> a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece.
I personally find no enjoyment in art where I have to have context for it to be "interesting". Either it is or it isn't interesting on it's own merits. I find all art the same though. If it isn't interesting on it's own, then it's not interesting on the whole (for me).
Did your receipt say anything about a government tariff?
The government was busy telling the hoi polloi that foreign companies were paying the tariff. They fought US companies that wanted to list the tariffs on receipts. They were actively suppressing clarity on the matter to end buyers. Your claim that customers assumed the higher prices was going to the government is specious or simply misinformed.
Costco explicitly itemized in their public earnings call that part of the price increase was the tariff.
"When we looked at -- we also source flowers from Central and South America. We looked at that item and decided that while we were able to offset some of the tariffs through similar activity that we did increase some price there because we felt that, that was something that the member would be able to absorb and it was more of a discretionary item there."
So Costco was straight up telling the public that when they raise price part of that is to pay these government tax. You keep talking about assumptions but want us to ignore that you're asking us to make alternative assumptions about the factual representations made by Costco in order to find parity with your argument.
Costco was telling it's investors why they had to raise prices. That's a conversation with investors about business costs.
Customers purchasing from them are on the revenue side and there was no line item on receipts listing tariffs, just increased prices. As a customer if you assumed that 100% of a price increase is because the business is paying tariffs, then you are almost certainly mistaken. Even if the price increase was 100% because of the tariff, the business made the decision to internally absorb the fees and not directly involve the customer. They absorbed that extra cost of business by increasing prices as needed to maintain business margins within acceptable ranges.
TL;DR: A customer paid a unit price for a good from a vendor. The cost the vendor paid or any future refunds they may receive on those costs do not factor into the transaction.
That only works if we pretend investors and customers are wholly disjoint sets of people who don't talk to each other, or are sometimes even the same person/people. However, they are/can, so we can't pretend they're working off different sets of information. How that affects the broader case; I'm not saying here, just pointing out that we can't really treat the groups as separate in this modern era. Especially since many shareholders/investors are that because they like the customer experience so much.
That being said, we should treat the designated audience of the information as an indicator how the information should be interpreted. Just because an investor shops at Costco and was on the public call doesn't somehow change the messaging on the receipt.
>That's a conversation with investors about business costs.
Paid prices are revenue to the business, not cost.
>Costco was telling it's investors why they had to raise prices
It told everyone. They were public. There was zero limitation at all that it go to investors, nor a ban from investors being a customer. It might have been targeted to investors but it was an earnings call broadcast to customers, indeed publicly made available to ~all their customers.
>Customers purchasing from them are on the revenue side and there was no line item on receipts listing tariffs, just increased prices.
They line itemed in their earnings call that part of it was to pay for tariffs. Not saying an exact amount doesn't unbind you from this and if no tariffs are paid it is a false representation (though in this case, not wittingly so, though they should still pay to rectify this false covenant).
I think this is even more obvious if you remove the political bias here by just saying something like "part of our prices are increased to donate to charity." If it turns out the charity was paid but for whatever reason had to return the money and no charity was actually paid, it would be obvious the business must repay the customers for this breach of agreement the portion of price raised to pay the charity even though there was no fraud or intentional deceit and even if they never told the customers the exact amount of the increase actually initially paid to charity.
> Even if the price increase was 100% because of the tariff, the business made the decision to internally absorb the fees and not directly involve the customer. They absorbed that extra cost of business by increasing prices as needed to maintain business margins within acceptable ranges.
Costco did absorb part of the cost, which turned out to be no tariff owed. They are in a position now though where the customers are simply asking the company to do what they promised the public in their earnings call which was for the tariff increases to be zeroed since the company promised and itemized out they would be used to pay for tariffs which are zero. A non-zero increase based on a promise to pay a tariff but with a tariff of zero obviously breaches this covenant made in the earnings call, as it can't be simultaneously true that a non-zero amount was actually collected in payment of a tariff while zero being owed in tariff.
This isn't a moral failure or even a case of fraud, just customers asking the company to fulfill the promise they made to the public.
It was a conversation about costs driving increases in sales prices. No need to twist my words. I mentioned price in the next quoted sentence even.
It's public because they are publicly traded. How about you venture a guess at how many non-investor customers had any knowledge about that call. Maybe some number caught a news article, but it wouldn't have been an appreciable number.
> false covenant
Seriously? Even if it was a "false covenant", it was to *INVESTORS*! For an investor, it's happy days if they recoup those costs because that's a net increase in revenue.
The company set the price for the good based on their costs. Customers bought the good based on the price advertised. The fact that the company might be able to reclaim some of those costs has ZERO bearing on the price customers paid. That's as far as you need to look. Trying to contort the situation to conflate it with fraud is disingenuous. They didn't lie or defraud anyone.
> Political bias
There's no political bias in discussing the core aspect. Sure, the situation leading to it is politically charged, but the core of the issue is the company made a pricing decision based on their costs, the customers bought the products, and in the future the company might be able to recoup some of their costs.
On your last paragraph, a few things. First, tariffs were paid and have not been refunded. They are still trying to affect that change. Second, they made no promise to customers regarding tariffs. Third, you happened to use the PERFECT word here to explain why your entire argument is flawed. You said "collected in payment of a tariff" with "collected" being the operative word here. Costco did no such thing. If they had, you'd have had a line item stating so, like the one for taxes. Costco is obligated to collect and remit taxes. The importer of record is obligated to pay the tariff (or ensure it has been paid). They didn't say they were increasing prices by adding and collecting tariffs. The raised prices to offset the cost of them having to pay the tariff or to cover the higher cost of purchasing goods from parties that imported the goods and paid the tariff.
This entire lawsuit is flawed at it's core as is this entire line of argument.
The investor call said the "member" (customer) was absorbing the tariff/tax. That is, they said they were increasing prices by partially ading the tariff. End of story, Costco has made a false representation if those tariffs are zero.
Thus the whole disingenuine "gotcha" where we say " ha ha ha, it's not on the receipt" is just a fraud to pretend the customers weren't explicitly itemized out in the investor call that they were partially paying a non-zero amount for what turns out to be a zero tariff.
Of course, we reveal your whole 'receipt' nonsense as a fraud -- the investor call came before many of these purchases while a receipt comes after the purchase yet you anachronously flip things expecting the receipt to be used to know about something that is only issued after the transaction. So you're receipt argument is flawed it its core and safely dissmissed.
Wait are you saying that because the Government lied and blocked corporations from exercising freedom of speech and commerce that therefore the government couldn't possibly be seen to be collecting the funds? Your logic is that if the Government lies we are assumed to have believed it and therefore have no recourse. Most people (not all) are nowhere near as dumb as you seem to think they are.
I'm saying that semantically a business that simply raised base prices to cover their increased costs cannot be attacked by using the logic that "I assumed the price increase was going to the government" unless that was specifically enumerated on your receipts. What you assume is on you.
Had the business been listing tariffs directly on receipts it would be a very different conversation.
You think a seller has some price obligation to you? If they set a price and you pay the price, what they paid for the good is irrelevant unless you had some cost-plus contract that they violated.
If they had listed a line item for tariff fees then I could see the argument and would say that any refunds should go to customers. By not listing a tariff line item, Costco absorbed the additional costs and likely increased prices. In that scenario they, Costco, are the ones that should be entitled to a refund.
This is the same if you walk the chain backwards. Suppliers to Costco that simply raised prices and internally absorbed the tariffs are the ones due a refund, not Costco. Suppliers that sent Costco and invoice with a tariff line item should be on the hook to refund Costco (which means they should be seeking a refund from the US)
Amazon did try to add that line item and the administration pressured them to remove it. And you are making a very big assumption that either Costco or their suppliers absorbed the cost of the tariffs. Because I don't have a link handy, one study I read said more than 80% of the cost of tariffs came from the consumer's pocket, not the supply chain.
