Quote from: rawma;1096781If you (or someone you knew) visited the US and returned, or someone visited Brazil, could they bring a large supply of odd dice "for personal use" without being taxed? (Just asking as background research for my future dice smuggler character. )

Depends on how innocent you look.

People returning from abroad are screened by customs officials when they arrive. Some are obviously exceeding their maximum alloted value of tax-free imports (which is 500 dollars), like the guys that insist on bringing home 5 TV sets because reasons. Others are coming back with expensive yet small stuff, like iPads or watches. If they can effectively make it look innocent, then they get away with it. However, if you say you have nothing to declare (tax-wise) and then get caught slipping stuff in between a few shirts in your luggage, you get to pay the full tax, plus a fine equivalent to at least the whole cost of the product again.

Your "dice smuggler" would have to be a sweet-talking genius to be able to convince the customs officials that his bag filled to the brim with 50 "Pound-o-Dice" baggies are all for personal use.

Quote from: Lynn;1096855What is the government's justification for this? It is something I always wondered about. Selling computer stuff into Brazil was always an issue.

Justification? HAHAHAHA....

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The government around here has never found it necessary to justify much to the population.

P.S.: In all seriousness, the original provisions for taxing imports date all the way back to the foundation of the republic in 1889, and were specially reinforced with the Vargas dictatorship of 1930-45. The reasoning was, and in large part remains, the protection of local industries. It doesn't matter that many of the imported products are not, and never were, produced locally.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1096856This seems like an argument against some countries taxes, and not the funky dice directly.

In part.

Yes, generally this is an argument that my country's import taxes suck ass and should (but never will) be abolished entirely.

However, it remains a fact that this will discourage or outright prevent certain games from ever getting a foothold over here, since the average gamer will not be able to scrounge up the extra money needed to get said funky dice (or, as in my case, will simply decide that money can be better spent somewhere else).

Quote from: BronzeDragon;1096863In part.

Yes, generally this is an argument that my country's import taxes suck ass and should (but never will) be abolished entirely.

However, it remains a fact that this will discourage or outright prevent certain games from ever getting a foothold over here, since the average gamer will not be able to scrounge up the extra money needed to get said funky dice (or, as in my case, will simply decide that money can be better spent somewhere else).

Pff just carve your own dice like the government wants you too.

With all that sugar cane being processed for ethanol, and beef production, and latex... there should be industrial waste to create plastics. What's stopping anyone from buying a mold (or reverse engineering the mold from a cast) and then supplying one's own national plastic for injection to start their own cottage industry of bootleg Zocchi dice?

Quote from: BronzeDragon;1096861Your "dice smuggler" would have to be a sweet-talking genius to be able to convince the customs officials that his bag filled to the brim with 50 "Pound-o-Dice" baggies are all for personal use.

Well, that would be a good specialization for the character, although I'm not necessarily set on "successful dice smuggler".

Fifty pounds of dice would be a lot, but I've met more than a few players who carry around amounts of dice for their own use that non-gamers would not believe.

The weirdo dice are cool.

But if you don't want to own them, you can download the Crawler Companion App for free, and use its dice roller.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1096889With all that sugar cane being processed for ethanol, and beef production, and latex... there should be industrial waste to create plastics. What's stopping anyone from buying a mold (or reverse engineering the mold from a cast) and then supplying one's own national plastic for injection to start their own cottage industry of bootleg Zocchi dice?

The two to five years of bureaucracy (yes, we measure bureaucracy in time units here, not amount) necessary to create such a business legally. All the taxes, permits, taxes, concessions, taxes and other necessary things (like taxes) will also cost you a tremendous amount of money.

Creating your own business here in Brazil is worthy of a D&D campaign....no, strike that, a Cthulhu campaign.

***OK, I Bought The Book.**"

Very cool artwork.  Very evocative.  Highly motivational, thematically.

Quote from: BronzeDragon;1096960The two to five years of bureaucracy (yes, we measure bureaucracy in time units here, not amount) necessary to create such a business legally. All the taxes, permits, taxes, concessions, taxes and other necessary things (like taxes) will also cost you a tremendous amount of money.

