They are charging exorbitant penalties to people who don't want to hand over information to a grocery store that is none of their fucking business. They are charging those penalties on FOOD.
They want to charge confiscatory prices for food. Club cards are the way they do it.
You choose not to participate in the "club"
That's my perogative. People should not be penalized for saying "no thanks." Especially on FOOD.
Or go somewhere else.
Almost every major grocery store has club cards now. Some stores charge double for non-card purchases on FOOD.
"Ripping people off" implies the store is doing something underhanded, which is not true.
Yeah it is. They're forcing people to give them information that is none of their fucking business in exchange for the "privilege" of NOT being charged a 75% penalty on food.
Your choices are laid out right in front of you.
Yeah. Give us your address and phone number or we'll plug an industrial vaccuum into your wallet. Bullshit. Ripoff. Cheat.
Just like I'm all for those stupid "club cards". I used to hate them, until I realized that the suckers who didn't use them were subsidizing me
So it's ok for the store to rip certain people off. That about right?
If they can come up with new revenue streams, that will create more margin for them to lower prices because of store competition
The only reason a supermarket will lower prices would be to (unsuccessfully) attempt to compete with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart can offer ridiculously low prices (and put their suppliers and everyone else out of business in the process) because they pay their employees part-time, summer job wages and make them pay for their benefits while they make local and state governments pay to build their stores.
This may come as a shock to middle management, but people don't want to watch commercials. The supermarket is already a clogged toilet of happy-talk announcer voices, video screens, blaring signs, surveillance cameras, one cashier for 15 customers and constant harping about signing over your credit profile to avoid being charged penalties of up to 75% on food.
The last thing people want to see is some blow-dried "my voice is smiling" asshole reading a 30-second factoid from a teleprompter while people try to find a box of breakfast cereal that doesn't annihilate a $10 bill.
Unplug the fucking televisions. At least give people the dignity of being ripped off in peace.
No such thing as rights to a "variation" on a trademark. Trademarks are extremely specific and limited only to the market in which they are used. If someone wanted to market "Super Hero" tires, they would be absolutely within their rights to not only use the name but trademark it as well.
This is similiar to the "Copyright Notice" that appears at most Kinko's which states with certainty that it is against the law to duplicate copyrighted material. That is absolutely false, and the people who wrote it know its false.
About time people started to understand the law is not "everything for them and nothing for me."
Re:Grossing Twice the Cost is a Flop?
on
The Story of Tron
·
· Score: 2, Funny
ron cost 17 million to make and pulled in 33 million. How is this considered a flop?
Well, they expected it to make $400 million, so it was a disappointment.
And if it made $400 million, it's still a disappointment because they expected it to make $2 billion.
The powers that be at the studio really resented the film with all these young conjurers, and Wilheit was looked down upon by the old Disney guard
Computer effects were being pitched to the major studios as far back as the 1970s, but no one was interested.
The people at Disney that were against Tron the entire making of the movie in the end stood up the week before it came out and 'said we're going to do more business than Star Wars
vs.
They thought it would be cool
I wonder just how many really great ideas have been lost to society because imaginationless people "resented" them? This is truly the most expensive problem society faces: the "it will never work" people. They cost society trillions in advancement 24 hours a day. It is wrong.
Solomon also pointed out that John Lasseter, who directed the Toy Story films, was inspired by Tron to move into computer animation.
Oh my gosh, that computer stuff, the film was a box office flop, we don't want anything to do with that, that's craziness
Tron became Finding Nemo, the Incredibles, Monsters Inc. and Toy Story. Hmm. Maybe they should have more box office flops?
SOME INVESTMENTS DON'T SHOW UP IN THE QUARTERLY REPORTS. SOMETIMES IT ISN'T JUST ABOUT THE TALL DOLLARS.
You mean "imaginary economy". In the real economy (the one that exists now and won't change) 70-80% have cars, insurance, promotions, family, and more.
Only 50% have real full-time permanent jobs.
The amount of taxpayer subsidies to Wal-Mart is $0.
