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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]

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Aww ... poor little ISPs.

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[–] [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.