First experience with the Prime free trial and the following cancellation was in 2016 (called Premium at the time), I did several times after that and I never had a problem. I never had a problem with Amazon in general, except for the following, who were mostly my fault:

- Forgot to unsubscribe after my trial period of Audible so I had to pay the monthly fee for a month, didn't get a refund but no problem cancelling, Maybe I could have got a refund by calling support, but I didn't bother and used the voucher I got.

- A single noticeable counterfeit received over about 100 purchases, a fake Samsung charger, but of good quality. I expected that considering I paid well below retail price. Didn't dispute, used the charger for years without problems. Now, I mostly stopped buying from sellers that don't pass the smell test on Amazon. If I want cheap Chinese crap, I usually go for AliExpress, which is significantly cheaper for the same product. In fact, many such Amazon listings are dropshipped from AliExpress.

In your situation, I suspect that someone else used your CC number for their own Prime account. It is possible that whoever stole your CC number had other payment methods, probably other stolen CC numbers, and he paid with them to renew his subscription. The surprising part is that both Amazon and your bank let an obviously fraudulent transaction pass several times, it looks like a big mess.

Not only cancelling Prime is easy, but they will also refund you if you get charged after your free trial ends and cancel before using your paid subscription. I actually never paid for Prime, but took advantage of these free trials several times and cancellation never was a problem.

Of course they will try to make you stay, and you have to click a couple of confirmation buttons. But that's standard commercial practice, everyone does that.

If you think clicking two buttons instead of one is hard, you probably never had a subscription that is hard to cancel. No phone call, no snail-mail, no deliberately broken website,... I remember a time when I was told the best way to cancel your ISP subscription was to ask your bank to stop paying the bills, ignore the threatening letters from your ISP and wait for them to cancel your subscription on their side. In theory, is is illegal to do it like that, but these ISPs knew enough not to get too much attention on their practices by taking it to court.

It could have to do with trademarks.

Mickey Mouse is a Disney trademark, and trademarks don't expire as long as you use them. So if you use Steamboat Willie in an ad, it may suggest that Disney is endorsing the product, violating trademark law. Usually, out of caution, you don't use other's trademarks at all in ads. In some situations, you can, but you have to be careful, and by filing that lawsuit in advance, that's the law firm being careful.

Ticketmaster offers a service to their customers: the bands, the venues... They have different plans, with fixed or dynamic pricing, different level of control on the secondary market, etc.. Their customers choose what they want.

They may have a quasi-monopoly on that service, which is a problem, and it can justify the high fees, but beside that, for pretty much everything they do, their customers asked for it. If tickets are sold initially below market value and resale at above face value is accepted *because that's what the customer asked for*, then there will be scalpers, and there will be bots. And if the event in question is a Taylor Swift concert, there are millions to be made, you are not going to stop the bots. They have botnets with residential IPs, they pay people to solve CAPTCHA, I can't think of any technical solution that won't hurt the fans more than they hurt the scalpers.

If you don't want scalpers, you need to treat the root cause, and it means either dynamic pricing (i.e. auctions) or ban resale above face value, something Ticketmaster can do if you ask them to. All Ticketmaster want is their commission, no matter how they get it.

All this to say that for anything but the fees, Ticketmaster may not be the most to blame. In fact I believe that Ticketmaster is happy to take the blame as to protect the reputation of the artists, evil-as-a-service.

Like Skype != Skype

Skype for business is actually not Skype at all, it is Microsoft Lync rebranded. Well, it was, because Teams replaced it.

I remember I had a Skype (for business) meeting once, tried installing the other Skype, and got all confused about why it didn't work.

Also, (GitHub) Copilot is not (Microsoft) Copilot.

What's wrong with Microsoft branding?

To be honest, beer contains a chemical has been shown to be harmful without a doubt: ethanol. Yes, the reason many people drink beer in the first place. In addition to the obvious bad things that happen when you are drunk, it also causes cancer, birth defects, and a whole lot of other health issues, like cirrhosis. It also affects sperm counts by the way. And recent studies have shows that it is harmful at any dose, though obviously much worse at high doses.

I am not telling you to stop drinking, as long as you are doing it with moderation. I drink too, occasionally, and I have no intention to stop either. But why should I worry about PFAS in by beer when the alcohol essentially does everything bad we attribute to PFAS, but worse and with more certainty?

PFAS is still a problem though, because it is present everywhere. You can easily cut alcohol, not so much with PFAS. And it also very stable and accumulates in the environment (hence "forever chemical"), so if it turns out to be really bad, it will be hard to fix the problem. In fact, that's what the conclusion should be. Not that you should worry about your beer, but instead that it gets everywhere we look, including beer.

When it comes to switching carriers, it is the complete opposite. eSIMs make it easier to switch carrier as it can be done entirely online, and it is particularly good for traveling.

