I'm in the US and bought perfectly legal supplements from a US company using BTC from my Coinbase wallet. I and several other customers of this US company had our accounts terminated by Coinbase. This US company we bought supplements from also accepted and still accepts major credit cards. Coinbase certainly cares.
The issue with Uber is tipping can affect ratings and Uber plays like tipping isn't part of the mechanics. They've pushed driver payout so low it's now important for drivers to figure out how to get extra money from their fares. Lyft has pricing parity with Uber so the same issue exists but they help the situation by allowing tips to be collected in app but not expose the tip during the ratings process. It's a more honest and mature mechanic and why I've switched over to Lyft completely.
Extending this point a little, in a competitive environment I believe it matters what your competitors are paying for their labor and services. Since overhead (taxes and insurance) is relatively uniform, taxes should matter very little to his ability to compete.
First we need to remember Joel doesn't spend as much time on his blog entries as Paul Graham spends on his. With that in mind - what did Joel mean? Joel meant at leat these two things:
a) Complex design patterns will be refactored into fewer elements. GWT is a nice try but Java isn't simplification - and you Java heads know this.
b) Optimization isn't the only secret sauce to rely on. Companies that put all their eggs in this basket get burned by companies that understand the larger problem begging for a solution. When resource scarcity relaxes, the companies that understand this will automagically appear at the front of the line.
And bundling IE was always the weak argument why Microsoft is a monopolist. Microsoft is a monopolist because they have a serious majority of the market, used completely undocumented features of their OS in their Apps, and particpated in extremely unfair trade practices.
Apple is busting an entrenched industry. This is good. Its possible that Apple will become the new Microsoft indeed. But they are so laughably far from this status the PC world article remains equally ridiculous.