It's just American custom to exclude some taxes from the posted price. Many countries include all taxes in the price, something I've always wished we would do in America. After that, I'd love to see the elimination of the custom of always ending fuel cost per gallon in 9/10 of a cent.
Rounding sales tax on each item will often result in a different price than rounding once for the total. The store will collect the wrong amount of tax that way.
They're saying include the sales tax in the price and set the item's price such that the sum of price + all taxes is an even increment of 5 cents. Gets a little tricky with fractional sales taxes but that's only a problem where POS systems strictly enforce 2 digit cents (not sure if that's the case).
Come on, this is not complicated. It's elementary algebra. You sum the rounded prices, then add a credit or surcharge of 2 cents to make the tax come out to a round number.
The tax is on the actual, real amount in your transaction subtotal. You are charged sales tax on the actual, real money you pay for the entire transaction. Then you multiply by 1.06 or whatever the tax rate is. That's how sales tax works.
If one rearranges the equations as we all learned in 5th grade, one can compute the amount that the subtotal must be to get a round number after tax. Then you charge or credit the customer the difference.
Alternatively, the retailer can simply pay the 4 cent difference in sales tax.
That's it. You either do algebra or just pay the difference. It is not complicated.
You have to do this algebra per state and locale, and your reward is higher advertised prices than the shop next door. I think you both underestimate the problem and overestimate everyone involved in retail, especially the consumer.
I’m not saying it’s hard, I’m saying there is enough friction where it’s just not going to happen without legislation mandating it.
Well, this is happening without legislation mandating it (that’s kinda the problem, our federal legislature doesn’t legislate much and is being largely ignored)
I don’t see why that would be the case? In my country, most prices with VAT (which is what you’re charged) are nice, round numbers, but not the price without VAT.
I suppose the stores set a target price, and then adjust it a bit to make the price + VAT a “nice” number.
Is there a reason that couldn’t be done to make all prices + VAT multiples of 5c?
The local tax is set by multiple independent tax authorities that change their taxes independently, the tax you see is the aggregate of those independent authorities computed separately, which do not coordinate with each other.
Some of these taxes are conditional at point-of-sale, late-binding the taxes, such that different customers are subject to different rates across these tax authorities such that it is unlikely to round to exactly 5c.
It is widely illegal to not display the true price and taxes paid separately. Trying to retcon a price and taxes for rounding purposes that is also strictly consistent across customers so as to not violate the law is not trivial.
And on top of all of this, the Federal government does not have the authority to regulate the way States and various locales structure their sales taxes. It is a herding cats problem.
> It is widely illegal to not display the true price and taxes paid separately. Trying to retcon a price and taxes for rounding purposes that is also strictly consistent across customers so as to not violate the law is not trivial.
Having lived in Europe, this should be changed. It makes it infeasible to keep track of your total bill as you shop. The amount without tax should be printed on the receipt, if you care to reference it.
The issue is that the legal change would have to be made independently across thousands of decentralized tax authorities. Herding that many cats is infeasible so it can't be part of a plausible solution. In some jurisdictions, the legal process required to make the changes have effectively insurmountable voting thresholds.
It may not be convenient but any realistic solution has to recognize the hard facts that shape the nature of problem.
Having lived in Europe and New Hampshire, I much prefer New Hampshire's solution to the problem. Just abolish sales tax! Its annoying for everyone involved. The state can get enough money from income tax. There's no need to double-dip.
I think that's what has to happen here. Things will be priced in such a way that the final price is a multiple of 5. That's a pretty easy thing for an inventory pricing system can figure out. We already do it for fractions of a penny, not sure why it would be a big deal for a fraction of a nickel
Lots of localities total taxes aren't whole percentages so it potentially gets tricky making prices work in those systems such that you can make whole 5 cent tax included prices with whole cent base prices. Do most POS systems support arbitrary precision item prices?
> Is there a reason that couldn’t be done to make all prices + VAT multiples of 5c?
Yes, there are reasons that can't be done.
We don't have VAT in the States; we instead [usually] have sales tax.
And therein: We have something like twelve thousand different sales tax districts, all set at different percentages by combinations of states, counties and municipalities.
