They key word here is "small". The complexity of managing a company grows at an geometric rate as a function of employees. The complexity of a project grows at an exponential rate as a function of the number of developers (at least after you get past a handful of people). Small companies that don't produce quickly die. I work at a medium-sized company where the scaling issues I described above really apply, so even though it's a good environment and management isn't a hindrance to making things happen, there's no way I would say work gets done quickly. However, the work does get done, and the environment is such that I feel like I can really make a difference. This contrasts to when I worked for a large company where I felt like nothing I said or did mattered in the long run (even though I did really good work for them.).

It sounds like you are in a good situation, and I hope it stays that way.

Whether the term is enforceable or not is debatable and almost certain to be rendered moot. Unlike US Republicans, UK Conservatives do actually believe in the rule of law and honest business practices (sort of). There isn't any party who believes that screwing the consumer is a constitutional right. There will be a bill passed.

A rather more direct question is whether the hotelier was entitled to collect the charge under the credit card agreement. And that is unambiguous, he isn't. A credit card merchant cannot use a charge card to recover a disputed charge. It does not matter what the purported contract term was or if it is enforceable. The credit card agreements are designed to prevent cardholders from dishonest merchants. So the consumer will get their refund and the hotelier will find themselves facing a 30 quid chargeback fee.

The only option for the hotelier to recover would be to take the matter to court. The most he could win is the hundred pounds, if he lost he would likely be out the legal costs which could be a couple of thousand. Small claims courts don't usually award costs but they might well do so in this case. Judges tend to detest bullies.

Its more than that, without regulation you end up with a lemon-law market.

Lots of times the difference between an honest product and a dishonest one only becomes apparent years later. If the product is safety equipment you only find out if the hard hat works when someone drops the brick on your head.

The libertarian theory that self interest will drive people to make honest products has turned out to be utterly false. In fact it turns out to be quite difficult for a company that intends to do the right thing to do so. I once had to get a guy fired after I found he had goosed his response rates for customer support calls by deliberately setting the phone tree up as a maze.

People do all sorts of idiotic short sighted stuff. This hotelier for example got his pants in a twist over a bad review and now he has probably sunk his business completely.

Rational choice is not an empirical fact of human behavior. It is a modelling assumption that tends to give good results in certain cases. But it does not hold for corporations because the interests of the corporation are not identical to those of the employees. All those banks who go belly up because the traders get big rewards for raking in profits and face no consequences for a loss. I don't gamble with my own money but if you want to give me $100,000 to gamble with I am happy to take it to Vegas, find a roulette wheel and let you take 100% of any losses and 90% of any gains.

I very rarely saw XP crash in a way that wasn't obviously attributable to a hardware/driver issue. Vista blue-screened on me a couple times, but I stopped using after about 2 months because it was such a turd. Windows 7 was better, and Windows 8 is too, once you do what you can to eliminate all the "Metro" stuff. Both of them are still slower than XP in my experience, especially when copying across a network to a Samba share, which I do a lot. But blue-screens are almost a thing of the past in my experience.

I learned less from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment than I did from the Minnesota Spankological Protocol.

In my experience, most people do the same thing, but using Word. It's really annoy when someone sends you a screenshot and it arrives in e-mail or a Bugzilla attachment as a .doc[x] file. :-/

Indeed. Only 3 can be properly done on a sofa.

Yeah, that ship has sailed. Now it's Federal Government uber alles and the states can, um, I guess they can still vote whether or not they use Daylight Saving Time.

What 10th Amendment?

I think the moderators have adjusted your score because it's plus 5 informative now.

Also, a lot of those "last minute concessions" were nothing but naked bribes. Those "conservative" Democrats who voted for ACA were bought and sold.

What is worse, a million people with a 12k debt they cannot pay or a thousand with a 300k debt they cannot pay?

And Romney wasn't just some RINO rebel GOP governor in a backwater state that the GOP could write off as being a product of a liberal constituent... he was who the GOP chose to be the shining star and face of their party to combat the derivative of the very plan Romney pushed for in his home state.

You really don't understand the Republican Party if you think those things are mutually exclusive. Nominations are as much a smoke-filled back-room process as they ever were and the leadership of the GOP neither respects, nor is respected by, the majority of people who consider themselves Republican.

Saying, "if you don't like it, move" is just naive.

I don't think anyone thinks this is socialized healthcare, but it is closer to socialized healthcare than it was before. The most important point is that it is not a free market. Not even close. So anyone expecting any of the benefits of a free market aren't going to find it. All that's happening is that the government is distorting the market in order to fix problems that were largely caused by the government distorting the free market. It's a vicious cycle of trying to fix the broken fixes with more broken fixes, with the same results.

Also, enacting ACA has just replaced, "If you don't like it, move to another state." with "If you don't like it, move to another country." I've moved between states (for job reasons, not policy reasons) and it wasn't any more effort than getting a new driver's license and figuring out a new state income tax form. People move all the time. It's really not a big deal.

However, I don't think leaving the U.S. is quite that simple. Plus it's the U.S. It's the country everyone in the world goes to to escape the crapholes they currently live in. I'd prefer we not ruin it.

So your argument is, if I my be so bold, just a little flawed.

> In theory that works great, in practice it does not work at all.

Actually, it works just fine. The problem is that the people adversely affected by bad policies don't realize the bad policies are to blame and keep voting for them.

See Detroit.

As, yes, you can thank the "Getting Some" amendment that was slipped in the night before it was passed.