I actually did this prompt and found that it worked with a single nudge on a followup prompt. My first shot got me a wine glass that was almost full but not quite. I told it I wanted it full to the top - another drop would overflow. The second shot was perfectly full.
Vail averages something like 240" of snow per year, which is 20 feet. Wolf Creek usually gets the most snow in Colorado and averages 430" of snow per year, which is almost 36 feet.
Judging from the comments I've seen, nobody believes this because RFK has completely shot his credibility, and I don't blame them either.
But it turns out there may actually be some emerging evidence to support this. This recent Harvard meta-analysis [1] from just last month looked at 46 different studies and suggested that there may actually be something happening here although it's not conclusive. Correlation but not yet causation.
Nobody should be making policy on this yet, but it's the kind of thing that I would allocate some research dollars to if I hadn't just fired all of the competent researchers.
> Further, a potential causal relationship is consistent with temporal trends—as acetaminophen has become the recommended pain reliever for pregnant mothers, the rates of ADHD and ASD have increased > 20-fold over the past decades
I do not have at all the right background to evaluate this research so treat this opinion for what it's worth, but it seems incautious for the authors to close with this note near the end. People like RFK are looking for an explanation for that 20-fold increase. But the hazard ratios in the studies with positive results seem to be along the lines of 1.05-1.20. They do also note changes in diagnosis criteria before this sentence, but it still seems like if they're going to mention a 20-fold increase, they should be even more explicit that any association with increased Tylenol use could only ever explain a very small part of that.
Ya, an increased risk of 5-20% on an already very low risk.
That means mothers who don't take Tylenol have baseline 3% chance their child will be diagnosed with autism. And mothers who took Tylenol (at the levels of the study) may have a 3.15% to 3.6% chance (assuming causation, which has not been proven).
It seems unlikely we "cracked the code" here.
The best justification for the high increase we're seeing in the data is still just that the data itself has changed in how it's measured and tallied and so on.
I read the study and TBH it's more or less expected that a correlation would exist between increased NDD diagnoses and prescriptions common to pregnant women in regions with increased NDD diagnoses.
Being afforded better care during pregnancy should correlate with better attention (and diagnosis of conditions) to offspring.
If one were cynical one might say this was a good call by Andrea Baccarelli, the Dean of the Faculty, to commission a meta study looking for correlations between common treatments and NDD diagnoses in the current climate of funding going toward whomever can put forward a thread to follow in pursuit of autism.
The irony is that if Tylenol use in pregnancy actually does increase the risk of autism, RFK's destruction of trust in the government's scientific process will probably just push that sort result back. He's a charlatan and totally unscientific regardless.
Luckily for those of us who care, there are private and foreign government organizations who still take healthcare and science seriously. Unfortunately the only sane solution seems to be to ignore the US authorities on this for the time being.
Right, I think this falls under the "broken clock correct twice a day" saying. RFK Jr says a lot of crazy things, but he probably does occasionally say something that makes sense, through no skill of his own.
I mean, he rails against processed food and color/dye additives, some of it being stuff that other countries with reputable FDA-analogues have banned. There could be something to that, even though I can confidently assume his opinions don't come from any sort of scientific rigor.
Some blue states are even (quietly?) jumping on the "MAHA" bandwagon on some issues. Not to categorically say "blue states right, red states wrong", but if your polarized political opponents are putting some of your ideas into practice, maybe not all your ideas are bad, regardless of how unscientifically you may have come by them.
You're forgetting that for half the country that trust was destroyed years ago, and RFK actually being aware of and wanting to investigate evidence like this is restoring it.
That half of the country is not having their trust in science restored. They're forcing their superstitions onto everyone else and calling that science.
That is a retrospective meta study, which leads to lots of speculation, but little actual proof of causation.
>> The researchers noted that while steps should be taken to limit acetaminophen use, the drug is important for treating maternal fever and pain, which can also harm children.
also:
>> Baccarelli noted in the “competing interests” section of the paper that he has served as an expert witness for a plaintiff in a case involving potential links between acetominophen use during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Huh, but digging in a little more does show some stronger studies... hmmmm...
> Nobody should be making policy on this yet, but it's the kind of thing that I would allocate some research dollars to if I hadn't just fired all of the competent researchers.
Yes but that is the whole RFK brand. He and his supporters always try to have their cake and eat it too. Claim something, things go wrong and blame others for misconstruing RFK's comments.
The way this is going - RFK is going to make claims based on this paper and when people get harmed, he and his supporters will claim that people who followed RFK's assertion didn't hear him correctly. He clearly said the policy was based on this paper and people should have done more research and read this paper. See this paper says there is correlation and not causation. So, you cannot blame RFK for this mishap.
Maybe we should. We're talking about pregnant women and autism, along with taking a different painkiller. And if the theory is wrong, it'll only take a few years to find out, presumably.
