Which is why if you read the second part about my comment above, free markets are regulated. It's a no true scotsman to appeal to the purity of free market semantics when nobody else is using language limited to the literal definition.
Markets are zero sum. Competition ensures that an inefficient business will lose out to efficient competitors.
In most markets where efficiency is not achievable, then businesses are not entitled to exist. This is why things such as tax subsidies and other forms of funding are used to bootstrap new markets (e.g. green energy) that have a net social gain.
Businesses that cannot afford to retain talent and remain competitive deserve to not survive, in order to make room for more efficient organizations. This is a principle of the free market.
Also as a principle, regulating said free markets for QoL improvements (e.g. min wage, HI, disability, comp, soc sec, etc.) affect all participants - both efficient and destined-to-die businesses alike. If you can't exist through playing by the rules that everyone has set, why are you still in business?
Yes, if HI becomes universal healthcare in the U.S., like most developed nations, then funding will be through a variety of means, inevitably involving income tax.
That said, depending on the splits, it's much more probable that the cost to "employee salaries" will be less than their typical OOP expenses anyways.
Health insurance is a budgeted overhead variable cost assigned to employee expenses. It's true that should HI disappear, not all of the HI cost will be transferred to employee salaries, but it's definitely a non-zero amount.
Why not just ditch time zones altogether and have everyone on the same clock?
DST was good enough to implement while in an agrarian society, so why not the universal clock in a global connected society? Just imagine the precision.
Most big box retailers lease store space (by the sq ft) to OEMs now, instead of buying and distributing the goods themselves.
Much less liability for the retailer, and puts the onus for sales on the manufacturer. I would be surprised if Amazon didn't try to do that with their 4-star shops.
>Apple closed off the iphone NFC api which dried up VC funding in the mobile payment scene. This is one of the reason we have QR Codes everywhere today, and not NFC tags.
Yep, this was my experience as well, working in the NFC space at the time. Apple also basically forced the whole IoT space to start focusing on QR codes instead of NFC tags, because they were lagging technologically with the iPhone.
It is today with different added features, but back in the 2010s you didn't need your bank to support it. You could do it with your VISA/Mastercard/AMEX credit or debit card.
Right, and with the advent of NFC in phones, US consumers didn't need the banks' permission to pay contactlessly. Despite this, contactless payment adoption was still slow in the U.S. even though most phones had NFC, it wasn't critical mass until Apple finally decided to support NFC technology.
Honestly, I think it was Apple refusing to fully support NFC until 2016 that prevented the market from jumping on contactless payments, at least in the US. They were holding something like a third of the market back from doing it which really made selling adoption to merchants difficult.
True, but it doesn't make sense to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
From what I've seen being argued about proponents of defi (or smart contracts) is they operate on the premise that the centralized authority is the bad actor.
While this is true in some cases, it's not all cases, and despite it's flaws there is still a need for centralized authorities to arbitrate.
Other than Second Life, those aren't really persistent virtual worlds. Video game worlds, sure, but do you really see Facebook creating video games for it's blue site and instagram audience?
They're an environment crafted to scratch a dopamine itch by providing instant gratification for work, with a social layer attached on top. I write this as someone who used to play MUDs back before MMORPGs even became a thing.
Unless Facebook is planning on releasing their own WoW branded as the metaverse, I don't see how they're the same.