Literally all of what I described are exactly the sorts of tricks corporations pay to work around taxes. And in general, they're better at finding loopholes than governments are at closing loopholes. I'm not saying it's not possible, just that it's likely to be way, way, WAY harder to pull off than you think, at least when it comes to subscription-based streaming services.

Plus there's not a sale when you're doing subscription-based streaming. It is no different than going to another country and watching it and coming back with the memory of having watched it in a theater, minus the actual travel, plus the pixels having briefly appeared on a screen somewhere else. Most people will balk at paying tariffs without actually having something in the end for their troubles.

Well, that's great then. I pay for a subscription. I pay nothing extra for the imported content. So no tariff.

But wait, the subscription is from a foreign company. Why isn't anyone paying taxes on this? We should tax it all because the company is foreign.

Ah, now the company has an in-country subsidiary, and you're paying that company. And suddenly the fees are no longer taxed. Instead, the content that comes from overseas is taxed. But the in-country company pays a licensing fee that is an infinitesimal fraction of the subscription fee that you pay. Then, they pay a huge "trademark licensing fee" for the use of the Netflix/Hulu/Paramount Plus/* name, so that nearly all of the money you pay for your subscription goes to the parent company untaxed.

Good luck sorting it all out and proving that they're violating the law.

So no, for entirely virtual goods and intellectual property, it's almost never that simple. In fact, it is ridiculously hard, and enforcement is downright nightmarish. The term "Hollywood accounting" didn't become a household term for no reason.

It's a bad idea because it hinders trade. However, if only one side is profiting from the trade, the other side doesn't have much reason to support the deal.

This is probably fallout from Trump's "pleasant comments" about our allies.

Headline to read "United States Massively Raises Tariffs, Shocked When World Refuses To Not Tax U.S. Digital Exports".

Some things are entirely predictable.

Mostly infeasibility. Taxing streaming means assigning a value to the content and sending someone a bill for the taxes, or else finding a way to absorb the taxes, and in any case, are you importing when they watch it, or when Netflix (or whoever) imports it onto their servers?

Once VPNs exist, it becomes impossible for a law like this to be enforced without enforcing strict age verification around the world, which is impossible given the technological state of many countries in the world (including the United States). It isn't even possible for companies to reliably comply with a law like this by blocking all access from Australia (because VPNs exist).

Once again, dumb legislators who don't understand technology have passed laws demanding something that is technologically infeasible (bans) instead of something that is technologically feasible (providing special accounts for underage people that give parental supervision, blaming the user if the user deliberately goes around that, and encouraging parents to report when their kids make friends with other kids who use fake ages to go around that).

The result, predictably, is that it doesn't work. And everyone who has ever worked in the tech industry is shocked in much the same way that we are shocked when the sun comes up in the morning, despite us demanding that it not come up until noon.

I think you've never tried to understand the code of a large project written by a different group of people.

I believe there was a period right after the civil war that was as bad.

Even that depends on how long you expect it to be before you need the funds. As the "cashing in" time gets closer, you need to reduce the high-risk part.

The problem is that this allows the trustees to bet someone else's money on wildly speculative things. Proving that they acted irresponsibly will be on the person who lost all their means of hiring a lawyer.

IIUC there are two different kinds of things that are called "gravity waves" in quantum physics by those who aren't experts in the field. One of those is undetectable, and the other is what we've been detecting. (I'm no expert, so I can't clarify that.) There's also something called "gravity waves" in fluid dynamics, and that's definitely detectable.

It depends on your time horizon. The predictions aren't *currently* testable. Testing them depends on building new tools.

I sort of don't like it, because I don't really accept continuity, but I've no evidence that my feeling is correct. (I expect things to break down before one gets to 10^-33 cm. But that's because of something Wheeler speculated about in the 1980's.)

Best isn't the question. Sales is the question. If you do a poll of photographers, the names you'll hear when you ask what they shoot with are almost always going to be Lexar and SanDisk. Sony won't be in the top five. IMO, that's mostly because they spent a decade with their own Memory Stick nonsense while other manufacturers were claiming the SD and CF card market for themselves. It's hard to force your way into an already crowded field where everyone has already picked favorites.

Yeah, but approximately nobody uses CFExpress. It was an attempt by the CompactFlash folks to stay relevant after the SD card standard ate their lunch. No still camera I've never owned, nor any camcorders (including fairly high-end 4K gear from major manufacturers) uses it. Everybody uses SD. Even most cinema cameras (which as far as I'm aware, are approximately the only gear that *ever* used CFExpress) mostly use SD cards now, or else have removable backs with SATA SSDs or similar.

Put another way, today I learned that somebody still actually made CFExpress cards. I thought the standard was thoroughly and completely stillborn. This is a tiny niche of a niche. And saying that Sony is price-comparable on something that is so niche that it is compatible with only maybe a dozen cinema camera models built by two or three companies within a narrow range of years doesn't exactly contradict what I said about suspecting that nobody uses them because of the cost. I doubt any other CFExpress cards are affordable, either, because economies of scale basically don't exist for a product that's so low-volume.

When I go to buy SD cards — and yes, at this point, almost everybody uses SD cards — I'm not even looking at products made by Sony. I'm looking at products by SanDisk and Lexar. I would be okay with Kingston or Transcend in a pinch. I guess some folks also like Samsung, though I've been burned by other Samsung gear often enough that I don't trust them with something critical like an SD card. Sony isn't even on my list. And pretty much every photographer and videographer I know does the same.

Given that Sony screwed around for more than a decade with their own proprietary "Memory Stick" format, they basically missed the market for SD cards, and other companies claimed that market.

Based on that, at least in my mind, I kind of assume that the people who buy Sony flash cards are probably the ones who have always bought Sony, because it's the only name they know and trust. Most of those folks probably started on Sony back in the 1970s when their products were actually built to last for decades, were top-tier in features, rather than being hobbled by pressure from their entertainment division, and when repair parts weren't priced so high that a power switch costs more than a whole new camcorder (not kidding). They're probably the ones who used to buy overpriced Sony headphones for $150 that fell apart instead of the $50 Koss headphones that didn't. They're also probably the ones who still have analog land line home phones, and most of them are probably retired or dead by now.

*Maybe* some of their mirrorless camera purchasers from the last few years buy Sony cards out of some bizarre sense of brand loyalty, but I'd imagine most of them talk to other photographers and ask what to buy, and again, I'm pretty sure Sony won't be on anybody's list.

I'm just struggling to imagine them having much of a market except perhaps in niche products like CFExpress or in cheap CF cards sold at Walgreens or CVS for high margins to people who don't know any better.

But maybe I'm wrong.

No, they would only consolidate their product line if they thought that doing so would make it more profitable. That would require a high enough volume of sales to matter. Companies don't usually cut entire swaths of products because of the price point. They usually do it because the product line makes so little money that it isn't worth the extra effort to keep it going.

This is so true, so true.

And it's not even US specific. In the wake of the Ukraine war, German parliament voted to give itself 100 billion of additional taxpayer money (i.e. debt) to spend on defense. Recently a report came out of all the money spent so far, 90% did not go towards the intended purpose.

Why any of the jokers in charge of our governments are still not in jail baffles me more and more every year. Oh yes, it's because they make the rules, sorry, my bad.