For people who don't have children: most medical advice regarding pregnant women and infants is overwhelmingly cautious and errs on the side of, "if we don't have enough studies confirming it's 100% safe, it's better to stick to the less questionably safe way." I'm not sure why this would be any different.
The issue here is you need to make a trade. It's not like cutting out alcohol. Now you have to decide, what alternative painkiller will replace it.
There was an initial reason why Tylenol became the standard one, because others were assessed to be riskier in other ways.
I agree with you, people should weight all the known risks from all legitimate studies and data, and base policies around that, and this is no exception.
People are worried though that this won't be the case, and that bias is present from the start in this case, and we might end up making the wrong policy call.
> Judging from the comments I've seen, nobody believes this because RFK has completely shot his credibility, and I don't blame them either.
All you’re stating is that you’ve found an echo chamber - which is true of Hacker News (and Reddit, and BlueSky). It’s also true of TruthSocial. I guess my annoyance is that this is Hacker news not DNC news - and as such, I’d hope for more than one (or even two!) perspectives.
I don’t think RFK has shot his credibility - even if he did withdraw from the DNC on October 9, 2023, less than two years ago. His perspective seems stable 20 years on after he wrote “Deadly Immunity” in 2005.
If you think he lost credibility, it wasn’t recent.
How can anyone find him credible after he pitched a "gold standard" health report (MAHA) that had hallucinated references, misrepresented research and "oaicite" markers that indicated it was AI generated?
I don't find that to be a controversial statement.
FYI, "DNC" or "RNC" doesn't refer to the party in general, it's the national party committee (also overloaded to refer to the convention). RFK Jr has certainly never been a member of the DNC.
I have a Garmin Descent Mk2i which I use for scuba diving, and it's a fabulous all-purpose fitness and adventure watch. I've used to for hundreds of dives, navigation on multiple backpacking trips, cycling, and tons of other stuff. I even wear it daily, and it nicely supports notifications from my phone.
When Garmin originally launched a scuba watch, I was kind of surprised. It's a small market, and there were a lot of established "good enough" players in the space. Everyone already had a dive computer. Who would want an expensive one from Garmin when they could buy an expensive one from Shearwater? But Garmin showed up with a good product, iterated by adding their sonar based SubWave for air integration, and eventually took a lot of marketshare by including fitness and smartwatch features the competitors lacked. Now I see tons of Garmins on dive boats. People love them.
Man, I wanted to get the garmin dive computer so bad. It's got so many awesome features, it's just priced out of my budget. Wound up going with the peregrine from shearwater, which was about half the price, but does way less than the garmin.
Another place they shine is for bikes. Their radar system that integrates with a bike computer is absolutely groundbreaking. It's so fantastic to be able to know when a car is coming up behind you without having to turn your head and possibly lose balance, it's such a great safety feature.
I have one of those as well and it's generally a good device but it has a few weird software defects which make me wonder whether Garmin employees do any real diving? Like in the Multi-Gas activity profile it will automatically prompt you to switch gases based on calculated PO2, but the message covers the entire screen so you can't see your depth! And there's no way to disable those alerts.
I'm just past the second dose on my older border collie, and it has been a good thing for him. But I would hesitate to call it a miracle. He's somewhat more active and flexible, but he still has some trouble climbing steps and stairs.
He also loves the cold, and he's always more active in the winter anyway. I would say he's close to the level he was last winter instead of slightly declined. That's great, but not miraculous.
We'll stick with the regimen and see if he continues to improve. I'll upgrade my judgement if he starts climbing stairs again.
> But this fallacy has been repeatedly exposed. For one, the organisations that are supposed to certify that indeed enough tree-planting has taken place do not have the tools to verify that the declared emissions will definitely be absorbed. Another problem is that many offsetting activities do not actually offset anything.
> A recent investigation into the world’s largest carbon standard found that 94 percent of its rainforest offset credits did not actually contribute to carbon reduction.
When I looked at the offset market in the past, I realized that it was one of the few markets where both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud.
- The buyer is motivated to seek the lowest cost offsets they can find. They're not paying for the cleanup - all they need is the offset document itself, often for legal purposes.
- The seller is more than happy to take the buyer's money and spend it on looking like they're doing something. The rest is free margin.
Neither side remotely cares about the underlying activity behind the offset, and neither side is really penalized if the underlying activity is fraudulent. In fact, both sides are actually better off if the whole thing is fraudulent! I can't think of many other markets where this dynamic exists.
> When I looked at the offset market in the past, I realized that it was one of the few markets where both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud.
> I can't think of many other markets where this dynamic exists.
Recycling market is the same - UK government pays you to recycle plastic, £60 per tonne. You find someone in a 3rd world country that will take it off your hands for £30 per tonne, and pocket the difference. They give you a document saying the plastic was 'recycled' and dump it in the ocean.
