Chess.com Regional Pricing: a Case Study

In the US at least sales tax is only going to show up on the final checkout page, so this dataset won't have it.

I checked several states from the US and some from other countries. I did not find any discrepancies within a country but I didn't check every combination of course!

For what it's worth VAT isn't uniform across the EU either. IIRC the EU specifies minimums, but countries are allowed higher rates and can manage their own exclusions too.

So like Windows then? Cause a free alternative exists?

Or farmers markets? Cause you can just grow all those crops for free yourself.

Or carpenters? Just get some tools, do your home renovations for free.

Or sex workers? Cause you can just go to a bar and get it for free.

Oh, they are differences between the free and the pay options? The occupy different niches in the marketplace? You don't say. Maybe they are not scams after all, just cater to different tastes.

(I also prefer lichess over chess.com but that doesn't mean I think this is a reasonable argument.)

That's still not a scam. They tell you what you're paying for. If you don't like it, then go somewhere else. There's no deception going on.

None of that makes it a scam. It makes it "more expensive".

It’s not. Plenty of investors might skip investing in arms, petro, cigarettes or betting for moral reasons, even though it might yield more money.

"Shareholder primacy" implies that at any time a decision needs to be made that puts the interests of shareholders against those of anyone else, the shareholders' should take priority. Since pricing affects revenue and revenue affects shareholders in some way, pricing should be structured such that revenue is maximized. So it doesn't need to be the maximum price possible, but it does need to be whatever price yields the greatest revenue.

And the VC world is full of examples where shareholder want the company to prioritize marketshare or riding certain hypes or other activities that increase company valuation within the shareholder's investment horizon. In most VC funded startups maximizing revenue would be a violation of your fiduciary duty

Yes! Dodge v. Ford is a tough one because Ford explicitly announced that he was using the company's money to advance his own philanthropic aim. That's essentially theft: it's the company's money, not his.

However, as long as management is running the company as a company (and not, say, the director's personal slush fund), the courts give them incredibly wide latitude. They're won't second-guess whether it was "correct" to prioritize long-term growth or short-term profit-taking, as long as either is vaguely in the company's interests.

A parallel case, Shlensky v. Wrigley, has absolutely bonkers facts. Wrigley wouldn't install electric lights at his ball field, clearly due to some...idiosyncratic...beliefs about how baseball "ought to be played." However, unlike Ford, Wrigley left open the possibility that this was also a business decision too: perhaps changing the neighborhood would drive people away, or the lights would cost too much to operate. Consequently, the court found in his favor even though one gets the sense they were not totally convinced it was a sensible business decision.

Longer thread with references and quotes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393674

Obviously money is important. We live in a capitalist world. It lets an org invest in future, greater service to its mission. But it's not WHY a business exists. It's just a measure. It's sort of like saying that you exist to breathe oxygen or pump blood. It's necessary and important, but suggesting that's your mission would be a little reductive.

Not really, they are part of the charter granted by government and they bind the company in its legal capacities.

Companies are de jure entities, they exist not de facto, but by registration with the state. For many reasons, you or others cannot go to courts and claim different things about a company as a separate entity from its owners without previously having declared to the state and courts that such a company exists and what the rules of the company were.

The mission of a company are thus part of the rules defined for a company at creation, such that if an owner made its riches in oil prospecting, but also had a company whose mission was software development, then other partners of the second company, or creditors in case of bankruptcy, would have no claim to riches that came from oil prospecting. For example.

Worker co-ops are scorned here? I think they just don’t come up much due to the nature of the industry.

Like all [citation needed] nerds I consumed a ridiculous amount of fantasy fiction growing up, and think programming is as close to magic as we’ll ever get in the real world. If somebody made a “Programmers Guild” in the style of a wizard’s guild, who among us wouldn’t join such a thing?

What are some examples of worker cooperatives that are successful due to their focus on quality and affordability?

What might I buy from them?

(The only worker cooperative I knowingly buy from now is a local bakery/pizza place.)

I've never actually seen them criticized here but I'll bite since I've worked for one.

Worker owned companies are just a different shade of typical corporate politics. I worked for North America's largest sewer inspection and cleaning company. The company did about equal volumes of each type of work but since inspection is more technology based there were far more cleaners than there were inspectors and analysts. I'd been there about a year and I'd noticed that we were so far outpacing cleaning that we'd started to lapse on some of our contractual inspection storage commitments which required about ten years storage of raw inspection files. The inspection files were raw video with annotations. I drew up a proposal to build out centralized storage arrays and upgrade video processing site internet connections. Pretty baseline stuff to meet the needs of our contractual obligations. It went up for a vote because it'd effect the yearly budget which impacted dividends checks. It was unanimously voted down by the cleaners. I realized then and there that any business that's worker owned will be primarily be influenced by the largest in quantity labor group and haven't worked for one since.

Long way of saying that I wouldn't say it's any better or worse than other management structures.

Valid inquiry!

> Eh you'd be surprised. GDP per capita in Bulgaria in 2024 was just $17,412 compared to $57,723 in Sweden (331% increase) while GDP per capita in Alabama was $61,846 compared to $116,883 in New York (189% increase). America's a lot more socioeconomically homogeneous compared to the EU due to Federal spending and a more integrated economy.

Using GDP as your _only_ metric, it does look that way.

Why do you feel that GDP is repetitive of the average citizens purchasing power for entertainment?

>America's a lot more socioeconomically homogeneous compared to the EU

Well also the fact that America is a single country with a shared history.

They're buttering you up, so you stay on the site and look at adverts and/or buy premium subscriptions. None of that nonsense on Lichess, which is run on donations, not ads/subscriptions.