IANAL, but I assume this could open Wikimedia leadership to charges of contempt and eventually lead to needing to avoid visiting the UK or other extraditing countries and potentially pave the way for asset seizures. You generally don't want to antagonize world power governments.
That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not wikimedia’s responsibility to ensure people from the UK don’t hit their servers by typing wikipedia.org into the browser bar.
That does make sense, but then that would mean that any business not doing business in UK would not have to follow the rule, which would make the rule worthless. But I hope I am wrong.
"It doesn’t matter where you or your business is based. The new rules will apply to you (or your business) if the service you provide has a significant number of users in the UK, or if the UK is a target market."
I’m sure that they can write that. But their actual enforcement mechanism is nonexistent. No country is going to work with the UK to arrest someone that does that when the same thing isn’t illegal under their own law.
Assuming that RFC1918 addresses mean "local" network is wrong. It means "private". Many large enterprises use RFC1918 for private, internal web sites.
One internal site I spend hours a day using has a 10.x.x.x IP address. The servers for that site are on the other side of the country and are many network hops away. It's a big company, our corporate network is very very large.
A better definition of "local IP" would be whether the IP is in the same subnet as the client, i.e. look up the client's own IP and subnet mask and determine if a packet to a given IP would need to be routed through the default gateway.
The computer I use at work (and not only mine, many many of them) has a public IP address. Many internal services are on 10.0.0.0/8. How is this being taken into account?
10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16 are all private addresses per RFC1918 and documents superseding it(5735?). If it's like 66.249.73.128/27 or 164.13.12.34/12, those are "global" IP.
Yes that's the point: many of our work PCs have global public IPs from something like 128.130.0.0/15 (not this actual block, but something similar), and many internal services are on 10.0.0.0/8. I'm not sure I get exactly how the proposal is addressing this. How does it know that 128.130.0.0/15 is actually internal and should be considered for content loaded from an external site?
The proposal doesn't need to address this because it doesn't even consider the global public IP of 128.130.0.0/15 in your example. If you visit a site on 10.0.0.0/8 that accesses resources on 10.0.0.0/8 it's allowed. But if you visit a random other site on the internet it will be (by default) forbidden to access the internal resource at 10.0.0.0/8.
My reading is this just adds a dialog box before browser loads RFC1918 ranges. At IP layer, a laptop with 128.130.0.123 on wlan0 should not be able to access 10.0.10.123:80, but I doubt they bother to sanity check that. Just blindly assuming all RFC1918 and only RFC1918 are local should do the job for quite a while.
btw, I've seen that kind of network. I was young, and it took me a while to realize that they DHCP assign global IPs and double NAT it. That was weird.
People believe that "my computer" or "my smartphone" has an Internet address, but this is a simplification of how it's really working.
The reality is that each network interface has at least one Internet address, and these should usually all be different.
An ordinary computer at home could be plugged into Ethernet and active on WiFi at the same time. The Ethernet interface may have an IPv4 address and a set of IPv6 addresses, and belong to their home LAN. The WiFi adapter and interface may have a different IPv4 address, and belongs to the same network, or some other network. The latter is called "multi-homing".
If you visit a site that reveals your "public" IP address(es), you may find that your public, routable IPv4 and/or IPv6 addresses differ from the ones actually assigned to your interfaces.
In order to be compliant with TCP/IP standards, your device always needs to respond on a "loopback" address in 127.0.0.0/8, and typically this is assigned to a "loopback" interface.
A network router does not identify with a singular IP address, but could answer to dozens, when many interface cards are installed. Linux will gladly add "alias" IPv4 addresses to most interface devices, and you'll see SLAAC or DHCPv6 working when there's a link-local and perhaps multiple routable IPv6 addresses on each interface.
The GP says that their work computer has a [public] routable IP address. But the same computer could have another interface, or even the same interface has additional addresses assigned to it, making it a member of that private 10.0.0.0/8 intranet. This detail may or may not be relevant to the services they're connecting to, in terms of authorization or presentation. It may be relevant to the network operators, but not to the end-user.
So as a rule of thumb: your device needs at least one IP address to connect to the Internet, but that address is associated with an interface rather than your device itself, and in a functional system, there are multiple addresses being used for different purposes, or held in reserve, and multiple interfaces that grant the device membership on at least one network.
Is it a gross generalization to say that if you're visiting a site whose name resolves to a private IP address, it's a part of the same organizational entity as your computer is?
The proposal here would consider that site local and thus allowed to talk to local. What are the implications? Your employer whose VPN you're on, or whose physical facility you're located in, can get some access to the LAN where you are.
In the case where you're a remote worker and the LAN is your private home, I bet that the employer already has the ability to scan your LAN anyway, since most employers who are allowing you onto their VPN do so only from computers they own, manage, and control completely.
