This is Variety. A film and media trade magazine. Are we expecting hard hitting journalism from this?
Copernican
joined 2 years ago
So I have thought about doing this option for some large purposes, but figured there must be a catch. There's no interest, but I believe there is a flat fee for each of the distributed payments in these plans. I thought it was a bit scummy how it's so not clear that was the deal.
On paper interest free loaned money is free money. You could buy a short term CD and come out ahead before the payments catch up. Or maybe you have annual credit card minimums, so it makes sense to distribute the payment of goods from Dec to January the following year to have more qualifying payments on a rewards card or something.
But between the challenge of not keeping track of many pay later options with different dates and not being aware of the fees, these things seem like a disaster. There's also a whole nightmare for how these things work with returns or items never received...
The defunct Consumerist used to run a poll. https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/04/09/ea-voted-worst-company-in-america-again/?sh=2dc357397aeb . It was always strange how EA beat out the companies that I think do more harm to society for several years. For some reason it's entertainment companies that draw a lot of vocal ire from consumers, despite financial institutions, pharma, telecoms, oil, factory farms, etc. doing more explicit and literal harm.
It doesn't go both ways. That is why states like New York have banned employers from being able to ask current salary. And made it mandatory to post pay ranges on postings. And those ranges are huge.
You are right employees are better off knowing what others make, but once the employer knows what you make you are screwed. It can be a game of chicken where the employee loses. If current prospect employee makes 60k but asks for 90k, the employer can still just offer 75 or 80k assuming you will not be willing to walk away from a 15k raise.
That's just going to drive down labor. And some titles have pay ranges of line 75k to 100k based on experience. And the employee is at a disadvantage since they don't have the list of all employees to do the research themselves.
What did he whistle blow on? A whistle blower is blowing the whistle on their own company they work for for malfeasance. Leaking documents that are not tied to wrong doing by the IRS is not blowing the whistle.
How does making it public stop that problem? If anything that would probably just screw people over if potential employers could see exactly how much money you make. Let's make it illegal for an employer to ask how much you currently make, but then let employers just query a DB of your income? That doesn't make any sense.
For some reason people seem to experience the most rage, vocalization frustration, etc. when it comes to having their entertainment fucked with (whether pricing, content itself, etc). Companies can cause global recession or market crashes, be responsible for child labor resulting in death and dismemberment, or engage in flat out fraud, but those companies will never bring out the toxicity, death threats, entitlement, and communal anger like a video game or film/tv company that impacts the entertainment of the masses. When people used to think of the most evil company in America back in the early 2010's, EA was more hated than Bank of America, Wells Fargo, or AIG. That never made sense to me.
I have no problem discussing political opinions. I hate how every thread gets co opted by un critical hot takes for the circle jerk of up votes. It's frustrating that any post about digital media has the top comments all saying "Yarrrr, time to sail the high sees." Or anytime there's any news about a corporation, the top comment seems to be "fuck capitalism and those greedy greedy share holders." Those kinds of comments aren't critical, aren't contributing to any meaningful conversation. On reddit I think it succeeded when you had communities of enthusiasts having conversations about the thing they are enthusiastic about. Lemmy seems to have a lot more people enthusiastic about a political position just try to spread that on any and all communities.
For me it's the over representation of self described communists that take over every thread to poetically or unpoetically just keep saying capitalism=bad and then do shit like justify bad behavior because capitalism=bad or pretend to care about making sure employees get paid while advocating for piracy of everything being justified.
Not crazy at all. Not sure why there's a surprise. Advertising is everywhere. Design goes into making buying goods user friendly. The whole point of brands is to build loyalty to it. All of that has cost to acquire customers. So obviously customers are an investment because acquiring them has cost and labor involved.
It's like selling an iPhone knowing you will eventually make money on app store sales percentage margins.
You don't pay until you file for a lot of those services. I filled out the tax info for the past 2 or 3 years to see what refund estimates and what not each software came up with. Then I filed with the one that was cheapest since they pretty much all output the same thing. For me, FreeTaxUsa was the cheapest. I think its free for federal tax filing, but 10 or 15 bucks to file the state taxes.