Odd things they do in other countries...

[Gallia-]

It's not just states.

You'd need to calculate prices by individual county, city, or borough. Some boroughs or whatever subdivision of cities probably have higher tax rates than others from different authorities, so you'd need to pretty much tally up inventory costs for each store individually, each time you're stocking inventory. It's a lot more work than you seem to assume and it's much easier to simply list a non-tax price that can be universally applied, then add it at the register for each store's individual costs.

If you could display prices electronically instead of with little stickers, it would probably be done, but you don't do that, so it isn't. I suppose in the future when you can geographically locate people browsing Wal-mart's website or whatever and have access to tax databases, the website will automatically display your final price based on local sales taxes on the website, but probably not in the store.

What actually happens is that most Americans can list off their various local and state tax percentages at the drop of a hat, probably tell you which portion of the local tax code it's listed under, and perform the calculations for prices in their heads before going to the register.

But why? Why all those different tax rates? Why not one national tax rate? Why do you have to make it so complicated?

Welcome to Federalism.

A single national sales tax would require collaborating with each city mayor in the country, each county commissioner, and each governor, in addition to the Congress. Rather than convene literally every elected leader in the country to agree to a single nationwide tax, we just say "fuck it" and let them figure it out instead.

Because the city tax funds the city government, the county tax funds the county government, and state tax funds the state government.

Wait, are those taxes used simultaniously on a product? So you have to add three tax rates before you know what you have to pay? How can you function at all?

Yes, I think this is very odd.

No.

Usually a county's, city's and state's sales taxes are added together into a single percentage. My city's sales tax rate is actually 2%, but it's added together with 4.225% state tax rate and the county tax rate, to produce something close to 7.4% sales tax. So it's actually gone up very slightly then what I remember. RIP me.

Most people can quote the combined tax rate on the spot and calculate using that.

The "sales tax" in America covers the state, local, and county governments' individual sales taxes as a whole.

[HC Eredivisie]

But why? Why all those different tax rates? Why not one national tax rate? Why do you have to make it so complicated?

Welcome to Federalism.

A single national sales tax would require collaborating with each city mayor in the country, each county commissioner, and each governor, in addition to the Congress. Rather than convene literally every elected leader in the country, we just say "fuck it" and let them figure it out instead.

Here the idea is 'pay the goverment, local authorities get some money later'.

Wait, are those taxes used simultaniously on a product? So you have to add three tax rates before you know what you have to pay? How can you function at all?

Yes, I think this is very odd.

No.

Usually a county's, city's and state's sales taxes are added together into a single percentage. My city's sales tax rate is actually 2%, but it's added together with 4.225% state tax rate and the county tax rate, to produce something close to 7.4% sales tax. So it's actually gone up very slightly then what I remember. RIP me.

Most people can quote the combined tax rate on the spot and calculate using that.

The "sales tax" in America covers the state, local, and county governments' individual sales taxes as a whole.

That makes it a bit simpler then, and slightly less weird. Dutch sales tax is 6 or 21 % by the way.

[Salandriagado]

Literally surrounded by people doing weird stuff here. Go a bit west and they put the forks upside down on the table. Go a bit more northwest and they drive on the wrong side. Go a bit north and they have dinner at 18.00 .

Go a bit further north and we have dinner at 12:00.

In north america people just crossed whenever they could. I felt like an idiot standing there and waiting for green

That's a point: making crossing the damned road illegal.

In Japan, the way restaurant staff thanks you for every little thing. I am the one receiving the service; I should be thanking you.

It's a Japanese thing. You're either thanking, apologizing, or noting that it's hot, cold or you're tired. Some 99% of Japanese conversation is that.

To be fair, the first four of those make up almost all of British conversation as well.

The metric system is overrated, for many reasons.
And also Celsius, which is even more overrated

Celsius is flawed, I must admit. The freezing point of water is not exactly 0 C and the boiling point of water is not exactly 100 C

But at least it tried, and at least it got close, to a scale based on two properties of water.