> Is it a gross generalization to say that if you're visiting a site whose name resolves to a private IP address, it's a part of the same organizational entity as your computer is?
Yes. That's a gross generalization.
I support applications delivered via site-to-site VPN tunnels hosted by third parties. In the Customer site the application is accessed via an RFC 1918 address. It is is not part of the Customer's local network, however.
Likewise, I support applications that are locally-hosted but Internet facing and appear on a non-RFC1918 IP address even though the server is local and part of the Customer's network.
Access control policy really should be orthogonal to network address. Coupling those two will enivtably lead to mismatches to work around. I would prefer some type of user-exposed (and sysadmin-exposed, centrally controllable) method for declaring the network-level access permitted by scripts (as identified by the source domain, probably).
Don't some internet providers to large scale NAT (CGNAT), so customers each get a 10.x address instead of a public one? I'm not sure if this is a problem or not. It sounds like it could be.
It wouldn’t be important in this scenario, because what your own IP address is doesn’t matter (and most of us are sitting behind a NAT router too, after all).
It would block a site from scanning your other 10.x peers on the same network segment, thinking they’re “on your LAN” but that’s not a problem in my humble opinion.
Many years ago, before it was dropped, IP version 6 had a concept of "site local" addresses, which (if it had applied to version 4) would have encompassed the corporate intranet addresses that you are talking about. Routed within the corporate intranet; but not routed over corporate borders.
Think of this proposal's definition of "local" (always a tricky adjective in networking, and reportedly the proposers here have bikeshedded it extensively) as encompassing both Local Area Network addresses and non-LAN "site local" addresses.
fd00::/8 (within fc00::/7) is still reserved for this purpose (site-local IPv6 addressing).
fc00::/8 (a network block for a registry of organisation-specific assignments for site-local use) is the idea that was abandoned.
Roughly speaking, the following are analogs:
169.254/16 -> fe80::/64 (within fe80::/10)
10/8, 172.16/12, 192.168/16 -> a randomly-generated network (within fd00::/8)
For example, a service I maintain that consists of several machines in a partial WireGuard mesh uses fda2:daf7:a7d4:c4fb::/64 for its peers. The recommendation is no larger than a /48, so a /64 is fine (and I only need the one network, anyway).
So in my case, I guess I need to blame the unconfigurable cable router my ISP provided me with? Since there's no way to provide reservations for IPv6 addresses. :-/
Right. OpenWRT, for example, will automatically generate a random /48 within fd00::/8 to use as a ULA (unique local addressing) prefix for its LAN interfaces, and will advertise those prefixes to its clients. You can also manually configure a specific prefix instead.
e.g. Imagine the following OpenWRT setup:
ULA: fd9e:c023:bb5f::/48
(V)LAN 1: IPv6 assignment hint 1, suffix 1
(V)LAN 2: IPv6 assignment hint 2, suffix ffff
Clients on LAN 1 would be advertised the prefix fd9e:c023:bb5f:1::/64 and automatically configure addresses for themselves within it. The router itself would be reachable at fd9e:c023:bb5f:1::1.
Clients on LAN 2 would be advertised the prefix fd9e:c023:bb5f:2::/64 and automatically configure addresses for themselves within it. The router itself would be reachable at fd9e:c023:bb5f:2::ffff.
Clients on LAN 1 could communicate with clients on LAN 2 (firewall permitting) and vice versa by using these ULA addresses, without any IPv6 WAN connectivity or global-scope addresses.
I don't think OP was specifically stating we need to save these specific jobs, rather they were pointing out the interconnected nature of the economy. Less importing hurts the workers in those industries. Taking that further, it will hurt businesses near the ports where the workers may have gotten lunch, etc. etc. etc. That's how recessions look at a microeconomic scale.
I'm fine with this as long as they include the tariff in the listed price.
I'm worried businesses are going to use tariffs as an excuse to have a fake list price, then hit you with massive hidden fees at the point of sale.
Some sectors have been doing this for years - "service fees" at restaurants, "regulatory response fees" in the telecom industry, all sorts of nonsense in event ticketing.
Physical goods have mostly been spared this type of fake pricing - aside from sales tax not being included, but that's been universally true in the US forever so everyone is used to it.
Tariffs could be the end of that if businesses see sales plummet. Especially because these scams actually work - the reason restaurants give for not just increasing their menu prices is because higher listed prices drive people away.
Bump em because of tariffs, bump em some more to pad the margins because what is an extra 5%, bump em even when they're not affected by tariffs because everyone else is doing so, and delay un-bumping them once tariffs fall again.
Yup. My grocery store raised bananas from 49¢/pound to 55¢/pound this week, with a sign about 10% tariffs… but the tariff would be on their wholesale costs, not the shelf costs. They're probably paying 1-2¢/pound extra.
People have a hard enough time understanding who pays tariffs. Stores'll be able to muddy the waters this way pretty much at will.
