you one, your brokerage gives you one, and your escrow account gives you one.
You think people are going to diligently collect all the 1099-INT forms for all the cards scattered around the house? If you forgot about a gift card, are you suddenly a tax evader?
That said, they could be required to supply a copy electronically directly to the IRS and the IRS could calculate your taxes for you. Change the responsibility for correctness from the taxpayer to the government, and offer an incentive to catch a mistake.
How does that work when gift cards aren't registered to anybody, and can be transferred between people without the issuer knowing about it?
1. Gift cards. Users want gift cards so it doesn't make sense to penalize companies for that (by forcing them to complexify their codebase and finances)
2. Top-up cards. I haven't really seen dark patterns here. You're usually not forced to use these as far as I've seen, and are usually rewarded if you do (accumulate points, get free stuff)
The worst are these Visa/Mastercard gift cards that are popular in the US: Often horrendously expensive to the buyer and cash-equivalent to the receiver at best, and broken or scammed and causing them further frustration and possibly monetary losses at worst.
Let me fix this for you: LANDLORDS made life worse for basically every renter in the city
It's easy to get things wrong trying to do second order thinking, or just make things up.
There's no reason to believe companies would do as you say. There are several other options, including choosing different financial vehicles to store the users money, implementing even more dark patterns to store N% more money so they are even, or can improve their returns over the status quo.
> You can’t just ignore consequences in a policy debate.
Consequences of consequences though, you can route almost any argument to any conclusion you want :)
He was incredibly successful at tackling hidden charges, and dark patterns, and extra fees tacked on after the fact
The country ate alive the nicest, most well meaning president we've ever actually had as far as I can tell
Although of course he was up against every media company in the nation, all, including social media, controlled by about... 8 people or whatever
All they had to do was two things after trump’s first term debacle: - keep to trump’s remain in Mexico policy - have a fair primary (or stick to the person picked in the fair primary)
According to Gallup [1], only 47% of US Americans thought that immigration should decrease in 2020. That number had held more or less steady since at least 2000. But it grew steadily over Biden's term, reaching 88% in 2024. This, I believe, is a reflection of how the democrats shifted their rhetoric to be "tough on immigration". And it handed Trump a populace that was primed to be more susceptible than ever to his much more aggressive immigration rhetoric.
Of course, this is just a small part of a much bigger picture, but I don't exactly think it helped.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigratio...
Even if the Democrats had run a perfect campaign they might not have won. And they probably came closer than many peer groups in other nations
We have a gestapo kidnapping members of our community in the streets and the xenophobic propaganda still has you believing the most vulnerable and underpaid people in our society were ever a serious problem.
The migrants were a serious problem for democrats and youre still denying that.
2. They feel discriminated against by urban people so they dont like them either
3. Combine those two and its easy to see how they can revel in the suffering caused by the situation. Politics is about narratives and this one spread like wildfire because dems had no counter narrative. End of the day cities are dominated by democratic politics so its easy for republican narrative makers to point at cities that are failing to deal with a crisis and turn that into a reason to not vote for dems.
4. Everyone loves a good told you so. The problem for democrats with this one was that it was so incredibly visible. Made for very good TV on fox news
Domestic enforcement is 1/2 the problem. Controlling your border is the other half.
So is due process, but that went out the window last year. It turns out that the constitution doesn't mean shit if the executive doesn't want to follow it.
Guess where Lina Khan is now.
Cf. Jimmy Carter
He is geriatric though.
The idea Trump is not in cognitive decline is easily rent asunder by watching any clips of his recent speeches and comparing them to clips from 2016 and 2020.
He's falling asleep in meetings, confusing words, hearkening back to old time shit like flag burning, stumbling, can't walk in a straight line, tweeting rambling word salads filled with falsehoods all night long.
But again, this just proves my point.
tbf he was doing this when he was 40
Biden was 78 when he assumed office, and so was Trump in his second term. Neither of them should have been in any position of power, not at that age - the average American has a life expectancy of ~75 years for males.
The position of the American President is inarguably the position with the most power, responsibility and stress in the world. Personally, I'd say if there is a floor cap of 35 years of age... there should be a ceiling cap as well. Pension age, or even lower.
Under Biden the US reduced inflation faster than any other peer country, reduced student loan debt by billions, secured 1 trillion in mostly green infrastructure investment, secured 500 billion in semiconductor manufacturing, had a low 4% unemployment rate, helped with the NATO expansion, supported Ukraine, fought for consumer protections, expanded transgender rights and visibility, and so much more.
Literally the most successful president in my lifetime, and all I hear is people tell me about how he couldn't do his job.
It just, doesn't mesh with reality. What it does mesh with is the messaging that's been pounded pounded pounded through everyone's heads for the last four years though.
Of course anyone trying to refute 15 lies in 60 seconds while actually performing the duties of his job (instead of say... tweeting, golfing, and calling women derogatory names while fostering hate, and rewarding sycophants with insider trades and contracts) and then also make their own point is going to fail.
Lots more people than Biden, who're a lot more physically fit would fail at debating serial liars and thugs like Trump.
