Which do you prefer to shop for, gas or hotel rooms?
Gas is always advertised with the tax built into the price. Every sign you see is the full price. When you look at online gas apps including Gas Buddy or even Google Maps, you’re seeing the full, final price.
Hotels advise one price on shopping sites and then you pay a much higher price once all the taxes are included. Can you look up the taxes in advance? Sure. Assuming you know to look for local sales tax, and county lodging tax, and the city entertainment tax. But why is that necessary? Why is it helpful to you as the consumer? Do you think the retailer doesn’t know the total price in advance?
Can you look up the taxes in advance? Sure. Assuming you know to look for local sales tax, and county lodging tax, and the city entertainment tax. But why is that necessary? Why is it helpful to you as the consumer? Do you think the retailer doesn’t know the total price in advance?
Exactly. There’s no reason any of that shouldn’t be included in the advertised price. I’ll never understand people who want to go to bat for practices that are at best asinine, and at worst, deliberately misleading because they place the burden of determining the final price on the consumer before reaching the “checkout” section.
A new rule proposed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would ban the sneaky fees some companies slap onto their services at checkout time. Thanks to these junk fees, which have crept into the process of everything from buying concert tickets to booking vacation rentals, the prices consumers initially see are often nowhere near what they end up paying.
The Biden administration has been putting pressure on companies like Ticketmaster and Airbnb to improve their ways, and both recently committed to providing more transparency about their extra charges. The FTC wants to take things a step further by banning the common deceptive tactics altogether. The proposed rule targets both hidden, mandatory fees that aren’t properly disclosed upfront and ambiguous “bogus fees” that leave consumers unsure of what it is they actually had to pay more for.
These practices are misleading, with companies often resorting to “bait-and-switch pricing and misrepresenting the nature and purpose of fees,” the FTC argues in the proposal notice. Under the proposed rule, businesses would have to include these additional fees in their advertised prices, explain what each fee is for and let customers know if any of it is refundable.
The FTC took comments from the public last year to assess the impact of junk fees and ultimately gathered over 12,000 responses to shape its proposal. It’s now opening up comments for 60 days so consumers can weigh in on the rule it’s put forth. “By hiding the total price, these junk fees make it harder for consumers to shop for the best product or service and punish businesses who are honest upfront,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. The proposed rule would "save people money and time, and make our markets more fair and competitive.”
My partner’s best friend helped pen the legislation for this and specifically took it on because she knows how much this shit pisses my partner off lol
Yeah, I could time the flips and almost 9 times out of 10 “guess” which side it was going to be. I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t game the absolute fuck out of that ability as a kid. We played street sports all the time, so it was pretty handy.
Flip such that the maximum rotation is achieved, height should be a natural arc a few feet high, then with open palm, strike down at the coin like your smashing a fly on a tabletop, and snatch it out of the air.
My buddy Julian taught me this 40 years ago… Doing it right now and I can still make it come heads every time. Why though?
As far as I can tell this is related to Benford’s law. The coin has to land sometime and at any given time it has spent as much or more time facing the way up it started, so it has more opportunities to land that way up. The fewer times it spins, the more pronounced the effect.
I remember trying to show this in math class in jr. high. I would deliberately try to flip the coin in the same fashion each time. I was able to get something like a 70/30 split out of 100 flips.
The coin has to land sometime and at any given time it has spent as much or more time facing the way up it started, so it has more opportunities to land that way up. The fewer times it spins, the more pronounced the effect.
I think that’s only relevant for coin flips which last for less than half a spin. Probably much less, considering momentum.
So maybe this means that 0.8% of all coin flips make less than half a flip. They basically just throw the coin up, without changing it’s rotation?
I don’t see how the number of times it spins could have any effect, as 1 spin is equal to 3 spins, or 101 and 57895.
If you understand why it matters that it spins at all, you understand why it matters that on each 360 degree spin, it will be facing up for the first half of the spin. Think it through.
on each 360 degree spin, it will be facing up for the first half of the spin.
Yes, and that’s decisive if the coin is stopped during that phase. It will be facing down for the second half of the spin, which is decisive if the coin is stopped in that phase instead.
Since coins can spin with different speeds and can be stopped after different periods of time, this should be somewhat random, once it’s spinning.
I think I got your point that on average, the coin is facing more up than down, since it started facing up. But I think that’s only relevant if the coin is stopped in that initial phase, before making at least half a spin.
Wait, are we approaching the same argument from different sides? If we assume a random distribution of spinning speeds and a random distribution of toss durations. Then there will be some coins which experience very slow rotation, and which are also caught early enough that they don’t complete even half a spin. These have to face up.
All the other combinations of spin and toss produce random faces.
It’s not like rolling a die, the toss has to end at a point in time and time is linear. T=1 must happen before T=2. At any given time, the difference between the amount of time spent facing up and facing down will be between 0 and T/2n where T is the total time spent in the air and n is the number of spins completed in T. The more times it spins, the smaller the maximum difference between the two but there will always be a difference. It has more chances to land face up than it does face down.
Get your head around Benford’s Law. It’s a headfuck but it’s true for certain data generating processes. A coin toss doesn’t produce the same kind of data but it is the equivalent process for a binary outcome.
E2A: actually, it is a bit like rolling a die (because they come to rest at time T too). But that’s a much more complicated problem because the die doesn’t just land, it bounces around a bit. There’s some stuff out there about this for craps and I guess it’s why the dice have to hit the back wall. Any edge due to technique must be small enough for casinos not to care about it.
I am not surprised. Part of the 50/50 idea is that people can toss the coin high enough to make an unpredictable number of turns. Which they can’t. I’d be interested in the information how many turns such a coin made before it landed. I’d expect to see a Gauss distribution here, with the center sufficiently off to explain the difference to a true 50/50.
I mentioned it because as far as I saw they did not specify what coin they used.
You haven’t actually read the article, have you?
(…) the authors of the new paper conducted 350,757 flips, using different coins from 46 global currencies to eliminate a heads-tail bias between coin designs. (They also used a variety of people to rule out individuals with biased flipping techniques corrupting the results.) Regardless of the coin type, the same-side outcome could be predicted at 0.508, which rounds up perfectly to Diaconis’ “about 51 percent” prediction from 16 years ago.
I should be specific, they say 4⁰ someodd coins but don’t mention a control coin or the effect of air.
You should probably reign in that snark as i specifically addressed your point.
Notably every coin has a face/tail bias because of how much material is removed for the design, a coin with no bias flipped in vacuum should have been the control to remove the design and/or air resistance.
i’d more say the point is that you don’t know if it’s gonna be heads or tails, sure maybe one is 60% likely but unless you go out of your way to statistically analyze your flips it’s still perfectly fine for randomly determining between two choices. where it doesn’t matter which one you go with.
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