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Comment Re: Mecial Cannabis companies (Score 1) 275

I would think, if the stuff kept flying off the shelf like that (even is only due to one customer), you would just stock more of it and then sell more of it. Stock enough to let her buy all she wants and still have enough left over for everyone else who wants to buy it to get theirs too.

You're not quite familiar with the concept of a loss leader, are you? You put a product in at a price where you're losing money but advertise it heavily in order to drive traffic to your store. You have a limited volume so that it doesn't cost you too much, and you accept the problem that customers who come in looking for that product after it's sold out will be dissatisfied. By putting a limit on the number of items that one person could purchase, you end up with one pissed off customer who isn't really generating you any profit anyways, and a lot of more satisfied higher value customers. If the goal is to get more happy customers, and the options are to put up more product you're losing money on or pissing off one person who's costing you money, you'll quickly find out that you don't feel so bad about pissing off that one person.

Netflix actually does a similar thing with their mailed DVD service. Let's say Bob and Fred both have HotSummerRelease on their wish list. Bob watches tons of movies, about 10 a month, returning the movies every 3 days. Fred doesn't watch nearly as many, usually only 2 a month, keeping the movies for 2 weeks at a time. You only have one copy of HotSummerRelease, who do you send it to? Most efficient and logically minded people will instantly say Bob. He's only going to keep the movie for 3 days, so you'll get it back sooner and can then send it to Fred.

That's not what Netflix does, though. They send the movie to Fred. Why? Because with all the movies that Bob goes through, he costs the company more money in terms of postage. Since Fred and Bob pay Netflix the same amount, but Bob costs more, Fred is a more valuable customer. Fred gets the movie first because Netflix wants to make sure that Fred is happy.

tl;dr: Not all customers are equal, and it's a fairly standard business practice to give preferential treatment to higher value customers and to tell expensive ones to shove off.

Comment Re:What about manufacturing? (Score 0) 262

Ahem.

"This report documents the environmental impact of our facilities and our efforts to reduce their impact. In particular, this report documents: â How we generate and use energy across our worldwide facilities including our corporate offices, data centers, and retail stores by highlighting our fiscal 2012 accomplishments"

Ahem? Ahem yourself. The quote being discussed, and the 75% claim is:

And for all of Apple’s corporate facilities worldwide, we’re at 75 percent, and we expect that number to grow as the amount of renewable energy available to us increases.

Now see page 10 of the report linked above. Notice how retail stores is a separate category than corporate offices.

Bottom line: No, the 75% does not include stores.

Comment Re:Enforcement (Score 1) 297

One option is to put the onus on the retailers to maintain a database of all the different sales tax rates in the country, so they can collect the appropriate amount on the purchase.

That is already what is expected for brick and mortar stores. You need to track all sales in all counties and collect all relevant sales taxes. If K-Mart can handle this, I'm sure Amazon can.

Another avenue is to put the onus on the buyer to calculate and remit the appropriate taxes to the authorities.

This is the current state of affairs. It's called a use tax. People ignore it.

NewEgg is contacted by the NY Department of Taxation and Finance and ordered to turn over their NY sales records. No warrant is required, since the request is for tax compliance purposes. DTF runs the records through their computer system and looks up the tax records of each NewEgg customer. If the customer didn't report the sale, they're in big trouble. If it's a significant amount that they didn't report, or there's a pattern of non-compliance, off to private prison with you!

Why go through all that hassle when you can simply legislate that the merchant has to collect, report, and pay the sales tax on every purchase directly? That by itself will already generate more revenue for you, and that's what politicians love

Comment Re:Come on, you knew this was an MMO (Score 3, Insightful) 290

Yes, there are many MUD's that have been running even longer. But that's citing the *exception*, not the *norm*. Most MMO's, like most MUD's, have a certain shelf-life.

True, and the *norm* for shelf life is typically when the expenses start to outweigh the income. It sounds like the plug was pulled on this far earlier, if they're taking in $900k/mo.

Comment Re:Irony? (Score 3) 397

That's not ironic, it's coincidental.

"The use of words expressing something other than their literal intention." Now THAT is irony!

2.Happening in the opposite way to what is expected, thus typically causing wry amusement.

I would guess that if most people were asked if the DRM-included version or the DRM-free version would be the most pirated, they would have said the DRM-free. That is the expectation. The opposite happened.

Comment A lack of market knowledge? (Score 1) 658

“The Smart and the Fiat 500 have high sticker prices, and people buy them because they are small cars,”

Fiat, maybe, but people aren't buying Smart cars because they want a tiny car. Smart cars are small because that's what the technology required for electric cars at the time.

Comment Re:RTFA (Score 2) 467

Facebook allows other people to add you to groups - in other words, your 'friends' can basically edit an aspect of your profile. It's bizarrely stupid, and has been a common complaint for a long time, and this wouldn't have happened if Facebook didn't do this, but Facebook defends this practice.

To be honest, the same effect would result if one of her friends posted "Hey, what's it like being a lesbian?" on her wall. I don't see anyone advocating a way to prevent that from happening.

The easier lesson from all this is that if you're going to try to keep secrets, but be active on social media, eventually you're going to get burned.

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