Well you can't minimise plastic use if the rest of society doesn't.
I think landfilling is fine, we just need to make sure it does not end up in the environment floating about and causing contamination. And that we are not getting defrauded.
They must be recycling enough of it to recover their £30. They may dump the unrecyclable parts into the ocean, but nobody doubts there are unrecyclable things mixed in with it. It can't be 100% recycled.
To expand on this for anyone who doesn't quite follow, the government pays citizens £60 for recycling, which requires a certificate of proof, a citizen can give their plastic and £30 to a company for a certificate, but the company doesn't actually do the recycling.
The government might as well be part of such fraud too? What do they care, if the plastics is not actually recycled.
But if they cay say to the voters, "Now we're recycling all plastics", then, some more votes, they'll get, in the next elections? (Maybe just a few more votes, if most voters also don't care)
This is true for a lot of corporate training as well, in particular for compliance stuff. It's all bullshit to check a box. Whoever's paying for it wants to spend as little as possible, nobody cares what the content is or whether its actually learned, it's just about transferring liability. It's these silly regulatory constructs that are too detached from reality (like offsets) that give rise to this brand of bullshit
Indeed. I found i can pass 99% of these trainings without reading any materials beforehand. I just check reasonably sounding boxes. That's it. I failed such training only one time among hundreds!
My colleagues pass these in foreign languages for the lulz
My favourite was a training I took once which, if clicked through fast enough, would just skip right past the tests. There was no final check for how well you did, so my "you passed" certificate at the end proudly displayed that I had passed with a 10% score (because I answered the first few questions before realising the bug).
Nice ;)
I certainly hope these things do not store answers forever. Because if they do, in ten years some scary social credit system will punish a lot of people
> both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud.
Many people fully believe that they are making the world a better place, they are not "happy with being deceived" but they are just ignorant. This is like saying that the tobacco industry lies make both happy. That is only true as far as the buyer, the smoker, does not find the true, sometimes in a very hard way.
And your argument also applies to economic scams. If I invest all my money in a fund and think that I am getting a 20% return, I may be happy because I do not know that the bank has lost all my money. So, I am happy until I know the true.
Here, all the fault is in corporations that lie and scam people. The consumers are just trying to be good people. Your assumption that people does not want to know the true seems very profitable for scammers.
> I realized that it was one of the few markets where both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud.
The tragedy of the commons is near universal on all transactions and our propensity for neglecting fraud regarding the commons is universal. It just so happens that for these transactions the focus is on the commons.
I think the environmental movement went seriously awry by aligning itself with socialist political goals. Socialism is nothing more than a way to monopolize corporate power for tremendous profits. Climate ideals of limiting carbon also diverted attention from real-world pollution concerns - like harm from large-scale mining operations.
Oh man, attacking "socialism" by invoking profits. Saying carbon limiting efforts do not align with concerns about mining. Implying limiting carbon isn't an important goal.
Telling that you invoke those leaders rather than the countries of northern Europe. In any case, I can't tell how your original comment aligned with the discussion about carbon offset credits, or more off-topic, how you think limiting carbon output is somehow not a worthy goal of reducing climate change.
Well, for one, trying to reduce carbon output diverts attention other environmental concerns - like waste management, resource depletion, particulate pollution, recycling, etc. (When is the last time you heard about environmentalists trying to solve those issues?) Second, it gives blanket permission to regulate virtually every aspect of your life. Across the board. Whether it is needed or not. It is also highly presumptions to think that we can effectively control it to the degree it will actually make a significant difference without crashing the economy. And by crashing the economy, I don't just mean the rich sacrificing some of their salary. I mean, people starving or freezing to death.
Many countries permitted leaded gasoline for a long time, and many of the countries that kept it around the longest are also places that grow a lot of chocolate. Lead from car exhaust tends to stick around in the environment for a long time - as part of the soil and the dust in the air.
In South America [1]:
> The first country in South America initiating the phase-out of leaded gasoline was Brazil, moving toward alcohol fuels and unleaded gasoline from AD 1975 on, and achieving a total phase-out in 1991. On the contrary, unleaded gasoline in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru was not introduced before AD 1990–1991, and leaded gasoline was still in use until 1995 (Bolivia), 2004 (Peru), and 2005 (Chile).
In Africa [2]:
> But lead was still common in fuel in Africa and the Middle East. In 2002, UNEP organized a coalition of African governments and oil companies to promote the phaseout of leaded gas, the supposed vehicular benefits of which have been found to apply only to very old cars driven in extreme conditions. Lead was history in sub-Saharan Africa by 2006, and by 2014 was found only in Algeria, Iraq, Yemen, Myanmar, North Korea, and Afghanistan.
And if I were the president, I would ban avgas tomorrow.
