Mildly Infuriating

I really like SEPA mandates for this. Yes, they're pull, but you can cancel them with one click within 52 days, and the money is back in your account in a few hours (if not instantly).

Most companies that use it are very clear, since auto-pay by law needs a reminder or the refund is an automatic legal cancellation of the contract. (Of course, this is sometimes disguised as an upsell, mostly by telco's or "disruptive startups").

And they work across Europe, so my German cloud provider can use debits to pull the money from my Durch bank account.

The US not having such a consumer friendly system is really unfortunate, but not surprising.

Here's my "Fuck BofA" story. A long time ago now, I was really tight on cash on a Friday and needed a few things before my next paycheck on Wednesday. I knew how much money I had in my account, and knew what I could afford, and what I couldn't afford. I couldn't afford the gas for my car if I bought my groceries and paid a few other bills, which meant that I would just overdraft the card for the gas. I'd be about $10 short of filling up the tank, so I was okay with paying the $35 overdraft fee for the gas, because I needed it to get to work. I did the math, and I'd be roughly -$50 when it was all said and done.

Come Monday, I find that I'm at -$500. I look at my account history, and I see that BofA reorganized all my transactions from the weekend, processing them from largest to smallest. So instead of ONE large purchase overdrafting my account and accruing a single overdraft fee, they hit me with like 6 overdraft fees because of all of the smaller, ~$5 purchases I had made that weekend.

I fought with them for months, telling them that I'd pay the single overdraft fee if they agree to charge me based on the timeline in which I actually made the purchases, but they refused to budge, and eventually closed down the account, and also blacklisted me from opening an account with any major bank again.

The next year, a law was passed that made it so they can't do that anymore. But the law didn't make them pay back anybody that they already fucked over.

Disabling overdraft is the first thing people should do when opening a bank account. It's extremely predatory.

I hope you are with a local or regional credit union now.

Cox is really living up to their namesake of being a bunch of dicks.

You are also getting Max subscription plan with this, This will completely boost up your internet speed and you will be amazed by the higher speed and smooth service.

Oh, so smooth. Doubling that arbitrary throughout limit will obviously improve latency and jitter. I always have my network fully saturated all day, every day /s

Everything will be super fast and when you stream or browse there will be no buffering or interruptions and you will have a great experience

Yes, because buffering is caused by your inability to download 62 more megabytes of video a second. It's totally not because the server isn't sending video fast enough or anything. Fucking slimeball.

It's been a bait-and-switch ever since it stopped being "Community Antenna TV" and they started showing ads on non-OTA channels.

I suppose with Cox we could be talking about TV or Internet. If it's Internet I've heard it called a duopoly. The cable TV company and phone company both had wires running to every house when the internet showed up on the scene. Typically these are the only two options available in an area, and when you zoom in further usually one of them has given up on a particular street or neighborhood, and you better just go with the one that has decent wires.

We sort of had protections in place at the phone company level for a while to stop this. ILEC and CLEC laws forced Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (the big phone co in the area, owns the lines on the poles) to share their last mile phone lines with a Competitive LEC, granted the CLEC shells up for their own equipment and puts it in a special section of the ILECs central offices. Bam, competition.

The problem is that the laws only specified copper, so when fiber rolled around, ILECs specifically targeted their upgrades to cripple the competition. The houses still would do DSL on copper, but the backhaul for the CO would get upgraded to fiber and the competition would have to also upgrade their handoff on their equipment to be fiber or just lose all their customers in the area. They would also set up fiber fed cabinets halfway closer to your house and offer VDSL. CLECs weren't allowed in those cabinets and could only offer 1/5th the speed on regular old ADSL due to distance. There were a lot of dirty tricks...the laws that were supposed to help just let the big company absolutely batter the smaller ones once they started their fiber upgrades.