This is inaccurate. Local municipalities and even state governments have awarded Wal-Mart billions upon billions of dollars in tax breaks and building additional services in order to get Wal-Mart to build a store in their area. This has been exhaustively documented in numerous publications, including magazine articles, newspaper articles and books. Taxpayer subsidies to Wal-Mart are in the ten figures at the very least.
There might be taxpayer subsidies to their individual workers, but that is because of a combination of a very wasteful government welfare policy AND the stupid lifestyle choices of the workers.
No. It's because Wal-Mart's average wage is less than $10 an hour, they won't allow their employees to work full-time so they can qualify for benefits, and even IF they qualify, these $10/hour employees have to PAY for their medical insurance.
These are people who do nothing except work for a living (in exchange for shit) and even they are treated with utter contempt because they don't make five figures a month.
It is pretty outrageous to expect a company to pay EVERY low-value low-skill worker enough
Welcome to the new economy. Medical or law degree? No? Then you are low-value. No insurance. No promotions. No home. No family. No car. No savings. No retirement. Those things are only for the "high-value" people.
Taxpayers subsidize Wal*Mart with $0 money.
BZZZT. I'm sorry. We have some lovely parting gifts.
The real challenge isn't the number of articles, it's their quality, especially the bad writing in a lot of them. Once an article reaches a certain level of quality, it actually tends to get worse over time, because of random, uncoordinated edits.
The whole argument is over who pays for government and how.
And right now, the overtaxed 20 and 30-something people are paying for government. Every time we try to "tax the rich," the middle-class and poor watch their taxes increase. The Alternative Minimum Tax is a perfect example. Huge unexpected tax bill for middle-income married couples. Huge unexpected tax bill for the self-employed.
Put a VAT on everything except food, clothing, medical care, medicine, school tuition, housing and car repairs. Repeal all other individual taxes. That would be a windfall for poor people. Problem solved.
Maybe companies should be less inane, absurd and incompetent. If a company is inane, absurd and incompetent (and most companies are inane, absurd and incompetent) it is the fault of inane, absurd and incompetent management.
Either you are making up dramatic sounding numbers
Or just including all taxes instead of just calculating income tax.
And at the end of the year, without taxes, they will have $30 in interest. Of course, they can't spend that or it will be taxed.
But it's better if they pay taxes on it whether they spend it or not. Meanwhile. the $3000 gets taxed four or five times too. Why do poor people pay taxes at all?
I paid about that much in taxes, with no deductions, in the state of California (one of the most expensive state income taxes). I made nearly twice that. Try using real numbers.
Did you include sales tax, excise tax, utility tax, gasoline tax, auto insurance tax, auto registration tax, property tax, capital gains tax, tax on interest income, county and municipal sales tax assessments, payroll taxes other than income withholding, FICA, Medicare, MediCal, Workman's Compensation and tolls?
Even taking away taxes won't give them the money to save.
Really? So they have no income at all then.
Ok, so you want to make the rich live 99.9% tax free.
They already do. A VAT has nothing to do with the rich. The rich/poor argument needs to stop or we will never fix the tax system.
Removing taxes from savings would have 0 effect.
Then why not try it? What do we have to lose?
People with enough money to actually save are better off putting them in real investments than savings accounts.
Depends on the goal of the investment. I just wonder why there is a tax on an account that pays 0.7% interest that also has its own tax form.
So how do you reconcile that with supporting a VAT? People making under 40k obviously have to buy things, do we have them save receipts and get an annual refund?
Anything already exempt from sales tax (food, housing, medicine, etc.) would be exempt from a VAT. People making less than $40K could theoretically live tax-free if they want to.
And by "making under $40k", we still have to have all the current rules and regulations about what is and isn't income.
What is and isn't income is irrelevant. There would be no income tax.
Sales taxes are regressive
Sales tax is only regressive if every purchase is taxed. Utility taxes are regressive too. More regressive than sales taxes, in fact, because everyone needs light, therefore everyone pays utility taxes.
but implementing regressive tax systems as a way to help poor people have more money to save is just more trickle-down/voodoo economics
A VAT would not help poor people have more money to save. It would repeal almost all the taxes on poor people entirely. Would that help them?