What eSIM makes harder is to switch *phone* while keeping the same carrier. With a physical SIM, you just have to take the card from phone A and put it into phone B. With eSIM, it depends on the carrier, some make it easier than others, and sometimes, you have to pay for it. It may be particularly bad if the phone you are taking the eSIM from doesn't work, which may be the reason why you want to do the transfer in the first place.

So does the Coca Cola company and gardeners.

Yes, we have proven solutions, that's the easy part. Now go convince 8 billion people to adopt them.

Your view is US-centric (so 4% of the Earth population) but let's run with it. Donald Trump is in power because he has been elected, he has been elected because he has the support of the general population, and he did that by openly not giving a shit about climate change, against a now clear scientific consensus. It is even taught at school. People simply prioritize their comfort over greenhouse gases, and they have a leadership to go with that.

And yet, compared to the rest of the world, Americans have it really good. Doing the necessary efforts is just a matter of comfort, it can be done (but the population doesn't want to). But for the majority of the world population, getting to survive at all is what matters, they don't have resources to spend for the environment, and they won't until they get to the standards of living of the first world. So what are you going to do? Punish them for it? That's one of the catastrophic scenarios.

You are saying that what is missing is leadership. A way to reformulate it is that we are missing a dictator. Maybe a China-like government but for the entire world could work. But be realistic, it won't happen.

The problem with climate change is that it is a slow process and kind of a prisoner dilemma situation. Why should I make any effort, it probably won't affect me in my lifetime? A lifetime later, as things are starting to become really bad and people are ready to take it seriously, then it is too late, and that's when the emergency solution will come handy, to buy back the time we lost so that we can do it properly.

Net zero will not happen soon enough, we have rung the alarm bell enough times, to the point of breaking it. Realistically, the only way it can happen quickly is through a major catastrophe, as in billions of people dying. It doesn't mean we should stop our efforts, but it is simply not a short term solution.

It means that if climate change is as bad as people make it to be, and we don't want billions of death, we *need* alternative solutions. And it means geoengineering.

Now, maybe climate change is not that bad and we can control it with moderate effort regarding greenhouse gases, and as a result we won't need geoengineering. It would be great, but it shouldn't stop us from researching these alternatives, because if we need them, we *need* them.

The study worries about what the remains of face masks ending up in the environment and though a lot of indirect means, come back to us.

Ok, but how does it compare to wearing masks. I am not just talking about the pandemic, I am thinking about medical and construction workers wearing respirators similar to COVID masks all day as they are working. All of the air they breath is filtered though these plastic fibers. Ok, these masks are presumably in good shape and not decomposing, but they are also ideally located to make everything that can go loose go right into our bodies, bisphenol and all.

With that in mind, had masks been that bad, we should see an effect on people working with masks all day. Which, by the way, is likely to include those who conduct these kinds of experiments.

It depends. Sometimes it is just that: you pay, you watch.

Sometimes part of the matches are covered by A, and part by B, with some covered by both, but some are exclusive to C, but C only has these matches. Oh, and C is only available as part of an internet package while A requires special software unless you have a compatible smart TV. Usually, it is not that bad, but it happens.

As for the sound, just turn it off, what are the "sounds of the games" anyways? A stadium is not a movie set or a concert hall, the ability to get a good soundscape are limited. Often, you can't hear what happens on the field at all. But here is a trick if you don't like a particular announcer and there is radio coverage: turn off the sound on your TV and listen to the radio instead. Radio announcers are usually more focused on the game than on "babbling bullshit" because without video, they have no other choice.

Look at the AliExpress prices. They are often so cheap that even with +50%, it is still worth it.

I commonly see stuff that sell for about $5 on AliExpress or Temu, $10 on Amazon, and $50 retail. Having to pay $7.50 instead of $5 is not "the end of cheap online shopping" to me. It will have an effect for sure, but I guess people will just pay the extra tax than go elsewhere.

Indeed Trump won, he even won by a landslide. It goes to show that if that Gmail filtering worked against Republicans, which is not the case according to the judges, it wasn't exactly instrumental.

Anyways, it it makes Gmail treat both parties equally by flagging all political emails, I guess that it could be a win for all of us (I can dream...).

There is only so much demand for fine literature.

And while fixing AI slop may not sound like the most glamorous job, there is no reason you shouldn't take pride in it. They asked you to do it because they can't and their AI can't either. This should at least give you some confidence in your abilities. Finding the little touches that turn AI slop into something you are not ashamed to put in your portfolio is definitely something you should be proud of.

Personally, as a software developer with more than 20 years of experience, I am not above fixing that stupid bug in a piece of code vomited by some drunk AI assisted intern. And I am proud that I did it quickly and efficiently. Doing this takes skills, and while having a drunk AI assisted intern do the job maybe wasn't the best idea in the first place, I have shown my value: it didn't work, now it works. It is also valuable experience when doing "fine art", as no one gets it right the first time, and knowing, avoiding and fixing mistakes is an important part of the job.