The planes can all stay grounded till a replacement is available. The damage caused far outweighs the benefits of using it.
Yes, I know ambulance planes probably use it... Yes I know farmers use it for crop dusting. Yes I know some remote alaskan communities rely on flights for supplies. But spreading lead dust throughout the whole nation is worse than not having those things.
In this context that takes on a very different meaning. I wonder how much lead is directly from crop dusting. Avgas is ~1g/liter of lead and 100LL is 0.5g/liter. A small plane burns ~50 liters per hour.
> Even if I put full fucking detail with brand and model I keep getting pages and pages of random products with different "sponsored" brands, model, features and so on. Its clearly need of Amazon are taking priority over mine.
When inside of a real brick and mortar store, have you walked by one of those displays on the ends of a row that's selling Pepsi products or Doritos? How do you think those things got there? They're called end caps, and stores make a lot of money from brands to put them there because customers are more likely to see them and purchase whatever.
Also, have you noticed that the shelves at stores usually contain the most well known brands at eye level while the cheap stuff or weird stuff is usually down low or up high? That may be store optimization, but more commonly those top brands pay for that eye-level placement.
Amazon didn't invent this. They just came up with the digital equivalent of what stores have been doing for decades.
Yes, of course end caps are doing the same thing, prioritizing the store's needs over the shopper's. They pull the same shit with how they lay out the store, to make you spend more time in it and travel over more of it. Which turns out to mean they're not just prioritizing profit over what's personally best for their shoppers, but also over public health, when there's serious infectious disease on the loose—which is all the time, and especially every Winter, but we got a particularly memorable lesson in the cost of that sort of thing, rather recently.
As serious as infectious disease is, I'm not even sure it's the biggest impact: the venn diagram of endcap products and products likely to contribute to metabolic syndromes is probably pretty close to a circle.
At least the pandemic moved a lot of shopping online and gave a margin of convenience back to customers.
Now I'm wondering whether all this customer-hostile activity on the part of grocery stores actually ends up being net negative for the economy. It may be a negative-sum action they're taking, in purely easy-to-quantify economic terms, without even putting a value on wasting shoppers' time or whatever extra stress or irritation that causes. A few extra flu cases per week per store can cause a lot of harm in lost productivity and medical bills, and then, as you point out, there's the way they push junk food.
I can ignore displays and go to right aisle to choose on products. On Amazon there is no equivalent. If they just ignore my search request I am stuck with trawling through irrelevant results.
Amazon search may have lots of results that I don't care about, but is generally accurate on the first try.
The brick and mortar experience is ostensibly 10x worse than being able to use a search box. Grocery stores and Home improvement stores are the worst - I probably spend 80% of my time there trying find where things are, with the overhead labels generally being useless.
Diver here. I'm looking at these four pictures after the fact, so I already know they're fake. They're good, but they also have some weird flaws. That said, I don't think I would have immediately recognized any of these as wrong on Facebook (maybe the diver photo).
- The nudibranch (slug thing) on the green coral doesn't look like anything I've seen in the Caribbean before, and the coral also looks odd for the region. That said, this is probably the most difficult photo for me to differentiate. I would have accepted this as a cool find of something I haven't seen before.
- The grouper (big fish) photo is actually pretty good, although DALL-E has misplaced its eyes a bit. That said, the lit foreground and dark noisy background are exactly the look I would expect for someone using a basic camera + lights with wonky post-processing.
- The diver photo is a horror show. There's a hose going nowhere on her back. It looks like she's blowing out of a harmonica instead of a regulator. Bubbles are collecting around the top of her mask for some reason. Her fins look like they were badly Photoshopped. Nothing looks right here.
- The lobster photo has a real but subtle flaw: Caribbean lobsters don't have big claws. It also looks like it's under a rock like you would find in cold waters around Massachusetts and Maine instead of the Caribbean.
Interesting stuff though. It will force me to be more skeptical when I look at people's photos in the future.
Just wait until you meet billing's angry roommate: invoicing.
In the US, an invoice is just a weird PDF that you might glance at before sending off to your accounts payable team. But in other countries, especially those that use VAT style taxing systems, an invoice can be a legal document that expresses costs and taxes in a legally prescribed way for accounting purposes. Many countries have prescriptive rules over how you invoice, who can write invoices, when you can invoice, what goes on an invoice, etc. And every country does it differently.
Are you building a service that charges incrementally many times per period? Or even worse, refunds incrementally? You might be sending a truckload of expensive accounting papers to your customer every month, one per transaction. And each of those pages was printed using government prescribed software from oddball vendors you must use or else.
Many years ago I led a billing team at Yahoo! responsible for billing for premium services in European markets.