Grocery stores have famously low margins. Everyone thinks they’re cash cows, but they have some of the thinnest profit margins of common consumer businesses.
Stores often sell common staples like bananas, generic milk, and other basics at close to cost. They’re the things that get people in the door. They make their profit on things like cereal, deli meats, packaged goods, and other non-staple items that people also buy once they’re inside.
It’s similar to how many gas stations compete on cost of gas to get people there, but hope that you’ll stop inside and get a $6 drink or some $5 packaged snacks.
Then you have to consider all of the other things that go into a store are also tariffed. The parts for the trucks that transport the bananas have tariffs. Many of their cleaning supplies. Parts for the checkout registers. The light bulbs they have to replace. Many of those tariffs could be well over 100%. They have to make up that price in the cost of bananas and everything else.
I moved to the USA from Belgium, and in the USA I have also seen that the lessee of said space stocks the shelves.
Of course, I didn't know this, which was very weird when I saw someone those stocking shelves, only to be met with a 'sorry, I don't work here' response when asking them a question.
It depends. Some companies choose to stock shelves themselves in order to make sure their products are properly stocked. Coke/Pepsi and their subsidiaries are this way. It ensures that old out of date product isn’t getting shoved to the back of a shelf, allows them to keep a better track on refills (thus an estimate of sales), so on and so forth. In other cases, the store sometimes requires it to alleviate their own stocking burdens. The vendors are also generally the ones who set up the sale advertisement displays (end-cap or stand-alone). It tends to be a win-win because the vendor gets to advertise with a large display and the store may sell more product (and doesn’t have to set the crap up or take it down). Though, anything can be anything from store to store, so these aren’t “rules”.
Everything in the world makes more sense when you accept that it’s all supply and demand. The net worth of the family that owns the business is irrelevant.
Supply and demand can both be impacted by perception, which can be tweaked by humans.
If tariffs increase the wholesale cost of an item by $1, but you can make consumers think $5 retail is what the increase should be, that’s an extra $4 in your pocket.
Economics education doesn’t stop at 101 for a good reason. “Supply and demand” is like “veins carry deoxygenated blood” - it’s largely true, but further learning reveals complexity.
Yes. If people are unwilling to pay $5 more, they will buy less or buy none. That decreases profits due to decreased demand. Now there is more supply than demand, which means you need to make the purchase more attractive, which generally means spend more on advertisements/rebates, lowering the price to an acceptable rate or improve the product value. Or strike a balance where you shrink both the cost (size), and price, and advertise the cheaper price to make people think they are getting a better deal when they are really just buying less for the same price (or more). Round and round it goes; supply, demand, and misleading.
People should remember that it isn’t just the corporations who raise the price that are at fault, it is the people who are unwilling to go without it when the price is overinflated. Yes, then we nit-pick into things like medical necessity and … thus back to the point that it is both supply and demand, and not.
It's not a pity. It's a valuable tool to understand behavior as it relates to supply and demand.
Supply and demand isn't the only thing that exists, but basically everything else feeds into and informs it. It isn't the only starting position, but you can reach basically any point from it.
The chain, itself, did $11B in revenue in 2020 for its ~100 stores. It's privately held, largely by the family and their friends. I certainly don't doubt they've purchased other investments with the proceeds over time, but they're making plenty.
no - I guess that the massive net worth of that family is related to capital investments.. the value of the property that a store sits on, with no debt.. skillful use of traditional investment vehicles using a predictable cash flow. things like that. Many frugal and tireless small business in the large port city here in California fail.
Pretty sure those bananas are grown elsewhere. Hopefully we'll still be able to get bananas in the near future. At some point, buyer demand will drop so much it may not make sense to ship them.
Yes. But the tariffs are on the import price, not the shelf price.
The shelf price went up as if it were on the shelf price, because consumers won't realize/understand the distinction. (Hell, a good proportion of the population still thinks someone else eats the costs entirely.) We saw the same thing during COVID - "it's because of COVID / supply chain issues" was the magic wand you could wave around to raise prices. Some of those increases were warranted, for sure. But all? Almost certainly not.
But what do you mean by “warranted”? Businesses are free to set their prices as they see fit (with some caveats), and you generally expect them to do so in a way that maximizes profits.
The prices before these tariffs were arrived at by some confluence of factors such as cost and competition, it wasn’t some universally agreed “fair pricing” scheme that determined them. So what does it mean for a price to be warranted?
Now businesses have to raise prices because of the aforementioned tariffs, and, you speculate, they will add some extra margin because they think the customer is primed to accept higher prices right now than they’d normally be.
First of all, is that the end of the world? If this is only made possible because the wool has been pulled over the customer’s eyes, then at some point there will be a correction in the other direction - unless you’re saying that there is actual and widespread price-fixing (which is illegal and enforced as such). This particular mechanism on its own won’t cause prices to spiral out of control or anything.
