New York Officially Calls Hot Dogs And Burritos 'Sandwiches'

In France, a sandwich is called "un sandwich." In Spain, it's "un sándwich." Things get weird in Portugal where it's called "sanduiche". Even in Greece, the word is "σάντουιτς." And it turns out that sounds a whole lot like "sandwich."

But just because inserting meat between two slices of bread is a near-universal concept, that doesn't mean it's free from the machinations of the New York Department of Taxation and Finance.

In order to help businesses determine what they should and shouldn't put a sales tax on, in 2011 the state posted a "bulletin" recently uncovered on Reddit that gets technical in its definition of what our friends in Japan call a "サンドイッチ" (again, sounds just like sandwich).

Here's what should be included in New York's so-called "sandwich tax," according to the state:

"Sandwiches include cold and hot sandwiches of every kind that are prepared and ready to be eaten, whether made on bread, on bagels, on rolls, in pitas, in wraps, or otherwise, and regardless of the filling or number of layers. A sandwich can be as simple as a buttered bagel or roll, or as elaborate as a six-foot, toasted submarine sandwich."

The bulletin goes on to list examples of what exactly a sandwich is. In case you didn't know, the items below are all sandwiches:

This BLT sandwich is what the New York Department of Taxation and Finance refers to as a "common sandwich," since, well, it's a sandwich.

People not familiar with what a sandwich is might call this a burrito. It's a sandwich.

Mmmm, check out this delicious open face butter sandwich served with roll bread.

Headed to the ball game? Be sure to indulge in a classic American past time with one of these hot dog sandwiches.

By defining these "bread-based snacks," the New York Department of Taxation and Finance defends it's just trying to help.

"It's trying to stress the point that all sandwiches are generally subject to sales tax, that's the message you want to get across," Cary Ziter, a spokesperson for the Department of Tax and Finance, told Gothamist in response to the new attention the bulletin's received.

In summation: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a sandwich.

Correction: A previous version of this article implied that the bulletin was posted by the city of New York. The New York Department of Taxation and Finance operates on behalf of the entire state.

If Women Want Better Pay, They Should Support Unions

The decline of unions has been bad for all workers hoping to join the middle class, but it has been especially terrible for women trying to keep up with men in any class.

Unions can be a useful tool for narrowing the gap between women and men at work, according to a recent paper by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank that studies economic and social issues.

Women in unions make 12.9 percent more, on average, than their non-union counterparts, according to the study. For women with just a high school diploma, that difference is 15 percent. Women in unions with a college degree make 13.4 percent more than their non-union colleagues, the study found.

While being in a union also boosts pay for men, the effect of unionization is about 1.4 times larger for women, on average, according to an analysis earlier this year by the National Women’s Law Center.

Why do women benefit so much more from union membership? The CEPR paper has theories:

For one, unions tend to do the most for workers at the lower ends of the spectrum, and women are much more likely to be low-wage workers. Women make up about two-thirds of minimum-wage earners in the U.S., for example. They also entered low-wage jobs at a faster clip than their male counterparts between 2009 and 2013.

And collective-bargaining agreements typically make pay policies more transparent and less dependent on the whims of managers. Women often get paid more when their compensation system is more standardized, which keeps unconscious bias from seeping in. They also benefit from transparency because it’s easier to spot an obvious inequity when co-workers know how much their colleagues are getting paid.

In 2013, women working full-time earned about 82 percent of what their male colleagues made, according to a March study from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Unions could help close that gap; unfortunately, unionization rates for both women and men have plunged since the 1980s, as the CEPR notes.

Among the other possible consequences of the decline of unions are a shrinking middle class and companies that have boosted profits at the expense of workers.

Yo Hacked Just Days After $1 Million Investment

Yo, an app whose function consists solely of messaging the word "yo" to other people -- and whose rise says a lot about the overwhelming absurdity of Silicon Valley -- has been hacked.

