This reminds me of the Subaru BRAT in the early '80s. There was a 25% tarrif on imported pickups. So Subaru added two plastic jump seats in the back of the BRAT, even making them face backwards. No seat belts as I recall just handles. They weren't even really intended to be used. They were just cheap plastic. But they served the purpose of making the vehicle a four-seater car instead of a pickup, with only a 2.5% tarrif.
Here in Norway we have the infamous "E6 ham". We have an import tax on dry-cured ham[1], but not unprocessed meat.
Someone figured out it was cheaper then to import unprocessed meat from Spain to Norway, turn the truck around as soon as they were customs cleared and drive the 3000 km or so back to Spain for curing.
Once cured they'd re-import the processed meat, which now has a different tariff due to being "Norwegian" ham processed abroad, while still being proper Spanish dry-cured ham.
So a ~6000 km (3700 miles) detour to save on import taxes, yay...
The name comes from the E6 route[2] the trucks drive through Sweden and into Norway.
> Someone figured out it was cheaper then to import unprocessed meat from Spain to Norway, turn the truck around as soon as they were customs cleared and drive the 3000 km or so back to Spain for curing.
Ahh, those Norwegians and their customs evasions. https://youtu.be/oP1Oq3JLNbc (do note that I'm ascribing this to Norwegians completely in jest - tone is difficult to get across in text)
I never get why you actually have to put the ham on the truck.
In a slightly less illogical EU you could just go to the appropriate EU committe, and get an exception where you send the ham on a "virtual trip". Just proove that you payed the cost of shipment. The ham benefits, the environment benefits, everybody wins.
I would even go further and introduce a legal principle. Every law that can be circumvented by a ridiculous trick is either void, or the loophole has to be closed.
> Every law that can be circumvented by a ridiculous trick is either void, or the loophole has to be closed.
California did something like this with window tint violations. It's illegal to have your windows tinted darker than some amount. In the old days, if you were ticketed for this, it would be a "Fix It" ticket. You get the tint removed, have a cop sign off that the violation was corrected, and pay some nominal fine. ($25, I think)
Almost everyone who got one of these tickets would have the tint peeled off, the ticket cleared, and be back at the tint shop the next day to get it put back on. If you like your tint, then true cost of the ticket was $225 or whatever.
Now the ticket gives you an option! You can still correct the violation, have it signed off, and pay the fee, or you can pay a larger fine and not have to demonstrate that you've cured the violation. They probably figured if the driver was going to go through the expense of removing and reapplying the tint, the state might as well see that money.
Wasn't really a loophole, per se, but it was a circumvention that the state decided to eliminate buy allowing you to buy an indulgence :)
Some tint shops responded to this loss of revenue by offering “tint guarantees” where you could have tint reapplied for some period of time for half price.
The game over here in New England is getting a statement of medical accommodation from an eye doctor asserting that bright sun is uncomfortable but you have no other limitations.
I had a drug dealer friend with a cop as a roommate. The cop “didn’t know” but he “loved to help out friends of friends.” It was entirely comical over at their house.
I've never heard of outright bribes, but plenty of people have a cop as a family member or friend who'd gladly fix the fix-it ticket for you. At the time I got mine, I didn't have that option. I paid the fine.
> The European Economic Area (EEA) was established via the Agreement on the European Economic Area, an international agreement which enables the extension of the European Union's single market to member states of the European Free Trade Association. The EEA links the EU member states and three EFTA states (Iceland, Liechtenstein, and *Norway*) into an internal market governed by the same basic rules.
There are about a billion rules. Do you volunteer to assess each one's impact on the climate and balance it against other economic effects of the rule, or do you simply attach the proper price to carbon and let the market figure it out?
I would remove the rules that aren't related to quality and safety and let the market figure it out first. Making things better for people to effect change is a better starting point than making things worse.
There are carbon taxes being implemented and on the whole i think they are good. But combined with the current spike in energy prices, they are hammering some people.
Too cheap for the climate, i.e. too cheap for anybody under 40. A tax-and-rebate system can help poor people without hampering the effect of a high carbon price.
This reminds me of puzzles (as in physical 1000 piece things) in the 90s. It was cheaper to manufacture them somewhere, import them, export them to Spain, import them again than sell them straight from the country of origin which I think was Finland. All the while the stuff never moved and it was all on paper afaik. The lettering had to be in Spanish though but it's a puzzle, you know how it works.
Biggest Polish IT company was bankrupted by this. Optimus SA was called Polish Dell&Yahoo combined in the nineties. They manufactured computers, made multimedia/education software and games, distributed software/games, IT contracts/system integration, POS systems deployments, ERP, consulting, biggest web portal, biggest online communicator, biggest search engine.
.. then one day in 1999 ministry of education announced a huge contracts for school computerization program, and specifically requested "no VAT" prices (22%) from all bidders. The only way to achieve this was exporting/re-importing Polish build computers, something Ministry itself not only suggested, but was publicly proud of securing.
Year later local prosecutor accused Optimus of evading $2m VAT, froze all assets (~$100mil company in 2000) and arranged SWAT to arrest CEO, leading to inability to pay wages/service debt. 3 years and multiple appeals later investigation was closed without so much as "sorry". This wasnt even the only company destroyed same way. Another one was JTT, mayor PC hardware distributor https://pl-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/JTT_Computer?...
Same year mayor shareholder of defunct JTT received ~$10mil settlement, which was immediately overturned. It only took them another 7 years to finally get ~$1mil just last year https://www-pb-pl.translate.goog/mci-otrzyma-5-mln-zl-odszko... for the destruction of a company worth ~$20mil in 2000.
Yeah, I remember that. I think I still have a framed, very old cover of Wprost with Roman Kluska (the owner of Optimus) after we won a pyrrhic victory against the state for that, years after the fact. Of course, none of the bureaucrats responsible for burning Optimus to the ground got even as much as a citation. In fact, I vaguely recall reading about them getting bonuses for slapping a big fine on Optimus.
The framed cover used to be a reminder that, in general, the state and the Polish equivalent of the IRS is not, and never will be, your friend. Sure, I've had some friendly and helpful chats with multiple people working for our IRS but I've never forgotten Optimus.
Perhaps the wrong choice of word, English is my second language after all. But it's quite well known in the food importing industry here AFAIK, and most seem to recognize it's exceptionally silly. But it's cheaper...
Infamous refers to something that is "well known for being bad!". A classic example would be a (well known) pirate! If the tax you are talking about is bad (I'm pretty sure it is) and well known (also, yes), then "Infamous" is a fine word to use
Notorious is a similar word - well known for something bad
Famous works if it isn't bad, but it usnusually used for people, and I would imagine "the highest threshold" of well-known stuff - so expect people to argue with you: "I haven't heard of X, so it must not be famous!"
Renowned and prominent are fine alternatives to "famous"
My personal favorite is Preeminent- which carries the notion of "#1 best". "My king is the Preeminent leader" - there is NO OTHER leader that can be king
If hams are fungible from a customs point of view (why would they not be?) you could try pre-curing the hams and have them ready just across the border. Ham in, ham out, ham in again, no extra trip to Spain required.
Then you sell the uncured hams you needed for the stamps to a pet-food factory or for German “salami” or whatever.
