That’s why I advocate for fines and penalties scaled to income and net worth, both personal and corporate. If you’re poor you should still be able to eat after paying a speeding ticket, but if you’re a billionaire you should be knocked down a couple of million for the same offense.
But if rich people can’t get away with everything (except for a light slap on the wrist) then people won’t be motivated to innovate and improve
Like trumps desire to rape children motivated him to bankrupt three casinos and become president
a country in europe (maybe finland?) does this. I remember a dude getting a multi-thousand euro(?) fine.
Can confirm it’s Finland.
It was in the six figures if I recall correctly.
it’s real once you get up to oligarch level.
In that case the fee would be around three-fiddy and not $85 or almost 50%.
Just have a look at the most recent slap on Meta’s wrist for knowingly ruining countless lives of children and teenagers.Treefiddy? They’d need about Treefiddy? Now wait now, they’re not a 500 ft tall cryptid from the Paleozoic era now are they? God damit it’s the Loc Ness monster again. No Loc Ness monster I ain’t gonna give you damned treefiddy!
At scale, you just described the financial industry.
Or tech industry
Or capitalism
but seriously though, notpayforfuel challenge sounds dope. That could lead to the zero carz society.
Something that actually works is buying farm diesel.
Until they break out a blacklight or dip your tank
How often/likely is that though. I’d imagine plenty do it without ever getting caught
Filter it through Fuller’s earth and it strips the dye.
This is true, but it is actually possible as opposed to somehow magically dispensing fuel from a pump without paying.
That is something completely possible. Dunno about texas, but in germany the pumps generally let you pump and then you pay afterwards.
I haven’t seen a place in the States where you’re not required to pay first in a very long time
Well, you can break out the black light and dip their tank, if you know what I mean
¬‿¬And they love to do that in rural areas.
Surely the fine is in addition to also having to pay for the stolen fuel?
In reality yes, hence the title
And not just the normal price, but usually with a factor of 2 or 3 involved.
If everybody did this, we would save so much money.
I would but I haven’t seen a gas station that lets you pump before paying in 30 years. They’ve all been post-pay since forever.
They can’t catch us all!!!
This loophole will be corrected before anything JP Morgan currently gets away with a fine on.
It’s not really a loophole, because we haven’t issued fines at less than triple digits in decades.
MAGA logic
- you can’t pump without paying/cc
Ok 85 usd, you still have a civil case incoming and they usually get treble aka 3x the price of what you clipped.
It depends on where you are, and “treble” is the word you want.
As opposed to bass?
Three types of damages are compensatory, punitive, and treble. Compensatory damages are the actual damages with which a plaintiff needs compensation. Punitive damages are issued to punish the behavior. Treble punishments add three times compensatory damages to further punish a defendant for outrageous actions.
Auto correct gets me every time.
And I agree it depends were you live, its mostly enforced on farms/livestock/crops.
Have you noticed how awful autocorrect has become? I remember back in Android 9 you had to try to make it get it wrong. Now it’s this and Apple has it just as bad.
You’re ducking right, it was better in the days of You’re.
Has anyone noticed that gum’s gotten mintier lately?
I noticed a big change when i moved to a FOSS keyboard for my phone.
That said, since I moved, it feels like I see more obv typos among others. Weird.
I’ve had a theory on autocorrect for years. Call me a conspiracy theorist or a nutter. But its all by design. They talk about writing “finger prints” I think auto correct catalogs our misspelling fingerprints. Our patterns
And yes its insanely bad at right click correcting, I have to do a search and it comes back 100%… Maybe by design?
My conspiracy theory regarding the enshittification of autocorrect is that they’re trying to make us all look & feel stupider until we finally accept it & incrementally lower our intellectual standards.
Thats possible and the more I think about it it makes sense.
I foresaw the iran war. I swapped to an EV about a week before prices doubled in my area. I keep doing the math, and ive saved about $300 – and it only cost me $7166!
I traded an F150 in on an EV.
I used to fill the truck up for between $50-$75 per week. My payment on my used EV is about $200. And I don’t have the truck payment anymore.
Oddly enough I also lost five pounds in the first month of EV driving because I don’t get tempted by little snacks at the gas station.
Was your vision limited to a time frame of months?
In about five years the investment will have paid off. Afghanistan was over 20 years, so I’d say you made a good choice.
How do people pump gas before paying?
It’s normal in the UK. Usually someone in the shop needs to see you, then they activate the pump, you pump what you need, then go in and pay. Some stations do have the option to pay at the pump, or via an app, but I’ve never seen one where you can’t pay afterwards.
