I think you might have a different definition of "merit" than OP. "Merit" to me means how much value the company brings to society. If I'm reading correctly about your point of it being legal, to you it seems like "merit" means how much value they bring to their investors.
Social media companies becoming more consolidated and influential might be legal and good for their stakeholders but it doesn't mean it's a net positive for the rest of the world. And unfortunately, as much as so many people like to believe otherwise, being a net negative to society absolutely does not lead to a company becoming irrelevant.
The article also points out that some states and a lot cities require retailers to provide exact change. Congress would need to pass legislation to allow rounding nationally. I'm guessing in the meantime they'll continue holding pennies from previous years?
So, implement sales tax like Europe does VAT and include it in on the shelf price, and make sure all shelf prices end in 0 or 5. Then, adding up items in a cart will also end in 0 or 5, and the tax is already included, so there is no math beyond the addition that could change the total to anything ending in something that is not 0 or 5. No matter how people pay, cash or card, the price will be the same, and it will always end in 0 or 5. As an added bonus, customers don't have to wonder how much tax they'll pay, because that's already included in the price.
America is allergic to baked in taxes - you've got to keep the appearance of a deal even when there isn't one. America also embraces a lot of junk and hidden fees - ticketmaster is a great example of this.
I think consumers would love having baked in taxes and clear prices and were the government functional I'd hope that a consumer advocacy agency could enforce this - but that's simply not where we are right now.
America isn’t against baked in taxes because of the appearance of a deal, it’s because there is the large part of the population that is against _taxation_. Their argument (which is probably right) is that if you bake in the tax then it will be ignored by more buyers and it will be easier to raise.
Lots of odd American customs can be explained by this phenomenon. The other major difference in the states is that we don’t have many places that only have federal taxes. States and every locality from the county to the water reclamation board can have tax authority. Those 2 things in conjunction go a long way to explain the differences you see in US tax treatment.
You can do this with State taxes too, but I think your impression that people just ignore it is correct. A good example of this is gas prices. Gas in CA is 70c per gallon, vs about 25c per gallon in the Northeast. This gets baked into the price, and is way more expensive in CA, but people need to buy gas. So you just have to pay. And since it is everywhere in the state, most people don't notice the difference.
Additionally, having baked-in taxes à la Japan would change how advertising works, since we don't have a uniform sales tax (unlike Japan). For example, I live in San Ramon, CA, which has a sales tax rate of 9.75%. If I drive just two miles north to Danville, the sales tax goes down to 8.75%. If I drive a few miles south to Dublin, the sales tax goes up to 10.25%. The reason is because California has a base statewide sales tax of 7.25% (with 1% of it going to local governments), and city and county governments are free to add up to 4% for local sales taxes.
By comparison, in Japan the consumption tax is 10% for most items (8% for groceries and takeout), and it's the same nationwide.
In addition, there are sometimes fees that are prohibited by law from being baked in. For example, California has a statewide ban on free "single-use" bags in grocery stores and some other businesses. These businesses are required to charge their customers for bags, and they are not allowed to bake it into the price. Some municipalities have extended this to disposable cups as part of an effort to discourage them in favor of reusable cups. For example, Santa Cruz mandates a 25 cent fee on disposable cups. The Costco $1.50 hot dog + drink combo is normally $1.50 + sales tax, but in Santa Cruz it's $1.50 + $.25 mandatory cup fee + sales tax (yes, the cup is taxable). I have yet to see someone bring a disposable cup to Costco or to other places where paper cups are sold, however.
Having baked-in taxes will require big changes about how taxes and fees work in America, the land of extra sales taxes, extra fees, surcharges, and tipping.
Some good news though - having baked in sales tax being required in advertising actually aligns marketing lobbying with pushing for harmonized sales taxes which I'd generally consider a more just system. IMO adding random regressive taxes in different counties to make up budget shortfalls causing very strange market effects is a bad thing.
> they'll continue holding pennies from previous years?
I think most of the ones from previous years are all in people's junk drawers, couches, etc., and only go back into circulation when someone decides to dump them into a Coinstar machine. Retailers are already reporting shortages.
Allowing gas stations to denominate their prices by the 10th of a cent has always struck me as a just an underhanded and extreme way to practice the "9.99" retail psychological trick. Why not allow retailers to price things 9.99999? Ridiculous.
It's because technically the dollar is divided into Dimes, Cents, and Mil. (this is why dimes say 'One Dime' on them instead of 'Ten Cents'.
So while the mil isn't really used anywhere else that regular people see any more due to inflation, it is a valid division of the dollar and that's why they are able to get away with it.
> (this is why dimes say 'One Dime' on them instead of 'Ten Cents'.
No, it's purely stylistic. We tend to spell out denominations on coinage and "dime" is just the American spelling of disme, meaning a tenth.
