Der Blog (mk II)

Argh, don’t you just hate it when you spend ages writing a long rant, and then your session expires and you lose it. Anyway.

I’ve been hearing lots about Half-Life 2: Episode 1. It looks pretty shiny, so I decided to buy it through Steam. Just after I fired up Steam I remembered that my debit card expired just over a week ago, and I received a replacement on the 7th. The bank said it had been posted on 3 May. Not only has it taken over a month to arrive, the envelope was sealed with sellotape. Very likely it’s been intercepted and opened and the card cloned. So I sent the bank a message rejecting the thing. Sigh.

I clicked on ‘purchase’ anyway, to see how much it would cost. It gave me a price in dollars… “plus tax”. It didn’t say what tax. So do I pay US sales tax, VAT, import duty, all three? What exactly am I paying here?

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