In Estonia two chains make you choose at the pump if you’re paying inside after pumping or on the machine before. One switches over automatically when the shop part closes and doesn’t even let you choose when it’s open. Others are pay-first.
And nobody needs to see you here, they have cctv anyway
and in australia, though some servos have prepay after 10pm.
and in costa rica (and id assume much of central america, idk) you don’t do the pumping, an employee at the station does it, then you pay them; you dont even leave your car
This was how gas pumps worked everywhere when I started driving
I’m still pissed off at being treated like a thief every time I go to gas up because they started a forever war in the middle east which inflated the price of gas. Then they never brought the cost back down with the price per barrel AND kept the paying before pumping policy.
Yeah.
If you were a local they’d see you pull up and turn on the pump. If you weren’t you’d go inside and pay cash first, but it was inconvenient because it was harder to just fill the tank.
My brother went to the same gas station in a small town, every day. Knew the staff by name. Went there for years.
One morning he pumps a few bucks of gas, then absentmindedly drives away.
Now I get it, a drive off is a drive off, and the cashier ain’t gonna lose his job. But it was like $10, in a small town (two stoplights), he knew these guys, they knew him. Float my bro $10 and figure it out later.
But no, they called the cops, sent officers to my grandma’s house trying to find him, almost gave her a heart attack.
He never went back after that. Which was a maybe a little extreme.
But listen, this is the type of town, and my family was the friendly trustworthy type, such that I’ve overdrafted at the bank by a few bucks, and had the cashier catch it and put her own money to cover me. They knew my mom better than me, but still.
Theres a station near me I go to regularly, and one time while waiting on a replacement card after my nunber got stolen online I went inside, gave them 40 cash tonpay for s few snacks and the rest for gas (about 35-ish for gas), and went out to the pump. My animal brain was used to pumping before going inside and getting snacks, so I just walked out, got in the truck, and drove home.
I realized it on the way to work the next day when my tank was low and had to buy gas at a different station on the way.
I figured I’d just lost the money and wasn’t gonna make any kind of fuss over it, but the next time I went to the station about a week later they recognized me and had kept the money in an envelope for me.
The mathematics I have to go through at fuel stations that don’t allow paying at the pump, gotta go inside and talk to the cashier, ugh.
Each tenth of my tank is 2.4 gallons, so if I’m at 4/10 and want to top off, (10-4)=6, so 6 x 2.4 = 14.4 gallons x price of fuel per gallon which is hovering around $6.90 lately (diesel in California), so I tell the cashier person I 'd like to purchase exactly $99.36 but gosh that’s so close to $100 let’s just round it to $100.
Remarkable how USian measurements always make people jump through some hoops. On my dashboard, I’d just see that the tank is missing about thirty liters of gas, so I’d get thirty liters. That was a car from the eighties, so we aren’t talking any fancy electronics, either.
Most cars don’t show that. Here’s the fuel gauge from my backup car since my other car is in the middle of repairs
Not only do you have to know the size of the tank, you also have to account for fuel tank math being different from regular math. The needle isn’t linear. E.g in a lot of cars it doesn’t start dropping until you’re down at least like 5 liters. That’s because people start whining about fuel consumption otherwise (“I just filled up and it’s already dropping”) and similarly the last half or quarter seems to be bigger in some cars. Middle bit is worth the least.
I don’t think I’ve seen a car that actually shows the liters. Maybe once or twice. I’ve owned like 10 or 15 cars and driven many more.
I thought for a minute that I misremembered, since image search shown only gauges like yours. But, here’s what it looks like in an old Volkswagen. Admittedly my car experience is very limited since I only bought it for fun and then discovered I just don’t have much need for a car. I guess most cars use the relative-scale gauges so that the instrument is interchangeable between models.
Yes but the cashier wants us to tell her a monetary amount. It has nothing to do with USA using gallons instead of litres. It’s a matter of multiplying money amount times unit of volume of desired fuel.
Hm, that’s still an odd system, to me. Around here, the cash register does the multiplication, and I probably wouldn’t be trusted to say the correct sum (nor would I want to). Never tried that, though — it might be possible to do it that way.
What I’m describing is not exclusive to the USA. It’s just how fuel purchases are made when paying at the pump isn’t an option, so you have to go in & do the transaction with a human behind a Point-of-Sale machine. The person at the cash register doesn’t know how many gallons or liters you need. So you have to tell them. But they want to know the corresponding cash amount, not the volume of liquid. So you have to do the math yourself in order to tell them the dollar amount to charge to your card. 🤷🏼♀️ I don’t know how to make this any clearer.
You can usually go back in and get change, or the balance refunded.
Well yeah but I still need to tell her a dollar amount. If I underestimate then my tank won’t get topped off. So I have to do the math.
