The General US Politics Thread

Yeah, I agree with that.

I always thought it was a stupid marketing gimmick that nobody would actually fall for growing up, but then I met someone who does that exact thing. Sees something that says "$1.99" and is like, "Hey, we should grab this, it's only a buck." Sees $14.99, goes, "This is $14."

I'm actually really glad she has her wife go shopping with her, because all those ignored $0.99 start to add up on a large shopping trip.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 2nd 2019 at 7:28:32 AM

It does sometimes work, although in my experience, it's less "this is 5.99, which means it's only 5 bucks" and more "this is 5.99, which means it's closer to 5 bucks than 6", which is also obviously false.

Funny that, I've developed the habit of up-rounding every 9 to 10 at the grocery store because they always have prices like 9.99 Franken, as if they were trying to manipulate the customers into thinking 9.99 Franken is closer to 9 than to 10.

Anyhow, a bit more on-topic, regarding Warren's funding plan for Medicare for All, what are the opinions? My sense is that they are still a bit over-optimistic in terms of how the money adds up, but within the "margin of error" so to speak. [1]

The 99cent thing isn’t so much a marketing gimmick as it was an attempt to stop staff shorting the till, as unless they were carrying the change needed by the customers they’d have the open the till so as to get the change.

Contrary to popular belief, the 99 cents pricing is not to make prices seem lower. It's to force the cashier to give change, which in turn requires them to open up the register and make a record of the transaction. It's to stop the cashier from just pocketing the money given to them by the customer and pretending there was no transaction.

So, in some regard, it's actually fully intentional that prices are always a oddball, inconvenient amount of money. If it was convenient, then the cashier wouldn't have to give change as often and would have a much easier time stealing money. I could even see this being a source of backlash to abolishing the penny, since the assumption that very few people pay for anything with pennies is part of how this whole system works. Pennies being meaningless bookkeeping is kind of the point.

That doesn’t even matter anymore though. Cashiers are under constant video surveillance. I accepted a counterfeit on accident once and they were able to point out the exact moment I did it on camera while they were berating me for it.

Edited by smokeycut on Nov 2nd 2019 at 3:03:41 PM

Rand Paul and Louie Gohmert are spreading around the name of the whistleblower.

Looks like Republicans are all but trying to get this guy killed:

https://www.salon.com/2019/11/02/republicans-go-lower-theyre-publicly-spreading-the-name-of-purported-ukraine-whistleblower/

Or at least scare any other potential whistleblowers out of coming forward.

Hardly surprising, though. Republicans have long since given up even pretending to have regard for human life

They can try all they want,spreading their name around will achieves nothing,and if they do wind up dead I don't even want to contemplate what would happen then,it would not be pretty

Imagine the backlash if something like that happened and they had the wrong name to begin with.

Is intentionally revealing the name of a whistle blower a federal offense in the US?

There would be actual,proper riots I reckon because they just had someone murdered

If its part of a secrets act probably

Edited by Ultimatum on Nov 2nd 2019 at 8:55:24 AM

Though charging them would, itself, expose the Whistleblower is the name their spreading isn't confirmed.

Do you know what it takes to get through Trump's border wall? 100 dollars for a saw.

Thing is the prototypes for the wall in 2017 were criticized for these kinds of security vulnerabilities, the Trump administration went with them anyway.

It's almost as if the wall is a symbolic vanity project and not any kind of practical solution!

I look forward to Trump blaming the Dems for not being able to finish the wall before the Mexicans developed saw technology.

> It's almost as if the wall is a symbolic vanity project and not any kind of practical solution!

Precisely,its a political stunt,it was never about keeping people out,it was about keeping a promise to his supporters,no matter how absurd

I've always said that the greatest failing of The Wall is that it's mankind's 8th invention, and it can be easily triumphed over just by using mankind's 23rd and 4th inventions (a ladder and rope, respectively).

I have seen people saying the wall is good because it slow them down and they need is a better wall......

• sigh*

I question the precise chronological numbering of inventions predating written history.

The real question is which do we think takes more work: orderly piling of things so that they can be thin and tall and present a barrier, or twisting flexible things together because harder to break?

Walls and ropes are naturally occurring, is the thing.

Like. We didn't invent those. The planet invented those. Cliffs and vines existed before we did.

Ah, but the human recreation of same: that's the one we're asking about.

I was just pulling those numbers out of my ass, but I do think the approximated order of inventions is probably close to accurate.

Whilst it is true that several of these inventions were in fact naturally occurring phenomenon that early humans replicated, since the Earth can't verbally claim credit for them humanity swooped in and took credit for "inventing" them.

Also it's been awhile since I've heard about the wall, how is construction going along? Last I heard a court blocked the Trump Administration from reallocating funding to it or something along those lines.

They stole the budget for it from the military's construction budget, because they sure do care about the troops right?

Edited by Imca on Nov 3rd 2019 at 3:14:11 AM