Secondly, even if you think it is bad and don’t want it to happen, how would you prevent it? I can’t come up with a single feasible approach that isn’t basically halfway to socialism (which is fine if that’s your preference, but then that’s a larger conversation).
In this case, I believe many companies raised pricing more than they needed to, because people misattributed the source of those increases. If, say, ice cream doubled in price in normal times, people would cry foul. COVID gave an ironclad excuse.
> unless you’re saying that there is actual and widespread price-fixing (which is illegal and enforced as such)
I see very little evidence of this. We're great at innovating new ways to price fix without attracting (or successfully fighting off) regulatory attention.
Like outsourcing the price decisions to a third party…
Import price + margin (and that covers a lot of ground) = shelf price.
So the one is necessarily influence by the other. I'm not sure where the breakdown in your understanding is. Trying to make a distinction doesn't really make sense. Somebody IN THE UNITED STATES is taking the brunt of this. More often than not, it will be the end-consumer.
"We saw the same thing during COVID" hints that you might understand the larger picture. You're on the right track: This comes down to supply chain costs.
We haven't had 49 cent bananas in my market for a longtime, so I'm wondering if they were adjusting for tariffs as well as just general inflation at the same time (but the sign wouldn't be honest in that case).
Back when the price of crude oil was in the news a lot, if a rise was announced, gas stations would immediately hike prices, even though it takes like a month for the oil to be refined into gas and delivered to the station.
Inventory is priced and sold according to market conditions, not the cost of goods.
Everyone does this. If someone was trying to sell their old car and they saw news of upcoming tariffs on cars, they’d expect to sell their car at a higher price even though the tariffed cars haven’t arrived yet.
A second factor is that volatility and unpredictable policy raises risk, which increases prices. There will be a lot of price increases in excess of base tariff rates simply because everything is changing rapidly on the whims of this administration and businesses need more buffer for unexpected shocks.
If you’re a company who set up manufacturing in China, placed orders 4 months ago, and you’re watching the tariff rate change from 65% to 125% or more in the span of days with threats of more, you have to increase your prices a lot to have more buffer. Those parts you ordered now have an unpredictable price tags attached when they arrive at the port. It’s completely out of control.
Interestingly I’ve seen the exact opposite happen and cause major problems.
In Japan the US Military buys fuel and sets the price at its on base stations according to what they purchase it for. On several occasions when I lived there this resulted in the Base CO having to address everyone and tell them if they don’t buy the fuel (that is now significantly cheaper outside the gate) then the Exchange cannot buy new fuel, and they may have to shut the station down permanently.
It never came to that; everyone just went and paid the higher price for a tank and the issue was resolved.
My point is that trying to price a commodity that moves prices like that by a lagging indicator is a great way to capture business on one side and a great way to go bankrupt on the other.
That's perfectly rational though. Stuff is priced taking into account the current value, and a raising crude oil price immediately increases the value of the already refined product. Just like falling prices would immediately lower the value of the already refined product.
Do falling prices in crude oil reflect in gas prices as instantly as rising prices in crude oil do though? I think that asymmetry is what the poster was calling out. It lets resellers skim a bit of extra profit off of the volatility, by raising prices quickly but lagging on lowering them.
And i know i simplifying things A LOT here.. but that is the mentality behind it..
When crude oil price go up then gas station raise their prices because they know next they they buy it will be more expansive and they will need more money to afford it, so they raise their prices prices immediately..
On the other hand, if crude oil prices drop, it means that next time they buy it will be cheaper, but the gas they currently have was expensive, so they need to keep the prices up to recover what they already paid for it..
The price will rise until it gets high enough that the product of sales * price falls.
It has always been that way. Businesses haven’t been selling goods and services out of the goodness of their hearts at an arbitrary price. It’s always supply and demand.
Tariffs are expected to reduced demand because they increase prices. This is why the stock market is down and nearly every economist is calling the tariffs a big problem. Companies won’t have room to raise prices infinitely because they feel like it, because consumers are about to be able to afford fewer things because the things they need are getting more expensive.
Supply and demand is one driver of economic pricing, but not the only driver. Efficient pricing is a complex topic and not as black-and-white as it seems. As demand falls, the price may be expected to fall, but there is an inelastic limit set by material, labor, transport, and taxation cost. A company may elect to decrease their profit margin per sale to offset increased costs, but there is only so much margin to eat.
In the current circumstances, though, companies do not have a choice to lower prices. The basic cost of taking an item into inventory from these suppliers has risen significantly, in most cases well above 2024 margins.
The net effect is that, despite the market's best effort to correct prices to within an affordable range, costs may rise considerably and availability may still fall regardless. Under severe shock to the system, the usual maxims that account for nominal shifts in day to day trading no longer apply.
> Both supply and demand change depending on the price.