So you're using the metric of a handfull of pro-baseball contracts
It is an example. Right to work does not mean "no guaranteed contracts."
And you're surprised by layoffs? Seriously?
Nope. All jobs are layoffs. There are no jobs in this economy. It's all temporary half-pay no-benefit part-time non-career busywork while middle management stuffs their pockets and orders from the seafood menu. 50% of the working-age population in this society is not employed in a full-time permanent job. FIFTY percent.
And a 2-bedroom house is $490,000. Oh yeah. I'll take that soup-can-stocking job at Wal-Mart.
Can you give us an idea of how you would write a 'guaranteed contract'? I'm just curious as to the language you would use.
Company will pay employee their salary in full for the entire length of the contract, layoffs and idiot managers notwithstanding. Just like any other guaranteed contract.
That's a lot more fun than trying to find the right company to be your surrogate parent.
I wouldn't have any problem with the "hired Monday fired Thursday" business model if the employee could simply cancel their credit obligations. It is unfair for the employee to be held to an ironclad contract while the employer has the flexibility of "right to work" agreements. Absolutely totally and inarguably unfair.
Um - last I checked - CA was a right to work state.
Yep. Dodgers play in California too. And there's a guaranteed contract here and there in baseball.
Right to work doesn't mean that contracts aren't allowed. There is no worse revenue agreement than a W-4 job. No business, and I mean NO business would accept a revenue agreement that can be unilaterally canceled.
When I was full-time I never saw anything "Guaranteed". Layoffs and downsizing - I saw plenty of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me again how this is "ripping" someone off.
They are charging exorbitant penalties to people who don't want to hand over information to a grocery store that is none of their fucking business. They are charging those penalties on FOOD.
They want to charge confiscatory prices for food. Club cards are the way they do it.
You choose not to participate in the "club"
That's my perogative. People should not be penalized for saying "no thanks." Especially on FOOD.
Or go somewhere else.
Almost every major grocery store has club cards now. Some stores charge double for non-card purchases on FOOD.
That about right?
Nope.
There is no "discount" club there
For now.
Third, are you familiar with the concept of the "courtesy card"?
No. What I'm familiar with is that people are being ripped off by grocery stores. It's wrong and it needs to stop. Today.
Umm, you opt-in for lower prices.
No. Everyone should get the same price. ESPECIALLY on food. Anything else is a ripoff.
All club cards allow stores to do is charge exorbitantly higher prices to certain customers. End of story.
"Ripping people off" implies the store is doing something underhanded, which is not true.
Yeah it is. They're forcing people to give them information that is none of their fucking business in exchange for the "privilege" of NOT being charged a 75% penalty on food.
Your choices are laid out right in front of you.
Yeah. Give us your address and phone number or we'll plug an industrial vaccuum into your wallet. Bullshit. Ripoff. Cheat.
Just like I'm all for those stupid "club cards". I used to hate them, until I realized that the suckers who didn't use them were subsidizing me
So it's ok for the store to rip certain people off. That about right?
If they can come up with new revenue streams, that will create more margin for them to lower prices because of store competition
The only reason a supermarket will lower prices would be to (unsuccessfully) attempt to compete with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart can offer ridiculously low prices (and put their suppliers and everyone else out of business in the process) because they pay their employees part-time, summer job wages and make them pay for their benefits while they make local and state governments pay to build their stores.
It's simple, really.
This may come as a shock to middle management, but people don't want to watch commercials. The supermarket is already a clogged toilet of happy-talk announcer voices, video screens, blaring signs, surveillance cameras, one cashier for 15 customers and constant harping about signing over your credit profile to avoid being charged penalties of up to 75% on food.
The last thing people want to see is some blow-dried "my voice is smiling" asshole reading a 30-second factoid from a teleprompter while people try to find a box of breakfast cereal that doesn't annihilate a $10 bill.
Unplug the fucking televisions. At least give people the dignity of being ripped off in peace.
DC Comics were quickly on us requesting that any product with the use of the name be sent to them for examination citing infringement.
The words "pound" and "sand" figured prominently in the attorney's response I'll guess. Trademarks are limited by market.
