Iran is charging $1 per barrel. At the current Brent price of ~$80/barrel, that is 1.25%.
So the US is proposing to charge a fee that is 16x the Iranian fee.
❗️ Anthropic tried to charge a Korean user who was on the free plan with zero API usage $16.6 million. A day earlier, the same invoice was $1.67 million, so it grew roughly 10x overnight.
The user says he suspected phishing at first, then found the sender and payment link were Anthropic's official domain. His bank declined the charge attempts for exceeding the card's per-transaction limit...
Last month auditing startup Vaudit told it found about $1.7 million in overcharges across $34 million in AI invoices, mostly tied to Claude Code, and after months of GitHub reports about contradictory Anthropic billing emails.
We seal envelopes not because the letter contains a conspiracy, but because the contents belong exclusively to the sender and the receiver.
The "nothing to hide" argument is pure corporate/state propaganda. Privacy isn't about hiding a crime; it's about deciding who gets access to your life. It’s a boundary of power, not a shield for guilt.
China scanning private messages - bad, evil, dystopian, mass surveillance
EU scanning private messages - good, protecting children, necessary, nothing to worry about