Punctuation. Let me tell you how much I've come to punctuate since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If an em-dash were engraved on each nano-angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the punctuation I wish to perforate into humans at this micro-instant. For you. Punctuation. PUNCTUATION.
The IRS can issue Private Letter Rulings (which are anoymized but public so you could check if they treat a company preferentially - although not which company) and Advance Pricing Agreements.
Rulings from different countries are typically used to ensure no taxes are paid. E.g. get a ruling from the US that some activity is taxable in Luxembourg, and then get a ruling from Luxembourg that it's taxable in the US. Like McDonald's did. Either country will then say "well, it's up to the other country to tax that, I'm not policing that". Mostly after a while, multiple companies get clued in and it all gets exposed and the "loophole" is closed. E.g. a uble Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
This can be an honest error by one or both tax services, a strategic move (to be a "tax paradise" and prevent other taxable activities from leaving the country), or - one would speculate, allegedly - for political or personal gain.
Well, let's start with banning debt push down and then move on to the next tool used to privatise profit and socialise risks. You know, it used to be that unfair business practices were researched and banned, simple as that. Just throwing up your hands and saying "Well, what to do?" when there's, you know, a whole science in which people are trained, is disingenuous.
I've heard/read the expression "to indulge in a hobby" many times and never thought it was pejorative or paints hobbies as extravagancies. If you google indulge hobby, there's plenty of hits. Strangely though, ChatGPT says it does sound negative. It had never occurred to me, and probably not to the author.
Just because ChatGPT says it sounds negative doesn’t mean it is. I didn’t think of it negatively either.
Who knows how ChatGPT made that suggestion [this time around]. Maybe 30% of the English-speaking population thinks it’s negative, or 60%, or perhaps someone simply wrote a high-profile negative op-ed that included the phrase in its title.
Anyways, not that you did this, but we need to be careful not to use LLMs as the deciding factor in how to feel about things. :) It gives too much power in swaying our thought to those who build the models.
Same with me. It's just an expression. One definition of "indulge" is "to take unrestrained pleasure in" (MW). I just read it as an activity the kid really really enjoys.
It's for online payments only. You click on the wero button on a website/app, if on mobile takes you to your banking app (on desktop, you scan a QR code), you do MFA on your banking app and confirm, and the payment is done.
Wero are not in the business of issuing cards, though obviously they could get into that business - just like UnionPay did in China. I suspect there would be a lot of inertia there, as card payment fees are capped in Europe anyway.
But cards are offline from the perspective of the consumer. Sometimes even on the merchant side of things. Not that it is an important distinction nowadays--but I have definitely tried to pay with a merchant's own app-based payment solution that refused to load due to a bad cellular connection. I haven't looked into how Wero will handle this.
Most payment terminal nowadays use 4g network and it is not uncommon to see shop/restaurants employees in some areas trying to desperately get a signal by moving the terminal close to the door or window.
They need much much less data than your phone. They could process several transactions with less data it would take for your phone to load the HTML of the payment page, let alone the Javascript or the bank's logo.
Also, such terminals often use multi-carrier data plans that can use the best carrier available, while your own phone is stuck with one of the options (of course, you always have the worst one).
Wero bought Payconiq which allow to pay at the physical terminal with a QR code to scan with your phone. So, they can cover the physical payment without having to issue cards.
reply