No such thing as rights to a "variation" on a trademark. Trademarks are extremely specific and limited only to the market in which they are used. If someone wanted to market "Super Hero" tires, they would be absolutely within their rights to not only use the name but trademark it as well.
This is similiar to the "Copyright Notice" that appears at most Kinko's which states with certainty that it is against the law to duplicate copyrighted material. That is absolutely false, and the people who wrote it know its false.
About time people started to understand the law is not "everything for them and nothing for me."
ron cost 17 million to make and pulled in 33 million. How is this considered a flop?
Well, they expected it to make $400 million, so it was a disappointment.
And if it made $400 million, it's still a disappointment because they expected it to make $2 billion.
The powers that be at the studio really resented the film with all these young conjurers, and Wilheit was looked down upon by the old Disney guard
Computer effects were being pitched to the major studios as far back as the 1970s, but no one was interested.
The people at Disney that were against Tron the entire making of the movie in the end stood up the week before it came out and 'said we're going to do more business than Star Wars
vs.
They thought it would be cool
I wonder just how many really great ideas have been lost to society because imaginationless people "resented" them? This is truly the most expensive problem society faces: the "it will never work" people. They cost society trillions in advancement 24 hours a day. It is wrong.
Solomon also pointed out that John Lasseter, who directed the Toy Story films, was inspired by Tron to move into computer animation.
Oh my gosh, that computer stuff, the film was a box office flop, we don't want anything to do with that, that's craziness
Tron became Finding Nemo, the Incredibles, Monsters Inc. and Toy Story. Hmm. Maybe they should have more box office flops?
SOME INVESTMENTS DON'T SHOW UP IN THE QUARTERLY REPORTS. SOMETIMES IT ISN'T JUST ABOUT THE TALL DOLLARS.
So their new strategy is to actually develop games?
The mind boggles.
Expect layoffs.
You mean "imaginary economy". In the real economy (the one that exists now and won't change) 70-80% have cars, insurance, promotions, family, and more.
Only 50% have real full-time permanent jobs.
The amount of taxpayer subsidies to Wal-Mart is $0.
This is inaccurate. Local municipalities and even state governments have awarded Wal-Mart billions upon billions of dollars in tax breaks and building additional services in order to get Wal-Mart to build a store in their area. This has been exhaustively documented in numerous publications, including magazine articles, newspaper articles and books. Taxpayer subsidies to Wal-Mart are in the ten figures at the very least.
There might be taxpayer subsidies to their individual workers, but that is because of a combination of a very wasteful government welfare policy AND the stupid lifestyle choices of the workers.
No. It's because Wal-Mart's average wage is less than $10 an hour, they won't allow their employees to work full-time so they can qualify for benefits, and even IF they qualify, these $10/hour employees have to PAY for their medical insurance.
These are people who do nothing except work for a living (in exchange for shit) and even they are treated with utter contempt because they don't make five figures a month.
It is pretty outrageous to expect a company to pay EVERY low-value low-skill worker enough
Welcome to the new economy. Medical or law degree? No? Then you are low-value. No insurance. No promotions. No home. No family. No car. No savings. No retirement. Those things are only for the "high-value" people.
Taxpayers subsidize Wal*Mart with $0 money.
BZZZT. I'm sorry. We have some lovely parting gifts.
Why is competition in the marketplace always characterized as a "war?"
Why are these "wars" always lost before anyone even knows about them?
The real challenge isn't the number of articles, it's their quality, especially the bad writing in a lot of them. Once an article reaches a certain level of quality, it actually tends to get worse over time, because of random, uncoordinated edits.
So it's worthless. Alright. Turn it off then.
The whole argument is over who pays for government and how.
And right now, the overtaxed 20 and 30-something people are paying for government. Every time we try to "tax the rich," the middle-class and poor watch their taxes increase. The Alternative Minimum Tax is a perfect example. Huge unexpected tax bill for middle-income married couples. Huge unexpected tax bill for the self-employed.
Put a VAT on everything except food, clothing, medical care, medicine, school tuition, housing and car repairs. Repeal all other individual taxes. That would be a windfall for poor people. Problem solved.
