And we all know that won't happen.
The thing with fines is that all the people ACTIVELY involved have interests that don't align with the public and taxpayers.
The shops are ok with fines if they happen rarely and in manageable amounts. Then they can just factor them in as costs of doing business.
The inspectors need occasional fines to justify their existance. So, counter-intuitively, they have absolutely no interest in the businesses they inspect to actually be compliant. Just compliant enough that the non-compliance doesn't make more headlines than their fines. So they'll come now and then, but not so often that the business actually feels pressured into changing things.
You misunderstand wealth.
Most wealth of the filthy rich is in assets. Musk OWNS stuff that is worth X billions. That doesn't mean he as 140 mio. in cash sitting in his bottom drawer.
Moreoever, much of the spending the filthy rich do is done on debt. They put up their wealth as a collateral and buy stuff with other people's (the banks) money. There's some tax trickery with this the exact details I forgot about.
So yes, coughing up $140 mio. is at least a nuissance, even if on paper it's a rounding error.
The actual story that got buried is that the filthy rich are now in full-blown "I rule the world" mode when their reaction to a fee is not "sorry, we fucked up, won't happen again", but "let's get rid of those rules, they bother me".
If they cared, they could force price compliance automatically using e-paper tags. The fact they don't deploy modern solutions to a known issue, means they don't want to solve it.
These automated tags are about $15-$20 each. If you buy a million you can probably get them for $10, but still. Oh yes, and their stated lifetime is 5 years. And you STILL need an employee to walk around updating because it's done via NFC.
In many cases, there are modern tech solutions, but pen-and-paper is still cheaper, easier and more reliable.
It's not necessarily malice. What I mean is: They are certainly malicious, but maybe not in this.
Now THAT is a rare example of an actually smart law.
No government funds needed to enforce the policy, while the stores have an incentive to post the right prices. Why the max $5 though?
My grandparents and parents sometimes talked about how mail used to work.
Delivery within the same city within a few hours. The mailman would come to your house several times during the same day. Every day.
Telephones changed that. With phones, if something is urgent but not so urgent you go yourself, you can make a call. So the demand for same-day-delivery disappeared. Visiting each house only once means a mailman can cover more houses in the same amount of hours.
Privatizing mail delivery is an astonishingly stupid idea, given that what is left in physical mail delivery is often important, official documents.
The only reason th US is where it is right now is because the dollar is still the world currency. It remains so because you need dollars to buy oil.
People who complain about the US dollar and oil are people who've never taken an economics class.
If you're too lazy to learn economics, then do a simple search to find out the world's oil production compared to the number of dollars in the world, and that should give you an idea of how much influence it actually has.
Simply stated, the psychological industry has a monetary profit motive in getting more people on daily maintenance medicine. Each person on a daily maintenance medicine means 2 to 4 office visits per year allowing a psychologists to have a steady stream of paying customers.
This is much cheaper than actually going through the labor intensive process of psychoanalysis, so insurance companies like it.
100 percent of the boys were diagnosed with ADHD - by their teachers. Doctors rubber stamped the diagnosis.
I wonder when we'll see the Ritalin lawsuits.
A 2015 handbook laid the groundwork for the nascent field of "Meeting Science". Among other things, the research revealed that the real issue may not be the number of meetings, but rather how they are designed, the lack of clarity about their purpose, and the inequalities they (often unconsciously) reinforce...
You needed a handbook for that?
Anyone who ever went to a business meeting could've told you that.
By my experience, it takes only 4 things to make a meeting productive: a) someone is in charge of the meeting and moderation, b) that someone had time to prepare, c) everyone in the meeting has received an agenda with enough lead time to have read it and (if necessary) prepare their part, at least a bit and finally d) there is at least a simple protocol of the meeting for those who couldn't attend, those who dozed off in the middle, and those who claim next week that something else was agreed on.
They're still making DVD drives. They're just mostly USB now. Ripping is pushbutton easy these days. No messing around with getting a copy of DeCSS and such.
Life. Don't talk to me about life. - Marvin the Paranoid Anroid