They possibly need to be cured in Spain so that they can be called Spanish (e.g. Serrano or Ibérico).
And I guess they aren’t fungible because they get tested for health reasons and protein content.
In the EU, tracking is needed. If people get ill from eating ham, it’s important to exactly know where the meat came from (factory, farm, sometimes even the specific pig. Conversely, if animals get ill, it’s important to know where their milk went. https://ec.europa.eu/food/animals/traces_en)
c) Yes but if the hams are fungible, which the other commenter explained they are not, then doing this at volume would make the timing irrelevant.
d) Yes, or just pre-sell them to someplace that doesn't care about quality. Just has to be inside the EU since these are the hams that (you say) have not yet been to Norway!
Crossing the border a thousand times, carrying a ham each way each time, would probably be less efficient, unless you get tax breaks for your hourly employees, in which case you could also have a thousand employees on standby and do it relay-style.
While it's true that this would never work, and if you tried it'd be extremely fishy, I do in fact know a place you can buy pork sausage that tastes of fish.
That sure sounds like fraud and lying to customs officers, a bit like saying you import cheap Chinese tablets and instead you import WACOM cintiq drawing tablets worth thousands
My understanding is that Napoleon's Continental System caused a shortage of cocoa in continental Europe, so chocolatiers had to substitute in hazelnuts. This became Gianduja[0], which later were modified to become Nutella.
There's also the Ford vs Chicken Tax; basically U.S. import tariff for passenger van is 2.5% and cargo van is 25%, so Ford, which manufactured their Transit van in Turkey, installed seats in factory and stripped the seats once they arrived in the U.S.
Now looks like they are in trouble for this scheme.
There's also the infamous Toy Biz, Inc. v. United States case where Marvel Comics argued that their X-Men toys where "nonhuman toys" and not dolls to avoid an import tax.
Still, technically true though I'd think. Mutants aren't human. The X-Gene makes them "Homo sapiens superior" and distinguishes them from humans who were mutated by other means (radiation, spider bites, etc). Do X-men want to erase the distinction or do they just want peaceful coexistence between the two species?
I'm not saying this would affect a court ruling, but as a point of curiosity: technically "human" means the homo genus, not just the sapiens species. So Neanderthals for example, or homo erectus, are both human. The X-men would be human too, if they were indeed homo sapiens superior.
Mutants and humans can produce fertile offspring, but hybrids aren't impossible across species just uncommon. Bison and cattle, or grizzlies and polar bears are examples. Where we divide groups into "species" is pretty murky. I'm sure somewhere there has to be a biologist who loves comics enough to sort all this stuff out for us. Then again, I've seen Neanderthals called both a subspecies and a separate species of human too so they should probably sort that one out first.
Given that every child is different from either parent (not only by half the chromosomes but transcription errors and epigenic triggers) what defines a mutatant vs “stock”?
For Marvel, mutants are those with an X-Gene, but in biology we tend to call something a mutant when an error in DNA causes something we wouldn't normally see (well outside of typical variation). We've all got screwed up DNA in us, but mutants are the ones who end up with really noticeable differences. That could apply to a lot of humans walking around today (albinos for example), but I guess it's considered impolite to call them mutants.
As species boundaries go, human/mutant is incredibly arbitrary. Either a mutant or a human can be created from a pairing of human-human, mutant-human, or mutant-mutant. It would be like classifying blonde people as a different species.
Wow. I hope the government loses their lawsuit here. Customs & Border Protection should have absolutely no jurisdiction over what an item is used for once it enters the country.
Ford lost in 2019. An appeal to the Supreme Court was denied.[0] My non-lawyer understand of the issue wasn’t so much that they were avoiding a tariff (“tariff engineering”), but that they were removing the seats upon entry. In contrast with the BRAT where the dummy seats were still there when sold.
I wonder if they could, in theory, sell you the car for 150% of it's final price (so that they seats are there when sold), then buy back the seats immediately for 50% of its price. The invoice would say something like: Car with passenger seats: $15,000; Passenger seat buyback: $5,000; Total after buyback: $10,000.
That way everyone gets what they want, and they've technically sold it with the seats still installed.
Yeah, when the law allows additional sanction for willful/knowing violation, courts will not only often see through your “clever hack”, but also see it as evidence of deliberate wrongdoing.
See also: the $10k reporting threshold for banks. Deliberately doing smaller transfers to avoid the reporting threshold can be illegal (depending on intent), and the banks are legally mandated to report suspicious activity (such as that) as well.
Frankly I think our justice system should be less tolerant of "hacks" like this. They clearly violate the intent of the law, even if technically following it to the letter.
I prefer judges and lawyers interpret what the law says, not what they believe lawmakers meant to say. It is lawmakers responsibility to craft quality laws. Such hacks expose weaknesses in the laws as written.
In reality: are you a software engineer? Or do you know one? Surely you (or they) have experienced how difficult it is to write code that manages even a small number of inputs? Even 10 different yes/no inputs give you 1,024 possibilities.
Now imagine writing laws to precisely cover an effectively infinite number of possibilities, many of which don't exist at the time the law is written, and expecting the laws to cover these new situations and variables with absolute certainty and unambiguity. And unlike software, you can't just push a commit to prod to fix the problems as they pop up. It's a really long process, because democracy.
It's not happening, no more than you'd be able to handle a piece of software that took some infinite and random number and variety of inputs and did something useful with them.
We should, as you say, write "quality" laws to the best of our ability but there will always been a sizable human element to the interpretation of law.
An interpreter tries to understand what your code means. It doesn't try to guess at your intentions. (Pedantically, some do, but on a limited scale.) You should write quality code. You should try to anticipate edge cases. Your code will fail sometimes. You'll fix it.
Law has the advantage of much more advanced interpreters; but judges should still be interpreting the law, not guessing at the minds of the people who wrote the law. Lawmakers should be writing quality laws and fixing problems.
That isn’t isn’t remotely how passing laws in a democracy works. I can push a fix to prod in minutes (or in the worst case, days) and it rarely if ever affects peoples’ lives in the way that laws do.
In contrast, passing new laws and updating existing laws is (by design) an arduous process in a democracy. There are things that can and should be improved about the ways that we accomplish this, but it will never be (and really shouldn’t be) fast and easy.
Sometimes I just want to ignore HN entirely because of embarrassing comments like this. “Code works this way, so everything should work this way!”
You should also try to write quality laws. But when you fail, do you want the same sort of consequences as with code? How much time, effort, and money has been lost to hacks taking advantage of errors in code?
I would love an interpreter/compiler/processor that knew that I didn't intend to allow a security vulnerability so anyone could escalate their privileges. Sounds great, truly.
Unspecified behavior[1] is used in programming language standards for a very similar reason: to provide the freedom to interpret in the, uh, spirit of the code, rather than the letter, when it would be overall beneficial.
That is a source of bugs and a known failure of crypto that try to consider the code as authoritative. If interpreters could figure out the intended behaviour, there'd be fewer or no bugs.
Lawmakers shouldn't be focused on bugs in written law, they should be working on new law
Judges aren't the only interpreters of law. They're simply the authoritative ones (ultimately). The law needs to be relatively authoritative so that people can make decisions around it. The whole process is actually a lot messier than such statements and there are usually valid arguments and evidence, but in general we should err on the side of least harm: which means if a law is poorly written, people might get away with something lawmakers wanted to stop. This can, and has, happened, and lawmakers deal with it by updating the law or crafting new ones. (Of course, I also think there is a distinction between the 'intent' of a law and what lawmakers intended and I really only object to basing decisions on the latter.)