Some cities have multiple sales tax rates even within their bounds. My own tiny little city is at the intersection of 3 different counties, and has 3 different sales tax rates: A store on one side of the road has a different tax rate than a store on the other side, and one down the block a ways has yet a third rate.
This reality doesn't have to be ideal. It doesn't have to make sense. This is what we have whether it is awesome or terrible or some combination of both.
It would take a monumental amount of effort to unwind all of that and turn it into something nationally-unified like VAT. This process would take a very long time (perhaps decades), in part because some states don't have sales tax at all and introducing a uniform VAT would represent a very different way for them to go about the ways in which they conduct both commerce and taxation.
---
Of course, there's other ways to inject something sane and predictable in the decommissioning of the penny, and there's a number of of them mentioned elsewhere in other comments. But using any of them would have required utilizing an ounce of planning or forethought, and we didn't do "planning" or "forethought" here.
The decision to stop producing came from On High, and was presented in the form of a social media post[1] from the President that declared that it simply would be this way. There was no public planning or discourse involved.
We can talk about whether that's an awesome or terrible way to enact policies, but it doesn't really matter because that business has already been concluded -- with all of the swiftness and grace of eating a ham sandwich.
IIRC, in New York it’s illegal to absorb sales tax on individual items because by law it’s a consumer tax collected by the business and explicitly not a tax on the business itself, but - and it’s a pretty big exception - anything sold as a bulk good can include the tax in the price. That includes things like liquid fuels, grains or candy by the scoop in the supermarket, loose sand/gravel/salt/whatever for outdoor use, and things like that. It’s been a long while since I had to set up an ecommerce site for New York though.
Who actually pays the tax depends on the Elasticity of the consumer and the business. Who the law says it should be collected from, is really irrelevant.
The law only says by whom and how the tax is collect, it doesn't specify the tax burden, because it can't, that's only observable and happens due to supply and demand.
The guidance published by the state says explicitly that a business collects the tax from the consumer as an agent of the state, and that the taxes collected belong to the state rather than to the business. If it was a tax on the business, then it could be paid later out of the business’s general funds.
Whether you believe the above or not - and I’m not going to discuss that part further, because this is all easy to find online - the fact remains that most sales taxes must be charged separately from the product price at checkout. There are, as I said, exceptions for bulk goods.
More specifically, if Americans stopped have a daily reminder of how much is paid in taxes (which IMO isn't egregious by any stretch), one party would have a tougher time whipping anti-tax sentiment.
I don't think this will happen in our lifetimes. It's like not moving the day hour ahead/behind twice a year. A wholly stupid idea that will likely never be fixed on the federal level because of inertia.
Just show the price including tax. (half-sarcastic, because obviously that would be an unpopular change for sellers because it makes the visible number go up, but it would solve two problmes...)
They could still set the post-tax price to something that results in round numbers, at downside of the pre-tax price having more decimals.
With a tax rate as precise as 1000ths of a percent in many jurisdictions*, you'd need extreme precision on the price tag (e.g. $11.798625), OR you need to substantially overcharge for tax (rounding up the tax to the penny or nickel on each individual item, instead of on the total of ALL items).
And sales tax rates can even be different from ONE CITY BLOCK TO THE NEXT.
Since that is a state thing, it can never happen and is likely outside the power of Congress to enforce, especially with our current activist federal supreme court.
So, lobby for changes to the structure of those taxes so that's not a problem. Tthe simple solution is changing them from surcharges adding a percent onto posted prices to making them a percentage taken out of the posted price; so that coin availability is only an issue in the improbable event that you are paying your sales tax bill in cash.
Of course, retailers don't want tax-inclusive posted prices, but... ::shrug::
Well I'm guessing that's about to change isn't it? unless you always pay by card, and I don't think that is the intent of this law. I assume they will always just round up and make citizens suck it up, because laws general favor the business and corporate classes, at least the recent ones.
Yes, stores are dealing with this alongside a whole legal framework today. They would not have the benefit of that for any changes without pennies, and in a few cases may open themselves to legal liability by underpaying state sales tax, overcharging snap recipients, etc etc. We don’t know because this was just a tweet decree by the executive while the legislature has been paralyzed.
The situation where pennies exist already has all the problems concerning rounding after sales tax. Things are rounded to whole pennies. The same solutions can be applied to round things to whole nickels.
