Technology

37805 readers

78 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

970

FCC says “too bad” to ISPs complaining that listing every fee is too hard (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

147 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Aww ... poor little ISPs.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The sum of a percentage of all items should be the same as a percentage of the sum, no?

Suppose you buy two items costing x and y, and there's a constant sales tax of t (say 10%, or 0.1). You'd pay t * x + t * y, or t * (x + y). You can even generalize this to Σ(t * x) = t * Σx (for x ∈ X, where X is the set of prices you're paying).

In other words, yes.

In case you want the math name for this property, it's the distributive property.

~~I think the issue they were bringing up though is that tax is not applied equally to all items, and that tax may be determined by number of items sold. I don't actually know if this is true or not, but if it is, the distributive property doesn't apply anymore.~~ Edit: I re-read the comment, that doesn't look like what they were saying actually. Either way, if tax is weird like this, distributive property may not apply anymore.