Due to the history of the internet, anything ".com" should be assumed to be a commercial entity.
If you are from the US, the only nation who doesn't frequently use a national TLD, the onus is on you to judge if a site is commercial, US-specific, global, or something else entirely.
On the contrary, it is a helpful term. Before the term, it was common to ask "are you a manager", and then you were defined oppositionally, as not-a-manager.
Whereas IC having its own identity means it has many positive connotations. "I'd much rather be an IC, so I can get things done" etc. You can still be very senior without having direct reports or having to do line management, often seen as a necessary evil.
It's extremely common, even in the USA, although in the USA it's more limited to running communities. In the UK, NZ, Australia, road running is common enough that anyone would know what you mean, but it's a bit less of a thing in the USA.
You haven't actually cited any studies, just "I haven't heard anyone say anything".
We have transaction taxes in the UK, on shares (stamp duty) and on property (stamp duty land tax). They are awful. SDLT used to be lower, around 1%, but it crept up as it's an easy tax to raise politically, the top band is now at 12%.
[The government's own modelling of SDLT is incredible](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/responsiveness-of...)
A 1% change in the effective tax rate results in almost a 12% change in the number of commercial transactions and a 5-7% change in the number of residential transactions.
This effect still happens at lower thresholds, it's just less dramatic, but it's still distortionary. If you tax something, you get less of it, and why do you want people to move less?
If you prefer anecdotes, these days it's very common to rent in the UK until you can buy a longer term home, rather than buying a starter home. I know very few people who _haven't_ done exactly that, you don't want to pay SDLT on somewhere you'll only live for a few years.
It raises very little, distorts the market hugely, it is a large reason that companies choose to list overseas.
Sales taxes are a (bad) form of consumption tax (VAT is better.) Consumption taxes are broadly good, the problem with transaction taxes are when you are purchasing an asset in a market.
It's the opposite in the UK. Most landlords are individuals, own one or maybe a couple of properties.
It's awful, rogue landlords who do everything they can to not do repairs or improvements and when they do it often comes after a long time. Often as they have underestimated all the expenses they're liable for and find that the profit is not very much.
Give me a company that owns a whole block every day, they've modelled the risk better, have economies of scale, and you have more recourse against them.
I'm not in favour of getting rid of the bureaucracy, some of it is necessary, but we're way past the benefit.
I think most regulation is a concave quadratic function of regulations vs benefit.
At zero regulation it can be very bad, but there also must be a point at which something is so smothered in regulation that doing anything is impossible. So there must be a maxima somewhere between the two points.
All I think is that the current state of drug regulation quite a long way to the right of that maxima, that doesn't mean I think we should remove it all to zero, or that some other things aren't to the left of it and need more regulation!
Probably most disagreements over this sort of thing are just people who disagree about which side of the maxima we're on.
If we put a $10k tax on beards, that's $600 billion right there!
What's that, people might change their behaviour in response to it, in possibly unintended and negative ways? Nah we can just hand wave that away, who needs liquidity or investment.
Plus, you are looking at it purely from a construction cost of the building point of view. If you build more densely, you don't need as many roads and other services, which also cost money, and once you have enough density, agglomeration means that it's economical to have local businesses nearby, fewer people need cars etc.
An alternate way to view the same situation is that the regulatory state being slow and bureaucratic is the cause of those ills. The more you over-regulate and make the official pathways too expensive by adding a million tiny costs, the less unreasonable it seems to abandon the official channel entirely.
Has that ever worked at scale in history?
This strikes me as the same as people who take a stand by not ordering from Amazon or not using whichever service, they make their life somewhat harder and the world doesn't notice.
Even worse, the people taking a stand signal to others that they do it, but most others think that the cost outweighs the benefit, and don't like being judged. Groups in which everyone signals and judges like that suck and devolve into purity spiraling, so few people sustain it, and the people taking a stand get bitter.
More political arguments about the other effects of unions aside - I've never heard a good answer for why unions are good for workers in professions with wide ranges of skill and impact, such as lots of types of knowledge work. Do you have an answer for that?
Roles that are more fungible, train drivers, factory workers, I can see the case from the worker's perspective, even if I think there are externalities.
But I can't even see it from a worker's perspective in roles such as software or sales, why would anyone good want to work in an environment where much worse workers are protected, compensation is more levelised etc?
I'm assuming this will boil down to some unspoken values differences but still thought I'd ask.
The other reason is more mundane. There's been a lot of political incentive to reduce immigration for a long time, which means adding arbitrary friction to increase the effort of applying and decrease the number of successful applicants.
Whether this is _effective_ is a different question, but certainly it's gotten a lot harder in recent decades, even pre-Brexit.
Generally, yes but I there's a surprising amount of cases when it is important, which makes it difficult to generalise
e.g. Huge amounts of the financial sector cares because of market times or regulatory reasons.