With some 5th grade algebra, one can adjust the total of a transaction to result in a round number after taxes.
Besides that, the law (at least where I live) is that the tax must be paid, but it does not specify by whom. It's completely feasible for a retailer to pay the 2 cent difference in the tax and charge the customer a round number.
Is this really the state of American education where a percentage calculation makes a very simple situation literally impossible? You can think of no other way to overcome the complicated calculations of checks notes x times 1.06?
Even with just a 6% tax, you end up with prices that need 4 digits of precision after the decimal (e.g.: $11.6494). That issue extends over a wide range of pre-tax/input prices, so one would have to DRASTICALLY change the prices so that the price including 6% tax rounds to even a penny, let alone a nickel.
While you could calculate a price that (after tax) would round a single item to the nearest nickel, it's completely IMPOSSIBLE to do so with unknown numbers of multiple items.
In addition, tax rates in the real world aren't just single-digit percentages. They have precision of 1/1000th of a percent, making such a calculation much more challenging.
Arizona: 10.725%
Hawaii: 4.712%
Minnesota: 7.875%
etc.
And sales tax rates can be different from ONE CITY BLOCK TO THE NEXT, so a company with more than one location would find it IMPOSSIBLE to advertise their prices at all.
Types help the programmer. When the compiler gives me a type error, it is telling me about something I messed up and that would otherwise be an error at runtime. Sometimes the type system is wrong and I need an escape hatch. A type system that is wrong too often isn't very useful. For the majority of exceptions, there no useful thing that can be done at the call site to deal with them beyond bubbling them up the stack. A type system that constantly makes me explicitly deal with such errors is making my job harder, not easier.
There are plenty of errors/exceptions that don't need to be bubbled up the call stack. I don't think that's the main issue with them. Like you say the issue with checked exceptions is that there is no escape hatch to shut the compiler up and panic if you can't handle an error or its not possible. They desperately need a short hand like Rust's ?, Swift's try?, or Kotlin's !!.
A a;
try {
a = someFnToGetA();
} catch (AException aex) {
// not possible in this situation
throw new RuntimeException(aex);
}
In a modern language that has checked errors that just becomes something like:
val a = try! someFnToGetA();
val a = someFnToGetA()!!
As another example, the exception type hierarchy doesn't pull enough weight. Exception is the base class of all checked exceptions and RuntimeException is the base class of all "ordinary" unchecked exceptions, but it confusingly subclasses Exception. So there's no way to catch only "all checked exceptions". Then, Error is distinct from that hierarchy, but some things that smell like errors were made into exceptions instead (e.g. NullPointerException).
This was compounded by the fact that, in the original design, you could only call out one exception type in a catch statement. So if you had 3 different disjoint exception types that you simply wanted to wrap and rethrow, you had to write 3 different catch blocks for them. Java 7 added the ability to catch multiple exceptions in the same block, but it was too little, too late (as far as redeeming checked exceptions goes).
> So if you had 3 different disjoint exception types that you simply wanted to wrap and rethrow, you had to write 3 different catch blocks for them.
Agreed. There's a proposal for exception catching in switch [0] which I'm hopeful will alleviate a lot of this. I think that jep plus combining exceptions with sealed types the error handling will be convenient and easy.
sealed abstract class SomeException extends Exception permits AException, BException {};
void someFn() throws SomeException;
// hypothetically handling in switch would let you enumerate the subtypes of the exception
var a = switch (someFn()) {
case A a -> a;
case throws AException aex -> new A();
case throws BException bex -> throw new RuntimeException(bex);
};
> As another example, the exception type hierarchy doesn't pull enough weight.
Kotlin has an interesting proposal for their language that creates their own "error" type that will allow type unions [1]. The only thing I worry about is that it further puts Kotlin away from Java making interop a lot harder.
which mattered because everyone pulls from master, because xorg stopped doing proper releases. it's certainly something to bear in mind if you intend to run xlibre though.
I don't think "everyone" pulls from master - "everyone" run the distributions, and they always pin to the specific git commits. Only people who run xorg master are the ones who want bleeding edge, and those would be using it no matter release or not.