While Fahrenheit has only one anchor, it's human body temperature, and it got that wrong by two whole degrees. The other anchor, 0ºF, is way out in nowheresville, some nonsense about ice and salt and a dodgy thermometer that some guy built himself.

Celsius is arbitrary, it's bad, and it is embarassing to have to include it in SI units, but Celsius > Farhenheit any fucking day.

Kelvin master race?

Hmm. You called me out on something I can't really give an expert opinion on.

As I understand it, we could define "water" as pure H₂O at standard temperature and pressure, but we couldn't actually measure its freezing point. Because what we have isn't pure H₂O. We'll get closer and closer, constructing a sample molecule by molecule using nano-engineering, but even then there will be some quantum wiggle in the molecules of our sample. It will always be a measurement, not an objective definition (the way we can define a number in mathematics), and always be subject to some uncertainty about how we measured it and what we measured.

A metre or a gram is also, ultimately, a measurement of something. It's not pure mathematics. Any measurement (distance, time, mass, etc) is subject to further refinement and correction in the future. And it will never be perfect.

Is there a theoretical possibility to absolutely define any measurement?

Yes: the second is absolutely defined: it is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Caesium 133 atom.

Dutch breakfast sprinkles

I guess I'm missing something

The Swiss have railway platforms that lead directly to the side walk across the entire length, no ledges, fences or anything. So weird.

There are plenty of stations around the UK that have public rights of way running through them: onto the platform on one side, over the station bridge, and out along the platform on the other side. Stations with barriers and stuff are still rare enough (outside of London and the major interchanges) that you are warned about them as the train pulls into the station.

Just gonna leave this here....

That's nice, but Fahrenheit and Celsius both have the same problem when it comes to using them for science: because the scale doesn't start at absolute zero, they're basically useless for any sort of calculation that looks at the relationships between temperature, pressure, etc.

But what about the classical equation PV = NR(T+273.15)?

There's only one that I'm aware of that does that - and if you work in an industry where start and end dates have massive relevance, it's enough to make you go totally postal at regular intervals.

Oh gods yes, but we sort of fixed this in our company because we wrote it into a contract that when our American supplier was writing dates, they HAD to use a standard of MON/dd/yyyy (or dd-MON-yyyy) so that the month wasn't just two figures, it was spelt out as three letters. It added an extra step in decoding it for our coders, but it solved every other problem we had with deciding what fricking date they were on about when they wrote 05/05/2002. Stupid dumb-ass dating system.

You picked a bad example there: 05/05/2002 is unambiguous.

My job is data handling and dates trigger most of our milestone processes. unfortunately the CRM we have uses US dates mm/dd/yy rather than sensible dd/mm/yy. So if people forget it throws the entire system out due to dates not matching. It drives me batty as half my work is reduced to changing dates

(grin) Like I said, we literally forced our customers to stop that idiocy and bow to our will

And why would ANYONE need the Month first? Who looks at a date and thinks "Yes - it's important I know what month it is and not what day it is?" I have literally never understood the point of it.

"Which month's expense report does this go in?"

Just gonna respond to this.

The only one of those I don't remember is standard gravity - the other two are 2000 and 1760. Now, it's not like standard gravity in feet per second per second is any difficult number - it's about 32.2. If you had to remember it, it would be just as easy as 9.81 meters per second per second.

But once you find out that there are 160 imperial fl.oz. in an imperial gallon but 128 US fl.oz. in a US gallon it gets weird. Then you learn that an imperial fl.oz. is 28.4 ml and a US fl.oz. is 29.57 ml and the whole system etches closer and closer to insanity. After that you discover the US dry gallon that is not related to the others in any conceivable way but just seems to exist to further mess with people's heads and the only sane reaction to this mess of a "sytem" becomes maniacal laughter.

