The brine won't kill anything if it's sufficiently disbursed.

So should someone who steals $2 million and a kid who steals a pencil sharpener both be given the same jail sentence?

Yes. Return what you stole and stay in your room until you've learned your lesson.

Maybe a full analysis was done and a round number close to the optimal number was selected.

That also happens to be a power of 10? There's only a 1 in 10 chance of that happening in real life, so that's not likely.

On the other hand why mandate when a number has to be reexamined? If inflation is low it could be quite a while before needed.

Someday the number will need to be raised, so why not plan for the inevitable?

Round numbers are easy to remember and deal with.

That's true, but other than criminals, who needs to memorize how much a person can deposit before it gets reported?

[The number is too low] When too many transactions get reported and the investigation teams get swamped.

That's an objective metric, certainly better than picking a number out of thin air as the first one appears to have been. Maybe they should write that into the law and also that the number must be re-determined periodically so it's never too high nor too low.

So instead of fixing the algorithm, they wrote a new law making it illegal to exploit the algorithm.

That's your federal government at work!

What's so magical about the $10,000 number?

Laws have to be black and white.

That still doesn't explain why $10,000 is a better number than $9,999 or $10,001. The fact that it's a suspiciously round number suggests negligence on the part of whoever wrote the law.

If inflation causes the number to be too low they can change the law.

How would you know whether the number is too low? Why wasn't that same mechanism used to help write the law long ago when the cost of making changes to the law was much lower?

Lets not go too far into this specific case. It is just an example of how knowing an algorithm can facilitate gaming the system.

You're partially correct. It's an example of how knowing a poorly designed algorithm can facilitate gaming the system.

When you find people gaming the system and the results of that are undesirable, isn't that a good time to refine your algorithm?

What's so magical about the $10,000 number? Why not $9,999, or $10,001? Should it be indexed to inflation? Did someone pull that number out of thin air, and if so, is that a responsible way to write laws?

If lack of competition is the disease and we use regulation to mask the symptoms, won't we end up with more regulation while the disease persists?

"Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use regulation.'
Now, they have two problems."
(With apologies to D. Tilbrook)

So everyone is penalized...

...when everyone is paid fairly?

Sure, but this is about salaried employees.

And sentencing could be completed on day two if the purpose of justice were rehabilitation and not revenge (which legal types call "retribution"), because everyone who commits a violent crime would get the same sentence: banishment from society until the person is no longer a danger to others.

The moment you throw in a few spaces to line something up on a non-tab boundary (say, to align a second line of arguments with the first argument), then you have a mess...

Not if both lines have the same number of tabs, and no tab ever follows a non-tab character on the same line.

The article describes how scientists painstakingly gathered data on the quakes, and then tried to find ways to communicate the results--which are quite definitive--to politicians who often have financial reasons to disbelieve them.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair