The willful ignorance of the tech community is getting out of hand. This is the same thing as the "windows 10 is the last version of windows" discourse which stems from the absolutely abysmal state of tech journalism. You would think that by now that it would at least match financial journalism, but apparently we're fine settling for people who don't care about or understand what they are writing about.
This isn't an issue, the 10 years of support was promised for the hardware, not the software. They are fulfilling that promise by updating the devices to GooglebookOS.
It's not like pension funds are forced to invest in VC funds. It's the unions decision too, so ultimately if they are bad investments, it's average joe union workers fault they voted for shitty leadership.
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.
Microsoft has the most used operating system in the world with a default browser that defaults search to Bing. How is that working out? Being a default doesn't matter when the other options are better and easy to switch to.
The judge ruled against Google for ideological reasons and then realized what the consequences of his decision were after the fact. Google's monopoly is in the ads space where they control the buy side, sell side, and exchange. The idea that chrome or android were ever a monopoly and should be sold off was ridiculous.
Chicago unions forced the installation of lead pipes for so long because of the higher labor cost of installation that the federal government had to step in and force them to stop installing lead pipes.
Payment Gateways don't actually process payments, they are built on top of payment processors and can only process payments if the underlying processor is willing to. You need to find a processor that supports your risk profile and they will generally have a white labeled gateway or integrations with gateways where you can bring your own merchant account.