My team existed for the sole reason that the European business did not trust that the US payment services team understood European needs, and the "invoice is a legal document" thing was one of them. I spent so many meetings repeating to the US team that no, we could not switch to their invoicing as long as a new software release might retroactively change the template used to show already issued invoices (e.g. the registered office might change, or the VAT number).
We didn't have to deal with printed invoices thankfully, but we did ensure we produced each invoice once and stored it, so that the European finance team could sleep at night.
At the time Yahoo! had 8 different payment platforms. Some of those were due to weirdness around acquisitions and Japan (which was a joint venture), but apart from mine I believe two others also existed because of local weirdness that the local businesses decided it was safest not to let Yahoo! US mess with.
At the time I left, after 3 years of that, we'd managed to get agreements to migrate a few bits and pieces to the US after they'd shown the understood requirements for specific features, but it was like pulling teeth.
I'm Anh-Tho, one of a co-founders of Lago, thanks for your comment!
I was the country manager of France for a US Sequoia-backed company before, and I never ever managed to convince HQ to work on EU invoicing, I think they just did not want to open the pandora box you just described!
And even worse - your biggest customers won't even smell your invoice unless you enter it line by line into some ancient SAP system developed 20 years ago, where everything cloud related is classified as telephony except storage space which must be classified as filing cabinets (movable) or your invoice will be (very slowly) rejected.
And if it is rejected you have to enter it all again by hand; editing isn't a feature.
I don't get what you're talking about. Our biggest customer reluctantly agreed to accept preliminary invoices for acceptance over fax instead of signed-for mail, provided that we also ship a paper version with a red stamp promptly.
Wow, haven’t lived this pain fortunately… but totally understand how hard it is to try building a « modern pricing stack » but being forced to create invoices in old softwares like SAP…
This is a property of how VAT works. In the common scenario, the seller is effectively "tax administrator" for the buyer (much like employer pays payroll taxes on behalf of employee), therefore an invoice triggers two independent payables:
1. Seller to taxman
2. Buyer to seller
Neither seller cares how you handle your payments to the taxman, nor taxman cares about customer payments.
The second part regarding credit/debit invoices is again a property of "append-only double-entry bookkeeping". You fix wrong credit/debit entry with reversed debit/credit entry.
To spell that out: if you made a mistake in an invoice or negotiated a new total or an extra item (or had to drop an item) after creating the invoice, you now need to first create a correction invoice cancelling out the invoice you created and then create a new invoice. All three documents must have different numbers. Oh, and invoice numbers must be sequential and continuous.
Many years ago, my dad wrote an accounting system for the company he worked at to automate some of this. He spent ages trying to convince the tax authorities that the database was sufficient, and that there was no point in printing out an extra copy of every invoice and gluing it into a book. The idea is it'd make it harder for you to retroactively manipulate invoices.
They eventually saw the light, but it was a long slog.
In the recent years Germany has started allowing companies to no longer issue print invoices. But you still need to keep a copy of every generated invoice.
Initially "digital invoice" meant that you had to get the invoice cryptographically signed by the same government agency also in charge of literally printing money (or an officially licensed company) and then ideally send it using the now mostly defunct monstrosity that is De-Mail because it made guarantees about end-to-end encrpytion and sender/recipient authentication. Luckily this is now largely irrelevant and most companies just send regular PDFs via e-mail and/or make them available for download.
Yup, it's a nightmare. Invoices needing to be in specific number sequences. Any corrections need to be dealt with by reissuing a special "corrective invoice". Don't even get me started on geocoding for taxes. Urgh. Also, when you've got the invoicing right, you've got to work out how to do the feeds to the accounting systems so that it all posts to the right place.
Yep, fortunately in Europe we can issue credit notes, making our job easier. I do think giving the possibility to send charges information to a webhook is a great way to start: this data can be plugged to any invoicing system (or any tax, payment providers) who are trying to solve those things.
The hardest part for me, when working in that fintech, was to build the whole logic to trigger the invoice, not so much the invoice itself. But this company was a EU company, probably easier to work with invoices
I’ll add that the accounting side can get complicated really quickly. You end up with lots of different scenarios. Earned but unbilled: out of bundle call charges, for example. Billed but unearned: a paid in advance monthly fee, for example - this may need to be recognised as a percentage per day. Etc etc. So much to take into account when feeding to ledgers.
> When someone in sales issues an invoice with a negative amount
I worked briefly with a tax-saas, and to handle refunds I just... did a negative amount. It worked! Except.... I hadn't looked closely. Their API removed the negative. A charge of -$7.92 was just a charge of $7.92. Their docs indicated "we don't accept negative numbers - use a refund transaction instead" but... the API accepted the negative number, then changed it to a positive, and kept running. No error code returned. Really really poor experience, and I hope they've fixed that.
In Italy too. They specifically developed an XML format for that, and each time you issue an invoice you have to (well, with some exceptions, but they are gradually removing all of them) send a copy to the revenue agency, which will forward it to the recipient (and keep a copy).
