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Norway to track all supermarket purchases?

lifeinnorway.net

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Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. I'm on an all-meat diet and I turned my health around thanks to it. Most often people who advocate eliminating meat look sickly, because they are.

I'm happy that worked for you, but nutrition is too complex to make sweeping statements like that. Some scientists say that animal fats are unhealthy, while others correlate the increase in lifestyle diseases with the increased consumption of vegetable fats. We just don't know enough about how the body works.

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Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, they would have loved to have Norwegian levels of government trust, but that's antithetical to the way the Soviet Union was set up.

Stasi was the secret police in East Germany.

Yes I'm aware of that. Do you believe the GDR could have established meaningful trust with the populace independent of Soviet policy?

Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?

#264
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, what is the worst possible consequence of a supermarket being able to track you? At worst, I suppose you be could be charged more for purchasing a certain item at that particular chain. I highly doubt this has ever happened, since it's bad for business. The usual consequence for getting tracked at the supermarket is getting a discount on certain groceries via a loyalty program, with zero downsides for…

I may be getting hung up in semantics, but calling this a sin tax is stupid. Who cares if alcohol is a “sin” or not? That’s irrelevant, what matters is that it’s a highly addicting poison that harms everyone.

> calling this a sin tax is stupid

"Sin tax" is the name for a targeted excise tax to discourage consumption. The name goes back to the 1500s when the Catholic Church used such a tactic (or at least justification) to tax certain activities.

Whether we current use a moral framework to distinguish what goods to tax, it's become an accepted term.

Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're already being tracked by the grocery stores With cash and no store "loyalty" app - no. > wouldn't it be better to be tracked by someone who at least tries to have your best interests at heart But this is not the case here.

> With cash and no store "loyalty" app - no. Several stores track your phone inside the store. Some also use facial recognition. I haven’t seen any store use automatic license plate readers on customer cars but It wouldn’t surprise me if some do.

>Several stores track your phone inside the store

phones made in the last few years have mac address randomization to thwart this type of stuff. It's not perfect, but it suffices to prevent them from building a profile of your purchases between visits.

>Some also use facial recognition.

good thing covid made face masks socially acceptable ;)

Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden is similar - you can't buy a beer with > 3.5% alcohol. Subjectively, they improved the quality of these 2.1% / 3.5% beers. It was piss some 10 years ago. Higher percentage, "normal" alcoholic products are sold in government-run Systembolaget[1]. And there's almost no cash in Sweden. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget

It's so sad that Sweden doesn't allow real beer in the shops like Norway does.

I don't know, I have started to think we shouldn't sell any type of hard drugs, like alcohol and tobacco, in grocery stores. Why not sell these products in separate specialized stores, like we already do with Vinmonopolet?

Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?

#267
post #79

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this would arguably be a great thing

Let's not stop there and let's profile people on everything they purchase and increase their taxes on everything that's not remotely considered healthy enough, because you know, they increase the burden on the whole society! That's the recipe for the abolition of individual freedom.

There’s a lot of talk in N about the “people health” and how people need to eat less sugar etc. And how things like sugar should be taxed more. But you can still buy as much candy and whatever at the grocery store. And it doesn’t seem terribly expensive, either. (Alcohol is, though.)

There should be some opt-in assistance for making better lifestyle choices, I think. More walk, less talk. There are already self-help ideas that center around promising other people that you won’t do X, or that you will do Y, and then having to pay them money or something if you do/don’t. Why couldn’t the government help you do the same thing? As a not-for-profit alternative.

EDIT: I don’t mean that the disincentive should be that you give the government money if you fail. That would be a bad incentive for the government.

Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?

#268
In the same week we see one government (Canadian) fining a company for unnecessarily storing data on users, and another government obtaining masses of data just for the hell of it.

EDIT

> SSB claims they want a less time-consuming way of collecting and analysing household consumption statistics in order to inform tax policy, social assistance and child allowance.

That does seem plausible. Inflation statistics, for example, are notoriously vulnerable to arbitrary changes in the "basket of goods" economists define. If economists could access the entire shopping list, including volumes, then there'd be no need to try to guess what a representative basket looks like.

Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?

#269
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're already being tracked by the grocery stores, wouldn't it be better to be tracked by someone who at least tries to have your best interests at heart vs. the grocery industry who just wants to sell you more?

Realistically, what is the worst possible consequence of a supermarket being able to track you? At worst, I suppose you be could be charged more for purchasing a certain item at that particular chain. I highly doubt this has ever happened, since it's bad for business. The usual consequence for getting tracked at the supermarket is getting a discount on certain groceries via a loyalty program, with zero downsides for…

You completely forgot that those data can and will be sold to anybody interested, anywhere.

Much more worrisome image rather than taxing ie chronic junkfood eaters who will inevitably cost health system easily 100x compared to healthy persons.

Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?

#270
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, what is the worst possible consequence of a supermarket being able to track you? At worst, I suppose you be could be charged more for purchasing a certain item at that particular chain. I highly doubt this has ever happened, since it's bad for business. The usual consequence for getting tracked at the supermarket is getting a discount on certain groceries via a loyalty program, with zero downsides for…

> I suppose you be could be charged more for purchasing a certain item at that particular chain. I highly doubt this has ever happened, since it's bad for business. I'm sure it has, it's just done in a subtle manner you don't notice. > What is the worst realistic consequence for a government...tracking all grocery purchases? As many other posters have noted, it's reasonable to imagine a progressive sin tax: That was…

>I'm sure it has, it's just done in a subtle manner you don't notice.

How do you figure? In all grocery stores I’ve visited, loyalty card discounts are clearly noted on the item's price tag. I've never seen any hidden discounts (or surcharges) that pop up only at checkout.

>Just swipe your "tax setting" card before you swipe anything else.

Very true, but decentralizing progressive sales tax collection is rife for fraud. Without centrally tracking everyone's cumulative tax burden, there would be no way to prevent people from using hacked Tax Setting cards that grossly underreport their income or cumulative meat consumption. Hacking notwithstanding, this would also be a lot more expensive that centrally tracking everything, since each Tax Setting card would have to maintain its own memory of cumulative purchases (otherwise, just ring up your massive meat order one steak at a time).

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