This should be illegal. If a contractor your hired to swap out a tile on your bathroom floor billed you for remodelling your back garden, you would obviously have the legal right to refuse that.
Not if your contractor had you first sign a 15 page contract that commits you to whatever costs they dream up and requires forced arbitration by a corporate friendly firm when any dispute arises.
Because that's somehow normal in today's tech world.
Slightly OT, but I've always taken a dim view of this sort of thing for consumers because the parties are never at equal parity, either in ability to understand the legalese they're agreeing to, or the ability to seek alternatives.
Legal contracts for consumers should be written at whatever the prevailing reading level is, and the government should step in the more monopolistic position a company is in.
It infuriates me to no end how preferential government is towards corporations vs individuals.
In jurisdictions where beastiality is legal, then yes, from the libertarian perspective, that's all freedom of contract, baby. I'm not defending either beastiality or libertarianism, but the logic is that you don't want the government deciding what two private entities can and can't freely agree to.
We're pretty far from the Lochner era in the US, where even minimum wage laws were held to be unconstitutional violations of a very broad view of freedom to contract. But it is still a principle in most legal system.
My guess is that at least in Europe they would have a good chance fighting this in court and getting their money back, but it’s a pain having to go through such a lawsuit.
You hire a contractor and agree they'll bill you per tile, regardless of how many tiles there are. They bill you per tile. End of story.
For a more acurate comparison, consider a utility. You agree to pay for your electic bill. It's not the utility's fault you invited all your friends who decided to run a crypto mining LAN party, and they can't cut you off lightly because it might literally kill you (e.g. you live in a hot place and rely on AC to stay alive).
"We can either charge per tile, per job or on demand. Or you can have us on call for a year and get any of the former at a discounted rate."
"Per tile. Lay tiles until I say stop"
>you fall asleep
"Wtf why are you still laying tile"
"You said per tile and lay until you say stop. That'll be 50k please"
"Can you lay tiles until I say stop, or until it's about $250 worth, whichever comes first"
"No, as one of the top tile layers in the country I can't do that, for your own protection. What if fifty elephants came and wanted to use your bathroom all at once? You'd feel pretty dumb having to reject them instead of me simply automatically adding $1 million to your bill"
But in this example, the last line of your story is the customer going “yeah, sounds good, let’s do it and hope that doesn’t happen” and signing the agreement.
The cloud services wrote the contract and the UI for their console. They then encourage young developers to try out their tools and encourage a market environment where those skills are needed to secure employment. Some kid goes and tries to build their first web app, they follow instructions and tutorials but miss that a single default selection on a menu three nested layers down is going to cost $2,000 per month. This isn’t disclosed on the page. Sure, it can be determined by reading several different documents, but the provider chose to not show estimates for costs in the setup.
There was never a process where Arab or Muslim conquerors completely replaced the native population, they just added to it. Conversion and Arabization gradually transformed the existing population’s identity. If descent from conquerors means colonizer, then virtually no population on earth is non-colonial. Arabs in Palestine, Normans in England, Turks in Anatolia, Romans everywhere…
Colonizer status is typically attached to an event and structure, not inherited indefinitely.
Interesting perspective. But does that mean that Taylor Swift is just as native as Sitting Bull? Or are descendants of aboriginal Americans more entitled to the land?
Under the most common frameworks for assessing claims about "indigenous status" or "land entitlement", length of continuous inhabitation and external support for migration are big factors. Considering Sitting Bull's lineage likely migrated unsupported from other regimes and his lineage inhabited North America for much longer, it's unlikely Taylor Swift would be considered "just as native." Whether descendants of Sitting Bull are specifically entitled to land is a matter of ongoing legal and cultural dispute.
Same for me. I actually don't order much but kept the subscription going for some of the shows I enjoyed. I promptly cancelled because of this. Obviously I'm in the minority, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
What exactly makes an environmentalist "radical" in your mind? Is it reading studies about planetary boundaries and the effects on micro plastics pollution?
You mean the widely p-hacked studies? Scientific journals had already gotten political and stopped being publishers of truth long ago. The pandemic should've showed everyone that.
The fact that my comment isn't just downvoted but flagged is also very telling.
> Plastics aren't a problem if people actually put them in the bin, and they are buried / recycled / burned.