While it is a bit inconvenient, though, I don't think it is a bad idea. I am pretty sure it helps a lot making the life harder for people evading taxes, and to some extent the availability of a standard machine-readable format makes it easy to do accounting. My wife sells videocourses online and I developed a thing that automatically issues invoices as soon as people buy a product (with some human supervision, mainly to avoid the machine doing havoc is some exceptional situation happens; normally it is just "click a button to send the invoice"). The invoices are then automatically available to the accountant for doing accountant things.
Not sure it is a good idea. It might be more flexible when you issue an invoice and have to modify it, but first it would enable fraud, and second it would mean that you have to monitor incoming invoices to see if anything changed and account for that. I think it's better to ask people to just emit correct invoices: if you need to invoice a bit more you issue another one, if you need to invoice less you issue a credit note. If you can't do that you need to work on your business processes.
And then just wait until you meet Invoicing's annoying cousin Purchase Orders (PO). THere is a PO. Can I pay this in multiple invoices ? Sorry the PO is not approved yet. We cannot accept an invoice. Sorry the Invoice doesn't have reference to our PO. Can you fix that please ?
Hey @codegeek! I'm Anh-Tho, one of the co-founders of Lago.
We're working on making the 'CPQ' : Configure Price Quote journey simpler, and this includes the PO dead end.
We're on a mission to make the pricing stack more open and customizable for companies (hence the open-source angle), and we're starting with the billing system.
Join the journey, we'll share our repo soon, and hopefully we can address these painpoints faster with the community contributions too!
Yep. Invoice software is country specific. One can sell invoicing software to several countries, it just can not be the same software. And no, you can't just abstract the differences, because the invoices focus changes widely.
At least we are in a situation where the seller is almost only subject to the laws of the seller's country. There are some exceptions, but one can mostly deal with those (the EU has plenty, the good news is that if the seller is not also on the EU, most do not apply).
Also, I haven't seen a country accounting system that made accounting papers inherently expensive. Some make refunds very expensive, but not the papers. It's more a matter of badly designed software and processes.
I work on a payment system that invoices consumers on behalf of other companies and pays out the money to these companies by splitting the payout on multiple partners (luckily I do not handle the support and follow-up). The system have ability to refund invoices and customers some times end up paying more than or just parts of the invoice. On top og all this it integrates with several old 90s systems with poor datetime handling and poor uptime (some times a windows xp box in the cudtomers offices). It also handles card payments and over all, by far the hardest thing to get right is the invoicing. Its just so extremely fuzzy and time sensitive.
And most big companies who agree to pay you net X days, that usually is after the presentation of a correct invoice. The invoice doesn't get to them, or it isn't right the clock doesn't start for them to pay you. Getting invoices wrong can quickly result in major cashflow drops.
I'm Anh-Tho, one of Lago's co-founders here.
Indeed, from our experience people see 'billing or invoicing' as a monolith block, whereas there's a whole 'pricing stack', billing > payment > invoicing > cash collection + accounting + CPQ + sales commission.
For cash collection, we mentioned the tool used by Lattice called Upflow which helps to manage account receivables.
Hi!
We decided to aggregate all costs of a "billable period".
Imagine you bill your customers monthly (the billable period), all the charges (usage-based features + subscription) will appear as line items of a single invoice.
This enables you to gather all the fees of a period into a total invoice, but still be able to provide granularity to your customers (breakdown of all the fees to be paid).
Hi, customer here. We'd like to change our billing period to start on the 31st of every month, and we'd like to pay 90 days in arrears, and we'd also like you to invoice us ahead of the billing month. Oh, and we're big enough that losing our business will end your startup, so don't get it wrong. Thanks!
Hey, Anh-Tho, just as a point of feedback, since you're leaving a lot of comments in this thread, it's not necessary to introduce yourself in each one. Most folks will be scanning the whole thread and seeing your introduction gets repetitive and breaks the conversational tone and makes it overly commercial. Thanks.
I was illustrating the point that customers are often unreasonable about billing, and there's no magical solution that fixes the problems. The answer is really to try to make sure you're not overly reliant on a single customer. That's hard as a startup though especially if you're in B2B.
Hey cm2012, I'm one of the cofounders of Lago (my business partner wrote this post).
Actually even if you're incorporated in the US, if you serve a client in EU for instance, the VAT rules of EU apply to how you're supposed to invoice your customer, beyond a certain transaction limit.
So... unless you're based in the US, and only serving US-based users, it gets complex very fast!
If you wire your dollars onto US soil, for a service performed in the US by US business, good luck getting the US legal system to enforce upon that US business whatever euro-cucked invoicing scheme is called for.
This doesn't matter. For B2B, if you don't show your EU customers a valid invoice, they simply cannot pay you.