Why? Because if an interpreter screws up, we update its code (or ours); but if a person screws up, we throw them in prison or fine them potentially devastating amounts. A person ought to be reasonably secure in acting in accordance with the law.
> It is lawmakers responsibility to craft quality laws.
Judging by how hard it is for programmers to write bug-free instructions for literal computers, I'm not sure your expectation of flawless legislation is something realistic for mere mortals.
Companies with literally thousands of people with billions of dollars to invest have a hard time making their products bug-free no matter how many times they patch and rewrite, and we're talking about dealing with computers here. Exactly how many years of rewrites are you willing to spend on each piece of legislation to make it bug-free? Is it even remotely realistic? or will your solution grind legislation to a halt?
My statement that judges should interpret law and not lawmakers is not equivalent to this idea that law must be flawless and bug-free. Those are ideas you've brought to the table that I've already disclaimed. I said laws should be quality laws. What qualifies as quality in law isn't "100% bug-free, literal, unambiguous, single-definition words that don't require any interpretation at all." To the extent that a law is bad (as qualified by law, not by a computer code metaphor), no I don't think judges should go about the business of guessing how it should work. It ought to be punted back to lawmakers. (Otherwise why even separated the two: Just have lawmakers act as judges or vice versa.)
I realize you're disclaiming them, but I'm trying to say you what you're asking for has consequences that you can't just "disclaim" like that. Practically every law will have unintended loopholes that legislators couldn't think of or practically enumerate when writing the law. If you keep "punting it back to lawmakers" instead of letting judges handle the exceptions, you obviously further obstruct the legislature's ability to move onto new, more pressing issues. Maybe that's fine with you—or maybe it's even your goal, I can't possibly know—but your optimization on that axis has severe consequences that will quite obviously lead to undesirable outcomes on many other axes that others (if not you) actually care about. You can disclaim the implications and the consequences, but that doesn't mean they won't come along with your idea.
Maybe spending more time on getting current laws right would be better than moving on to new laws.
More laws = more ways people/organisations are burdened with things they need to know (and will be punished for whether or not they know). Having canonical interpretations of laws that aren't written in the laws just makes that even more fraught with peril.
Those consequences do not follow, because I am not asking for judges to interpret the law literally. If that's what you've read, we have a miscommunication here. There's an entire spectrum of interpretation from literal to "I personally know the guy who authored this law and I asked him what he meant."
The poster I originally responded to thinks we ought to be further right along this spectrum. I think we're either in a good place or if anything we ought to move a little further left. I don't think either extreme is desirable, and the left extreme is where we get those consequences you want to ascribe to me.
The justice system is already quite intolerant of such hacks. In the Ford case, they didn't even interpret the law differently. Instead, they determined—with evidence— that Ford was actually importing cargo vans and not passenger vans.
It is a judge's responsibility to literally judge whether a given application of the law is appropriate.
This encompasses every possible input including "what they believe lawmakers meant to say".
Edit: To get out in front of the obvious "Well what about when a judge just decides to do whatever they want??" response, I will say: That is why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional trust all matter.
I'm having a little trouble interpreting (pun a happy happenstance!) your comment. Judging whether an application of a law is "appropriate" basically gives judges free rein to do whatever they want, although I can't think of a better description of what judges should do. (I suppose your use of "literally" is problematic in that, as used, it simply refers to your definition of a judge's responsibillity but is easily conflated with other posters' use of "literal" in the sense of the judge not doing any "interpretation" of the law.)
Gorsuch infamously ruled that the application of contract law (I guess, IANAL) was appropriate against a man who chose not to freeze to death by staying with his stranded work vehicle. I imagine a lot of other judges thought it was inappropriate and would have ruled in favor of the employee.
Taking into account what a judge thinks lawmakers meant to say also gives the judges a lot of wiggle room in their pronouncements.
Your list of 5 things that matter is commendable. However, the last 3 things have been torn to shreds over the past 4 decades -- and were never that strong historically, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. Tradition and precedent are easily side-stepped when convenient. And, of course, you have the infamous Supreme Court decision effectively placing Bush in the White House that explicitly said it was not to be used as a precedent.
And, of course, everything gets thrown out when corruption comes into play!
My use of "literally" is only intended to convey the literal meaning of the word.
And thank you for providing some excellent example of why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional trust are important.
Or have the dealerships take care of the aftermarket conversion.
Ford should only have issued a guide to independent dealers and repair centers on how to do a conversion between cargo and passenger (and made sure both were possible) but only import the passenger version into the country.
Then it's murkier, because not all dealerships would offer it and the customer isn't buying it from Ford, he's getting an independent dealer to install additional things (or remove) from the vehicle.
Isn’t a lot of securization necessary for two more seats? Adding floor reinforcements, seatbelts, and more importantly, passing the crash tests with two more seats?
The power to tax is the power to destroy. The same overzealous power they have to tell me what my usage intent was also allows them to totally ban items that aren't actually banned.
> Customs & Border Protection should have absolutely no jurisdiction over what an item is used for once it enters the country.
I mean, that's the whole point of the import tariff law, so if the CBP has jurisdiction to enforce tariff law, surely how the item is used (or at least how the item is intended to be used or how the item can reasonably be expected to be used) is the primary factor to consider.
How long does the rule apply for? If someone removes seats from their van, is that tax evasion? What if it's temporary? If an individual can do it, why not Ford?
The problem I have here is how easy it is to avoid the tax. CBP shouldn't have any jurisdiction over car modifications and repairs; that responsibility falls to different agencies.
It seems that the issue was that Ford, the importer, changed the class of vehicle between import and being sold inside the US. Presumably if you aren't the importer you can go wild (IANAL).
Yeah, so they're really just getting punished for not dotting their is and crossing their ts. They could create a subsidiary with the same board of directors as Ford that they sell the cars to, and then the subsidiary does the dirty work of repurposing the cars from passenger vehicles to cargo vehicles. They skipped paying the $100 corporate registration fee, so now they're on the hook for a billion dollar fine that would have been legal if they added another company to the mix? Give me a break.
Except that now those vehicles are used and may be more difficult to sell again. If you don't go through the trouble of retitling them, then clearly they were never really sold and the courts will see right through this scheme.
If they "escaped on a technicality" then they weren't breaking the law. That "technicality" is part of the law.
The indefensible part is tying a large difference in import tariffs to how many seats are installed. Absurd outcomes such as this one highlight systematic flaws in the rules. If the basis for the tariffs were logically sound you wouldn't be able to work around them without addressing the reason the tariffs were imposed in the first place.
No- the norm is for things to be imported, then combined or modified and sold as a new product, without paying the import tax based on the new product.
If import tax on a cpu is x, and motherboard is y, should you have to pay computer import tax z if you build and sell PCs? After all, what imported cpus and motherboards aren't destined to be assembled computers?
I was more talking about this particular case, where it seems it was judged that Ford didn't make a new product out of imported parts, but importing a finished vehicle as one thing, and selling it as another after minor modification.