TechCrunch reported on Thursday evening that three Georgia Tech students had claimed to gain access to the app's phone numbers. One of them told the site that “we can get any Yo user’s phone number." Yo founder Or Abel later confirmed that his app was undergoing "security issues," and that "some of the stuff has been fixed and some we are still working on. We are taking this very seriously.” Yo users reported the issues on Twitter:

Yo, I've been hacked http://t.co/Il1TGRS653 pic.twitter.com/HyFS8jy5TA

— Derek Ross (@derekmross) June 20, 2014

Yo may be little more than a gimmick. But it's a gimmick that has received more than $1 million in funding. After The Financial Times reported on Yo's financial backing and its origin story -- the app was created in a mere eight hours -- it took off in popularity and created a Twitter firestorm. As of this writing, it ranked as the third most downloaded free app for the iPhone.

U.S. Patent And Trademark Office Cancels Redskins Trademark

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office canceled six federal trademark registrations for the name "Washington Redskins" on Wednesday on the grounds that the football team’s name is “disparaging to Native Americans” and thus in violation of federal trademark laws banning offensive or disparaging language.

“We decide, based on the evidence properly before us, that these registrations must be cancelled because they were disparaging to Native Americans at the respective times they were registered,” the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board wrote in its opinion Wednesday.

The landmark ruling was filed on behalf of a group of Native Americans.

The decision was first reported by Think Progress.

Below, more from the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal trademark board ruled Wednesday that the Washington Redskins nickname is "disparaging of Native Americans" and that the team's trademark protections should be canceled, a decision that applies new financial and political pressure on the team to change its name.

The 2-1 ruling from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board came in a case that has been working its way through legal channels for more than two decades. It doesn't force the team to abandon the name, but it comes at a time of increasing criticism of team owner Dan Snyder from political, religious and sports figures who say it's time for a change.

The Redskins quickly announced that they will appeal, and the cancellation for trademark protections will be on hold while the matter makes its way through the courts. That process could take years.

It was the second time the board had issued an opinion on the case. A similar ruling from 1999 was overturned on a technicality in 2003.

"We've seen this story before," Redskins attorney Bob Raskopf said. "And just like last time, today's ruling will have no effect at all on the team's ownership of and right to use the Redskins name and logo. We are confident we will prevail once again."

The ruling involves six uses of the "Redskins" name trademarked by the team from 1967 to 1990. If it stands, it would mean the team can continue to use the name, but it would lose a significant portion of its ability to protect the financial interests connected to it. If others printed the name on sweatshirts or other apparel without permission, it would become more cumbersome to go after such groups.

Courts overturned the board's previous ruling in part because the plaintiffs waited too long to voice their opposition after the original trademarks were issued. The case was relaunched in 2006 by a younger group of Native Americans who had recently become adults and therefore would not have able to file a case earlier. The hearing was held in March of last year.

The chorus of critics against the use of the name has grown over the past year.

On Saturday, a major sector of the United Church of Christ voted to urge its 40,000 members to boycott theRedskins. Half of the U.S. Senate recently wrote letters to the NFL urging a change, one of the letters stating that "racism and bigotry have no place in professional sports." D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray suggested Wednesday the name will almost certainly have to change if the team ever wants to build a new stadium in the city.

Snyder, who has vowed repeatedly never to change the name, declined comment as he walked off the field after a minicamp practice Wednesday. Redskins players have mostly avoided the topic, aware of a potential conflict because they are employed by the team.

"Our job as players is to focus on what we can on this field day-in and day-out and let the legal people take care of that stuff," quarterback Robert Griffin III said after practice. "And when it's the right time, then we can voice whatever it is we know about the situation."

The Redskins have responded to critics by creating an Original Americans Foundation to give financial support to Native American tribes. Suzan Shown Harjo, a lead figure in the trademark case, called the foundation "somewhere between a PR assault and bribery."

Supporters of a name change quickly hailed the decision.

"Daniel Snyder may be the last person in the world to realize this," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor, "but it is just a matter of time until he is forced to do the right thing."