I mean, the US already uses half the SI system: ampere, second, mole, candela and many units derived of those. So they just should get it over with and also adopt the rest.
Can't be that hard to sell to the public. Just use that fact that many Americans wrongly think that they use the imperial system and dress the change as the throwing off of the last English imperial shackles and obtaining complete freedom. Then just add the fact that the French revolution was just a copy heavily inspired by the American revolution, so by transitivity the metric system is basically an American invention and everyone should be on board.

Perfectly logical! (Of these, I've seen all except twip, poppyseed, shackle, Roman mile, spindle, skein, shaftement, link, and one of the chains actually being used (I've seen one of the chains, but not sure which)).

Wait... I haven't said anything yet.

Eh... having constitutions I can't read in about fifteen minutes because their so long (looking at you Vietnam and your eleven-chapter constitution with 120 articles.

Try India's.


For that matter: obsession with constitutions.

Having separate tabs for hot and cold water at sinks and bath tubs.
I've seen it both in Ireland and the UK, and I don't get why you would go to all that extra hassle to fix another tab just so that you will never be able to have warm water - only boiling and freezing.

Old British houses used a method of getting hot water that meant that you couldn't guarantee that the hot water was drinking water-clean, and mixer taps allow for contamination of your (clean) cold water supply from your (potentially not clean) hot water supply.

That still doesn't explain why you couldn't add taxes to the price tag, assuming the tag is on the shelves. Just make different tags for different states.

It's not just states.

You'd need to calculate prices by individual county, city, or borough. Some boroughs or whatever subdivision of cities probably have higher tax rates than others from different authorities, so you'd need to pretty much tally up inventory costs for each store individually, each time you're stocking inventory. It's a lot more work than you seem to assume and it's much easier to simply list a non-tax price that can be universally applied, then add it at the register for each store's individual costs.

If you could display prices electronically instead of with little stickers, it would probably be done, but you don't do that, so it isn't. I suppose in the future when you can geographically locate people browsing Wal-mart's website or whatever and have access to tax databases, the website will automatically display your final price based on local sales taxes on the website, but probably not in the store.

What actually happens is that most Americans can list off their various local and state tax percentages at the drop of a hat, probably tell you which portion of the local tax code it's listed under, and perform the calculations for prices in their heads before going to the register.

The problem here, is devolving full tax powers way too fucking far.

NASA works with metric.

https://www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/functi ... s/isu.html

Which system is going to immerse a child in the logical methods of algebraic conversions and calculus faster? There are merits to both, but in the overview being able to count to ten isn't all that impressive in a 5 year old when there is another 5 year old that can tell you there's 16 ounces in a pound and around 51.7129 Torr per foot-pound per square inch.

Metric. Every time. Because you don't waste nearly as much time memorising stupid conversion ratios by rote.

But why? Why all those different tax rates? Why not one national tax rate? Why do you have to make it so complicated?

Welcome to Federalism.

A single national sales tax would require collaborating with each city mayor in the country, each county commissioner, and each governor, in addition to the Congress. Rather than convene literally every elected leader in the country to agree to a single nationwide tax, we just say "fuck it" and let them figure it out instead.

No it wouldn't: just the state governments (and you only need to go that far down because of annoying constitutional bollocks): you just collect all of the money in at the top, then hand some portion of that money down to all of the lower layers. As well as fixing the stupid pricing thing, this would also let you fix the ridiculous mess that the US currently has, where poor areas get less funding than wealthy areas.

[Jello Biafra]

One tenth: subject (singular)
of the cups: specification of the subject
Verb must be conjugated in accordance with subject.
Is.

This is what I'd do if I were so silly to expect English syntax to make any sense.

I'm not sure how a fraction is a subject, but I agree that it doesn't make much sense half of the time. (pun intended)

[Galloism]

Because the city tax funds the city government, the county tax funds the county government, and state tax funds the state government.

Wait, are those taxes used simultaniously on a product? So you have to add three tax rates before you know what you have to pay? How can you function at all?

Yes, I think this is very odd.

Usually people don't worry about how it's broken out. They just remember their one tax rate.