But that's a massive oversimplification. It's like saying programming is "just typing". Technically, sure; accurate, no. There's latency in the real world. Bad actors. Information asymmetries. Regulations. Monopolies. Stuff you can't do without and can't even always decline (ambulance ride for an unconscious person). Fake news about a supply crunch changes demand without changing supply for a while.
Most relevant in modern global economies: lack of available alternatives.
One of the primary reasons for combination in low-margin markets is to gain pricing power. And even if there are 2-5 entities in a given market, informal price collusion is far from unheard of.
It's a lot more complicated than that. Prices are sticky. When you raise prices, consumers notice and your sales go down. Therefore price changes are generally larger and less frequent than would be indicated by a pure supply & demand situation. And that's just one complication among many.
The demand side in particular can be tweaked by human factors, though. We have advertising because the level of demand isn't some fundamental cosmic constant of the universe like the speed of light.
"The price went up 10%, that must be the 10% tariffs" is something consumers will inherently understand… but it's not the case. The 10% is not on the on-the-shelf price; it's on the wholesale price the importer's charging. The $20 shirt at Old Navy is probably $4 (with $0.40 in tariffs added) for tariff purposes… but they'll add $2 to it anyways, because consumers will go "oh ok". There's a massive information asymmetry here.
The unpredictable nature of these specific tariffs is fairly unique, too. The rates change randomly, with zero warning, and how they're set isn't sensical. With ships across the ocean taking weeks, that's gonna chill the supply side as well.
We recently had a good article about the tariffs and the price of shoes here which had a good explanation for why the retail price goes up at the same rate as the tariff. Sorry I can't find and link it.
1. The average apparel retail store margin is nominally 50%, but half of that margin is given back to the consumer for their ubiquitous sales. So that $20 shirt costs the store $10, but the average selling price is actually $15. So if they directly pass through the 10% tariff, it adds $1 to the average $15 sale on that $20 shirt.
2. Increased prices reduce sales. Non-product costs are fairly fixed, so just passing through the tariffs will have a significant impact on store profitability. Retail stores are going bankrupt left and right in this Amazon age. They don't have the capacity to absorb increased costs, if they don't pass them on they'll just go bankrupt more quickly. So that $1 in tariffs turns into a $1.50 price increase.
Re: "You can get 2,000 calories for a couple bucks." Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Can you please let us know how can you get 2,000 calories for $2?
Rice bought in bulk can certainly be had for that price per calorie with some left over for a little protein. I don't recommend anyone follow such a diet though.
I'm a little surprised you didn't get scurvy, or have bone health issues (because of a lack of calcium or vitamin K2), have electrolyte imbalances, or have imbalances in fiber and essential fatty acids. But good for you. Thank goodness we don't base nutritional advice on anecdotal evidence.
"You can see that the money runs out before the month is gone, you can see that people are buying smaller pack sizes at the end of the month," McMillon said.
They do need to eat, but they are eating less - and not by choice. They don't have the money to buy what they want to. No amount of advertising will fix that.
Apparently my country is technically capable of being self sufficient but people diet would have to change back to the 19th century if we were completely cut off (no coffee, tea, tomatoes, bananas, shiracha sauce).
True, but human psychology is a huge confounding factor. One area where this is evident is gas prices that "go up like a rocket, and come down like a feather" in response to crude oil prices. Simple supply and demand does not explain this.
There is inelasticity in gas prices. If the cost of gas goes up you still have to drive to work and the supermarket. Eventually you buy a more fuel efficient car or switch to an EV.
The reason the stock market is down is because of the raging uncertainty of the environment in which businesses have to navigate. Multi-month, let alone multi-year planning has become impossible. Businesses can deal with tariffs, taxes and costs. What they can't deal with is uncertainty.
I am so tired of people echoing “supply and demand” like it’s Econ 101. The modern market is infinitely more complex with infinitely more ways to create inefficiencies that don’t respond to simple supply and demand.
The problem is that focusing on supply and demand ignores all the ways markets are sticky and not efficient. Asserting that markets are efficient is equivalent to asserting that P == NP.
It's especially galling because if markets actually worked this way, then central planning would work as well.
"Econ 101" people always seem to ignore that there are higher level economics courses that further expound upon the many complexities, nuances and vagaries of "supply and demand."
In my experience, once they raise prices due to "external reasons", once they lower prices they are almost always higher than the original price. At least for goods that people buy anyway
Of course businesses charge the maximum the market will tolerate. That’s how it’s supposed to work. No need to treat this as surprising, nefarious or unexpected.
100% this. I’d take it a step further and say that sales tax should be included when you are logged in and it can be anticipated, like is the case in most other countries.