Maybe companies should be less inane, absurd and incompetent. If a company is inane, absurd and incompetent (and most companies are inane, absurd and incompetent) it is the fault of inane, absurd and incompetent management.
But they'll just fire everyone instead.
corporate IT project teams
Group of eight people, all trying to get the other seven fired while talking over each other in meeting after meeting.
I'll pass.
Since when were these things "fine arts", especially game development?
Every single one of them requires artists, writers, musicians, composers, animators, designers and directors.
Either you are making up dramatic sounding numbers
Or just including all taxes instead of just calculating income tax.
And at the end of the year, without taxes, they will have $30 in interest. Of course, they can't spend that or it will be taxed.
But it's better if they pay taxes on it whether they spend it or not. Meanwhile. the $3000 gets taxed four or five times too. Why do poor people pay taxes at all?
I paid about that much in taxes, with no deductions, in the state of California (one of the most expensive state income taxes). I made nearly twice that. Try using real numbers.
Did you include sales tax, excise tax, utility tax, gasoline tax, auto insurance tax, auto registration tax, property tax, capital gains tax, tax on interest income, county and municipal sales tax assessments, payroll taxes other than income withholding, FICA, Medicare, MediCal, Workman's Compensation and tolls?
Even taking away taxes won't give them the money to save.
Really? So they have no income at all then.
Ok, so you want to make the rich live 99.9% tax free.
They already do. A VAT has nothing to do with the rich. The rich/poor argument needs to stop or we will never fix the tax system.
Removing taxes from savings would have 0 effect.
Then why not try it? What do we have to lose?
People with enough money to actually save are better off putting them in real investments than savings accounts.
Depends on the goal of the investment. I just wonder why there is a tax on an account that pays 0.7% interest that also has its own tax form.
So how do you reconcile that with supporting a VAT? People making under 40k obviously have to buy things, do we have them save receipts and get an annual refund?
Anything already exempt from sales tax (food, housing, medicine, etc.) would be exempt from a VAT. People making less than $40K could theoretically live tax-free if they want to.
And by "making under $40k", we still have to have all the current rules and regulations about what is and isn't income.
What is and isn't income is irrelevant. There would be no income tax.
Sales taxes are regressive
Sales tax is only regressive if every purchase is taxed. Utility taxes are regressive too. More regressive than sales taxes, in fact, because everyone needs light, therefore everyone pays utility taxes.
but implementing regressive tax systems as a way to help poor people have more money to save is just more trickle-down/voodoo economics
A VAT would not help poor people have more money to save. It would repeal almost all the taxes on poor people entirely. Would that help them?
So you're using the metric of a handfull of pro-baseball contracts
It is an example. Right to work does not mean "no guaranteed contracts."
And you're surprised by layoffs? Seriously?
Nope. All jobs are layoffs. There are no jobs in this economy. It's all temporary half-pay no-benefit part-time non-career busywork while middle management stuffs their pockets and orders from the seafood menu. 50% of the working-age population in this society is not employed in a full-time permanent job. FIFTY percent.
And a 2-bedroom house is $490,000. Oh yeah. I'll take that soup-can-stocking job at Wal-Mart.
Can you give us an idea of how you would write a 'guaranteed contract'? I'm just curious as to the language you would use.
Company will pay employee their salary in full for the entire length of the contract, layoffs and idiot managers notwithstanding. Just like any other guaranteed contract.
That's a lot more fun than trying to find the right company to be your surrogate parent.
I wouldn't have any problem with the "hired Monday fired Thursday" business model if the employee could simply cancel their credit obligations. It is unfair for the employee to be held to an ironclad contract while the employer has the flexibility of "right to work" agreements. Absolutely totally and inarguably unfair.
W-4 employment is obsolete.
Um - last I checked - CA was a right to work state.
Yep. Dodgers play in California too. And there's a guaranteed contract here and there in baseball.
Right to work doesn't mean that contracts aren't allowed. There is no worse revenue agreement than a W-4 job. No business, and I mean NO business would accept a revenue agreement that can be unilaterally canceled.
When I was full-time I never saw anything "Guaranteed". Layoffs and downsizing - I saw plenty of that.
There's a surprise.