[Galloism]

One tenth: subject (singular)
of the cups: specification of the subject
Verb must be conjugated in accordance with subject.
Is.

This is what I'd do if I were so silly to expect English syntax to make any sense.

I'm not sure how a fraction is a subject, but I agree that it doesn't make much sense half of the time. (pun intended)

"People are really silly. One-tenth are comically silly."

What's the subject of the second sentence?

[Khalisako]

Eating eggs that're boiled in little boy's urine.


I'm looking at you, china.

[Jello Biafra]

I'm not sure how a fraction is a subject, but I agree that it doesn't make much sense half of the time. (pun intended)

"People are really silly. One-tenth are comically silly."

What's the subject of the second sentence?

Well obviously given the discussion it would be 'one-tenth', but in the absence of this discussion I would have said 'people', given the context, or in the case of 'one-tenth are comically silly' as a sentence standing alone, I'd have said that the subject is unstated.

[Galloism]

"People are really silly. One-tenth are comically silly."

What's the subject of the second sentence?

Well obviously given the discussion it would be 'one-tenth', but in the absence of this discussion I would have said 'people', given the context, or in the case of 'one-tenth are comically silly' as a sentence standing alone, I'd have said that the subject is unstated.

See though, now you're saying the subject would have been in a different sentence.

As far as I am aware, the only subject that can be implied (or as you said, unstated) is "you".

[Jello Biafra]

See though, now you're saying the subject would have been in a different sentence.

Yes, I am.

As far as I am aware, the only subject that can be implied (or as you said, unstated) is "you".

That's interesting, that there is one, but only one. Language rules are silly.

[Gallia-]

Welcome to Federalism.

A single national sales tax would require collaborating with each city mayor in the country, each county commissioner, and each governor, in addition to the Congress. Rather than convene literally every elected leader in the country, we just say "fuck it" and let them figure it out instead.

Here the idea is 'pay the goverment, local authorities get some money later'.

Here, it depends on the state's constitution on how local authorities are organized.

I don't know anything about this, though, except that I think some states grant substantial latitude to their subdivisions (counties, municipalities, whatever) in states that don't apply Dillon's Rule. I'm not sure if any states operate as federal unions with their local subdivisions, but 10 states lack Dillon's Rule in their constitutions, which explicitly doesn't protect local subdivisions from unilateral destruction (City of Trenton v. State of New Jersey), so that sort of implies that one of the protections of states that don't have Dillon's Rule on the books is protection against unilateral destruction.

My state operates as both a "home rule" (i.e. local municipalities and counties have powers beyond what is specified in the US and state constitution) and "Dillon's Rule" state, so it can unilaterally destroy subdivisions and create them, among other things. I don't know the specifics of that, though, as that would require digging into state constitutional law.

Suffice to say, it's complicated. Probably not as complicated as European Union law, but more complex than any one EU state or Britain, besides maybe Germany.

No one actually needs to know any of that to know their sales tax, though.

Wait, are those taxes used simultaniously on a product? So you have to add three tax rates before you know what you have to pay? How can you function at all?

Yes, I think this is very odd.

Usually people don't worry about how it's broken out. They just remember their one tax rate.

This, but my communist city government puts the break downs on their 1990s website anyway.

[Galloism]

See though, now you're saying the subject would have been in a different sentence.

Yes, I am.

Well you're wrong. it's just that one-tenth is a plural quantity, as it's not one, even if it is one. Here's an example.

One-tenth of the astronauts are Pacific Islanders.

There are ten astronauts. One-tenth are Pacific Islanders.

You don't say "One-tenth is Pacific Islanders" even though you're talking about one person.

You can also say "Ten percent are Pacific Islanders".

As far as I am aware, the only subject that can be implied (or as you said, unstated) is "you".

That's interesting, that there is one, but only one. Language rules are silly.

That's because where "you" is implied, you're talking to the subject.

Go to the grocery store.

Go vote.

Rub my back.

Shoot the bastard.

In all those, "you" is implied.