Taxation

Wasting Millions, Earning Billions

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First, via Hit & Run I learn that the american taliban bushies are not only running a ridiculous deficit but that they are also wasting millions of the dollars that they don’t have chasing down willing folks selling product to willing buyers. Come on feds, if there are assaults, rapes, fraud, extortion, etc., go after’m otherwise leave the people you are supposed to serve alone.
And, then I learn via Boing Boing that the guy who may or may not be the world’s richest man makes a portion of his billions selling furniture to the folks willingly buying product from the folks the feds are harrassing.
Ahhhh, the webs of commerce.

Just Who are you Working For?

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As The Angry Bear Points out:

You can’t play Three-Card Monte without a mark, a patsy, a sucker. Guess who’s playing the sucker in Greenspan’s shell game?

And, it is you and me folks who are playing that roll. Read the rest here and here.
Shouldn’t we be getting just a little bit angry about getting robbed every day? If our government will not protect us perhaps it is time for a change…and not just presidents.

Keeping Track of Your Clothes (and maybe you)

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RFIDs well probably be a positive thing for retail inventory management:

(London, UK – 18 February 2004) Exel, the global leader in supply chain management, has announced that it will embark on a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) project with House of Fraser, Britain’s leading department store group. The trial will represent one of the most advanced and ambitious projects in the industry as it will test the application of RFID across international supply chains.
The project will encompass individual products from House of Fraser’s own brand manufacturers in China. RFID tags will be attached directly to garments providing the scope to track shipment movements at item level. The tags enable automatic, real-time product visibility at any point in the supply chain.

This type of application is well underway in the US as well. In particular Wal-Mart has an agressive program.
Once these things proliferate everyone and their cousin will have RFID readers, for example: 1) your friendly border guard will quickly know that you are lying about the price of that nice coat from Canada; 2) on the positive (?) side the traffic cop could quickly know if there are stolen goods in the car she just stopped; 3) your neighbor will know that you bought that sweater at the dollar store not Nordstroms. We will all probably need to buy RFID zappers to kill the damn things once we take something out of the store.
Oh, and remember to pay cash so that your purchases can’t be tied back to your credit card. There is no point in feeding federal, state, local or business databases and giving the banks an automatic skim on everything that you buy.
Via White Rose.

Rental Car Blues

This entry was posted in Capitalism Libertarianism Marketing Taxation on by

More often then not folks renting cars are in a hurry. For instance, your plane just landed and your luggage is waiting, etc., so you do not read all that fine print in the contract and, of course, the fine customer service rep working with you has likely been trained to only say things that might maximize revenue. What happens next?
Well, Dan Gillmor tells us

about a man who was charged more than $3,000 for a car rental because he took the car out of state without realizing that would violate his contract. How did Payless, the rental company, know? It was using satellite-assisted tracking equipment to spy on the customer.

The original article is here.
The charge of $1/mile for driving outside the state of origin is surely excessive. I do not even understand the logic of the charge. And it is not nationally common. Example, fly into Cincinnati I mean Kentucky to go to Cincinnati. I have done this quite a few times and not been charged anything extra.
Sure, the guy should have read the contract. But I argue that failure to disclose and explain potential extra charges in big print on the front page may be deceptive given the context of the typical rental transaction.
And, the Oregon proposal (mentioned in the comments) to use GPS to calculate your driving miles as a basis for taxes is just broken before it gets out the door.