It is a more normal way around these sorts of tariffs to import a vehicle as a kit of parts (CKD / "Complete knocked down"), and perform some level of final assembly in the end country. The sort of rules you talk about apply then, you pay the car parts import rate on the kit, not the (presumably higher) rate for a complete car[1].
[1] Or otherwise avoid whatever other protectionist measures mean you can't just import a fully built car.
If the difference in definition between two categories is minor, then a minor modification is all that should be required.
Either it meets the definition of the lower taxed category or it doesn't, at time of import.
Any other way of interpreting it gets into intent and degrees modification, or worse, applying import taxes after the fact for domestic modifications.
Reverse the scenario: is an imported pc taxed at z need to be taxed at x and y if the only purpose was to get the parts and sell the cpus and graphics cards a la carte? If x and y were cheaper than z, do you think the govt would refund the difference?
The courts tend to take a dim view of "clever hacks" to get around the law, where the intent is clearly to circumvent the law and the action has no other purpose. They don't always rule that way. But if you pull this kind of stunt, you risk the court saying, "Very clever. No."
The rule applies to the entity responsible for importing the item. Since Ford was importing the vehicle and then altering it immediately afterwards to escape the tax, they are in the wrong. If they instead sold it as-is to a customer, and the customer then made the modification themselves, it wouldn't be a problem.
It was pretty transparent that they did that to circumvent regulation.
Imagine Coca-Cola getting clearance for importing coca leaves for flavoring but then instead sells it to a third party who processes it for something else.
At least decades ago when I first read about it, it was said that the third party, a company called the Stepan Co., imports the coca leaves, removes the cocaine, and sends the leaves to Coca-Cola and the cocaine to Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals.
It's basically about lying. Coca-Cola says "I am going to do X so let me import this", while intending to actually do Y. Meanwhile, the gov't is like "well in principle we don't want people importing this because of Y but we'll make exceptions if it's for X"
And like many rules, it's not necessarily about stopping 100% of everything all the time, but about preventing enough of it so that we don't have some problem.
In the universe in which you agree X is fine but Y is not, and that there is some sort of proof that Coca-Cola knows what is going on, it seems really obvious that Coca-Cola is responsible!
I mean, we (ideally) pass laws to benefit society.
I'm not somebody who really loves rules and regulations and I'll be the first person to say that America's "war on drugs" has been an utter disaster in multiple ways.
But, generally speaking, flooding a country with cocaine is not what most of us would call beneficial to society.
If you don't think that we should have a society and/or laws, cool, that's another discussion. But if you accept the premise that we should have laws, controlling the flow of industrial quantities of coca leaves seems like the good kind of law.
I mean, I guess we could just let Coca-Cola import metric tons of coca leaves, sell them to whoever the fuck they want, and then just... prosecute the people who do bad things with them? I think we would find that orders of magnitude more work and orders of magnitude less effective. There would be a large cost to society, and nobody wins except Coca-Cola, really.
>I mean, I guess we could just let Coca-Cola import metric tons of coca leaves, sell them to whoever the fuck they want, and then just... prosecute the people who do bad things with them?
Yes? Basically?
(1988)
"Workers at the Stepan Co. plant, the nation’s only legal importer of cocaine, must undergo strict background checks, and agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency frequently visit, said plant manager John O’Brien.
DEA spokesman Milton Smilek in Newark said there haven’t been any security problems at the plant just west of New York City. He said it processes hundreds of tons of cocaine each year."
This is where Coca-Cola is said to get its flavoring from.
It sounds like the age-old market segmentation thing. People driving their kids to soccer practice don't make money with their vans, so they'll notice the higher price (and if they find out their congresscritter was responsible, they'll vote for a different one). Meanwhile, cargo vans are used to make money, so the users can bear the extra cost. There's also overtones of taxation without representation going on here; individuals can vote, and so they have lower taxes than businesses, which can't vote. (It's too bad that Ford doesn't dump the seats they take out of the van into Boston Harbor! Someone would probably still get the reference.)
It's the same game that SaaS companies play. Everything is free until you want SSO, then it's $30,000 a year. If you need SSO, you can afford it.
Personally, I hate this in both cases. I think we could save everyone a lot of time if every vendor you did business with just grabbed you by the ankles and flipped you upside down and took whatever money fell out of your pocket. Why tiptoe around what they really want...
> There's also overtones of taxation without representation going on here; individuals can vote, and so they have lower taxes than businesses, which can't vote.
I'm confused about this statement. Businesses are comprised of individuals, and those individuals (if citizens) can vote. So the business has a vote through the voice of its employees and representation in government through the people employees at a business.
Or are you saying the legal fiction of business personhood should give the business a ... vote? That just sounds like business owners (individuals) getting 2 or more votes then...
> Or are you saying the legal fiction of business personhood should give the business a ... vote? That just sounds like business owners (individuals) getting 2 or more votes then...
I believe the more common proposal is to resolve the contradiction the other way: remove taxes on corporations, as the individuals comprising the corporations generally already pay taxes. That would be politically quite unpopular, but there is a certain logic to it and it would also make taxes easier to administer and more difficult to avoid. And it doesn't need to be as pro-rich as it sounds - you could just replace corporation taxes with other taxes targeting wealthy individuals, such as a wealth tax or higher income taxes.
The sort of already happens. Over here, businesses don't have to pay sales tax (VAT) on the goods and services they buy, because when they finally sell the item or service to a customer, the sales tax is charged in full.
So while a business doesn't pay sales on the fuel they need to deliver their goods to me, it gets paid in the end because the cost of the fuel is included in the price I pay and the sales tax is levied on the whole purchase price.
(It is a little more complicated than that. Don't sue me.)
>I believe the more common proposal is to resolve the contradiction the other way: remove taxes on corporations, as the individuals comprising the corporations generally already pay taxes.
Without a wealth tax that would just make tax evasion even easier for the ultrawealthy in the usual manner of borrowing against the equity of the stock they own.
If we remove the taxes on corporations should we also remove the shield on liability against the owners of the corporation? Why make it more transparent one way but not the other?
maybe businesses can't vote, but they can buy votes of the congressmen directly.
why go through the hassle of voting and deal with uncertainty whether you voted a right person, when you can just buy with cash whatever law/regulation you need
>"Why SHOULD a cargo van have higher import taxes than a passenger van, other than to serve the needs of some random private company?"
Have you read a tariff schedule? They're full of this stuff, which seem to be protections or favors for specific industries. Anti-dumping protections seem similar.
I am not sure it is 'corrupt', though that may be a question of semantics. I didn't mean to disagree with you, just point out how rampant the issue was.
I don't think it's corrupt exactly, often these details are worked out in deals between the various countries or as retaliation for other unilateral increases. We lower your rate on rice to 6% if you lower our rate on chicken; if you raise your rate on our machine parts to 25%, we'll raise our rate on your cargo vans to 25%. Etc. It's part of the negotiations, and it often has nothing to do with the specifics of the items being tarriffed.
The Chicken Wars brought the powerful agricultural lobby in
France into direct conflict with the powerful agricultural lobby in the
United States. Not surprisingly, France, the largest poultry producer in
the EEC, was unwilling to embrace a free trade policy whose benefits
would be spread among consumers throughout Europe. The benefits of
protectionism were concentrated in France and the costs were borne by
consumers throughout Europe. Indeed, the stakes were sufficiently high
that France might have quit the EEC had not French agricultural interests been appeased.
