It's not payed-for entertainment, but the contractually binding drip-fed variety. I like to consume entertainment in my own time and go for whatever's most appealing to me at the time.
With MMORPGs you haven an incentive to "get the most" for your money, even if it isn't particularly very good. The only way choice comes into it is if you choose to actively quit. And even then Blizzard punish you by deleting all your characters.

Also consider that someone who started WoW back when it came out will probably have payed anywhere upward of $1200 in fees, just for a single game. Asking them to pay full price for an expansion every two years or so on top of that just seems rude to me.

It's only worth questioning if you can question it in a meaningful and constructive way. And that's when you realize that there was no attempt to compare the two cases, just a line or two of handwaving which is used to insinuate that the judge is racist.
Prejudice works in both ways you know.

The only way it wouldn't take place is if they wouldn't have it done at all for $333 (supposing 25% tax takes it to $250 for the company). In the real world however needs and demands are pretty flexible.
BTW, it's also an instance of the broken window fallacy to say that it is an inherently wrong decision not to have someone mow the lawn.

Having the sysadmin do it OTOH is more efficient, assuming that he could do it in his hours and that he can still fulfill his obligations as a sysadmin. If he can't then the manager made the wrong decision and jeopardized the company's system support, which will mean he'll either have to hire more people or will have downtime which impacts other employees, both of which costs money.
In order to get your fallacy to work you've had to assume the sysadmin does it for free. But that's just the manager being an asshole rather than a sound economic decision.
Understandably this sort of behavior is illegal in most countries. That's not to say it doesn't happen but they'd have practically the same incentive to pressure him even without the tax.

Finally, hiring professionals can easily be very inefficient. You have to negotiate, do quality control and administrate. The people you're hiring also have travel costs and might not necessarily be very efficient in the first place. In the end you might find you're better off doing it yourself which is what many small businesses do.

What you describe just doesn't hold. Normally all economic activity is taxed and private chores aren't. You can't compare them.

Say a company needs their office lawn mowing and rather than pay a gardening company they do it in-house. They will need an new employee as no-one else has any spare time, but say they have a lot of lawn and from a purely material view it works out as efficient as having the gardening company do it. Tax benefit? Not really. They may save a small amount of money but the amount they save will go towards their before-tax profits and they will end up having to pay the same amount of taxes as if they outsourced. By the end of it the only way to save money is if they can do it more efficiently than the other company.

Private companies are good at developing new products in established fields and using existing engineering and research practices (so long as they promise returns, which is another matter). They're usually the one who create the most recognizable products. But they simply don't do much in terms of fundamental research.

It's interesting that you mention Bell Labs. Their heyday was back when AT&T had a (government-granted) monopoly. They were able to focus on stuff which didn't belong to their core products of the day. Things have changed since then.

You don't devalue a floating currency. The bankruptcies would just induce everyone to sell and you have a debt crisis just as before, only that common people's savings are heavily devalued.
I don't see how this would have helped Cyprus anymore than the fall of the Krona helped Iceland.

You basically just described the business cycle, and it's a part of any reasonably useful currency. With fractional reserve banking it's easy to see how the same would happen with a gold standard. Except that it's got another parameter complicating everything, potentially making it more erratic.

The advertising just says there is no annual service contract, and that you can use your existing phone. If they were advertising a new phone for free with no future payments there might be a problem, but they didn't do that.

Legally every purchase you make is a contract. But in this context it's pretty clear what they mean by "no-contract": You can use the service without committing yourself to recurring payments.
From their website it seems like they're separating the concepts of financing a new phone and using the service as much as they should need to and they let you pay up front if you want to do that. If you want a phone you have to pay for it. Anyone who thinks this is unfair is clearly delusional from years of absurd marketing strategies by the telcos.

Well, that's not really how it works. Violence is a crime that requires intent and there is little room for interpretation. Being distracted isn't a crime by default and there are perfectly legitimate reasons why you might find yourself distracted. But there are some things that are so distractive and risky that it's simply best to outlaw them alltogether like cellphones and drink-driving.

That's just an (unconvincing) anecdote. Almost every credible study out there shows that all people have much worse control when using a cellphone, which is hardly surprising.
FWIW here's my personal experience: I know people who drive while on the phone and people who drive shit. There seems to be a strong correlation between "driving like shit" and "driving while on the phone". It's most likely an Illusory superiority that leads to both.

That's like testing a jet pilot by by having them take off and land once, or judging a bodyguard by looking beefed-up and walking behind someone. The situations where it really matters are so far out of the ordinary that you can't reasonably exclude that someone won't be a risk.

1) If the software isn't strictly limited to software but interfaces with some medical hardware or fancy shit't you don't want to mess around. Go directly to 3)
2) Virtualize. Chances are it will work out of the box. Then you can enjoy the benefits of new hardware and a new OS and still use your old software.
3) Maybe you don't actually need an upgrade. There's no benefit of running your old software on a new OS, the only benefits will be peripheral. Just have a seperate machine running whatever new stuff you like and keep the legacy hardware for your mission-critical legacy software.
4) If you still want an upgrade it's more of an issue of wanting to upgrade you specialty software and hardware, which of course can be expensive. In this case you need medical consulting rather than just plain IT consulting. Maybe there's a cheaper solution available.

There certainly was inflation under the gold standard.

There is actually. And that's because our legal systems put a lot of weight on intent and negligence. People aren't punished for unforeseeable or purely random accidents. But they are punished if the accident came about while being negligent, such as drink driving or driving with a phone in their hand. While they may not have been intentionally "driving like an asshole" their behavior makes it much more likely for an accident to happen.

You'd need to elaborate a little more, but this may have been a historical remnant.

In the days of human computers a lot of them were female math students. But the work was pretty menial for someone with such a high education.

The systemic bias you speak would be that most people hired would be men. That isn't unfair or discriminatory. You can introduce a different bias to unfairly favour women and get a more equal distribution of gender in your employees. But you've only gained something if you perceive it to be a problem when there is a large proportion of a particular gender in a certain working environment. To me that in itself seems like a sexist attitude.