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In New Orleans, I've seen it advertised as "cash discount." So I guess technically its not a fee on card transactions - it's a discount on cash ones.


Very common, in small, independent shops, though it often seems to be as much about avoiding taxes as avoiding the fee for the credit machine


Interesting. I don't think I've ever seen it here in Britain. Some smaller businesses might insist on a £5 minimum spend if you're not paying cash, but even that has become very rare since the pandemic.


We get something like this in Appalachian ballads and other isolated (Anglo)American folk musics recorded in the 20s. Little attention was payed to American folk music until the early students of English ballads discovered 100+ year old tunes (thought dead to oral tradition) in tact due to the isolation of the mountain valleys. They were the most preserved versions of those songs in existence.Their singers had no concept of them being passed down from anywhere but their home but they likely had melodies and rhythms in common with the broadsides of their grandparents homeland. https://www.loc.gov/collections/songs-of-america/articles-an...

I've noticed a similar thing where blues music fans are unaware a tune they consider "traditional" is actually a version of a published minstrel show tune. It seems pop music doesn't die, we just forget where it came from until it becomes folk music. Then I guess we forget that happened and try and make it up the melodies from scratch.


I believe Cecil Sharp was one of the first to extensively catalogue Appalachian folk music. He'd done the same in England (but was not the first), and was interested in how traditional English folk music had survived in communities of English descent. Olive Dame Campbell put him onto Appalachia when he met her in Boston. Arguably, his bias towards English-origin music meant that he neglected to record and preserve the full range of Appalachian folk. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Sharp#In_America


For one, because if there are enough people to pay higher prices, the market will reflect that and the locals will have to deal with the new costs despite the fact that there are no local jobs paying enough to afford these things. So yeah for people who are already merchants (likely a minority) it's great; everyone else gets poorer. Thus, inequality increases. This is already playing out in US cities.


I won't pretend to know about this stuff. What I can tell you is that, since covid and the advent of remote work, so many countries have been rushing to launch some sort of "digital nomad" visa, precisely to attract this new type of worker. So clearly they've determined the model to be a net positive for the economy.


I cannot pretend to have an adequate breadth of geopolitical knowledge on this topic nor an understanding of the underlying reasons behind the various governments and the advent more recent "nomad visas".

However my knee-jerk reaction is that, the various programs governments will incentivize regarding foreign investment and relocation are not necessarily in the best economic or social interests of the locals for a given area, despite that governments intent.

One story I recall from earlier this year was regarding Lisbon and the backlash against their visa [1]. From the article it's obvious there were other (tax) incentives that existed prior to the nomad visa, however it appears to me that the visa was a turning point in public discourse on the topic, as it incentivized highly paid individuals to relocate to Lisbon (4x the average Portuguese salary).

Though I don't disagree that it could still have been weighed by the government and determined it to be a net-positive still.

[1] : https://www.politico.eu/article/portugal-digital-nomads-bubb...


Portugal has been handing out extremely desirable EU residency to very wealthy people for more than 10 years, in exchange of real estate investment. I don't blame them, together with Greece they were the hardest hit by the last global crisis. But of course that was going to noticeably drive prices up. A lot (most?) of those investments are now airbnbs which is the real problem they have. I don't think this can be compared with the recent wave of nomad visas that are little more than extended tourist permits.


If foreign money decides to entirely stop spending in developing economies and only spends money in developed economies, it seems like the outcome would be even worse. As in, developing economies will never develop and developed economies will continue to hoard all the wealth.


If they're spending money into a local economy, that means the money is flowing into the local economy.

> merchants

hire a whole panoply of people as their business increases.


This very much! I wasted so much time trying to "memorize" the fretboard. It comes naturally by practicing music. Almost all of it began from knowing just the low E string and applying first octave patterns, then other intervals as I understood what they were. Without musical context, it's not really all that useful to know how to instantly name a note on a fret. Maybe finding octaves quickly, given a starting note, could be useful in the time-based game realm.


I'm a professional musician who makes a good portion of my "living" selling recorded music. You use the same mix for all mediums but need to master differently for vinyl. (Mix refers to levels of individual microphones, mastering is the frequency levels of the finished mix) I'm sure some people master different for digital outlets, but we don't. Regarding profitability,it's so much easier to sell vinyl than cds it's a challenge keeping them in stock, and pretty much every vinyl plant on earth is backlogged right now. Also the return of an lp vs. spotify is orders of magnitude higher; our Spotify income is barely quantifiable. (maybe bc we didn't specially master for it ha?)


Totally agree with your comment. Just came in to leave for others: I believe "TTY" stands for "Teletype"(writer). Learned fun facts I didn't know when I hit google to double check: the original teletypes are descendants of a morse-code printing device called the "teleprinter" (from the 1830s!") One of the early popular devices for encoding and printing typographic characters was patented by Emile Baudot(for whom "Baud rate" is named) in 1879! This means that the commercial mechanical typewriter barely predates the teletype.


It's almost a central theme of "Brave New World." I've always wondered why 1984 gets so much credit for prescience when Brave New World and Vonnegut's "Player Piano" seem to have (from this vantage point) got our nail on the head a little better. If you haven't read "Player Piano" its about a future where, as all jobs have been automated, society is divided into engineers and non-engineers on the dole who are basically assigned busy work (either fake road crew, or fake soldier) so they can get money to buy the stuff the engineers are making.


The latter sounds something inspired by Keynes except he predicted a 15 hour work week but the books scenario insists on a 40 hour work week. If engineers work too much they can work less hours and give the remaining hours to another person so that there are more jobs. If the engineers insist on working full time, then what happens is that one engineer does the work of three people which means two people either end up unemployed or they must do pointless busy work so that the engineer's ego isn't broken because he thinks he is some kind of hero overworking himself for the sake of lazy people living on government benefits.

Keynes would say something like, "if there are private interests standing in the way of building housing and the like, then burying bank notes in the ground and making people dig them up would be better than... nothing."


Just wanted to chime in to say that it seems like all the puzzles are still solveable without the shift key. (I'm mid-way through the flip-flop section, perhaps there's moments you need it in the final level?) edit: I take it back, foiled by delay


Music theory is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Its purpose is not to tell you what sounds good, but to have a common language to describe what you've heard.


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