That's from the 'further reading' link on Wikipedia.
Which is a lot younger than the chicken tax from the 1960s
For some context: it is about washing chicken meat with chlorine dioxide to kill bacteria, especially salmonella, at the slaughterhouse. It may seem ridicoulous that europeans prefer salmonella to chlorine on their chickens, but european food health and safety argues that the practice is needed in the USA due to the very unsanitary, and therefor cheaper, chicken meat production, whereas europa requires high standards during production instead of washing the end product in chlorine, and is therefore more costly. Some argue this cost difference is the major driver of the ban, and it is not an actual health and safety issue.
The US also has more lax rules than Europe has governing what food chickens can be fed. Without going into the rather revolting details, this is a legitimate reason to exclude US chicken.
At the same time, the U.S. auto industry was suffering its own trade crisis due to competition from growingly popular foreign cars and trucks. During the early 1960s, sales of Volkswagens surged as America’s love affair with the iconic VW “Bug” coupe and Type 2 van shifted into overdrive. By 1963, the situation got so bad that Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers Union (U.A.W.), threatened a strike that would have halted all U.S. auto production just before the 1964 presidential election.
Running for reelection and aware of the influence the U.A.W. had in Congress and in the minds of voters, President Johnson looked for a way to persuade Reuther’s union not to strike and to support his “Great Society” civil rights agenda. Johnson succeeded on both counts by agreeing to include light trucks in the Chicken Tax.
While U.S. tariffs on other Chicken Tax items have since been rescinded, lobbying efforts by the U.A.W. have kept the tariff on light trucks and utility vans alive. As a result, American-made trucks still dominate sales in the U.S., and some very desirable trucks, like the high-end Australian-made Volkswagen Amorak, are not sold in the United States.
"American-made" = all the labor-intensive parts are made abroad and only the final car is assembled in the US. The USMCA merely requires that a majority or plurality (depending on the item) of item content come from a member nation.
If there was a war American industry would shut down overnight.
I find it incredible that people think the government does things like this "just because." It do so because its capitalist masters demand it. Of course this is lobbying driven. The government in a capitalist society exists almost solely to bring the agenda of lobbyists into the legislature by any means possible be it via cash contributions, manufacturing consent via the corporatist media, riling people up via the pulpit, fixing elections, demonizing unrelated minority groups, threatening or even attempting coups, blocking the teaching of certain subjects in school, assassination, etc.
Its incredible to me that there's an entire political identity that borderline denies any of this happens, and instead the government itself is somehow naturally corrupt but business and the lobbying and capital owning class are all angels and saints. Everyday conservatism buys into this fallacy fairly well and this dishonesty seems to be the core of libertarianism.
Explaining this concept to some people feels like how I would imagine explaining water to fish must be. We're just so surrounded by it and it defines so much of our culture, that you can fail to see if you choose. You can just call everything government corruption from cradle to grave without asking about the source and motivation of that corruption. You can swim your whole life and never wonder why you're wet.
The issue was that the seats were only added for the purposes of evading tax, and the tax evasive purpose was established by Ford systematically removing the seats prior to sale.
Ford would have been fine if they had kept the seats in the car until they were sold and left it up to the customer to remove the seats. (This would not have affected the customer, tax-wise, since the import duty is paid by Ford, and by the time the customer has removed the seats, they have already paid the sales tax on the vehicle.)
I've always been lead to believe the intent of a law or regulation is what matters in the eyes of a court.
The Subaru case probably violates the intent as well but maybe that would be a lot harder to prove. But the Ford case they clearly conspired to violate the intent. Which, if "intent" really is the important thing, I suppose should have lead to criminal charges too.
I suppose intent probably matters a bit more when it's the little guy on the receiving end of it.
I sincerely hope Ford gets hit hard and pays back all the profits they made from their tax dodging scheme plus penalties.
I'm beyond tired of massive corporations sending jobs to other countries, pretending to care about their own country and lying about being made locally, and dodging taxes. Ford hit all three here.
Perhaps a more relevant and legally robust example is the Mercedes Benz Sprinter, which is manufactured in Germany, but US-bound vehicles have various parts removed before shipping. A facility in NC reassembles the vehicles (the removed parts are shipped with the van) once they arrive, which reduces or eliminates the tax.
I'm guessing they're only trouble because they took the seats out. Probably cheaper just to leave them in, and sell along with wrench to remove them 'in case it's needed for repair.' A friendly source will publish in a trade magazine it's the same van after 12 minutes to remove the seats, and the scheme will continue.
According to an article about it[1], Ford also removed / panelled in various windows as well, so conversion probably isn't as trivially DIYable as just removing some token seats.
Although I suppose van buyers are slightly more likely to know someone with a welding torch and some steel sheets than the average person, so perhaps they missed a trick...
> Now looks like they are in trouble for this scheme.
All these cheats will never be accepted for working individuals. Corporations get a different flavor of justice. Even then they push it to the limits and dinner times find a burocrat in the pertinent agency willing to push forward a rightful punishment.
SMB and sole proprietorships get away with ridiculous tax things constantly! The only difference is they usually don't try to take it to the Supreme Court when the IRS audits them.
A seafood company in Canada has a 100 foot section of train track, where they load trucks on and right back off, in an attempt to get around the Jones Act requirement that goods shipped between 2 points in the US must use US flagged vessels
We need something like the senate filibuster debate rule for taxes. Basically just state that there is this thing I can do to skirt the tax system so I declare a tax evasion without having to actually make people do stupid stuff.
That defeats the purpose of the law. If they’re flagrantly violating the spirit and intent by barely passing the technical requirement, then the law should either A) be removed or B) retooled to address the loophole.
We should never encourage ignoring certain laws or it undermines the whole system. It’s why I don’t support states legalizing weed under the federal government’s nose/while they turn a blind eye. Sure, we like it for weed, but what happens when a super conservative state does something less popular like, say, functionally bans gay marriage and goes, “well you aren’t enforcing drug laws, why should they get a pass but not us?”
I’m sure there are better examples but hopefully I’m getting my point across. Exceptions = weakening of the established structure. I don’t know about you, but I like that “the law is king” in the US. Mostly because we can change them.
> That defeats the purpose of the law. If they’re flagrantly violating the spirit and intent by barely passing the technical requirement, then the law should either A) be removed or B) retooled to address the loophole.
Yes, indeed. It completely defeats the purpose of the law, which is why the suggestion is akin to your A solution (that it should be invalidated/removed).
The law doesn't encode "purpose" or "spirit", the law only exists as written. When applying the law, and tax law especially, it's counterproductive to speculate as to "spirit" or "purpose", and best to focus just on what the law actually is, because that's the only part that really counts as "democratic". Intentions and ideals weren't voted on, the actual literal text of the law was.
The fact that laws can't (or just don't) address purpose is a major shortcoming. IMO, the preamble to the US Constitution is its most important part. Defining purpose and scope gives later judges clear guidelines on how to handle future ambiguous cases and people who think they're clever for finding technical loopholes.