Sales tax cannot be per-calculated, since it is charged on the total sale. Rounding errors will get you. (when I worked fast food 30 years ago one value meal was $3.18, but two were $6.27) The government pays attention to this type of thing and they will get you for those pennies. (remember there are many governments, it is possibly all the local governments in question would decide not to pay attention, but that doesn't mean those rules apply to someone else who lives in a different area and thus has different local governments)
> Sales tax cannot be per-calculated, since it is charged on the total sale.
Most of the developed world pre-calculates sales tax.
If McDonalds charges you $10.32 in Australia, the government gets $0.84(8181812...) of it. Rounding isn't an issue because you don't write a check for each individual $0.84(8181812...), you pay them the aggregate amount on a regular basis.
Yes. This is silly. We should change it. (But it's largely an issue for online sales, not physical locations. The McDonalds in San Anselmo, barring The Big One, stays in San Anselmo.)
See also: American healthcare, college, etc. "Our setup is absurdly complex in bad ways" is not an argument for keeping that setup, it's an argument for making fixes.
Why is this silly? If you're selling something, sales tax (or in other parts of the world, VAT or GST) will be owed[1]. Different places will have different levels of commerce and budgetary requirements, and sales taxes are one of the ways they can fill their coffers. Allowing for local jurisdictions to set their own tax rates is part of the federal system of government; indeed in the U.S. it is arguable that a national sales tax rate a la Europe would be unconstitutional.
And why should we eliminate sales taxes, etc. for online sales? Isn't the whole point of software that it makes it trivial to handle multiple sales taxes?
[1] Sales tax, VAT, etc. are taxes on the buyer but are collected by the seller as a matter of administrative convenience. Use tax / reverse charge covers the situations where a non-local seller doesn't collect the tax, but compliance was so low in the first several decades of e-commerce that every government around the world decided to expand sales tax compliance for online sales to non-local sellers.
Because it's an immense amount of paperwork, compliance, legal risk, etc. all to avoid just setting a more reasonable state/federal level of taxation. The US has a deeply weird attitude towards any changes to taxation.
> And why should we eliminate sales taxes, etc. for online sales?
No one's proposing that. Online sales just introduce the issue of not knowing the tax jurisdiction that's applicable for a brand-new shopper.
just setting a more reasonable state/federal level of taxation.
We have reasonable levels of taxation right now. 0% federal rate, because the Constitution does not allow for a federal sales tax. States can set their own rates based on their own needs, just like every member of the EU can set its own rate. And counties and cities can tag-along with their state's sales tax.
This was complicated back in the day when it was all paper tables. Software makes it easy. Excel makes it easy, and the dedicated sales tax SaaS make it even easier.
At my last company, we handled hundreds of thousands of sales a day globally and my tax department spent less than four hours each month on sales tax/VAT compliance because we used Avalara to handle sales tax rate lookups and compliance. (The four hours were for filing the VAT returns in the two dozen countries we couldn't file through Avalara.) To put it in terms a programmer would understand: each month, my entire department spent less time on sales tax compliance than the average Typescript programmer spends on compiling.
Online sales just introduce the issue of not knowing the tax jurisdiction that's applicable for a brand-new shopper.
That has been an issue for decades, and people got along just fine in the days when they had to do it by hand.
"The federal government could theoretically levy a nationwide federal sales tax under Article I Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, but Congress has declined to do so."
(And I'm advocating for a higher state/Federal income tax rate so we don't need sales tax rates to make up the budget gaps we fill with sales taxes today.)
> To put it in terms a programmer would understand: each month, my entire department spent less time on sales tax compliance than the average Typescript programmer spends on compiling.
Sure. Because you outsourced that work to a third-party. Who doesn't work for free. You pass that cost to your customers, yes?
Opps, my memory of prices is obviously wrong after 30 years. I can't tell you which number is right though.
One penny times the thousand or so meals per day over a year adds up. I don't know if we were audited - but I' s we would have been shut down for failing the audit.
There's a slight difference between having one tax rate at the country level and having numerous differing state and local sales tax rates. You don't even know what to charge the customer until you know their exact location.
But do they have the same kind of state and local sales tax rules that we do? Again, _you can't know the price to display if you don't know where exactly in the country the package is going_. It is not possible to display the "final price" in US online stores ahead of checkout unless the user is already logged in AND the shipping address is the same as where the user lives.
The juice is not worth the squeeze for online retailers. Users are used to seeing the final amount at checkout and you know, it's really not that hard to mentally estimate <price of thing I'm buying plus 10%> (which is actually usually an overestimate).
Googling says 27 tax jurisdictions in the EU versus over 13000 in the US. Again, not quite as simple as you're making it out to be. And for what? Making the checkout process slightly more convenient for people who lack the mental ability to estimate their total?
> Googling says 27 tax jurisdictions in the EU versus over 13000 in the US.
Cool, great place to start. Let's fix that. Both have similar land mass, similar populations, similar balance of federal-ish and state-ish and local-ish governance, similar cultures, etc.
> And for what? Making the checkout process slightly more convenient for people who lack the mental ability to estimate their total?