The capped bust dime from 1809-1839 had "10 C." rather than "One Dime". Similarly, the capped bust quarter said "25 C." instead of the modern "Quarter Dollar", the half dollar said "50 C." rather than the later "Half Dollar" and the half dime said "5 C." rather than the later "Half Dime."
Most of the 18th century and early 19th century coinage, besides half pennies and pennies didn't have their denomination written on them at all.
There is no such decipence division in the UK, but fuel is still sold with a vestigial .9 pence on the end. In fact, since the denomination is per litre, not gallon, the .9 is about 4 times more significant.
When the final calculation of XX.YYY litres * AAA.9 pence/litre is done, it's then rounded off to 1 pence.
They're allowed to get away with it because of a dysfunctional lobbying driven government. Mils don't exist in the common knowledge and if any reasonable person looked at this they'd call it out. It is useful in accounting but a Mill has never been minted and the last half penny was minted in 1857. It has never been possible using issued physical legal tender in the US to pay a debt of $3.129
The Mill doesn't exist because of some archaic need - it's pure dysfunction and the utilization of it in gas prices is a practice that should and very easily could be made illegal.
Yes, the "Mill" discussion looks to be totally irrelevant. [1] and [2] seem to back up my claim that, at least in modern times, it's purely a "just-below pricing" psychological trick and has nothing to do with the Mill unit.
$4.999 looks a lot smaller than $5.00 to everyday people and it makes the gas company more money than $4.99. That's all there is to it.
So do whatever they do with mils but for the penny too. They don’t nor have they ever minted a mil coin, so the procedure for this is already well established if this is correct.
Turns out the station charges you a round number of cents per gallon. Then there are federal taxes, which are, IIRC, 24.5 cents per gallon. And then there's state tax, which varies from state to state but seems to always be x.4 cents per gallon.
So I don't think it's just "evil retailer tricks".
Is the amount rounded before or after taxes? Must be after or you have to round again. So who eats or gains the rounding? The merchant or the tax collector?
Here in Argentina the law says they must be rounded down. Initially it was for 5 AR$cents, and some shops still has the oficial sign that says AR$ 0.05.
We unofficially drop the coins/bills when the reach ~US$0.03, so now we dropped the AR$50 bills and everythig in cash is rounded down to AR$100 (US$0.07).
(The only exception is the photocopy shop 2 blocks away from home.)
Credit cards are charged the exact ammount, with cents that are irrelevant.
This is exactly what the article is arguing people are doing when betting on the Jesus thing:
> [Time Value of Money] The Yes people are betting that, later this year, their counterparties (the No betters) will want cash (to bet on other markets), and so will sell out of their No positions at a higher price.
...
> Has this galaxy-brained trade ever gone well? Yes! In late October of last year — a week before the election — Kamala Harris was trading around 0.3% in safe red states like Kentucky, while Donald Trump was trading around 0.3% in safe blue states like Massachusetts. On election day, these prices skyrocketed to about 1.5%, because “No” bettors desperately needed cash to place other bets on the election. Traders who bought “Yes” for 0.3% in late October and sold at 1.5% on election day made a 5x profit!
No, not really. What I was doing was playing predictable spikes in volatility in the market over a long span - theoretically i could have done it forever had the market never closed. I also doubt the hillary market moved because of liquidation needs in other markets - it was driven almost entirely by conspiracy theory news. I followed it very closely, it was not this at all.
I'm pretty sure the comment was sarcastic. The grandparent comment was so over the top with its moral outrage that sarcasm feels like about the only appropriate response.
I am now realizing that it was most likely sarcastic after reading your comment and am now wondering how I didn't take the extreme speech as obvious sarcasm before.
Should've know when they said interpreters and compilers.
Incidentally I replied with sarcasm to theirs as well so it all works out.
This opens the door for fully legalized bribery. Which is already happening. The SEC recently asked a judge to halt its own investigation into Justin Sun for fraud after he bought $75 million worth of Trump's WLF coin, $56 million of which went directly to Trump, immediately after the election. The case now will likely get dropped completely.
What's to stop foreign governments from doing the same thing, if they aren't already?
I am against meme coins, but ruling them to be collectibles like a trading card makes sense to me. How is a meme coin different than a baseball card? What about a virtual baseball card or other virtual item from CSGO or World of Warcraft?
To bolster my point, one could face the same corruption issue we face today with baseball cards: Trump could own a limited-edition baseball card; foreign governments then could then buy all the other prints of the same card, lowering the supply and raising the demand of Trump’s collectible. One can thus see how anyone can use any collectible as a means to corruption in the same ways that meme coins can be used.