> but what happens when a super conservative state does something less popular
Or like abortion. The new abortion rules in conservative states are betting they can sway the federal gov if a lawsuit arises, but its based on the assumption they'll get to ignore the gov.
Luckily it was shot down, but yeah, my concern is the serious precedent weed legalization is setting. I like the outcome, I am scared of the precedent.
Rule of law lasts only so long as the laws are accepted by juries. If the laws drift too from from public acceptability, the people will weaken rule of law on their own terms.
The solution to a bad or poorly written law is not to leave it on the books and have some "oh well we actually meant" thing that means it can be arbitrarily applied in a different way than written.
Courts can interpret laws if the interpretation is the problem. If there is just a stupid loophole, then either the law itself makes no sense (as seems to apply to this Jones Act) or it needs to be reworded to align with its intent.
This reminds me of all the california electricity deregulation games where Enron et al moved power out of state and back, or had plants go down strategically for maintenance in order to gain the system. The correct solution is not to say "play nice, you know what we meant". It's to have a consistent and enforceable set of rules that dont admit gaming.
Laws, at least in many European countries, are prefaced with a preamble, introduction, or Vorwort, that explains a bit of the history, the motivation, the underlying principles, the philosophy, the practicality, and the guidelines for interpretation of that law. The words, as written, are not to be taken, in any case literally. Moreover, a literal interpretation contradicting the spirit of the law is unlawful, and that is one of the principles of many legal systems. Using a loophole that contradicts the law is unlawful; imagine the law says you have the right to water your plants in your balcony; however, you only do it when the neighbor below is sitting at their balcony with the intention to bother them: you are abusing the law and committing an unlawful act.
A law system like that requires wisdom. America has a lot of smart but almost no wisdom, so it would be chaos and anarchy if we suddenly switched to such a system.
You're being downvoted but that's actually how tax works in the U.S. and Europe.
Tax is one of the few areas of law where activities can be declared illegal and subject to punitive sanction after the fact. For example, the fictive loss tax shelter scheme that was popular 15 years ago. Fictive losses were technically legal at the time the scheme began (in the sense that they were legal within the letter of the law but violated the intent of the law), and weren't explicitly stated to be illegal until years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkens_%26_Gilchrist).
That's amazing. The section of track (ahem proper Canadian railroad) is quite visible on Google maps and street view has a great shot of it[0]. It is VERY short indeed.
Chrysler specifically designed the PT Cruiser to fit the NHTSA criteria for a light truck in order to bring the average fuel efficiency of the company’s light truck fleet into compliance with CAFE standards.
That's fascinating. I remember hearing there about a giant book on import taxes on apparel with various definitions. For instance, "sandals" may be taxed X but "open toed shoes" may be taxed Y. Apparently these rates drive fashion trends to an incredible degree where even small modifications to a product could totally change the economics.
There's a famous example that Converse All Stars included a very thin fuzzy lining along the outside of the soles so that they could qualify under the "slipper" tax instead of the higher "sneaker" tax.
> Footwear with open toes or open heels; footwear of the slip-on type, that is held to the foot without the use of laces or buckles or other fasteners, the foregoing except footwear of subheading 6402.99.33 and except footwear having a foxing or a foxing-like band wholly or almost wholly of rubber or plastics applied or molded at the sole and overlapping the upper:
>> Having outer soles with textile materials having the greatest surface area in contact with the ground, but not taken into account under the terms of additional U.S. note 5 to this chapter 12.5%
>> Other 37.5%
> Sandals and similar footwear of
plastics, produced in one piece by
molding. 3%
Recently in Europe we had a kinda reverse - Suzuki removed the rear seats of the Jimny, a small 4x4, to reclassify it as a commercial vehicle to qualify for laxer CO2 emission standards.
Yeah, but they also really dumbed down the interior and lowered roof quality, while selling it for the same MSRP as the previous model (still + 10k from the actual sellers, bringing it to Toyota RAV4 territory price-wise).
Ouch, I think I'd seen something about them swapping to steel wheels instead of alloys, but I didn't realise it had generally been downgraded. And that price...
Pity, as I kinda like the Jimny even if it makes no sense at all for me to own one.
That's a great article. Dives into philosophy without getting wishy-washy. Must have been a fun article to write.
> And if it's true to say, "a Jaffa Cake is a cake" (or "a Jaffa Cake is a biscuit") then that also tells us something about the world, i.e. about the properties of a Jaffa Cake, as well as about the meaning of the word "cake".
And of course it's even more fun because I have to mentally substitute "cookie" every time I read "biscuit".
I am reminded of the candy tax my state tried 10 years ago and was quickly repealed. Food and candy had different tax rates, and it was decided that if it had flour as a ingredient is was food not candy leading to situations simiarbitray pricing. So kitkat was food snickers were candy
It does shed a light on how arbitrary and ridiculous tariffs can be. I can't imagine the amount of resources wasted on enforcing, complying with and avoiding tariffs. There aren't many consensus in economics but getting rid of tariffs is one and here we are in 2022.
> The U.S. Customs Service changed vehicle classifications in 1989, automatically relegating two-door SUVs to light-truck status.[4] Toyota Motor Corp., Nissan Motor Co., Suzuki (through a joint venture with GM), and Honda Motor Co. eventually built assembly plants in the U.S. and Canada in response to the tariff.[1]...
> Customs and Border Protection (CBP) ruled in 2013 that Transit Connects imported by Ford as passenger wagons and later converted into cargo vans should be subject to the 25% duty rate applicable to vans and not to the 2.5% rate applicable to passenger vehicles. Ford sued and finally, in 2020, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case which confirmed the position of CBP.[22]
This kind of thing is apparently pretty common. The two that I know of are shoes -> slippers by adding fabric to the bottom and European manufactured vans being imported to the US as passenger vehicles and then converted to cargo after arrival.
I remember those! A family friend had one and he called them the "Oh Shit" handles! I had a blast riding back there for short trips. I think I was 12 or so. The 80s and early 90s were a very different time.
Oddly, the Subaru Baja is much more car-like than the Brat ever was (the Baja has 4 real seats, not jump seats), but when I had one, it was registered as a pickup, not a car.
The "truck" (trucks, SUVs etc) class of vehicles in the US have lower average gas mileage requirements than cars so many cars are made just large enough to be classified as "trucks" even though they are marketed still as cars. Subaru did this with almost all their cars back in 2004[1].
In Automotive manufacturing, CKD kits are a thing - Completely Knocked Down, or disassembled and shipped as parts and re-assembled again, to avoid taxes like this.
Preferred, but you often need more nuance than that — for example, if a carbon tax is set high enough to deter profitable heavy industrial activities it would require care not to have a disproportionate impact on people who depend on cars, non-electric heating, etc. Those can be mitigated, of course, but it starts to make the tax policy a lot more complicated.
The other problem is that we probably had time for a carbon tax when the idea was first advanced decades ago. It's not clear to me that we can afford a gradual approach now when we really need to be doing things like saying you just can't buy new coal burning equipment at any price, for example.
Carbon taxes are set up so they cancel regular taxes. So if you use the average amount of greenhouse gasses, you come out equal, if you use more than the average, you come out worse, and if you use less than the average you come out better. So overnight not a whole lot changes but everyone enters a race to use the least greenhouse gasses.
