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.

Ah yes, don't participate in modern society. I see you are very smart.

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.

It's not a surprise if human knowledge which is kept secret doesn't show up in LLMs. And today, not putting any knowledge on the internet is effectively that. The reason all our nerd shit shows up in LLM data is that we made it freely available to all on the open internet.

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.

Fuck you cowardly oil-sucking cucks.

I don't know how hard it would be to do with your existing install, but I have Windows 11 in a QEMU/KVM VM with a virtual TPM and it works fine...

Point out some Nazi shit and get modded down.

B!zX puts Re!ch in the word filter, and also has put Nazi in there multiple times, to try to prevent people from talking about Nazis

Slashdot must be run by Nazis.

Cleaning up the mess from all the people filling and then subsequently emptying the large tanks for their large cars is something we literally do not know how to do, so it can be considered to take an infinite amount of time and cost an infinite amount of money.

People don't care, so we should burn the world! What a fucking stupid, senseless, self-centered argument.

On what basis?

The laws are garbage because people will cheat on the laws? That sounds more like the cheaters are garbage, and you're an enabler.

Every. Single. Car. Company. In. The. US. Can. Meet. Those. Standards.

They choose not to.

Guess who bought these laws? These are intended consequences.

No.

Yes, Dieselgate involved Mercedes, BMW, and Bosch as well.

You could just look this up.

The DOJ also collected settlements from Mercedes and BMW. VW was just the company they had conclusively nailed, and they're also largest of them. VW led to Bosch which led to Mercedes and BMW. It all actually makes sense if you know about it.

All cars since the late eighties have had the former and all cars with automatic transmissions since the nineties have the latter. Even where they have a linkage to a valve on the throttle body, there are still computer-controlled solenoids.

AFAIK the only vehicle in the US with 100% drive by wire steering is the Cybercuck. All of the other drive by wire cars have a linkage with a clutch that fails closed so if you have a complete power failure, you still wind up able to control the steering.

My 2008 Versa also has EPS (electric power steering) and it took me a long time to get a feel for it. Now I no longer even notice that the steering feel is different from hydraulic except for very, very fine adjustments. Those still feel kind of sloppy. In my car the steering motor is on the column. Obviously in this kind of system there is no clutch, the linkage is always connected.