And it's not like metux will suddenly become more careful just because he does not have to worry about other anymore. If anything, I expect there to be much faster changes and much more breaking things... Here is a great quote [0]
> @metux that you've had to fix this bug twice (!1844 (merged), !1845 (merged)) shows a lack of attention and care. This was a known regression, with clear reproduction steps, and at first glance, it does not look like you tested your PR at all.
> And that goes in general; I really haven't seen the level of care and attention I would expect to see in these patches; several of them had obvious buffer overflow issues that would have easily been caught if tested.
I'm not even trying to say they shouldn't have kicked him out, just that it had nothing to do with wokeness, and more to do with philosophy of how the project should be run.
> an ipo is a way to seek more capital. they don't think they can achieve agi solely through private investment.
private deals are becoming bigger than public deals recently. so perhaps the IPO market is not a larger source of capital. different untapped capital, maybe, but probably not larger.
> In my opinion, the fact erotic literature exists is proof aphantasia is not normal. Words cannot be arousing if you cannot imagine things "in your mind's eye".
The opposite seems to follow? erotic literature is proof you don't need images to be aroused.
Hmm, no? The words must elicit images and sensations, otherwise they wouldn't work as erotica. Words are just words. If you cannot picture what they are describing, you cannot get aroused.
> If you cannot picture what they are describing, you cannot get aroused.
This is your thesis. In the first place, the existence of erotic literature doesn't prove this is true, like you claimed. I would furthermore claim that it calls this assumption into question. If the goal was imagery, the more straightforward approach would be to draw an image. If that wasn't possible, you would instead describe the image you wanted to draw in words in great detail. But this isn't at all what most erotica consists of.
> In the first place, the existence of erotic literature doesn't prove this is true, like you claimed
Everything we are discussing in this comments section must be understood in an informal way. I obviously did not "prove" anything; I don't think anything can be proven about this anyway. Whenever I say "proof", read my statements as "[in my opinion] this is strong evidence that [thing]".
It's a figure of speech: "this cannot be so!", "it must be like this other thing", etc. It's informal conversation.
> If the goal was imagery, the more straightforward approach would be to draw an image.
Maybe straightforward, but as with anything related to the phenomenon of closure (as in Scott McCloud's closure), drawing an image closes doors. If you describe but don't draw an image, the reader is free to conjure their own image. Maybe they visualize a more attractive person than the artist would have drawn, or simply the kind of person they would be more attracted to.
Have you never seen a movie adaptation after reading the book and thought "wait, this wasn't how I imagined this character"?
> If that wasn't possible, you would instead describe the image you wanted to draw in words in great detail. But this isn't at all what most erotica consists of.
That's such a mechanistic description! Words don't work like this. Sometimes describing less is better, because the human brain fills in the gaps. You don't simply list physical attributes in an analytical way, you instead conjure sensory stimulus for the reader.
(If talking about sex and adjacent activities makes anybody nervous, simply replace this with literature about food. In order to make somebody's mouth water you cannot simply list ingredients; you must evoke imagery and taste. Then again, some people -- aphantasiacs -- simply cannot "taste" the food in textual descriptions!).
They're remarkably standoffish outside of the city. They'll scurry as soon as you come close, unless they're nesting, at which point they stand forlorn a marked distance away from their nest waiting for you to leave.
Oddly enough, within town, they're remarkably tame. Maybe with enough humans around, they learn that we're not a threat, and it's costly to evade a non threat. Likewise the turkeys. My daily bike commute goes past a public golf course, and there's usually a pair of cranes there, sometimes with little ones. They ignore me.
I suspect that depends on the nesting status. Long ago I worked in an office building where a mated pair would frequently raise their chicks outside the front door, and before the eggs hatched they would aggressively harass anyone walking to the building.
there's an extension called "ad nauseum". this is it's goal. it doesn't seem to have destroyed the ad economy yet, but maybe if more people install it it will
for whatever reason you can't get it on the chrome addon store.
Ahhh, interesting, hadn't heard of it. I think that an extension-based approach is too easy to mitigate, though. I think to be effective, it would need to be people clicking on the adds themselves, because it would be much harder to separate their traffic from legitimate traffic. When people are manually clicking ads, their traffic looks organic, whereas an extension clicking everything in rapid succession probably looks programmatic and would be trivial to filter out.
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