All of a sudden, I noticed a bunch of things that inspired this post. Kudos, New York!

I just wrote about two consumer protection initiatives that apply only to New York: a law banning personalized pricing so a company can’t spy on consumers to determine how much to overcharge and the click to cancel rule for NYC. This makes it as easy to cancel as to order subscriptions.

A printed information guide for the midterm elections that’s sent registered voters by NYC Votes is clearly written, not in the convoluted, confusing voice of some lawyers that we used to struggle through. In addition to the standard foreign languages, it’s available in Arabic, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Polish, Punjabi, Russian and Urdu.

Last week I discovered I’d lost my OMNY card, a contactless “tap‑and‑pay” fare system for NYC’s subway, buses, and other MTA services.It must have slipped out of my handbag as I left the bus. Because I have automatic renewal, I blocked the account until I could get to one of the subway stations that offer replacement cards. Customer service on the phone worked like a dream. My suggestion is that there be additional venues to get replacement cards. I was on the upper east side and my nearest choices were the 125^th or 42^nd Street subway stations. Thank goodness for Apple Wallet that paid for transport to Grand Central.

Congrats to the Imperial Theatre on Broadway where I recently attended a [fabulous] show. One of my friends wields a walker. The ushers became a team of professional guardian angels—one announcing our arrival via walkie talkie to others inside. We were expertly guided to our seats.

“A nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there,” will never go away. I love it here and am filled with pride when things work as they have been lately.

Have you noticed an uptick in service where you live?

   

I heard an eye-opening segment on Brian Lehrer’s morning show on WNYC recently where he interviewed Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative and the author of a new book “Gouged: The End of a Fair Price–and What That Means for Your Wallet.” 

Her mission is to restore honesty to the economy.

Some highlights of their conversation follow.

Her findings illustrate that inflation doesn’t only fall at the feet of tariffs and war. Pricing is carefully calibrated to reflect how much a company can get away with. Using AI and other tech aids companies are reinventing the ripoff. Pricing is now a highly scientific engineered skill. Loyalty programs and junk fees raise prices.

Did you know that on rainy days, children’s museums charge more as does Expedia when potential customers log on from wealthy zip codes? Walmart has applied for a patent to allow smartphone technology to add to the price of mayo when a customer puts tuna on the shopping list.

She wrote about an initiative in collaboration with Consumer Reports involving Instacart. Some 400 volunteers ordered the same 23 items like eggs and cereal and the prices were different –as much as 23 percent–for 75 percent of the items. Two weeks after the report was published Instacart stopped running the experiment.

What’s to be done? She praised a law that’s ready for NY Governor Kathy Hochul to sign that bans the “creepy” practice of personalized pricing which allows a company to spy on consumers to decide how much to overcharge each. She said there was some movement in other states.

Lehrer and Owens congratulated New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Samuel A.A. Levine for the first “Click to Cancel” rule, which bans subscription traps, making it as easy to cancel as to sign up. She called the practice “set it and forget it.”

On the program, she described a landlord price fixing algorithm and one that impacted the cost of gas.

Shopping shouldn’t be exhausting, she said. There should be a Shopper’s Bill of Rights as proposed by her Groundwork Collaborative, “a proposed 12‑point set of consumer protections aimed at curbing hidden fees, dynamic/surveillance pricing, and barriers to cancellations in today’s tech‑driven marketplace.”

“AI should work for consumers, not companies,” she said.

Have you suspected this all along or are Owens’s findings news to you?

   

A friend shared a horrendous story the highlights of which I post here. Like the protagonist, my father was a legal immigrant with green card for many years, but I would hope anyone reading what happened to this man recently would shudder regardless of personal proximity to an immigrant.

The nightmare began with a knock on the door—the man and his wife were sleeping–in a southern city where they had retired. In his 70s—tall, thin, dark brown skin and an accent—he had been in the country for 35 years. He and his American wife have two kids, one a doctor the other a lawyer. Soon after his detainment he was sent to a jail in another city. In this prison he contracted pneumonia and barely survived a stint in the ICU only to be sent back to prison in a room with seven others.