I am illustrating why the SEC ruling is not completely unfounded on first pass. However, I think meme coins have a higher chance of being used for scams (and corruption, but that is a separate point) because there is an implicit promise that this product will induce a return and because the coin is rarely an ends in itself. But how do you regulate people’s intention? You can’t read people’s minds and force people to not to buy a collectible for the sole purpose of making a return on investment. I think people would find it ridiculous to tell pawn shops to not buy a Pokémon card if the shop treated the item solely as a means to flip, for example. Moreover, such market participants are beneficial because they offer liquidity to more sincere buyers and sellers.
I am not sure what logically consistent and beneficial regulations around meme coins would look like, but with more thinking than I have been able to put into this topic, I am sure one could come up with some. My instinct is SEC regulating the tokenomics to maximize transparency and force the creators to release the tokens in a way that won’t allow them to “rug pull” would be a good starting point. I think I would not be opposed to such relegations in any collectibles market, making the regulations logically consistent.
Regarding the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter was forced to sell his peanut farm to avoid conflicts of interest. I think that anyone who becomes the president of the United States should have to liquidate their whole net worth — collectibles and all — and put it into an independent fund that they have no control over. They will then get a set percentage amount of money from this fund every year, and everything left over when they die goes to their presidential library. They are not allowed to take money from anywhere else ever again. That would fix this corruption problem for good and has the added benefit of deterring people from running who just want to use the office for their own personal gain.
The only reason he tried to get out of it was because tech stocks tanked shortly after the bid and he knew he could have gotten it for far cheaper than the $44B. The entire time it was happening I was convinced that if he could get out of the bid he would immediately make another one for around $30B and still buy his favorite addiction. People like him and their motivations aren't that hard to read.
He wasn't _forced_ to buy anything. He was forced to pay what he promised for it.
I wonder if this effect can be explained by the we form the "bouba"/"kiki" sounds when we speak them. "Kiki" has a sharper enunciation when using your tongue and mouth to form it, while "bouba" feels more like an open round one.
This question narrows the scope of "safety" to something less than what the people at SD or even probably what OP cares about. _Non-random_ CSAM requests targeting potentially real people is the obvious answer here, but even non-CSAM sexual content is also a probably a threat. I can understand frustration with it currently going overboard on blurring, but removing safety checks altogether would result in SD mainly being associated with porn pretty quickly, which I'm sure Stability AI wants to avoid for the safety of their company.
Add to that, parents who want to avoid having their kids generate sexual content would now need to prevent their kids from using this tool because it can create it randomly, limiting SD usage to kids 18+ (which is probably something else Stability AI does not want to deal with.)
It's definitely a balance between going overboard and having restrictions though. I haven't used SD in several months now so I'm not sure where that balance is right now.
> non-CSAM sexual content is also a probably a threat
To whom? SD's reputation, perhaps - but that ship has already sailed with 1.x. That aside, why is generated porn threatening? If anything, anti-porn crusaders ought to rejoice, given that it doesn't involve actual humans performing all those acts.
As I said, it means parents who don't want their young children seeing porn (whether you agree with them or not) would no longer be able to let their children use SD. I'm not making a statement on what our society should or shouldn't allow, I'm pointing out what _is currently_ the standard in the United States and many other, more socially conservative, countries. SD would become more heavily regulated, an 18+ tool in the US, and potentially banned in other countries.
You can have your own opinion on it, but surely you can see the issue here?
I can definitely see an argument for a "safe" model being available for this scenario. I don't see why all models SD releases should be so neutered, however.
How many of those parents would have the technical know-how to stop their lids from playing with SD? Give the model some “I am over 18” checkbox fig leaf and let them have their fun.
> The harm to society of people who need them not getting pain drugs far outweighs the pain to society of those who don’t need them abusing them.
How do you measure that? Opioid overdoses accounted for at least 72,800 deaths last year [0] and there are countless more addicts out there whose entire lives are ruined because of that addiction. Many of those people, if they ever recover, will never take opioids again for any real medical pain relief like you did for your wisdom teeth because of the very real risk of relapse. Additionally, opioid withdrawal is, according to almost everyone who's gone through it, is one of the worst experiences you can feel.
I'm not taking the side that it definitely doesn't outwheigh the need of those who genuinely need them. On the whole I actually probably agree with that. But stating that so confidently and ignoring the very real pain, lost lives, and broken families caused by opioid addiction because you had your wisdom teeth pulled and wanted opioids feels pretty dismissive and not a serious argument.
The incidence rate is per year and the study was over an average of 32 years per patient. At that rate you'd expect around 105 incidents instead of 4, although there are other considerations like age to take into account.
Social media companies becoming more consolidated and influential might be legal and good for their stakeholders but it doesn't mean it's a net positive for the rest of the world. And unfortunately, as much as so many people like to believe otherwise, being a net negative to society absolutely does not lead to a company becoming irrelevant.