Hacker News Reader

Comment by RankingMember | Hacker News Reader

That symmetrical registration/cancellation is being slow-walked like this is absurd (but under this admin, certainly not surprising).

View on HN

It's absurd if you believe the point of government is to be by, for, and of the people.

If you see government as a way to enhance the ability of the owner class to enrich themselves, it makes perfect sense.

It’s almost as if the previous administration was focussed more on the former, and the current administration more on the latter.

I guess you get the government you vote for.

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for lunch.

It's more like a 9 sheep and a wolf with a great PR firm who convinced 5 sheep to vote against the other 4 for lunch plans. Those 5 sheep aren't going to come out of this any better than the 4 of us.

This is a lazy argument. It only serves to dissuade the masses from doing critical thinking and analyzing party platforms.

It also explains why blue collar Americans vote for tax breaks for billionaires and union busting legislation.

One party doesn't actually have a platform and they've abandoned all the principles in their past platforms. Now it's just agree to whatever one deranged person cooks up in his head after watching TV.

I'm getting tired of this whataboutism.

We did not have an almost daily turmoil of shit happening in 2021-2024.

One of the biggest accolades Biden got for a lot of people was they got 4 years of being able to turn off the news and nothing was on fire. His critics might have called him sleepy Joe (despite his administration being quite prolific) but it terms of normalcy and the government not constantly meddling in your life and business he did a bang up job.

No, just genocide as usual, a few proxy wars, typical neoliberal US foreign politics, and then a threat to the American public that if we didn't allow business as usual to continue unabated, we would experience domestic hardship through Trump.

> just genocide as usual, a few proxy wars, typical neoliberal US foreign politics

that's all terrible stuff but the reality is all that has been happening almost non-stop since the 50s. US foreign policy has always been a shit-show.

what we're seeing today is an extra thick layer of daily bshit on top of the usual layer

> a threat to the American public that if we didn't allow business as usual to continue unabated, we would experience domestic hardship through Trump

which turned out to be even more true than anyone thought was possible

> US foreign policy has always been a shit-show

Yes, that's why I said as usual and typical.

> what we're seeing today is an extra thick layer of daily bshit on top of the usual layer

No, as far as foreign politics it's really same shit different day, we're siding with dictators and meddling with other countries' affairs, economically bullying other countries... Just more out in the open now, and with a somewhat different set of dictators. The only material difference is that Trump's mission is to weaken our global supremacy, which is a mixed bag, as some of that supremacy should indeed go away, but tariffs etc are not the fucking answer.

> which turned out to be even more true than anyone thought was possible

I thought it was going to be even worse. We still have 4 years to find out how bad it gets.

Are king wolves any better?

Well, you being collective.

I'm happy to see the waste reigned in and corruption exposed.

On this issue there is no difference between the previous admin and the current one. The FTC voted 3-0 to postpone. Even though Trump fired two of the original five, if those two had both voted against postponing they would have still lost 3-2 and the same decision would be reached — and I don't think there's much evidence that the two he fired would've voted against postponing, anyway.

This is incorrect. The party makeup of the 5 people changed with the new administration. Lina Khan (D) left and Mark Meador (R) was appointed, changing the balance from 3(D)-2(R) to 2(D)-3(R).

Ah, I hadn't realized that. Still, given that it was 3-0, all three of the former FTC commissioners would have had to be unanimous against deferral — and given that all of them voted for deferral on Jan 19th [1] (the original deadline, when none had been fired and Lina Khan was still onboard) — I don't think there's much change here.

1: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/10/ftc-delays-enforcement-of-...

Then explain why the rule was created in the first place?

This administration is making a pattern out of 1. Creating a rule or executive order to score easy political points with their base, and then 2. Immediately walking it back or “postponing” it once those points were scored and their base are not paying attention. Trolling-As-Governance.

Democrats see government differently than Republicans.

I would be even more specific and say that Lina Khan sees government differently than most Republicans and Democrats.

I agree, though I think it is worth giving some credit to the people who chose her & appointed her. They didn't have to do that. It was one of the more impressive moves by the previous admin, and won them a lot of points from me.

Well yes, I agree. But GP was saying "government" writ large behaves XYZ.

Which absolutely does not imply a monolith of people all working in perfect lock step.

It seems like you're looking to fight on the internet - would you consider a different activity instead?

> It's absurd if you believe the point of government is to be by, for, and of the people. > If you see government as a way to enhance the ability of the owner class to enrich themselves, it makes perfect sense.

No I actually think it's important for people to square views like "government is a way to enrich the owner class" with actual reality, such as the fact that the government when administered by a different party did the exact opposite.

Nihilism is useless. We've made enormous progress since the first human stepped on this planet so I would say we've disproven nihilism for good. Modern governments are definitely not purely tools for the owner class to enrich themselves.