The problem is that people are starting from wildly variable positions. An old person on a fixed income can’t afford to replace their heating, add insulation, etc. quickly unless we have programs to help them; a rich guy who thinks gas is better for cooking or heating up his outdoor dining will blow off the minor increase; etc.
The problem is that we wasted 3+ decades on denialism and a lot of pollution comes from things with long service lives. A high-pollution SUV will be polluting in 2040, maybe 2050; a gas or oil heater might run into 2070. At this point we need more than gradual nudges — things like requiring special permits to buy new fossil fuel-burning equipment with heavy subsidies and 0% loans for installing electric alternatives.
Carbon taxes seem to be pretty unpopular and I think it’s a failure of imagination for climate economists to keep repeating the same idea instead of trying to find things that are more palatable.
Being against climate change and against carbon taxes at the same time basically boils down to "I want everyone else to work hard on solving this problem, except for me. I want to keep benefiting from the low prices that the pollution economy has made possible, but I don't want any pollution."
I don't think there's any reasonable solution that will appease those people.
Carbon taxes appeal to economists because they are a direct incentive to stop doing the bad thing. But they are a bad policy because no one will implement them. In the past it seemed that dealing with climate change was going to require populations choosing to suffer economic loss to decarbonise the economy. But these days that seems less necessary. For example solar is cheaper than many dirty sources of power so just investing in ramping up solar power can help make it even cheaper and the economics then discourages dirty power because energy is too cheap for it to be profitable (and having cheap energy is not bad for the economy either). Subsidising hybrid[1] car purchases could be another helpful thing for emissions and doesn’t require people to feel like everything is getting more expensive.
I think the problem with carbon taxes is that they are a good solution to a negative sum game, but I think it turns out the actual game is positive sum and that carbon taxes are not an implementable solution.
[1] the big constraint with electric cars is batteries. Plug-in hybrid cars use electricity for short trips (ie most miles travelled) and so lead to more efficient use of the available batteries than electric cars that mostly use <20% of the battery capacity in a day leaving the rest unused.
Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I'm pretty sure any solution that is drastic enough to actually work will be unpalatable. "Somebody else will pay for it" is the only solution anyone wants to hear.
Selling stocks at a loss is only helpful in the short term, or if you don’t think those stocks are going back up. If you harvest a loss for a tax deduction on December 31, and the stock goes back up by the end of January so you’d be even, you are way behind – because the loss only comes back to you at your highest tax rate.
> and the stock goes back up by the end of January so you’d be even, you are way behind
there are ETFs created for the sole purpose of circumventing this, by providing exposure to the same asset or market forces
the wash sale regulation has amendment aimed at preventing this by prohibiting trades of "substantially similar securities", but I don't think it passes muster or has any teeth. you report all the trades to the IRS its up to them to figure out if your UltraShares 3x Inverse Pez Dispenser ETF is substantially similar to the Direxion one
The wash sale rule has teeth. Currently, trades on a stock or direct derivative (options tied to that stock) will all trigger the wash sale rule.
I have never seen an ETF of a single security. Got an example? It would be hard for me to fathom that one could be made and remain economically viable but who knows.
ETFs however, do currently provide some loopholes with wash sales. While selling/buying AAPL within 30 days is a wash sale... selling VOO and buying IVV
(both which track the S&P 500) within 30 days is currently not considered a wash sale.
You see some explanations as to why that currently is (technically those two ETFs are from different asset managers... so they have some different risks, etc). But it looks like the rule just hasn't been amended and maybe the IRS doesn't see this as prevalent enough of a case to change the tax code.
direct indexing helps with this as well --- own thousands of individual stocks that collectively act as an index, and trade in some losers for their similar competitors every time you have to realize gains
But it's not exactly the case you could pull this off with, say, Tesla, unless there's some ETF that's 99% TSLA (is there?)
> But it's not exactly the case you could pull this off with, say, Tesla, unless there's some ETF that's 99% TSLA (is there?)
Don't know, doubt it but its a business opportunity. It’s why there are so many ETFs, take your 20 basis points from investors and work on something else.
More likely to find an ETF that hasn't rebalanced and has a large holding of Tesla.
I direct index... but I don't tax-loss-harvest the index which is what your are describing here (just noting that you can direct index and not do TLH if you want to).
It's not a tax incentive though - an incentive encourages you to do something, nobody is encouraged to lose money. Also, if one were to do the above, and the growth fund went up, you'd wind up paying taxes on that gain which would offset the tax deduction you took on the loss when you eventually sold it, whereas you could have just stayed in, waited for it to go back up, and you'd be at a wash.
If someone followed your advice exactly and sold on day 364 vs staying in they'd lose even more, as by the time the initial investment goes back up (after day 365) you'd be in long-term capital gains territory, which is a lower tax rate.
That's why I said it only works in the short term - eventually the gov't is gonna get it's money.
While the benefits are limited, there are advantages:
1. Harvesting your capital losses allows you to offset other gains which may be taxable at an earlier date. $1000 today is worth substantially more than $1000 in 10 years time. 'Tax deferred is tax avoided.'
2. You can offset up to $3000 of losses a year against regular income which is taxed at a higher rate.
For me at least while it seems worthwhile to switch index funds to harvest losses when the market falls substantially the upsides aren't enough to justify the lock in of using something like Betterment's automatic tax loss harvesting features of their platform by having you invest in many individual stocks managed by their roboadvisor rather than an index fund.
Most people wouldn’t care, but if you’re in a high tax bracket and you can sell one to buy another and keep your risk profile roughly the same, you’ll do it.
People prefer to pay long term gains and take short term losses. The benefits work in your favor and against the govt. The tax code reflects that, and has for a long time.
it can work if you're offsetting existing short term gains and hold the replacement for >1 year, or if the stock never recovers, in which case you pull forward the deduction
Tis a very important note for as an amature tax-advantageous practice! You can buy something similar, though. eg trade AMD for Intel or some such. Where investors are concerned about markets rather than invidivuals stocks (AMD and INTC are both hardware tech stocks), the notion is that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that large, sector-related good news for Intel is good news for AMD. It's not strictly true, obviously, but it's close enough that the practice is worthwhile.
Canon will choose to make an insufficiently sized heatsink on its DSLR so that in video mode it has to shut down after 20 minutes so it can be classified as a camera and not a video recorder. https://www.cined.com/canon-eos-r5-heatsink-mod-improves-rec...
>Canon will choose to make an insufficiently sized heatsink on its DSLR so that in video mode it has to shut down after 20 minutes so it can be classified as a camera and not a video recorder.
The camera will record indefinitely in 4K line-skipping mode, so that's not actually the reason they didn't put the heatsink on.
That reason is either incompetence or market segmentation.
> That reason is either incompetence or market segmentation.
Yes
Or simply because most people don't record longer videos. Or because that heat has to go somewhere and a bigger heatsink might heat some areas (or the user).
Or the current heatsink is an existing part and it was "good enough"
The average person isn't recording 8K RAW videos and doesn't have a computer capable of handling that either. And the EOS R5 at 3900$ is unarguably a professional camera.
> Fortunately, the fuzzy bottom doesn't affect the performance of the shoe.
That's false. They slide all over the place on tile and polished floors. They're terrible. I've abandoned them for Vans. Maybe they've improved in recent years but they lost me long time ago.