Before I go on, some context.

Beth Schwartzapfel and Anna Flagg reported in The Marshall Project in August, 2026 … “even as Trump’s enforcement upends lives and livelihoods in immigrant communities, the number of people detained and deported falls far short of the president’s goal of deporting 1 million people per year.

“In total, since Trump’s inauguration last year, ICE has detained over 610,000 people — more than the population of Atlanta, Baltimore, Milwaukee or the entire state of Wyoming.”

According to the headline for a June, 2025 article by David J. Bier of the Cato Institute, “65 Percent of People Taken by ICE Had No Convictions, 93 Percent No Violent Convictions.”

Back to this unfortunate man who finally had a hearing at the end of September.

My friend wrote: “His crime? He made a mistake on his yearly green card application four years ago. The subsequent three years were correct.  So he was sentenced to return to his country of origin. He does have a brother there who will help.”

I interrupt the narrative to point out that we shrug at people in office with far worse “crimes” than once making a mistake on paperwork.

To continue, this is how we treat people we deport.

My friend wrote, “he was taken from the prison in one town to the airport in another wearing prison pajamas and no socks or shoes. He was put in a holding pen with quite a few other men. Hours of no food or water or toilets and he wasn’t able to bring anything that was in his suitcase. On the plane still with no shoes or socks. This is what a law- abiding person with a legal right to be here gets for a ‘mistake’ on an application that no one told him about four years ago.”

The man had “all sorts of legal help as well as his congressman,” wrote my friend. Could his treatment have been worse? I guess. Originally, he was slated to be sent to one of two countries with no connection to him where he didn’t speak the languages.

Is there any rationale or excuse for such inhumane treatment of innocents or any prisoners?

   

Decades ago, we were in a severe traffic jam outside Orly Airport. The plan was to return our rental car after a glorious vacation and catch a flight home.

After a while our eyes started to tear up and we were coughing so we closed the windows. We were spoiled by the clean air standards that had been adopted in the States and were shocked at how quickly we reacted to the exhaust. France hadn’t yet taken such steps.

This memory haunted me when I read about the administration’s reversal of federal fuel economy standards that may “increase carbon dioxide emissions by roughly 50% and worsen local air pollution,” according to AI.

The rationale is to lower the price of vehicles, a tempting if short-term gain and a big price to pay. It mocks the congestion pricing program NYC implemented to lower pollution and untangle gridlock.

Are you willing to pay a little more for your next car to maintain the goal of fuel efficiency from 50 miles per gallon, which it is now, to 34.9 by 2031?

   

“My Friend Pocketed the Money From Our Charity Event. What Should I Do?,” was the headline of a recent New York Times Ethicist column.

The reader wrote: “My friend took the lead on creating wonderful things for us to sell (in addition to regular donations), and we advertised heavily about the charity we were fund-raising for, which energized everyone to contribute more because of how relevant it felt.”

They didn’t create a bank account for the event and the friend said he’d deposit the money in his account. The fellow subsequently lost his job and ghosted her for a year when she reached out to get back the money.

The reader concluded with these questions for columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah: “What do I owe my friend and what do I owe everyone who donated? Should I, being fortunate enough to have a well-paying job, suck it up and donate the amount myself? Should I let the friendship die, knowing that he essentially stole from a charitable cause?”

A partial excerpt of Appiah’s advice: “Your compassion for your friend is admirable, but personal misery isn’t an excuse for robbing a charity. Nor should you continue to conceal his misconduct in order to preserve your friendship. This man hasn’t just failed to pay up; he has betrayed everyone who organized the event and trusted him to send the money on, and he has let down everyone who bought something or donated, as well as the cause you were all supporting.”

Have you run into a thorny situation like this?