tonight Apple Pay asked me to authorize a payment, then billed me more than that. initially it was WTF? but eventually a receipt came through itemizing local + state sales tax beyond the authorized amount.
is this new? i think Apple Pay should solicit authorization of the full amount it will bill.
(also they charged rates much higher than the actual sales tax rate where i live.)
one reason the US is so mad at insurance companies is not because rationing exists, but because care is often rationed the same way firms ration customer service, by byzantine discouragements that only the most dedicated persist through. even the most dedicated can and often do die from delay.
“the destruction of American public transit in the middle of the 20th century and the suburbanization of the middle class and aspirants both came before the increase in crime rates” @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/12/24/public-transportation-and-crime-are-not-about-each-other/
[new draft post] Wreckresentative democracy, "Secret Congress", and bee-sting theory https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/12/24/wreckresentative-democracy-secret-congress-and-bee-sting-theory/index.html
@Canevecchio (i’m not sure that one, “concentration camp” in translation, would meet CNN’s high standards of journalistic neutrality, given its well-known history.)
US FY 2025 deficit?
what would CNN’s euphemism, in the name of journalistic neutrality, be for extermination camps?
there would be a lot less rationing relative to medical need if what was rationed was inexpensive and abundant.
which is why, while rationing in some form of course is everywhere, it is much less contentious, less big a deal, everywhere else.
@dpp @eARCwelder how do we know you do not actually live in Providence Plantations?
really a fascinating meditation on the freedoms and burdens fragmented political spheres vs centralist attempts to order and rationalize them and then decentralist romanticizations in reaction. balance it strikes me is the thing, but balance so often is just a nice name for conflict. https://lateralthinkingtechnology.wordpress.com/2024/06/19/the-cult-of-the-patchwork-chinese-modernity-1978-2012-and-the-holy-roman-empire/ ht @guan
if we were better at housing, they would welcome us as liberators.
@eyesquash but currents aren’t agents. they don’t choose themselves. we don’t pretend we can hold molecules accountable for them.
one way to describe donald trump is he likes to be a dick to friends and a friend to dicks.
the career paths now are health insurance ceo, only fans, and uber driver.
@gooser3000 "taxpayers" also are not a coherent agent.
"voters" are not a coherent agent, have radically diverse interests, no means of being held accountable in common. constituted as "voters" we are a phenomenon, not an agent, no more constructive to blame than a lightning strike. if our behavior should change, then our institutions must.
if luigi had been convicted some time ago and was on federal death row, would biden have commuted his sentence today?
tired: peace through strength
wired: peace through conquest
are there no rare earths in Antarctica?
