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Comment Re:Informationless fluff piece article (Score 1) 91

Critical point. In a fair world I'd expect it to be one of the biggies with a deep market. In a less fair world it'll be one that just so happens to be mostly controlled by connected insiders where paying the coinage to publish the stats is in effect a transfer of public funds to those insiders.

Comment Re:Lifetime has a special meaning (Score 3, Insightful) 65

Not even that, it means 'whatever we want it to mean'. Many many years ago I purchased a 'lifetime' VPN via SlashDot Deals. Come to find out 'lifetime' was defined (unwritten) by the VPN company as 5 years. The dollar value was low enough that the 5 years worked out to a trivial amount per year so I didn't come out feeling outright swindled, but I was disappointed in the marketing gymnastics just the same. The company still lives on today.

Comment Re:Weird (Score 1) 159

I would absolutely wave a magic wand to have the shelf labels include tax. Long gone are the days of having to relabel literally every item when the tax rate changes, and the advent of digital shelf tags makes it trivial. I do see some differences with the 'tariff surcharge' from sales tax though:

* Sales tax is the same across vendors. I know the approximate sales tax in an area. I don't know via what exact supply chain the store obtained an item, or when, so I can't know what the tariff was. The store doesn't either -- individual items that were subject to differing tariffs are indistinguishable on the shelf, thus the tariff surcharge will be arbitrary.
* Companies hate to disclose what they paid for stock, and in many cases are contractually prohibited from doing so. An accurate tariff surcharge would disclose this to me. Thus the surcharge is going to be an approximate / averaged amount.
* Approximate surcharges become the dumping ground for 'whatever we think we can add at the end of the sale process that won't cause the customer to abandon their cart' with little relation to the actual cost to the company.
* I am not aware of a case where a store gets to keep some of the sales tax. If the tax rate goes down, they don't get to keep charging the higher rate and 'oopsie' keep the overage. A tariff surcharge, since it necessarily can't be linked to the specific unit, is really just unbundling their cost of goods sold so they can double-dip.

Comment Re:It could, but it won't yet (Score 1) 153

The power consumption isn't really related to the amount of transactions -- a block holds a fixed amount of transactions, and the chain adjusts so that blocks happen about every 10 minutes. The power consumption is only due to miners trying to 'win' the mining race and get a payout. You could process the same number of transactions with 10 machines mining blocks as whatever you have now.

Comment Re:Sometimes the president makes little difference (Score 2) 206

Except they have a MASSIVE investment in petro infrastructure that they don't want to write off. All those oil rigs, oil plants, oil tankers... An oil company wants the transition to non-oil to happen at no faster then the natural depreciation pace of their infrastructure. Otherwise they are left with a $5-15B oil refinery that still has useful life left but is not generating income. That refinery was built on the expectation that it would process oil for 75+ years.

So, even if a $ invested in renewables will return more profit then a $ invested in oil starting from today, the company has to look to protect its massive *past* investment. If a $ spent on oil prevents them from having to write off $100 in oil infrastructure, it still makes sense for them to push for oil.

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