Those are really interesting! I'm resisting diving down that rabbit hole myself. Must... get... work... done...

Yeah, it's just a negotiating position. Pleading guilty out of the gate means just throwing yourself on the court's mercy. A not guilty plea means you get to negotiate with the prosecutor for a lesser charge, or get the prosecutor to provide more favorable sentencing recommendations (not that the judge has to follow them, but they usually do). Sometimes that negotiation happens before arraignment, so the first entered plea is "guilty", but not usually.

Thank you. Your post sent me down a research rabbit hole, such as medieval "towns" being defined by the right to host a flea market for surrounding villages, and historic gazebos called "market crosses" that serve as information booths, and a 10th Anniversary Stadium that doubled as a market square in post-communist Warsaw, Poland, and some open-air market promoters (such as YLNI in Fort Wayne, Indiana) seeking to distance their producers' markets from the sort of flea markets that attract non-professional vendors, and some professional vendors operating on a touring basis at a different market each weekend, and asking people from parts of Europe how much it typically costs to set up a table at a flea market.

Takeaways:
- Like the chips in Japanese stored value cards, European payment cards' chips allow small transactions to be authorized offline and batch-captured hours later.
- Flea markets largely replace garage sales in much of mainland Europe, and the promoter may be providing electronic payment service.
- Now I understand the third act of James Halliwell-Phillipps's short story "The Three Little Pigs", where the wolf meets the pig at an outdoor market, slightly better.

This competition for computer hardware is really becoming annoying for us consumers. Google, Amazon, and MS are in a market-share fight and using their cash cows (search ads, e-store monopoly, & office-ware) to subsidize AI datacenter builds. This game of chicken cannot last forever, their actual AI revenues don't carry their own water. One of these 3 will eventually blink and expose the bubble for what it is, and Marvin will get his Earth-shattering Kaboom!

There's also the matter of perception. GW's business model relies on being able to command a pretty solid margin on some injection moldings that are decent quality but nothing super heroic by industry standards(certainly not Lego tier).

If the customers (who, given that this is a tabletop wargaming thing, skew toward hobby artists more than average) feel that they are being lazily bot slopped; they probably aren't going to be any more willing to pay GW prices rather than going with the assortment of either straight counterfeit or 'clearly intended to be Astartes(tm); but 'space marine' is plenty roomy for legally distinct interpretations' vendors.

They could, presumably, realize some immediate savings by culling a few artists; but when you are in the position of being a 'premium' vendor who people pay for; you really, really, want to be careful about destroying that perception and ending up in a margins knife-fight with the guys who just do bulk plastics on ultra-tight margins. Same sort of thing as being a lawyer and getting caught with slop in your filings. Did you save on paralegals? Yes. Is your future hourly rate potentially going to reflect the fact that you are a stenographer for a chatbot? Very probably.

Correction, it was tepples who made that point, in a different subthread.

wyHunter made the excellent point that including the transaction fee in the price isn't possible, not the way transaction fees are currently structured. The percentage portion of the transaction fee can be included in the price, but the flat portion of the transaction fee can't.

Maybe that's okay. The percentage portion could be included in the price, and you'd just expect that you're going to pay an additional 30 cents (or whatever) on the whole transaction. The receipt could itemize out both the percentage part and the flat fee.

This all assumes that there are no more two or three payment options, of course. Beyond that, putting many prices on the label would become impractical.

<shrug/>. I'd like to see the total price on the label, but for basically my whole life I've lived in places where that's not how it works, you just always know that sales tax will be added on top of the listed prices. Free market rules still work.

No, they generally don't. Perhaps because of less-reliable telecoms infrastructure, 20-30 years ago Europe moved aggressively to chip cards, and the chip is trusted to authorize a lot of transactions entirely offline. The payment terminal must go online eventually to upload the transactions, of course, and there are various triggers in the card-side and terminal-side logic that will force the transaction online, but this rarely happens for small-value transactions. Or at least, that's how it was when I worked in that space 15+ years ago, and I doubt it has changed much because it worked very well and the move to mandatory chip + PIN was making it even better.

