111–120 of 259 posts
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Hopefully your local civil services are not terribly affected by your dodging of taxes, in case you or someone you care about ever needs them.
California gets plenty of tax revenue, trust us. We’re reminded of that every paycheck.
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"However, despite the sky-rocketing prices" Not despite. People don't understand the Apple brand.
Price elasticity of demand isn't linear. Something that is a Giffen good at a lower price may well have negative marginal demand if the price rises too much.
On a much smaller scale, this is achieved in the US by going to a no sales tax state like Oregon or Delaware. With the sales tax in Los Angeles at 10.25%, I’ve ended up queuing up large purchases together, buying a round trip ticket to Portland ($200-300) and hitting up the Apple Store, Target, Best Buy there. And get a free trip to Portland! I’ve read the Christiana Mall in Delaware is especially popular for people…
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For the USAians, Rs24000 is $325.78. By comparison, I paid $92.04 in sales tax for my new iPhone, and I am currently in a geography that is considered low-tax.
What is USAian?
The former are just having a laugh, and the latter are looking for things to be offended by.
I don't know which camp the GP falls into but I'll be charitable and assume they're just being silly.
On a much smaller scale, this is achieved in the US by going to a no sales tax state like Oregon or Delaware. With the sales tax in Los Angeles at 10.25%, I’ve ended up queuing up large purchases together, buying a round trip ticket to Portland ($200-300) and hitting up the Apple Store, Target, Best Buy there. And get a free trip to Portland! I’ve read the Christiana Mall in Delaware is especially popular for people…
Hopefully your local civil services are not terribly affected by your dodging of taxes, in case you or someone you care about ever needs them.
Problem is, often they are not wrong, there is massive government corruption, and taxes are often used for unethical and wrong things, meanwhile actual services are often paid by the population themselves.
For example: my family pay all our business and whatnot taxes correctly, because we don't want to get dragged into a crime spree (if you are avoiding taxes you open yourself to extortion, and from extortion to other crimes...), yet my parents paid my education until I was 18, I paid my own education after that, the street in front of our house, we bought it, literally (was crazy expensive too since our house is in a corner). The phone lines? We also paid for that, when we moved in there was no phone in the neighbourhood, but since we had a business we needed phone, so we paid people to install the cables for us. Deliveries? All done with private companies, the public service is crap. Police? We often pay private security, all times we had to call emergency, it didn't work (in one egregious case: we told the cop someone broken in violently in a neighbour house, the cop replied on the phone, literally: oh sorry, my shift today has few people, and we don't want to risk our lives, so we won't go), fire? Same shit, calling for the firefighters worked ONCE for me, and was because the road itself was on fire, all otehr attempts failed, many they didn't even picked up, my parents house did got damaged because of it (someone tried to burn trash in a field behind the house, it burned our backyard that was full of fruit trees, and burned a neighbour house down, and damaged a ton of other houses). Health? Well, that is one thing that works more or less right... still most of my healthcare I paid for it, the government healthcare is prone to make stupid mistakes and kill people for stupid reasons (for example the hospital nearest my house killed a guy by giving him insulin AFTER he warned them he was allergic, they didn't believed him and though he was some kind of conspiracy anti-vaccer nut and was using allergy as excuse).
And the list goes on, and on, and on.
Whenever I argue against taxes, people reply with a list of: "Oh, you don't use X?" and then I reply: "Yes, I use it, and pay it as a private service" the only thing I don't pay a private service for, is the military.
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> That's almost all taxes. I mean, that’s a good thing, right? Smokers should pay for the externalities their habit has on society as a whole.
Except smokers actually aren't actually a net cost to the healthcare system, because they die earlier. "complete smoking cessation would produce a net increase in health care costs" https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199710093371506
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"as of May 2019, the US has the highest tariff rate among all developed nations with a trade-weighted tariff rate of 4.2%"
US tariffs tend not to be on consumer goods though, right? Also, I'm curious how much that number has changed over the last 4 years. Were we also at the top in 2016?
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What is USAian?
It's a term people use to either be funny, or it's because they're somehow offended that people from USA use the demonym "American" even though there are other countries in the Americas, yet despite the fact that no one else in those countries seems to care because they have their own demonyms they use. The former are just having a laugh, and the latter are looking for things to be offended by. I don't know which cam…
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Even $300 is a big premium for what you get. Basically just an extra camera and a LIDAR sensor that nobody knows what to do with yet. Oh, and a shiny stainless-steel band around the edge. I think what Apple has realized is that a certain subset of their customers will always want the best model , no matter how little sense the price makes compared to the regular model. For some people, it will always be a status symb…
I would add to that a brighter screen, the base has twice the storage and the pro has better camera capabilities (that could actually be claimed to be 'pro'). When you equalise the storage, the price differential is about $200.
Since the article lists prices in INR: The price of the iPhone 12 Pro in India in USD today is $1,615.22, and the price in Dubai is $1,140.15. So it must be possible to fly round-trip to Dubai for less than about $475, which seems plausible.