It's not EU governments or post-purchase issues you have to deal, most of the time - it's trying to persuade a large accounting department to pay you unaccountable money. If you can't follow their invoicing requirements, it's just not going to happen.
Do people ever stop and wonder WHY in nations like Portugal the informal economy is roughly DOUBLE of say the US? When every invoice must be available to the government, what actually ends up happening is non-conforming invoices either get made up by the customer or the money magically flows out under some other auspice.
Making it literally illegal to accept an invoice that is legal in the country in which you obtained it borders on logic even my toddler can understand is absolutely begging for bad business climate or tax evasion.
What is the mechanism for French government to subpoena a non-EU business to find this invoice? If the customer (instead of vendor) produced an invoice that matched their bank statements and non-conforming receipt, hypothetically, would anyone really know the difference?
Probably they wouldn't as full audits aren't that common, but audits do happen and most accountants won't care about your purchase as much to personally commit a felony and forge documents for no good reason (accountants do have personal responsibility, and every accounting course reminds wannabe accountants that "the boss ordered it" is not an excuse) so they simply say that they can't/won't do it and if the vendor can't send a satisfactory invoice then they won't do business with that vendor.
How would a French audit uncover anything wrong with a conforming format invoice under the name of some random American company that exactly matched the bank statement, physical goods, and customs paperwork?
I don't think US has many relevant freedoms left. Some people cling very hard to legacy 18th century ones while the Moloch just gobbles up all the new ones stemming from progress.
That american exceptionalism approach will work with private citizen customers. With business customers, leaning back in the legal framework encouraging tax fraud will not fly. They just won't buy from you then.
That's why any US company wanting to do business in Europe either has an European subsidiary, or follows something that's compatible with EU invoicing schemes.
>. With business customers, leaning back in the legal framework encouraging tax fraud will not fly.
Yes which is why in nations like Portugal, where any business invoice may be subject to accountability to government, there totally isn't a massive informal (read: tax-evading) economy to deal with the fact that the government makes it literally impossible (at least in above words) to accept an invoice legal in the jurisdiction in which it was issued.
It's not illegal to pay an US company with an US invoice in the EU. (HN likes to invent problems where there aren't, and companies do that all the time). It is not even limited to the US, most other countries can't/won't follow the format.
However there might be extra steps in adding those invoices to their accounting. For example, when import, the buyer will be charged the import tax (instead of having it added to the invoice)
The informal economy of Portugal has nothing to do with the above btw since that has nothing to do with American invoices (and you can bet German rules are not much simpler) - not saying the bureaucracy isn't, most of the time, stupid. The US also has it fair share of stupid crap that people have to deal as well but it is "transparent" to most Americans.
You keep bringing this up and it's simply not true. The EU has a single set of VAT invoice requirements that applies across the EU (the MOSS invoicing standard). Any VAT invoice that satisfies these rules is legal in all EU countries (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32..., article 226).
My company does plenty of business with EU businesses and we use a single standard EU VAT invoice without issue.
It's not literally impossible - the simple solution to standard invoice being unacceptable is to issue a different invoice that matches the requirements, and almost every vendor is happy to do so in order to make the sale.
Also, the informal tax-evading economy relies on personal contacts and 'mutual understanding' - it's not easily accessible to a foreign vendor, and when foreign vendors do want to access that economy, it requires much more adoption of local customs than just making a different format of invoice.
Yes literally impossible to take something in a format legal in the US, that doesn't match the foreign requirements, based on European testimony above (the exact truth of which IDK).
Informal tax-evading (when the seller isn't evading, just the buyer) doesn't require personal contacts. This is just naïve thoughtless statement. It happens all the time. Example: business owner goes to Panama where they know no one. Buys a pallet of llama wool, seller gives a non-conforming receipt. Buyer goes back to France, imports the pallet as "cotton" and creates a fake invoice showing the Panamanian sold cotton. Seller then sells llama wool on the streets for cash, marking in the books that they sold "cotton" for significantly less. They then use the on-the-books "cotton" proceeds to buy a shit-wagon car or something, and fix it using the unrecorded cash on the side. They sell the now nice shit-wagon and record the proceeds as profit. Now all the money for the llama wool is accounted for.
Cross country tax-evading is only assured in this case to require personal contacts when the tax evading happens on _both_ sides. When it only happens on the EU side, there's no need for personal contacts on the US side.
> Buys a pallet of llama wool, seller gives a non-conforming receipt. Buyer goes back to France, imports the pallet as "cotton"
Customs catches him (distinguishing cotton from non-cotton is surprisingly easy, so is forged documents for invoicing and freight papers, especially given that Panama is an unusual country to export raw cotton - or raw wool - from), he is now in prison for 5 years for tax fraud and document forging, llama wool is confiscated and auctioned off to legitimate sellers.
