When was the issue with the embossed white cover with braille text? December 1994? January 1995?
That was peak Wired: techno hippies in Prague, the new year "scared shitlist" (President Dole... President Gates!), TV watches you, General Magic, Ricochet radio modems (the very first wifi), and it still had much more of a "moody b&w" aesthetic than the dayglo nightmare that was to come.
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.
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
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.
> The thing holding back unions in the U.S is the unions themselves and the laws around them. Once a union forms, they have entirely too much power.
This is a nice summary of the central issue with unions in the U.S. A rational person can quickly see why people are clamoring for unions in the U.S. and also why American companies are so resistant.
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.
When you're the public face of a company you don't get to separate your personal political blogs from your work life. Your employees shouldn't know your political opinions and when you're that much in the public eye that means keeping them to yourself.
I genuinely don't understand why you believe this. Were you holding Bill Gates to the same standard when he still ran Microsoft? A charitable foundation is inherently political (it asserts the importance of the causes it financially supports, and holds them to represent matters of significant moral weight); should he not have put his and his wife's name on it?
this is in the same category as "the law in its majestic equality forbids both beggars and rich men to sleep under bridges".
DHH advocates "no politics at work" because as a powerful guy that's organized politics potentially directed at him. He advocates blogging because he knows perfectly well that he has a large audience and his employees or critics don't. That's why the rich tech bro class loves getting politics out of the workplace and getting it onto the platforms they own.