As I understand it, the same approach has carried forward with phone-based payments. iOS uses exactly the the same sort of chip (called a Secure Element, when it's embedded in a phone) with the same sort of applets and logic running on it. Android is a more complicated story, but it also works offline.

Aside: Although I didn't work on the Google Wallet team I actually designed the security scheme used by Google Wallet to secure the keys used to authorize payments. It's an ugly hack I came up with to work around the lack of secure elements in Android devices circa 2014, and it has been partially superseded with the use of secure elements today (using the SE APIs I built). The basic idea had two parts. The first was to reduce the value of the secrets by making them single-use. The second was that data held in RAM was fairly hard to extract since most compromises that enable access to data in DRAM require a reboot, after which the targeted data would be lost. There are ways around this, like "chip-off" attacks where you freeze the device so that the RAM contents will persist for a few minutes even after power is removed, then you quickly -- and without warming the chip! -- desolder the RAM and pop it into a device that will dump the contents, but they're sufficiently difficult to execute that the risk is acceptable given all of the other fraud mitigation present in the payment systems.

I figured we could safely store payment keys in RAM for a few years until SEs became common enough, then we could switch. As it turns out, the RAM-based security scheme is still working just fine over a decade later, mostly because chip-off attacks and similar actually got harder due to increased hardware integration. In 2014, DRAM was discrete parts soldered to the mainboard. By 2018 or so and new flagship SoCs included the DRAM in the SoC in a package-on-package configuration. So it's still the case that the best way to extract secrets from RAM on an Android device is a remote software compromise -- but thanks to Android manufacturers' once-abysmal record of delivering security patches, the Android OS adopted a deeply-layered defense-in-depth security strategy that makes effective remote software compromise surprisingly hard even on devices with lots of known security vulnerabilities. Google gradually got Android OEMs to do a better job of delivering security patches, but the defensive security architecture is still there.

Obviously, the downside of the "keep your secrets in RAM" strategy is that they get lost on reboot. This was the defense against attack, but it's a problem for use, too. The solution is that after boot you need a network connection to re-retrieve the secrets from the server (that also pushes the problem to one of preventing attackers from getting the secrets from the server, but Google has good server-side mitigations). So if you're standing in the checkout line in a building that blocks cell service and your phone reboots for some reason, you're screwed when you get to the payment terminal. That was rare enough not to be a big problem, but it was a problem. Now, of course, most devices have SEs, so secrets can be stashed there, protected by user authetication -- and the secrets are still single-use and so relatively low-value. The obvious downside of single-use keys is that you can theoretically exhaust your supply before getting a network connection. AFAICT that basically never happens, though.

Anyway, enough history...

In Germany they're called "Flohmärkte", which literally means fleamarket. In most other European countries it's less of a regimented commercial operation (how characteristically German, makes me chuckle) and more of a big community event. I've seen it in France, where a few times per year they close off a bunch of streets and the whole town brings out all their stuff and sets up tables. It was 20 years ago that I saw this, and at that time it the French community "garage sale" events were all-cash, but according to Gemini (grain of salt, but it's believable) today there are a lot of digital transactions at these events, all mobile phone-based. PayPal, direct digital bank transfers (e.g. Wero) or contactless tap (Apple Pay, Google Wallet on the buyer side), using an app the seller can download (Zettle, Square, Viva).

There's undoubtedly still a lot of cash used, but it's apparently declining fast. According to the European Central Bank, in 2024, 52% of small-value and person-to-person payments in Europe were made with cash, but they expected that by the next report (due end of 2026), this would continue falling and cash would be fall to a minority position. In 2024, 62% of Europeans felt like it was important to have cash as a payment option. That's still a significant majority, but I think it's actually quite striking that a third apparently don't think they need cash at all.

Wow, this ended up being a long post.

> I remember back in the 70's they said because of all the pollution, we were headed to another ice age.

Who are "they"? Two dudes? yawn

> It's called a CYCLE. It's been going on for thousands of years.