I’m 60, so me, too. But, I haven’t seen a pump or a station that allows pumping before paying in many, many years.
You hand over cash at the counter, and they turn on the pump. Or you pay at the pump--you need to put your card in before the pump will start.
In my wanderings around the USA I’ve only encountered one pump that allowed pump before pay. At some obscure Nevada gas station in a little pass-through town in the middle of nowhere.
It’s possible that some of the places that used to skip prepay were illegally taking the cost of a pump and run out of the pay of whoever was on register. I’ve never experienced it personally, but I’ve heard a lot of stories.
Depends where you live. I live in Australia, and there isn’t a single service station that makes you prepay where I love. You can just pump and pay at the end, always.
You make love in the gas station?
No elevators nearby
How do you pay before you know how much you need?
Pay the clerk. If you can’t fit x litres/gallons/whatevers, you go back to the clerk and they give you the remaining balance back.
Well these days credit cards have an authorization function where they can hold $50 or $100 and then when done can release the hold and charge you the proper amount.
And cash is rare enough that they don’t mind inconveniencing those people anymore.
In Europe it blocks €300. Fuel prices are high. Sometimes a payment doesn’t go through as it should and the remaining amount isn’t released. Then you get an article in the newspaper of someone complaining their couldn’t pay in the shop because 300 was blocked on their account. These things resolve themselves as the bank does a check automatically after a day or two but some folks get caught close to payday.
Longest it’s taken has been 5 minutes for me. I’d be furious if it took a day, even an hour.
Hence why when this happens once every few years it’s national news.
Credit cards? What’s that?
It’s a piece of plastic used in financial transactions, but that’s not important right now.
You mean like a debit card but worse?
Where I live, the credit card is better than the debit card. Better protections against fraud.
That’d mostly a US thing I believe, ain’t no bank here leaving money on the table just because you paid using a credit card. Still gotta pay it back or pay interest.
Credit cards are more secure.
A debit card payment is settled immediately. A credit card payment is actually a small loan that’s settled at the end of the month. This goes back to the time that shops made a carbon copy of the card, fill in the amount and let the buyer sign it. That’s why the numbers were raised. Basically they were used as cheques.
Personally, I estimate. I have a quarter of a tank, I need 3/4 of a tank. That’s 9 gallons. Times $3.99 is $35.91. I get $30 on pump whatever
In most of northwest europe this is standard. Otherwise how do you know how much you need pay to fill the tank?
In Canada its an auto function of the payment system. You say you want $100 in gas. The card gets preauthorized for $100 to ensure the money is available then the pump starts. After you finish pumping and get only $80 in fuel that is what is actually charged to the card. The card is charged only after you finish pumping.
What if one only as cash?
Then you pay at the counter for the amount of gas you want to pump and if you overpay you go back to the counter and they give you back the difference.
That is definitely not true. There is no gas station here where you can do that anymore without having either signed in via an app or credit card.
It used to be like that, but that was a long time ago.
How do you fill your tank without paying for more gas than you’re going to use?
In some gas stations you must pay beforehand, but in others you can pay afterwards so you can fill your tank.
How do you fill your tank without paying for more gas than you’re going to use?
you don’t pay for more than you use. I prepay $100 on my credit card, use $58 and I’m charged $58, the $100 was a security hold and is the most you can get.
That’s pretty standard some places. Or at least it used to be.
The same way that people get completely exonerated of a crime by paying a fine for missing their court date: they fucking don’t.
Standard procedure in Australia
not at Costco
Yeah but that’s the exception to the rule. There are also self-service servos popping up (is it still a servo if it’s not attached to a shop?). Same rules as a vending machine for those ones (tap first to pre-approve, amount is adjusted when you’re done pumping)
Its something u get in high trust society. This is the cost of soft on crime polices. In most places in Australia its just the norm. You fill up then go in and pay. I can see the downfall of my nation as they start introducing pay first.
That’s a of total!
That citation might have cost 85 dollars in 1981.
Can you even get gas without paying? Seem rare nowadays
How does it even work having to pay before? Cos in germany you pay afterwards. But lets say you fill up for 40 dollars; does the pump then automatically stop when 40 dollars are reached?
You can pay cash or card inside at the counter, tell the attendant how much you want to pay. The pump is then turned on and will pump until it reaches the amount you paid. So, yes, it turns off automatically.
The other option is to pay a the pump, you put your card in, enter your pin, and the pump turns on.
If paying with cash inside before pumping, yes. Then you basically guess how much you need and pay that.
With a card, you “pay” with the card first, but it doesn’t charge the money until after you finished pumping and it knows what to charge.