Maybe you can come up with a better example then :) Here in the US pallets of cocaine regularly make it through customs. Our customs officers are generally one rung above high-school dropout. They'd generally be lucky to distinguish heroin from a pallet of sand, let alone cotton from wool.
Not in the export/import business myself, just passed through customs enough to see just how truly stupid and vapid these officers are, combined with the truly insane amount of import/export volume each one is responsible for. In the US distinguishing types of fabrics and ensuring various legal substances that look vaguely similar actually are what they say they are is near the bottom of the priorities list. I don't have a lot of experience with EU customs (except see last paragraph).
I know people want to believe customs is some highly intelligent caring group of individuals who are sleeplessly guarding the country and the purse in a carefully planned and executed manner with a fine-toothed comb. Anyone with this belief has probably never crossed an international border. In practice it's more like the mental equivalent of a 4 year old set loose with a completely unreliable "drug dog" that alerts on a grandma who is ruthlessly interrogated while one guy with llama wool and 10 pablo escabars pass on the other side.
I can recall one occasion where I stepped directly from fucking IRAQ into EU and not a single customs officer even looked at me. Not one. Just a stamp without a single question. I could have been carrying literally anything and no one cared. I could have been coming from Iraq for any reason and no one gave a fuck what that reason might be.
Yes. It would be even larger if US companies couldn't accept foreign invoices without being in a special format. Does tax evasion in the US somehow disprove tax evasion in Europe?
The difference is marginal at best. Most of the requirements are obvious and never/rarely change, like your address or the date. And adding a an incrementing number to a set of documents isn't exactly rocket science, either.
In this particular case, do you think non-US governments could protect the interests of consumers in their jurisdictions in a way that is less unfriendly to the businesses that want to sell to them?
In my experience invoicing, and really all 'printable' documents is the land of "oh someone did something wrong put X on the document". And then again and again and again... And "this is two pages long that's too much" and on and on ...
It's bike shedding insanity with no ideal or end in sight. Every change is arbitrary with no real measure of success.
I swear the only time anyone LOOKs at these documents is to bitch about them.
Oh man and just as if I summoned it someone just sent me a ticket about something on an invoice.
Just because you don't understand invoicing doesn't mean that the concerns that appear trivial to you are actually trivial.
From the perspective of someone who works with the people who process the invoices, putting "X on the document" and "two pages long" can be a huge deal when you have to deal with hundreds of invoices or when "X" can mean that an invoice must proceed down a different processing path. These aren't bike shedding concerns; they affect the actual processing of the invoice. In many cases, these concerns affect the validity of the invoice, meaning that the recipient's obligation to pay (or the associated deadline) is not triggered.
And doing something wrong on an invoice is never bikeshedding. An invoice is a legal contract, and in the E.U., an invoice is an unmodifiable document.
They're trivial... when you make the same change to add something, remove it, add it, remove it and hear that it's all being done "because X" and "X" never stops, it's clearly not working and the changes are trivial.
It sounds like you simply don't understand why they're doing it and you just assume that they're trivial because you have no knowledge of the domain.
Off the top of my head, I can thing of a dozen reasons for why they'd require something to be added, then removed, then added, etc., from one invoice to the next.
- Changes prompted by common vendor mistakes: DBA vs Legal vs Tax name, Tax vs business ID vs tax account id, projects vs Departments vs Accounts vs Budgets
- Changes prompted by compliance needs: business type (which governs the type and level of compliance required in most jurisdictions), changes to invoicing laws, changes to tax compliance laws
- Changes prompted by business needs: changes to the company's PO/invoicing/expensing process, changes to the company's financial, ERM, or payment processing software or service provider, one-off large expenses that aren't adequately handled by the existing data form; changes to financial modeling
- Changes prompted by marketing: new logo, design, or template
- Changes prompted by legal: new court rulings, etc., affecting legal's approval of the existing template(s)
- Changes prompted by employees: form is too complicated, form is not complicated enough, form doesn't capture my department or project's needs
The problem with an all inclusive form is that it is too complicated for most vendors and they end up filling it in wrong (requiring several rounds of review by the payor company), but too simple a form and you end up needing to make a lot of changes like the one the parent was talking about.
You could do multiple templates, but that just multiplies the work, and makes it more difficult for employees to figure out which template they should be using, and so they'll all end up using whatever random template they find first leading back to the One True Template and you're back to square one again.
And yes, all of the examples above are based on real life examples.
> You might be sending a truckload of expensive accounting papers to your customer every month, one per transaction. And each of those pages was printed using government prescribed software from oddball vendors you must use or else.
I guess that's good for employment numbers? There's really two ways to create jobs, innovate or regulate. The US and the EU have apparently chosen very different paths. With every country having it's own special snowflakes laws, there's a reason EU founders always try to come to the US first.
