Is the cost of a dining room socialized if a restaurant does take out? It's a business cost that was from it's inception sold as a way to increase potential customer base and reduce risk, which is still a valid and correct way of looking at it considering bounced checks don't get paid out to merchants and cash gets skimmed.
What payment provider is allowing payments without accessing the customers current funds? With a CC, you can charge $1000 with only $100 in your bank account. That is not something you can do with ACH, check, cash, etc. Pay Now Pay Later providers like Affirm would also allow this, but I'm not sure what that looks like from a merchant POV
Visa/MasterCard are essentially a network of banks, they only get a small percentage of the interchange rate. Most of it goes to the issuing bank which they use for rewards.
This line of thinking also ignores an important aspect of credit cards that benefit the merchant. 2-2.5% is not that much when it means you can sell to people without worrying about if they can pay for it. When that customer ultimately doesn't pay their CC bill(look at how high CC debt is), the issuing bank still needs to pay the merchant.
Besides a complete stranglehold on labor markets in a number of industries where the government is required to use union labor for infrastructure projects and they limit the number of laborers to drive up price. Or how about the Plumbers union that forced the city of Chicago to continue installing lead pipes until the federal government had to force them to stop. Beyond that, the power to promote good workers or make necessary changes across the org. For example, why doesn't Chicago have any driver-less trains and a conductor shortage? The unions are preventing both.
That's not the case at all. His blog is his personal blog, not 37Signals, and he has never said employees were not allowed to share political opinions outside of work.
Part of Satya reorg in 2018 moved windows into a weird leadership structure where it was part of bing iirc. I think they recently finally fixed that org mistake and hopefully they quickly push an improved windows 12.