Why We Can't Have Nice Things (Page 4)

Investigations

Washington Let Lenders Approve $793 Billion in Pandemic Payroll Loans on the Borrower's Word. A Houston Man Reported 50 Employees and $375,000 in Monthly Payroll for a Company With No Staff, and Bought a Lamborghini.

The Paycheck Protection Program opened in April 2020, weeks after the CARES Act created it. Its purpose was to keep small businesses paying their employees through the first lockdowns, and its governing principle was speed. The loans were fully guaranteed by the Small Business Administration, made through private lenders, and

Banned For Everyone

Airbnb Banned Parties Worldwide After a 2019 Halloween Shooting at a House Booked for a Family Reunion. By 2024 Its Software Was Deterring About 38,000 People in the United States From Renting a Whole House Over Halloween Weekend.

In late October 2019, a woman booked a large house in Orinda, California, through Airbnb. She told the owner she lived in Lafayette, that members of her family had asthma and needed to get away from the smoke of the Kincade Fire, and that she wanted to host a family

Industry Paid

A Network of University Scientists Set Out to Be "the Voice of Science" on Obesity and Said Diet Was Getting Too Much of the Blame. Its Website Was Registered to Coca-Cola's Headquarters in Atlanta.

In 2015 a nonprofit called the Global Energy Balance Network promised, on its website, to be "the voice of science" in discussions about healthy lifestyles. Its leaders were well credentialed. James O. Hill was a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Steven N. Blair was

Corporate Memo

Meta Fired About Two Dozen Los Angeles Employees in October 2024 for Misusing $25 Meal Credits. One of Them Reportedly Earned $400,000 a Year and Had Spent the Credits on Toothpaste and Tea.

At its large campuses Meta feeds its staff for free, in cafeterias, three times a day. Its smaller offices have no cafeterias, so the company gave employees there the next best thing: a daily allowance on food delivery apps such as Grubhub and Uber Eats. Twenty dollars for breakfast, twenty-

Recalled

Philips Recalled 15 Million Breathing Machines in 2021 Because Their Sound-Dampening Foam Could Crumble Into the Air Patients Inhaled. An FDA Inspection Found the Company Had Been Aware of Degrading Foam Since 2015.

On 14 June 2021, Philips Respironics announced a recall of CPAP machines, BiPAP machines and ventilators, around 15 million devices worldwide. Most were sleep apnea machines, which blow air into the airway of a sleeping person so that it stays open through the night. The ventilators were for people who

Revoked

REI Let Customers Return Anything, at Any Time, for 75 Years. Among the Things That Came Back Was a Snowsuit Bought in 1970 to Climb Mount Rainier.

Recreational Equipment Inc. was founded in 1938 and is organised as a cooperative. From the start it offered a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee, and the guarantee had no expiry date. If a piece of gear failed to satisfy, it could be brought back to the store, and the store took

Community Bulletin

Kyoto's Gion District Asked Tourists Not to Photograph Geiko in Its Private Alleys. After a Maiko's Kimono Was Torn and a Cigarette Butt Went Down Another's Collar, the Alleys Closed to Everyone.

Gion is the district of Kyoto where geiko — the local word for geisha — and their apprentices, maiko, work in teahouses. Getting between appointments means walking outside in full costume, along a network of alleys, some of which are one to two metres wide. Several of them are not public roads.

Discontinued

Spotify Sold a $90 Dashboard Player, Discontinued It Five Months Later, and Said It Would Keep Supporting the Ones People Owned. In December 2024 It Switched Every One of Them Off.

Spotify released Car Thing in February 2022. It was a small screen that mounted on a dashboard and controlled Spotify, aimed at drivers whose cars were too old to have an infotainment system. It cost about ninety dollars, and it required an active Spotify Premium subscription to do anything at

Under Review

The FTC Wrote a Rule Requiring That Cancelling a Subscription Be as Easy as Starting One. A Federal Court Vacated It Six Days Before It Took Effect, Over a Missing Cost Analysis.

The Federal Trade Commission finalised its revised Negative Option Rule in October 2024. It was known almost immediately as the click-to-cancel rule, because its central requirement was that a subscription be as easy to leave as it was to join. If a customer could sign up in four

Revoked

AT&T Sold Unlimited Data, Then Began Slowing Customers Down After Two Gigabytes. Eight Years Later It Paid $60 Million, Which Came to About Seventeen Dollars Each.

AT&T sold unlimited data plans in the era when the iPhone was new and nobody had a reliable model of how much data a telephone would eventually consume. The plans were popular, the estimate turned out to be wrong, and in 2010 the company stopped offering them to

Reallocated

Saudi Arabia Banned Growing Alfalfa at Home in 2018 to Save Its Groundwater. It Grows the Alfalfa in Arizona Now, Where a State Lease Let It Pump as Much Water as It Wanted.

On 5 November 2018, Saudi Arabia banned the cultivation of green fodder within the kingdom. Growing alfalfa and similar forage crops in a desert had been consuming roughly seventeen billion cubic metres of water a year, of which about nine billion would be saved by no longer doing it. Domestic