Surely handling 13k tax jurisdictions is expensive for businesses and consumers on many levels?
Forcing brick-and-mortar stores to show a higher price including tax than that shown by online stores seems like it would have some unintended consequences. It would likely push more people towards online purchases even if the final price is identical.
There are a lot of people who cannot calculate what 10% more equals to. You mentioned that's an estimate and often not correct, so even if you do the calculation, there's a good chance it's wrong. A lot of people are on a budget and what is a rounding error to you, could be the difference between being able to afford it or not for them.
In Germany different tax rates apply to items that you need to survive such as food and other goods. It can be difficult to know which rate applies to a product. The good thing is you don't need to know because the total price is displayed
In the EU, when I go to some online shop it first lets me chooose my language (and country), then it displays all the prices with the correct VAT amount.
You in the US keep saying "we are so special, so it is impossible to change things for the better in any way". While other countries also have complex rules for similar things yet they still manage to provide a better experience for shoppers, citizens, sick people - everyone.
Agreed in practice, but there is a key difference: sales tax is uniform for all products, import tariffs are not. As a customer I want to effectively compare prices between different options. For sales tax you can simply assume a uniform 9% bump. For tariffs the fee varies for comparable products. I would prefer knowing the full price ahead of times but I absolutely need to know the relative price ranking.
> but there is a key difference: sales tax is uniform for all products
Sales tax is not uniform for all products depending on your state. My home state for example does not charge sales tax on food items and clothing. Some other special categories also have different sales tax depending on what they are - e.g. vice taxes for some items.
In stores yes, but on the Internet, including it in the price makes it easier to bump up prices. Showing the price without tariff allows you to easily compare before / after, and then when you see tariff added to your bottom line order (e.g. on Amazon) it should drive home the point that tariffs are a tax paid for by the consumers (which unfortunately lots of people still dont believe).
I see two items for $5, but when I add the imported one, suddenly it costs more — and Amazon didn’t tell me that ahead of time or give me any way to choose the one without tariffs on the grid/list view.
This makes tariffs more effective because they can’t bump the domestic price to match — while giving customers a negative chock each time they choose an importer for a product.
Right, but they'll underprice just below the floor price for the imported good, because why would businesses leave money on the table?
The choice for consumers won't be "choose between a $5 item and $15 item" it will be "choose between $13 and $15", like I mentioned above.
This doesn't work as easily if the sticker price for the imported good is $5 and the real price displayed at the end of the purchasing funnel. The local business will have to keep its sticker price at $5 to avoid losing customers when they initially compare goods or rely on customers to come back to them once they get faced with the tariff tax, which will also lose customers.
A few days ago I tried ordering a bottle cage for my bike from the US. The price was 22.95€. At the checkout, they added a "Tariff Recovery fee" of 1.84€. On top of that, they charged 60.25€ for shipping. The grand total was 80.04€.
I stopped trying to buy stuff from the US, because there's always a ton of added costs
> Some sectors have been doing this for years - "service fees" at restaurants...
If the additional fees is government-forced, such as taxes, then it makes sense to display it separately. You are throwing government-forced costs and regular business costs in the same bucket. If tariffs should be included in the listed price then why not taxes?
I think they want the price to be the amount they will have to pay to get the item or service. On the bill you can then split up the price into taxes, tariffs and whatever else you want so they are not thrown into the same bucket.
That way there's no surprise at the checkout and you still see how much of the money goes to whom.
The reason that works in the rest of the world is, taxes are the same throughout the country. For example in the UK, the standard VAT rate (20%) applies uniformly to most goods, throughout the UK. So the price can be printed on the label. In the US some states have no sales tax at all, for example Oregon.
These generally aren't taxes. These are conservative business owners complaining about having to pay a living wage rather than a poverty wage.
When the rent goes up, the prices change. When insurance goes up, prices change. When labor costs go up it's a "service charge"? That's garbage, just set your prices accordingly.
>Especially because these scams actually work - the reason restaurants give for not just increasing their menu prices is because higher listed prices drive people away.
Is there a good way to account for the loss of customers from this practice? I have certainly opted out of restaurants with extra fees.
It's not about being used to it. There's good reason sales tax isn't included in the price, which is that sales tax varies locally. It isn't even the same per ZIP code. You couldn't advertise a statewide or nationwide price if you had to include sales tax. You couldn't display prices online at all until you entered your full address, which seems antithetical to privacy.
This is different from most other countries, where the tax is the same nation-wide.
The regional supermarket chain in new england that is owned by kroger ALREADY localizes their weekly sales flyer TO THE STORE despite every store in the state having the exact same tax rates.
They STILL don't include the tax in the price listed because fuck you, this is america
>The regional supermarket chain in new england that is owned by kroger ALREADY localizes their weekly sales flyer TO THE STORE despite every store in the state having the exact same tax rates.