I don't see the contradiction between the two propositions "government is for the ruling class" and "there have been some progress". There are even economic theories that start from that tenet (globally referred to as "trickle-down-economics").

> There are even economic theories that start from that tenet (globally referred to as "trickle-down-economics").

Those economic theories are not proper economic theories. As in, mainstream economists don't support them. That theory is propaganda in service of some specific political parties.

> I don't see the contradiction between the two propositions "government is for the ruling class" and "there have been some progress".

"There has been some progress" is a gross understatement considering the age we're living in. There has been tremendous progress and the lifestyle difference between the poorest members of a developed country and the richest ones is much, much smaller than that between the poorest and richest members of a country 200+ years ago.

He's talking about the trump administration, not making a general point about all governments.

GP made no indication it was about this specific administration and not about government in principle.

It’s abundantly clear from context.

I don't think it was. Certainly that's a position that people have held since long before Trump.

[flagged]

I might just be arguing to argue, but it did read to me like "nothing has really changed"-style cynicism. (I don't personally agree, but that's a different question.)

"owner class" is too outdated and myopic. It's also incorrect, as plenty of people born into low income households go on to become elected representatives.

It's better to think about it in terms of "people who choose to pursue positions of power to benefit themselves financially while cosplaying as wanting to help the average person".

With any other disadvantaged/discriminated class (skin color, sexual orientation, gender, etc.), getting elected in power doesn't change the disadvantage. So the incentive is still there to fight for that equality.

This is not so when it comes to the poor. Once in power they are no longer poor so the incentive to fix any issue related to this almost entirely evaporates.

Elected officials should make the average salary from the year prior. If it's not enough to survive then they'll need to do something about it!

Let's follow the money. A policy that pumps stocks by dumping labor + consumer rights delivers a roughly equal cost to everyone but delivers benefits in proportion to net worth. Suppose it pumps assets by 1%.

A $200k NW individual gets 2x cost and $2k gain.

A $3M NW individual gets 2x cost and $30k gain.

A $6B NW individual gets 1x cost and $60M gain.

A $400B NW individual gets 1x cost and $4B gain.

If it wasn't obvious, these numbers correspond to the Median American, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. People whining about focus on ownership and complaining that all politicians are bad are drawing this equivalence across 3-6 orders of magnitude of incentive to do evil.

In contrast, I argue that incentives matter and that high NW individuals in politics have uniquely misaligned incentives. The focus on ownership doesn't just matter, it matters more than it ever did before.

owner class: people who choose to pursue positions of power to benefit themselves financially while cosplaying as wanting to help the average person

There now it’s both. They want to own agency if the idea of owning stuff is too gauche for modern audiences.

Just because they weren’t born into the owner class (or “capital class”) doesn’t mean they didn’t work their way into it. That’s kind of the American dream.

You can only become wealthy later in life at which point you can’t advantage your past self. Thus new money receives fewer benefits than old money from the exact same policies.

Further having 100m at 40 doesn’t suddenly bring the kind of social connections that going to the right schools and the right parties would. At the extremes, the average lottery winner is surrounded by people asking for help, the average Fortune 500 CEO’s social circle aren’t. So if they suddenly fall on hard times the lottery winner is stuck but that CEO may very well claw their way back.

It’s still possible for poor people to succeed and 3rd+ generation wealth to fail, but the odds are wildly different.

> but under this admin, certainly not surprising

Services have been making it hard to cancel subscriptions for many years, under many parties and administrations. Many things are Trump's fault, this is not one of them.

Choosing not to enforce the click to cancel rule is not Trump's fault? How so?

Laws get pushed off for all kinds of reasons.

It seems like this was pushed off to give businesses more time to comply.

Many kinds of businesses have subscriptions, each with a different situation. Some small businesses don't even have a programmer.

Requiring a phone call is not always (although often is) to make it difficult to cancel. Often it's because a company doesn't have the proper infrastructure for the frontend.

So I think it's reasonable that they are giving companies some time.

In the end, I hope that on July 14th this goes through, it will be a big win for consumers.

EDIT: My answer didn't fully address the question, so let me add: I don't think is the result of Trump trying to be friends with billionaires for their money. I understand why it seems that way - because he literally does that. But this doesn't seem special or extraordinary. Enforcement of laws gets pushed off all the time.

Everything you're saying makes sense if you assume you're dealing with good faith governance.

But we're not.

So maybe you're right. I don't know. But I sure as hell wouldn't assume as much based on the words of these people. We'll see in July I guess.

It would be good if folks actually read the FTC letter rather than having a visceral negative reaction.

The Biden admin had put the May 14 deadline for certain things even though the rule as a whole went into effect in Jan 2025. Trump's commish is defending that by another 60 days.

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/negative-option...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com