+1

There are a couple of bars in my home town that tried this. I like beer, I spend money on beer, but those places get no money from me.

if the shit really hits the fan, a pen and paper can be used to write receipts, then reconciled with the computerised systems when the power/EFT system is back online. It's not efficient but it's 100% legal and better than doing no business at all during an outage. Here in .au, there seems to be a major hours-long EFT outage every couple of years. It's fun to go shopping during these times because all those people who hate cash stay at home.

Yep, Stapleton was being encircled by the growing city of Denver, so there was no room for the airport to grow. So they picked an empty spot on the map ~20 miles east of there and built a brand-new airport. (I believe a senior city official owned that land and made a tidy profit selling it to the new airport) The new airport had a few teething troubles when it opened, their computerised luggage handling was the butt of many jokes, but eventually they got it all working. They "tent-like" roof is striking and I believe they have only had to evacuate the place once due to heavy snow accumulation. It wasn't uncommon for the road into the place to be closed due to weather though. I was a younger man so I would just sleep on the floor of the passenger terminal. Now that there is also a direct light rail connection to the city, getting stuck in the airport might be less common than it was in the early 2000s. I don't go to Denver much anymore but from what I have seen the light rail has really improved the city, and has definitely made the airport experience much less sucky.

As for Stapleton, it sat empty for a while, I heard they filmed the airport scenes of the second Die Hard movie there, though the Wikipedia page is ambiguous about this. Last time I was there it was a retail center. I bought a laptop from the Best Buy near there in 2016 :-)

The bank for my debit card was local. The credit card they forced me to eventually use was from another country. The whole reason I am sharing this anecdote is because it simply doesn't make sense to me, for "security" or even for cost of processing the transaction. And what sort of clerk, instead of simply pressing the "checked ID" button, when they actually *have* seen the ID, would go to all the extra hassle of demanding a different card?

Maybe not a monopoly, but definitely a cartel. Every rental outfit on the strip is just as bad. I have rented from this strip in years gone by, it never used to be like this. In case you're interested, it was Denver Airport. If I only needed to go downtown, they have a great new light rail link from the airport terminal, and I would never have wasted time/money with a rental car! But I needed to head into the mountains where there were no real public transport options. So I guess there's a de facto monopoly on "driving is the only way to get to the destination." and having just arrived by airplane, I obviously couldn't use my own vehicle.

Worse than that, they take a deposit the moment you make the reservation. So if they drive you away, they get money for free.

I was renting a car. They already had my ID. And my real address, signature, and a deposit from the debit card, proving that it was a real card and there was money in the account.

Yep, they had me over a barrel. They already had my deposit, so if I got frustrated enough and chose to walk out of there without the car, they would have got money for free. This was a rental car at an airport, you know the sort of thing that is out in a field where there are just a bunch of car rental offices? So you have to take a shuttle bus from the terminal to these rental offices, then if you don't get a car you either have to take the shuttle back to the terminal or walk the 15 miles downtown. Their "competition" along the rental car strip all pull the same kind of crap, so I couldn't shop around for a different rental business that didn't suck. It didn't always suck! I've been renting cars since 2002, and I had never seen anything like this until 2024. There has been a race to the bottom, and the customers are the losers. The race certainly hasn't made it any cheaper to rent a car.

Not Budget, and not Nu. In my recent experience, that is 100% of car rentals that I have tried. And worse, they will happily charge the debit card for the reservation, then refuse to accept the exact same card when you arrive in person to collect the vehicle. So you have to accept their stupid whims or wear the booking fee and walk home. I don't understand it and it doesn't make sense to me, but that is what happened.

Same thing happened to me in 2024. My Visa debit card from a local bank (with a great history over 20+ years and plenty in the balance of the account) was rejected. I couldn't get a sensible answer as to "why" but eventually I had to acquiesce and produce an old Visa credit card. From a foreign bank on the other side of the world, but this was accepted without the clerk batting an eye.

Obviously, I would have just walked away from bullshit like this if I had the chance... so the "what" I was buying is important here. It was a rental car, which I had pre-booked online, like 95%+ of customers do. Well, it turns out that when you do this, you're committed to the rental shop taking your money. Even if you don't take a car. Even if the rental shop pulls some bullshit stunt at the desk and demands a "different" that carries the same Visa branding. So I was screwed. I had the "choice" to drive out of there or walk out of there, but either way I was going to be charged money.

I would love to know the real reason for this bullshit, which I can assure you was not written anywhere in the rental terms and conditions.

29 million bucks in seed capital makes it cross the line from "plucky upstart" to "rich arrogant scumbag." Also anyone who has Pinterest on their CV is already responsible for so much enshittification that we know they are probably not naive starry eyed idealists.

I think "peak idiocy" might be the fact that these clowns have managed to attract "$29 million in seed funding led by Spark Capital"

For now.

Or there will be a sneaky insider deal with health insurers, who will make it mandatory.

It's early days and I'm not using any of their "advanced" features yet, but I have been experimenting with protonmail and am satisfied so far. Their web client seems pretty good.

OK, it's more than a few hundred metres, but if we had the political/economic will we could already do that with rail. A trainload of containers arrives in a town, then the containers get put onto short-range trucks and delivered round the town. Because it's short-range, the trucks could easily be electric too.