I can hardly think of anything more ridiculously overpriced than some canvas, rubber, and eyelets for $60. Then they have the gall to add extra crap that wrecks the shoe to pinch a few more pennies.
> Without the stiff competition of the smaller, lighter, easier-to-drive, and more fuel efficient import pickups and vans, Detroit automakers were no longer required to keep pace with innovation of foreign brands.
One has to wonder how much this innocent-looking levy contributed to the overall global warming situation, by never having the US automakers to be incentivized to manufacture more efficient commercial fleet, and, as such, inbreeding the culture of buying the overly big pick ups and SUVs with massive engines for private use, too.
I’ve heard that pickups got so big in the past decade or so because of Obama-era emission regulation. A bigger truck was classified differently and not subject to such strict guidelines, so when the old 3/4 and 1-ton trucks couldn’t possibly meet the new rules they got bigger to get around them.
To this day, super-duty pickups do not have to report fuel economy figures. I technically own a 1984 Ford F350, with a 460 cubic-inch (7.5 L) V8, that is rotting in a family member's yard in North Carolina, which (when operative) got 8-9 miles per gallon. It's about the size and length of a brand-new Honda Odyssey; the real split is between vehicles classed as commercial, and those that were not. Even today, you can buy an F250 with no EPA ratings due to the GWVR
Funny thing is a new superduty can match or exceed the highway mileage of a new 4Runner. As long as you aren’t cruising around town or catching red lights you’re not doing all that bad. ~20MPG in eco mode.
NPR's Marketplace had a fascinating story about something similar in the apparel business. They design pockets in various types of clothing to reduce tariffs.
Certain women’s garments with “pockets below the waist” get lower duty rates than those without. Because of that, a number of the women’s shirts Columbia Sportswear makes are intentionally designed with tiny pockets near the waistline, which lowers the cost of importing them. One of the company’s shorthands for “pockets below the waist” is “nurse’s pocket.”
Something similar: for the original Playstation 2 that was sold in the EU, Sony included a DVD with a BASIC interpreter to classify the console as a personal computer. This little hack avoided some EU import taxes back in the day.
"In 2006, the European Union created a law that added an import duty of 5-12% to any video camera. What determined whether a camera was a video camera? In short, the ability to record longer than 30 minutes. Thus, companies like Canon and Nikon decided to cap their video clip lengths, preventing their enthusiast and prosumer cameras from being considered video cameras."
Funny enough, I learnt about this from Noel's Retro Lab YT channel last week [0]. When I saw the title, I figured it is about CPC 472 before loading the page. Yup it is. I recommend a video to watch, it is fascinating of why they did and Noel shows the breakdown of this unusable RAM in the video.
It's funny that they explicitly set the number of RAM KB for machines. I wonder what was the logic?
---
BY ROYAL DECREE 1215/1985, OF JULY 17, A MODIFICATION HAS BEEN INTRODUCED IN THE TARIFF DUTY ASSIGNED TO SUBHEADING 84.53.B.II OF THE CUSTOMS TARIFF, CONSISTING OF SETTING A SPECIFIC MINIMUM DUTY OF 15,000 PESETAS PER UNIT.
THE BROAD CONTENT OF THE REFERENCE SUBHEADING, IN WHICH DIFFERENT ELECTRONIC COMPUTER PRODUCTS ARE CLASSIFIED AND TAKING INTO ACCOUNT THAT THE MENTIONED SPECIFIC MINIMUM SHOULD ONLY AFFECT A CERTAIN TYPE OF AUTOMATIC MACHINES FOR THE PROCESSING OF INFORMATION, KNOWN SECTORALLY UNDER THE THE NAME OF "MICROCOMPUTERS", MAKES IT ADVISABLE TO COMPLEMENT THE CITED MODIFICATION WITH THE TIMELY CLARIFICATION LIMITING ITS SCOPE.
BY VIRTUE OF IT, AND IN USE OF THE POWER RECOGNIZED TO THE GOVERNMENT BY ARTICLE 6 SECTION 4 OF THE CURRENT TARIFF LAW, AT THE PROPOSAL OF THE MINISTER OF ECONOMY AND FINANCE, AND PRIOR APPROVAL BY THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF AUGUST 28, 1985, I HAVE :
ARTICLE 1. FOR THE PURPOSES OF THE APPLICATION OF THE SPECIFIC MINIMUM RIGHT OF 15,000 PESETAS PER UNIT INTRODUCED IN SUBHEADING 84.53.B.II OF THE CUSTOMS TARIFF BY ROYAL DECREE 1215/1985, OF JULY 17, IT SHALL BE UNDERSTOOD BY TAXABLE UNIT AFFECTED BY THE CITED RIGHT THOSE AUTOMATIC MACHINES FOR PROCESSING INFORMATION THAT CONSIST OF INTEGRATED OPERATIONAL UNITS, WHICH COMPRISE IN A SINGLE ENVELOPE AT LEAST ONE CENTRAL UNIT AND ONE INPUT UNIT, WHETHER OR NOT PROVIDED WITH AN OUTPUT UNIT, AND WHICH HAVE RAM MEMORY WITH CAPACITY NOT EXCEEDING 64 KB.
ART. 2. WITHOUT PREJUDICE TO ITS EFFECTIVENESS FROM JULY 25, DATE OF PUBLICATION OF ROYAL DECREE 1215/1985, THIS ROYAL DECREE WILL ENTER INTO FORCE THE SAME DAY OF ITS PUBLICATION IN THE "OFFICIAL STATE GAZETTE".
GIVEN IN PALMA DE MALLORCA ON AUGUST 28, 1985.-JUAN CARLOS R.-THE MINISTER OF ECONOMY AND TREASURY, CARLOS SOLCHAGA CATALAN.
Glock ships their Glock 19 from Austria to Smyrna, Georgia, with adjustable target sights to have enough points under US import law and then an armorer changes those sights to their fixed self defense sights to be sold in the US market. Presumably the sights get shipped back to Austria for the next batch.
I'm Spanish and I'm finding this very hilarious because that explains a "urban legend" that was about that computer. People said that the Amstrad had a secret chip that only the NSA could use.
Yes secret chips for a foreign government in a offline computer.
> The CPC472 itself was sold for how many? pesetas (how many? euros)
As far as I can remember, the CPC472 was sold for the same price as the CPC464. It was never marketed as an actual improvement over the 464 and competition in the market was hard enough to be able to justify a higher price without a clear justification.
Then again my memory is not that good now so anyone feel free to correct me.
My boss in the early 2000's told me a story where in the 70's, they would bring in computers from West Germany to Poland, and there were restrictions on how "powerful" they could be due to a ton of restrictions.
So they would get a lot of spare parts with each computer, bought separately, to make them usable as intended.
It is unfortunate to read about such decisions. I can't imagine the amount of waste, carbon footprint and other environmental impact due to such decisions. This is purely policy failure. I am curious - did they advertise these machines with the extra bit of RAM? That would surely be false advertising as the additional 8KB was unusable...
It's my understanding that is reason for the PS3 having Linux / other OS support at launch. It was classified as a "computer" vs gaming device and this resulted in a lower import tax for certain countries.
Tarrif averted, thousands sold!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru_BRAT