Indeed! But in politics, especially in the two-party systems that are the US and the UK, it is (almost) never about actual actions, policy and even campaign promises to a degree (because no one believes them any more). Individual voters often lack knowledge, context or empathy with others to recognize when stuff happens and if it is important.
In contrast, a politician's public image aka his "story" is much much more important. Even in a country like Germany which one might think focuses more on policy. We had incumbent Chancellor Schröder neck-deep in issues in 2002, then a historic flood disaster happened - and Schröder showed up in rubber boots while his competitor Stoiber was off vacationing. In the 2021 election, Armin Laschet didn't realize Steinmeier was talking on camera, someone cracked a joke or whatnot, he laughed - and got caught by said camera [2], which damaged his campaign so hard that he lost to Scholz.
Biden's age was already under discussion in his first term, and the critics were very vocal. There would have been the chance to set up Harris in the second half of his first term as a successor, prop her up into the spotlight and promise the voters continuation, the DNC didn't do that - and lost.
> Lots more people than Biden, who're a lot more physically fit would fail at debating serial liars and thugs like Trump.
Of course, of course. But still, I wish y'all had less gerontocrats in place.
[1] https://www.stern.de/politik/hochwasser--was-gerhard-schroed...
[2] https://www.rnd.de/politik/laschet-lacht-was-war-der-grund-u...
For instance, Trump has said "oranges" instead of "origins", said that Hannibal Lector was a late and great person, praised pedophiles...
And where's the wall to wall coverage of that like there was when Biden screwed up that debate? Where's the weeks on end coverage of those stumbles? How come ABC doesn't even show the public when Trump calls _their own_ reporters piggy and tells them they're incompetent?
Not detached from reality, but thanks for the lame, no effort comment.
Similarly! Where were the weeks of coverage for the IRA which expanded energy production in this country (which most of my friends don't even know what the acronym stands for)
Where was the coverage for the semiconductor act which added 500bn in semiconductor manufacturing.
Biden wanted to do a land on the moon type quest to cure cancer, how much cooler would that have been for our nation than ICE raids on farm workers.
The man was incredibly successful, and barely anyone realizes that, and that's what I'm talking about.
Part of the reason people liked him is he was not intrusive. He didn’t change his mind like Trump does.
The president needs to be clear-headed and cogent as much of the time as is reasonable. Biden is and was far beyond that. So is Trump for that matter.
I’d assume the goal of the task force is to propose new laws which should be pretty easy to get passed.
So, while the next president can just undo executive orders made by any previous one, making them a bit ephemeral, they do have direct and real consequences going as far as torture.
https://www.kcra.com/article/new-california-laws-in-2026-jan...
In a practical sense the right place is wherever it gets passed. If the United States is an experiment every legal jurisdiction is a laboratory.
> Protecting consumers, including renters, appears be a large part of Mr. Mamdani’s early agenda as mayor. The actions of Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, appear so far to indicate a willingness to govern based on a leftist political agenda.
Has the overton window just shifted so much that not wanting to get screwed by greedy con artists is communist now? Or is the perspective of the NYT's coverage skewed because they don't like this guy? It's weird.
According to this same article, the efforts seem to be a continuation of existing work that was happening before he got elected:
> In June, Letitia James, the attorney general, announced a $600,000 settlement with Equinox Group over the difficulty of ending a membership. Last month, she joined a multistate coalition that filed suit against Uber regarding the difficulty of canceling subscriptions.
The left and right actually agree on a lot at a high-level but do not agree on how to tackle the problem.
I've seen this dude described as an "islamo-communist" more than once in different countries' medias (not fringe medias). I presume "islamist" because muslim, and "communist" because he's left of the center-right. You can't really talk with these people anyways, they're too far gone
Mamdani seems very proud to be a socialist and you get a taste of it where he says "...the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment" and "..we have to continue to elect more socialists and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism", etc. He is very clear about his beliefs.
I also doubt either channel can define communism or jihad correctly.
"Communist" in American political parlance is just a synonym for "Democrat" and has been since the days of the New Deal.
For an US perspective, yes. From an European perspective... him and Bernie are center-left, if not centrist. The Overton window is positioned much more towards the authoritarian right in the US than it is here - although the huge amounts of American and Russian funding towards far-right parties have been shifting the window here as well for about a decade.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-nspm-7-seeks...
It really isn't rocket science lol
So if this seems like Mamdani is doing something weird here, I think it's more that the twisted media framing of the left has pushed people to have a vision of it that is dissonant from its real ideology and goals.
Using the term "leftist" to describe something Nixon would do is absolutely a sign the Overton Window has shifted.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-11...
In the context of US politics, progressive politics have been often labelled "communist" for around 100 years.
> According to this same article, the efforts seem to be a continuation of existing work that was happening before he got elected
Mamdani is not the first progressive politician in NYC
Killed and captured the oil industry resulting in the decline of GDP and standards of living.
Great example to prove my point
Junk Fees - Executive Order 09: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/executive-ord...
Subscription Traps: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/executive-ord...
I don't see any interesting new phenomenon.
(Not an American, just an attempt at satire)