Do they actually "localizes their weekly sales flyer TO THE STORE", or you only think that way because they ask for the exact store location to view their flyers? It could very well be that they ask the exact store for analytics purposes, but all the stores have the same flyer.
Probably because it's just not as impactful as hidden tariff costs would be. Sales tax is relatively small and consistent. Depending on the product a tariff could be negligable or it could double the sticker price and the customer would have no way of knowing until checkout.
It’s kind of petty to list tariffs as a separate line item and not all the other costs that contribute to the final price. Why just the tariffs, unless Amazon is trying to make a political point?
It strikes me as just as petty as when restaurants started listing “Living Wage Fee” on their bills. They’re bitching and moaning directly to the customer just because they need to pay their staff more and they’re butthurt about it. Why not list all the restaurant’s costs as line items on the bill? They could list the customer’s proportion of the restaurant’s rent, electricity charge, water bill, licensing and taxes if they wanted to. But no, all they put in your face is the Living Wage Fee.
What's wrong with Amazon trying to make a political point?
Amazon is obviously trying to pressure the Trump admin into easing the tariffs. Why wouldn't they? Why shouldn't they? Amazon is as much a political actor as any other company, and they have a major stakeholder when it comes to tariff policy.
>What's wrong with Amazon trying to make a political point?
Mainly with the concept of letting a ginormous multinational megacorp with more money and resources than 99.9% of the rest of America combined influence our political process is literally how we got here.
The CEO of Amazon is welcome to lobby as himself but letting an extremely already privileged legal fiction (an LLC) have more power over our society is just dumb.
> 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts
That's too generous. "Not your personal army" started because 4chan had a well-earned reputation for harassment - usually raiding other web sites, but often targeting individual people who caught their attention for one reason or another.
The "not your personal army" slogan came about because people who were very aware of this reputation were showing up, hoping to make a web site or person they disliked the next target. That got annoying fast, hence they told those people to go away.
It wasn't a moral stance against target harassment - far from it. It was a stance that the group mind will choose the next target when they feel like it - not because some rando is mad at their ex or something
When the first-gen iPhone was out there was a TIFF vulnerability so bad that you could jailbreak an iPhone just by visiting a specific web site. I remember going to Best Buy and seeing all of the display phones had been jailbroken. (It was easy to tell - this was before the App Store, so having extra app icons on the home screen wasn't normal.)
This was a user-empowering application of the vulnerability. Obviously, a bug that allows root-level arbitrary code execution just by getting the user to load a single image could be used for some pretty bad stuff. (And perhaps was.)
I would also say don't run ghostscript with the same permissions as the web server, especially not if you can just hand it your PDF through stdin and take a PNG through stdout. Sandbox it as much as possible. PDF is a really complex format which means lots of opportunities for buffer overruns and the like. (Edit: Actually, reading through Arch-TK's post above, it sounds like it was much dummer than something like a buffer overrun.)
There are portable SCIFs, basically specially designed trailers, to allow senior staff to communicate securely on the road. It's very likely Vance had one of these nearby.
Not to mention plenty of DoD facilities from coast-to-coast with SCIFs - even without a portable SCIF, he likely wasn't far from one.
Failing that, these people almost certainly have laptops connected to DoD networks at a lower COMSEC level than a true SCIF (indeed, "high-side laptops" were mentioned in the Signal thread). They could have communicated with those. I don't know about DoD policy if those would be acceptable or not for discussions about planned strikes, but it'd be a hell of a lot more secure than unsecured public smartphones.
In the early days of the iPhone, there was a vulnerability that allowed you to jailbreak your phone by visiting a specific web site. IIRC it was some vulnerability in the TIFF handling code. The same vulnerability could have been used to silently install spyware with root level access. No need to break signal's crypto if you can just silently capture screenshots.
It's not hard to imagine some foreign intelligence agency is sitting on some severe zero-day vulnerability, waiting to use it on very high value targets, such as senior administration staff.
You don’t have to imagine. This is a billion dollar intel industry that pays out millions of dollars for vulns, and charges corrupt governments more for access to hack their citizens most private data.
Those unscrupulous enough to sell the vulnerability to the exploiters, there is gold. Of course we would rather they did the right thing and got the bugs fixed.
> No need to break signal's crypto if you can just silently capture screenshots.
This is also something that comes up with esoteric cryptography schemes. There are systems designed so that you could theoretically deny whatever property, but in reality, the bad guy looks at your phone and believes whatever is on the screen anyway.
Endpoint integrity is also critical. If Apple or Google were compromised, they could silently push an update that replaces the real Signal app with a modified version that forwards everything to an adversary.
Any system where the government doesn't have total control over software deployment will never be viable for handling claasified information.
If not, why not just say "we aren't a UK based organization so we have no obligations under this law"
Let the UK block Wikipedia.