Creating your own business here in Brazil is worthy of a D&D campaign....no, strike that, a Cthulhu campaign.

... wait, so even street vendors take years to set up? :eek: That's way worse than the Balkanized Bureaucratic Circus of SF Bay Area (which, all things considered is not bad, just no "one stop shopping" gov't office. Everyone want their little fiefdom to tell you what to do -- but I would safely recommend our street vendors here without hesitation (even more given what I've learned gow thorough it is).

That said I now want a Kafkaesque bureaucratic Call of Cthulhu adventure, and Brazilian small business vendor sounds awesome! What if we wrote it up, in Portuguese and also in English, and printed it for the Brazilian market? How many years would a 16 page comic floppy module take?

Granted the shipping is cheaper here in Canada where I live. At least Brazil is further geographically away from the USA. Canada and the US are next to each other how the fuck do they justify the shipping costs is beyond me.

Quote from: sureshot;1097256Granted the shipping is cheaper here in Canada where I live. At least Brazil is further geographically away from the USA. Canada and the US are next to each other how the fuck do they justify the shipping costs is beyond me.

I am reminded of something the CEO of a macOS developer / publishing company said to me when I asked why their macOS version of their product was 30% more expensive than the Windows version. The answer was:

"Because we can."

Quote from: sureshot;1097256Granted the shipping is cheaper here in Canada where I live. At least Brazil is further geographically away from the USA. Canada and the US are next to each other how the fuck do they justify the shipping costs is beyond me.

That's what happens when you have a government monopoly. The U.S. post office is heavily regulated, which involves not just price fixing (for example, Congress must pass a bill before the first class mail rate can be raised, and they're very reluctant to do so), but also heavy subsidies (for instance, huge corporations like Alibaba ship packages to the U.S. for a fraction of what U.S. companies pay to ship packages domestically, because China is considered a developing country), all kinds of weird restrictions (e.g. revenue neutral requirements by class of mail), mandated costs (like those sweet pensions, or how they can't close any of those tiny little post offices because muh jobs even though they make zero financial sense), and of course mandated service (allowing companies like FedEx and UPS to compete only in the lucrative package business while ignoring the loser side of the business like delivering mail every day to every house). As a result, the USPS has very few places where they can raise prices to make up the money they're bleeding elsewhere because of political meddling. That's why international shipping rates went through the roof a half a dozen years ago.

Quote from: Pat;1097272That's what happens when you have a government monopoly. The U.S. post office is heavily regulated, which involves not just price fixing (for example, Congress must pass a bill before the first class mail rate can be raised, and they're very reluctant to do so), but also heavy subsidies (for instance, huge corporations like Alibaba ship packages to the U.S. for a fraction of what U.S. companies pay to ship packages domestically, because China is considered a developing country), all kinds of weird restrictions (e.g. revenue neutral requirements by class of mail), mandated costs (like those sweet pensions, or how they can't close any of those tiny little post offices because muh jobs even though they make zero financial sense), and of course mandated service (allowing companies like FedEx and UPS to compete only in the lucrative package business while ignoring the loser side of the business like delivering mail every day to every house). As a result, the USPS has very few places where they can raise prices to make up the money they're bleeding elsewhere because of political meddling. That's why international shipping rates went through the roof a half a dozen years ago.

Amen, brother. I am so tired of junk mail. I think that they should raise the cost of mail to $1 per letter and eliminate all corporate and political discounts. Everybody pays the same cost for a letter. I suspect that a lot of the junk mailings would go away quickly.

I have a similar thought about e-mails. Charge a person a tenth of a penny per e-mail. I'll bet that most of us would hardly notice the cost, which would probably be only a couple of bucks per year for many of us. But when a SPAMmer wants to send our crap to 100,000 people it would cost them $100. That would probably solve the SPAM problem, too.

Oh, and you kids -- get off of my lawn!

DCC is a different kettle of fish.  I'm reading and soaking it up.  My first assessment, is that it's like a better presentation of 1st Edition AD&D.