I wish the FTC hadn't exempted restaurants from junk free transparency requirements.
https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/ftc-exempts-restaurants-...
Restaurant industry celebrates "win" on exemption from junk fee disclosure:
https://www.lra.org/2024/12/17/advocacy-win-restaurants-ftc-...
But delivery fee transparency may be coming:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/16/2026-07...
The following should really apply (of course those "shipping charges" can be another scam, see eBay etc.):
> Businesses may only exclude three categories of charges from the total price: government charges, shipping charges, and fees or charges for optional ancillary goods or services that people choose to add to the transaction.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/rule-unfair-...
My own answers for "why" here things like the incentives of middle managers to always be adding bullet point features (eg 2FA most places), the more of your effort something takes up the less time you can spend on competing options (eg bloated shopping websites that take 10 seconds to load each page), the ever-present desire to siphon more surveillance data from your personal devices, etc.
My own response is to withdraw from these types of businesses where I can, avoid high-touch "services" that want to own the experience (ie be able to arbitrarily change them) in favor of libre software and my own digital software/systems/infrastructure, and generally accept being a "weirdo" for customer service people when I don't accept answers like "just install our app!". It helps to understand how these systems work too, like for shipping item returns rather than ever logging into the website from my phone (lol) I just save off the QR code image and send it into a Matrix chat, which is available on my phone. While the dynamic is unavoidable, solutions are there for many of these problems but it takes deliberate effort to push back against manufactured complexity.
Even though MacOS drivers and software were available, all of the online instructions were strictly for Windows. So I set the printer up with the Mac software. Knowing what I know now, I could have done all of the printer setup with the printer control panel.
As far as I can tell, all the printer really required on a reasonably modern copy of SuSE Linux was a PPD. I haven't done pcaps, but taking it at "interface value" it looks like it ingests ghostscript-generated PDFs just fine. I haven't tried to get the scanner working on Linux.
"Reality drifts when systems stop learning from feedback."
These days you can't even warn people about things that are already happening.
Oh, man, am I sympathetic to that. But I try to remind myself that the problem isn't the field itself, it's the industry. Those are two different things. I am on my way out of the industry (it has been getting increasingly problematic over decades, and the water has become a bit too warm for this frog), but will probably never quit the field.
> because things seemed fine and then suddenly everything started to turn so fast.
This is how things often go, historically speaking. Punctuated equilibrium. You have a period that looks like a steady state that is followed by sudden change.
/anecdote