We used to not pay anything for stuff, for instance I bought items that were dropped shipped from China under a certain value but that has ended. https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/trump-tariffs-trade-war-sto...
Sales taxes are on a state by state basis and online companies are required to collect it from the buyer and forward/report it to the state. Local purchases all have sales tax paid to state governments, some to city in urban areas. Some food items are exempt. A state can choose to not have a sales tax but most do IIRC. There is no federal sales tax. Until these tariffs which are essentially taxes.
The US doesn't have an equivalent to VAT. Sales taxes at are at the level of states and cities. VAT would be in effect a federal sales tax, which the US doesn't have.
Since different states had widely varying sales taxes (ranging from 0% to 8%), for people living close to state lines, it sometimes makes sense to buy items just across the line to avoid sales tax. Although some business/individuals would get in trouble for deliberately evading sales taxes, as you are technically supposed to report on taxes.
This created a problem with online retailers, who were essentially avoiding sales taxes. Legislation in the mid 2010s changed that, the law is somewhat complicated but generally the sales tax is collected where the business "resides", which could be multiple jurisdictions. If there is any "office" in a state, all purchases originating from within that state have to pay that states sales taxes.
The linked article is written in an absurd way. Clockwise is not a fundamental measurement, it's relative to the viewer.
What the original article explains, is that this is relative to our observer point of view (obviously).
It's still very interesting, since, disregarding any potential interaction in our local group, randomness was expected and we should see around 50/50 rotating either way unless one of the explanations came into play.
I don't believe there's a single person in the USA that's so poor they can't pay $3 for toothpaste every 3 months. I also believe that having such a low personal hygiene where you don't brush your teeth altogether, even if you drink water with fluoride, will have terrible results anyway for your teeth anyway.
I'm completely sure that any people that don't brush their teeth is just because they are too lazy to even bother.
This trope of justifying everything with "but there are millions of poor people in the USA" is really tiresome.
It's not that they can't afford a $3 toothpaste, it is the environment they are in that makes it hard to prioritize things like this. It is the education and the overall life quality (or the lack there of) that causes this problem.
There's no such thing as "free" when something is "given" by a public entity. It always costs the people that actually work and are forcibly taxed, something.
They aren’t really scientists though, they are social “scientists”. I.E. someone that feels the need to validate their pseudo science as actual science in order to fake credibility.
I think there is a lot of denial going around right now.
The present path of IA is nothing short of revolutionary, a lot of jobs and industries are going to suffer a major upheaval and a lot of people are just living in some wishful thinking moment where it will all go away.
I see people complaining it gives them bad results. Sure it does, so all other parsed information we get. It’s our job to check it ourselves. Still , the amount of time it saves me, even if I have to correct it is huge.
A can give an example that has nothing to do with work. I was searching for the smallest miniATX computer cases that would accept at least 3 HDDs (3.5”). The amount of time LLMs saved me is staggering.
Sure, there was one wrong result in the mix, and sure, I had to double check all the cases myself, but, just not having to go through dozens of cases, find the dimensions, calculate the volume, check the HDDs in difficult to read (and sometimes obtain) pages, saved days of work - yes I had done a similar search completely manually about 5 years ago.
This is a personal example, I also have others at work.
Did it really shatter their self image, or it just made every Dane realize that the tabu their society created against speaking badly on the absurdity high taxation they face is actually felt by everyone that is a net contributor of their system?
The middle class citizen in most of Europe is now paying more than 50% of their earnings to the state. I don’t believe a single one actually believes this is anything fair and many surely think it’s oppressive and a form of slavery.
There are only 3 kinds of people that defend these outrageously high taxes:
- the ones that are a net negative to the system
- populist politicians
- people that are indoctrinated to virtue signal about the theme, but that don’t actually believe in it (the ones in the video)
We are really living in the Dictatorship of the Majority.
My immediate thought when reading this was that the number of people is much higher today than 50 years ago, but before my kneejerk reaction I decided to check the math. Assuming the results of a quick google can be trusted, we have around 4 billion more people today than 50 years ago, which means that entire percent of the population growth in the past 50 years are people in slavery. That's staggeringly higher than I would have estimated before reading any of this.
Colonization has only ended in express terms. In many parts of the world, including essentially all of the developing nations where slavery has expanded in the past half-century, the dominant economic activity are forms of extraction at the behest either multinationals, OPEC, China, or USA.
If you consider these imperial powers to be ultimately responsible for the mode of production in the countries that they trade with, does it not stand to reason that they have some obligation to assume responsibility for the governance, policy, and policing of these countries?
The Americans are not (to my knowledge) pointing a gun at Bangladeshi sweatshop owners and telling them “You must produce a quota by whatever means necessary.” The Americans might be benefitting from this arrangement, but if they refused to buy these products, it’s not like slave labor would disappear; it would just be redeployed into other sectors. The countries where this slavery occurs have to bear some level of responsibility for the things they permit to happen within their own borders, otherwise they were never sovereign countries to begin with, and they ought to be colonized by those powerful enough to enforce the rule of law.
I think GIMP could become a big proper competitor to commercial photo editors just like Blender did on the 3D space, as soon as they go the Blender way and do a complete overhaul of the UX/UI like Blender did.
I remember, for years and years, trying Blender and quitting it due to the terrible UX choices. Likewise, I also remember the devs and some older users on the internet trying, at every turn, to tell us how much superior Blender UI/UX was, that all the people were wrong and they were right. They weren't right, of course. Then the team at Blender finally accepted it, they did a complete redo of the UX/UI and now Blender is winning prizes at the Oscars.
The same could happen to GIMP if they just accepted the UX is terrible.
I'm saying this, totally agreeing that these devs did a fantastic job and that they don't owe us anything. This is open source, of course. But, this level of stubbornness, is preventing GIMP from being used by a lot more people that want to finally ditch Photoshop.
For Blender it wasn't just the UI, it was great leadership, direction, focus and decision making that got it where it is today. This culture started attracting more talent in both users and new developers.
Gimp UI is like every image editor since 1985, and uses CUA keybindings. It has nothing to fix on the level of Blender’s drag with wrong mouse button mistakes.
So, when I sell something to the USA (on eBay) for instance. It doesn’t pay VAT automatically. Do Americans pay VAT when it’s delivered?
But, when an American buys something locally, they do pay VAT, correctly?