By your logic, banning it through regulation decreases options and hence diversification.

Governments are not angels which seems to be an assumption in your and sibling replies. They're a bully who doesn't want someone else to get power.

I'm not being extreme, humor me. If the govt didn't want a monopoly, isn't it a hypocrisy that they themselves are one?

The proper thing to would've been to get closer to anarcho-capitalism, ie let there be govt currency and FB's libra. Let people decide what they want to use.

You speak as though corporations and democratic governments are the same thing. The government is (at least notionally) the will of the people. A corporation is unaccountable to anyone but it’s shareholders. It is folly to treat EU legislators the same as Zuck et al.

Not sure about the website you run but there might be a corelation to Linux users and your site. It could be either due to your network and the way people came to know about the site or it could be the content among other things

Why aren't autonomous or remotely controlled rovers, or turrets ever installed?

Me too, I assumed its the electric blanket one which is right after that paragraph.

This seems awfully contrived.

Issue 1: It's very difficult to tell if your contribution got 50% improvement in performance because there were 10 other devs pushing in features and bug fixes. This is the attribution problem

Issue 2: This happens over time. It's very unlikely that your 50% improvement happens every year or month. Because, think for your self, this is compounding with large rates. It grows quickly. 1.5x improvement in 6 cycles (months or years) is 10x. This essentially is the time problem

Issue 3: even if you deliver the results you did, in a large company there's a large bureaucracy and no one person has the ability to increase your salary by that much. This is the control problem.

I agree, but is it _that_ easy? Not like no one has tried

A good competitor can make a drop in replacement possible by aligning their api with that of google's

look how good it went for Microsoft's competitors trying to build a Win32-compatible OS....

Look what Linus and Stallman made to replace UNIX.

What? Like WINE you mean? ;-)

and where is this mythical job/ company?

In Silicon Valley, pay is high, so is the cost of living, reverse in other places. If your situation differs, you've got it good (unless you're in a bad job in a high cost of living place)

what's the point of a cvv then? This seems rather odd

It's up to the merchant; since in the event of fraud they'll be the ones who get hit with the chargeback, it's up to them to decide if they want to require that extra safety or not.

For a recurring subscription, the cvv was verified at the beginning. Cvv is for verifying the card security, not vendor account management.

The thing about the invisible hand is that it works really well if you buy a chocolate bar that you don't like. The next day, you won't buy that same chocolate bar. However, when a handsome man in a suit offers my cousin a loan for a house that she can't afford and puts her in severe financial trouble, she might very well not use that bank again the next time she's looking for a loan (in maybe 30 years), but that doesn't help much.

The free market self regulates well in some areas. Others need some assistance.

The fact that banks are allowed to give loans with money they don't have to people who can't repay them is mostly because of that "assistance".

That only works if they let you cancel. Otherwise they can't lose customers.

“If they don’t learn they will go out of business” sounds nice, but in reality, we can all point to hundreds and hundreds of different companies that show that that simply does not happen. Otherwise, the US would have the best and friendliest companies in the world, since that’s where capitalism runs the most rampant, and where you can really see that “the market will sort itself out” philosophy in action.