When I say absorbed I don't mean they didn't raise prices. I mean they didn't just transparently pass those extra tariff fees on to customers as a line item. With that increase in base costs they either lower their margins and earnings or they increase prices to keep them in a stable range. They are a for-profit business so it's highly unlikely they'd simply absorb the increased costs and not raise prices. There may have been some initial elasticity where costs rose faster than price rose.
Why would a company you are consulting for invest in training you up exactly? They are paying a consultant with the expectation that they are bringing the knowledge.
Eh, consultants are brought in not for the knowledge or advice! Management already knows what todo and where to go- they just want somebody external sanctify the decision!
TigerData:
> pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license)
They deemed AGPL untenable for their business and decided to create an OSS solution that used a license they were comfortable with and they are somehow "pernicious"? Perhaps take a moment to reflect on your characterization of a group that just contributed an alternative OSS project for a specific task. Not only that, but they used a VERY permissive license. I'd argue that they are being a better OSS community member for selecting a more permissive license.
Laundering actual freedom respecting licenses through genai may give the poster more freedom, but that additional freedom is solely to avoid sharing any improvements to the freedom respecting code they are benefiting from with others.
In this specific situation I would say that if the part is under manufacturer warranty, then the retailer should either offer a refund at the price paid or assistance for the customer in getting the manufacturer warranty replacement. Expecting the retailer to replace the faulty unit when the *wholesale* price has changed dramatically is.. unfair. I'm sure many people would scream "cost of business" and perhaps they are right. But, if the retailer is making a good faith effort to resolve the issue in a manner that keeps the customer "whole", that should be the metric for both "legal" and "moral".
Playing with a hyper-spectral imager makes you rethink how we see things. I've talked about this before, but human vision essentially "low resolution" on the spectral bands. Using an HSI that "sees" in 4nm spectral slices from 350-1000nm is really interesting (Cubert Ultris X20 Plus). There's so much spectral information that we just totally miss. I really wish the equipment for capturing images at these higher spectral resolutions wasn't so expensive so we could see people experimenting with them on a large scale. The one I got to work with was more than a nice SUV and that's cheap in the space. The ones we looked at from Headwall that did something like 400-2500nm started at $250k. Those weren't even full-frame imagers like the Ultris, they were line scanning imagers. That massive cost jump was down to the fact that from ~1050nm+ you need much different hardware to capture spectral data.
If anyone is interested in some technical aspects of the "full frame" HSI I worked with, it's quite interesting. It had a 20MP Monochromatic Sensor that captured single-band 12-bit data behind an array of lenses that split the incoming spectral range (350-100nm) into 164 individual 4nm wide bands of light that hit 410x410px squares on the sensor. The sensor can capture from 350-1100, but the QE drops of really fast past about 850nm and the product limited the upper range to 1000nm. I'm sure I munged something there, but you should get the general idea. I highly recommend researching the space of HSI, it's fascinating.
Last thing to point out, when working with an HSI like this, one thing you can do is capture a "spectral fingerprint". Since you've gone from three bands on spectral intensity information to, in our case, 164 bands you have the ability to turn that high-density spectral data for each pixel into essentially a line graph. Using that information you can do matching against a database of known spectral fingerprints and identify materials and material properties really well. In the multi-spectra world you'll see this capability used to identify crop health. In the hyperspectral world you can identify so much more. For instance, it can see skin anomalies that aren't visible to the human eye. You can identify specific minerals in a picture of a bunch of rocks (you need up into the 2500nm range for this though). You can easily spot foreign objects on a conveyor of food items. Overall, it's a long list of capabilities and I'm certain there are many more uses we could discover if the imagers were cheaper. And if you are into the wider ML world (not just focused on LLMs I mean), you'll see ML Classification Models being trained on these spectral fingerprints as well.
Anyway, the "full-spectrum" is fascinating, especially when you are able to slice it thin.
> a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece.
I personally find no enjoyment in art where I have to have context for it to be "interesting". Either it is or it isn't interesting on it's own merits. I find all art the same though. If it isn't interesting on it's own, then it's not interesting on the whole (for me).
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