Only 9% of all plastics ever produced has been recycled. 100% is impossible due to the various composite materials that exist.
Landfills don't work in many places in the world due to lack of space and are expensive, hard to manage and come with methane emissions. Burning is obviously the same as burning fossil fuels and cannot happen if we want to keep our planet habitable. It also happens almost always in poor communities that suffer health consequences because of it.
Even if the disposal was somehow magically solved, we still have the problem with production. Plastics are a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry and are expected to account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030. Cracker plants for plastics production are also usually placed near communities of colour or in developing countries and create toxic conditions for life around them.
Plastics are a problem. Regardless of the disposal.
Burning is a lot better than dumping it in a river, as happens in many places in Asia. It reliably gets rid of the plastic, produces energy (ideally offsetting fossil fuels that would otherwise have been burned), and regulations for exhaust filtration keep the toxins at bay.
Not producing plastic would be preferable, and sequestering it in a landfill is the second best option, but burning it is a great alternative where the first two don't work
that is a misleading number.
In my country it is almost 100%.
Most gets recycled, the rest used as fuel in energyplants.
The real problem is the 10 countries in the world that are responsible for 90% of dumping stuff in the rivers (all in south asia and africa).
Plastic can't be recycled at all, that is a complete myth. The only thing one can practically do is down cycle it, and even that costs more than virgin plastic so is uneconomical.
Of course theoretically perfectly clean and pure singly type plastic can be recycled, but that is something very different from post-consumer waste
"PET bottles on the Dutch market averaging 44% recycled PET content in 2023".
Also, many other products:
Fleece jackets are made out of bottles. That's up-cycling, afaik.
And lots of packaging materials (bags, shampoo bottles, etc).
If it is economical depends on many factors, and can be different in each country. Landfill may be cheap in the US, but extremely expensive in European countries, because there's no un-used land.
but yes, what can't be recycled is epoxy (also a plastic).
But nearly all plastic recycling companies in the Netherlands have gone bankrupt recently. Unfortunately it is usually best to just burn the plastic for energy.
For the case of PET bottles, recycling is possible if:
- products are made from a single sort of plastic with the intent of recycling
- can be collected as a dedicated waste stream
- are not contaminated in a way that is not easily cleaned
- there are rules and regulations to offset the added costs
As all these conditions have to be met, one might as well use reusable bottles instead of recycling altogether, like we do with glass beer bottles. But then why were plastics used in the first place, as there is then hardly any advantage?
> How much of it is their own waste? How much was produced for Western consumers and then off-loaded onto them?
From following ocean cleanup project, for plastic ending up in the ocean it's usually own waste. The issue is countries that don't have working waste collection systems, any rainpour will often wash out the trash into river/oceans.
(littering is also an issue in countries with waste management though, but to a smaller degree, I kinda hate when people don't realize that stuff they throw in the street will often end up in rain collectors and directly flow into rivers)
Thanks for the reply! I was able to find the source you mentioned. Is there room in the conversation to talk about how much of their "own use" plastic is sold to them by Western companies who control the local markets?
No, it is not and the idea that extreme weather would somehow result in more food is laughable on its face. Higher CO2 concentrations also reduce the nutrients in food.
It accelerates plant growth, reducing nutrient concentration per cubic centimeter of food, but increasing the total nutrient yield because the overall boost in biomass outweighs the dilution effect. This is why greenhouse farms pump CO2 into their environments. Your reaction though really demonstrates a close-mindedness about your belief that CO2 is harmful that is anti-science.
But an individual human eats a fixed amount of food. So that fact seems pointless, since people will get less nutrition overall- unless we should all only eat ultra-processed snacks and reserve fresh food for the wealthy?
On what basis do you claim that an individual eats a fixed amount of food?
If you're worried about how artificially elevated CO2 levels affect agricultural products, then you should start taking issue with commercial greenhouses, which regularly pump CO2 in to increase yields. This is a common practice, and only now is it being viewed as something bad or strange because it's not convenient for the climate change narrative that presents industrial emission of CO2 as the apex threat that requires government-enforced collective action to solve.
A good move but it's still mad to me that we're banning junk food ads while fossil fuel ads are still allowed which are creating damage many orders of magnitudes greater than a muffin ever could.