Rarely had it change as fast as it has. Usually mega-volcanos or meteors were involved in comparable rapidity.

Not to mention that in their world, consumers will have enough bandwidth to upload a quarter terabyte video file in less than a day, which I definitely do not.

I had in mind the CrowdStrike outage of July 2024. It caused a local bike shop to close for the day because they could accept no payment, and I had to find another bike shop not using CrowdStrike to get my tire looked at.

True of the person buying something or sending money. However, the person receiving money through a card payment still needs an Internet connection.

I was not aware of that.

Which means you need to store enough stuff that you can afford to rent a table for a day, and you can't have one member of the household watching and the others performing household tasks (such as cooking and cleaning) while there are no customers. How often does each neighborhood hold a flea market? Or do customers in a particular city need to go out of their way to attend a flea market that might be on the other side of town?

I am unfamiliar with flea market customs in European countries that might affect the viability of electronic payments smaller than a euro. "Flea market" on Wikipedia didn't give even a ballpark estimate for where they are held, how often, and cost to rent a table. What keywords should I put into DuckDuckGo to learn more about this? I tried europe bans garage sales which returned irrelevant results about the transition from petrol vehicles to electric vehicles.

Minors can have bank accounts, and bank cards.

Reliable infrastructure minimizes that issue. It won't go away entirely, of course, but from what I can see most of Europe has 99.99% uptime on their electrical grids. And if your payment terminals have to have antivirus, you're doing it wrong. Also, many credit/debit transactions in Europe are offline, so phone/data connection outages are less critical.

Plastic cards exist and are very cheap.

I don't know about other countries, but garage sales are illegal in much of Germany. You instead take your stuff to a flea market and rent a table, and the flea markets generally provide electronic transaction services. I think most of Europe is like this, except I don't think most areas actually ban individual garage sales; it's just not what people do.

I hadn't thought about that, but it makes sense.

It's interesting that the large grocery store chain I built a cash management system for ~30 years ago didn't mention that. Cash back was less common then, as I recall. Also, I wonder if the cash back transaction amounts were/are just too low to make much difference. I don't know about you, but on the rare occasion I've gotten cash back I only get like $20. If I want a few hundred cash I go to an ATM instead.

The cash management system was kind of cool, BTW. We used counting machines to sort and bundle bills and coins, then shrink-wrap them, barcode them, and scan the barcodes to track their movements within the store and to/from the bank. The system reduced shrinkage significantly, more than enough to compensate for the additional labor and equipment costs of bundling, scanning, tracking etc., but the real goal of the system was actually something different. The chain had several hundred stores and the total amount of cash in registers and safes across the whole enterprise at any given moment was high single-digit millions, sometimes low double digit millions. So the real goal of the system was to be able to provide a real-time, substantiated data feed on the cash held so the finance team could use it as collateral for leveraged investments. They convinced their brokerage to trust their numbers and give them cheap marginal rates on purchased securities, because of the hard collateral represented by the distributed cash pile.

I later heard that they made a lot of money using this scheme but then lost a lot of it during the dotcom bust and ended up removing the system. Even though it more than paid for itself without the investment shenanigans, it was too closely associated with the investment scheme, plus local store managers found it annoying, and the backlash from the big loss got it ripped out.

High-stakes gambling, whether on casino games or on the outcome of sport matches, has never needed a lot of local computing power. JRA PAT (Japan Racing Association Personal Access Terminal) was an application to bet on horse races that ran on a Super Famicom with a 3.6 MHz 16-bit CPU, 128 KiB of RAM, and 64 KiB of VRAM. The same machine hosted Vegas Stakes, an application that simulated casino gambling.

In the city, maybe. In rural areas outside the service area of cable and fiber, the penalty is nearly a second of speed-of-light latency to and from the geostationary satellite and the data transfer overage bill from the ISP at the end of the month. Likewise for work done on a laptop while riding public transportation to or from home: if it isn't completely local, you incur a mobile hotspot/"tethering" bill from your cellular ISP.