Somebody predicting an AI product category is FUBAR instead of wonderful magic productivity?

That's not what a cancellation fee does, though. By definition, when you pay a cancellation fee, they are no longer providing service.

It was good up to the point they forgot how to pool-chalk their unicorns.

While it might be true they fired a bunch of help-desk people and replaced them with AI, that's not the same as being any good.

It's possibly a case of being technically right but practically wrong.

For example, you could replace staff with monkeys who you pay peanuts and claim you saved lots of money. Yes you did, but customers are now talking to monkeys. It's banana logic.

unwanted feature...that permit microsoft to steal photos of your children for "training purposes".

Isn't that how EpsteinGPT was invented?

Because that $2,000 is consideration for the other party providing something. If the penalty clause is the entire remainder of the contract fee, then the other party should also be compelled to provide service for the remainder of the contract term, or some equivalent consideration. Otherwise, it isn't really much of a contract.

If they get out of providing service, then you should get out of paying, except for some penalty to make up for sunk costs, e.g. the prorated cost of provisioning initial service, the prorated cost of a phone that was free with contract, etc., plus some *reasonable* amount to discourage people from pulling out of the contract on a whim.

Also, understand that the company providing the service had way more power over the contract than you. You were almost certainly told "take it or leave it" when presented with the contract. That's why putting limits on what contracts of adhesion can do is generally considered to be a critical function of government.

The part you're missing is that contracts like this are contracts of adhesion, and there may or may not even be an option to sign up one month at a time. And even if there is, having a penalty clause for canceling a contract is reasonable, but having a penalty clause that massively exceeds any plausible damages isn't, particularly when one of the parties in that contract has dramatically more power than the other, and that party is the one writing the contract and demanding the penalty clause. That's why it is reasonable for governments to limit the amount of those damages through statutes. It is just compensating for that inherent power imbalance.

Also, real-world companies aren't typically selling bonds against their subscription revenue, and unless this is a very small business and the contracts are among equals (which a customer relationship almost never is), a bank isn't going to care about the difference between 1,000 subscriptions and 1,001, nor do stockholders. They care about the difference between 1,000 and 100,000. Orders of magnitude matter. A few cancellations around the margins are noise. So although you might be correct in theory, in practice, single cancellations don't matter, and if the cancellation numbers are high enough to matter, there's something much more seriously wrong with the company, and locking consumers in to a long-term contract likely serves no one's best interests, including the company's, because that just reduces the pressure on the company to fix those structural problems.

The thing is, if you stop using the service after two months, they aren't providing you a benefit, and it isn't reasonable for them to keep collecting money. And charging exorbitant fees has the net effect of forcing people to continue paying a month at a time because they can't afford the cancellation fee all at once. That's what makes it predatory.

If we were talking about a small company, where someone canceling service (e.g. a maid service) would mean that they have to go seek out other clients to stay in business, then charging such a fee makes sense. For a big company, it is really rather hard to justify.

This is doubly true if the company either does not offer a month-to-month plan or charges only slightly less for it. At most, you have cost the company the difference between the yearly contract and month-to-month price, and if the penalty is greater than that difference, that's really not right.

But I do agree we still pay too much for health care and the outcomes we receive are sub optimal. Obamacare was insurance reform, but I would like to see the U.S. pursue a universal single-payer system like pretty much every other high-income country in the world. Oh no, wait, "socialism!!!"

Oh God no...please never let the US govt be in charge of my health care.

It's not even the socialism thing.....it's just the massive clusterfuck that government is running things.

Some are a necessary evil....military....etc.

But no....I've been to Social Security offices....ugh.

I've been to other federal offices and it almost agony getting anything done.....and often it takes way more than one trip.

I imagine it would be akin to the DMV with govt medical care.....and I just do now trust MY health to the bloated mechanisms of the govt bureaucracy .....

That's not even getting into the politics that would inevitably get involved.

And the US....we could not afford it for everyone, hell we can't afford the US health care we DO have....Medicare and Medicaid....too bloated, too $$$ and just horrible to have to deal with....

Sure we need to fix the private industry....lots to be done there, but the govt is NOT the answer I want.

Hell.....who'd want to have govt run medical centers right now with a govt shutdown going on....?

No thanks.

They will if they want viewers over age 30. I like shows where I can just keep watching episodes one after the next for a month, so nearly everything I watch is a decade old or more. It's not worth my time and effort to figure out whether I might like to watch a show if I'm going to run out of episodes in a day of viewing.

I can only think of one show that I've watched when it had fewer than 20 episodes, and I regret not waiting longer, because it would have been much more enjoyable watching three seasons instead of two a year from now. Modern shows require too much effort for too little payoff. The threshold where I feel like it is actually worth my time is about 40 episodes. And most new shows will be canceled long before they reach that threshold, which means most new shows aren't worth my time.

Not really. If social media causes stupidity, kids should stop using social media, cuz it'll make them stupid.

If stupid people use social media, kids should stop using social media, because it obviously isn't making them smarter, while other activities just might.

The Trump administration is not much into science and exploration, they want "glory missions" with US astronauts dancing YMCA on other planets.

Thus, they are cutting unmanned probes, especially anything to do with climate research. Those climate scientists are all "bribed woke riggers".

Open source is self-reliance. If other nations do something goofy, you just fork and wave goodbye to them.

Greenpeace never said "don't mine", only "don't mine dumbly". Maybe China does it dumbly because dictators don't care much if they sicken their population, and boot out Greenpeace.

Why not use Libre Office formats if they want to avoid MS?