The Time Amazon Stabbed A German Knife Maker In The Back

Amazon has been in the news lately for its tough negotiation tactics, refusing to accept presale orders for certain books from the publisher Hachette as well as some new DVDs and Blu-rays from Warner Bros. as it attempts to get more favorable contract terms with both companies.

This isn't out of character for Amazon. In fact, the mammoth online retailer has a history of playing rough with suppliers. Take the case of Wüsthof, the maker of fancy German knives, whose relationship with Amazon ended in broken promises and threats. Amazon was once the largest U.S. online retailer of Wüsthof knives. Now, Wüsthof won't even do business with it.

Here's why, according to Brad Stone's 2013 book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (which, as it happens, is published by a division of Hachette).

Amazon once bought a lot of knives from Wüsthof, a 200-year-old German company, writes Stone. But in 2006, Wüsthof thought the relationship was no longer worth it, and stopped selling to Amazon.

The problem was that Amazon was selling the knives for below what's called Minimum Advertised Price, or MAP. MAP, Stone explains, requires brick-and-mortar retailers not to go below a certain price in their ads, and requires online stores like Amazon not to post prices lower than those on its product pages.

As Stone writes in The Everything Store, "Wüsthof felt it needed MAP to defend the value of its brand and protect the small independent knife shops that were responsible for about a quarter of the company's sales and were not capable of matching such discounts."

Cover of Brad Stone's book.

After a few years of selling Wüsthof knives, Amazon stopped adhering to the company's MAP, instead discounting the knives heavily. So Wüsthof decided to stop supplying Amazon.

"It was painful for us," René Arnold, then the company's CFO, told Stone. "Those were lost sales, at least in the short term."

Three years later, in 2009, Amazon promised it would play nice with Wüsthof and adhere to the company's MAP. So the knife-maker resumed selling to Amazon.

But once again, Amazon went below MAP.

From The Everything Store:

René Arnold, the CFO, was overwhelmed with complaints from his other retailer partners, whose prices remained 10 percent higher. These small shop owners either lost sales to Amazon or were forced by their customers to match Amazon's price. In their angry calls to Arnold, they threatened to lower their retail prices as well, and now it was easy for Arnold and his colleagues to envision a day when all these retailers would start demanding lower wholesale prices on Wüsthof knives, cutting into the company's profit margins. The economics of its traditional-manufacturing operating in Germany would no longer make sense.

Amazon said it was simply matching the prices of its third-party sellers -- retailers from which you can buy products on Amazon's website, but which aren't actually part of Amazon. The problem was that some of those third-party merchants weren't authorized Wüsthof sellers. Some could even have been selling stolen knives.

So in 2011, Stone writes, Wüsthof again cut ties with Amazon and stopped selling its knives to the huge retailer.

But it didn't end there.

Amazon representatives, according to Stone, not only said that they'd continue to sell Wüsthof knives through other distributors, but also said they'd show advertisements for competing knife companies when a customer searched Amazon for Wüsthof knives.

Wüsthof to this day refuses to sell to Amazon, though you can still find its products on Amazon through third-party sellers.

"We couldn't control our relationship with Amazon.com," Arnold, now the CEO of Wüsthof Trident of America, told The Huffington Post last week. "We have a very strict MAP policy. They couldn't care less about this."

Retailers and vendors constantly tussle over prices. Typically, retailers try to negotiate lower prices from vendors so they can, in turn, have the lowest prices in the market. Walmart is legendary for this.

Amazon, for its part, says it's just trying to get the lowest prices for consumers. But the company has incredibly thin profit margins -- less than one cent for every dollar of revenue, according to Bloomberg. Amazon, whose stock is down 18 percent this year, is under intense pressure from shareholders to make more money.

"When we negotiate with suppliers, we are doing so on behalf of customers," Amazon said in a statement last month about its standoff with Hachette. "Negotiating for acceptable terms is an essential business practice that is critical to keeping service and value high for customers in the medium and long term."

A spokesperson from Amazon would not comment on the company's relationships with Hachette or Wüsthof beyond that statement.