Many local restaurants are getting tired of the high fees and offer discounts for cash. I've started using cash much more often myself. The banking industry is out of control. Increased profits is not always a good thing. There are times that a business sector needs to shrink.

If you've forgotten how to innovate, do what everyone else does.

Original: smaller companies would come out of nowhere and eat the lunch of more established players by out-innovating them. Comment: That is actually what is happening right now. You are just to blind to see it. Examples not statements!

It's simply a conduit for fraud.

I can't imagine how this could go bad...

Good luck figuring out the brain. It's crazy complex and wonderfully simple all at once.

The mass market is for cheaper stuff. Yup. Maturing market. That's a good thing.

Crypto has enabled fraud on an unprecedented massive level and not done much else other than divert capital from the poorer social classes that should have gone into productive investments. It should have been shut down decades ago.

These laws are really more about stating a societal/political value than stopping access. It probably will have some influence on society. But probably not much. A much more effective idea--ban phones entirely from schools. I'm 100% behind that. Particularly from the lunch room. Kids aren't learning how to socialize and that's producing a major crisis.

If it was VI. That would be news!

I'm just not buying the idea that AI is taking away all these jobs. When times are good big companies hire lots of people to do all sorts of unnecessary things. When times get tighter, those jobs go away. It's convenient right now to say "AI replaced them". But how much of that is real? AI is changing the face of work. But like all revolutions it starts mostly with hype then more slowly transitions into reality.

The current generation is socially isolated, lonely and scared. The reason is phones provide a bubble that lets kids hide from the awkwardness of talking to the kid sitting beside them on the bus or at lunch. But, without those awkward moments kids don't develop friendships and social skills. Those are far more important than academic skills. The very fabric of life is at stake.

Being socially awkward is a big part of growing up. Unfortunately, today the moment a kid today feels the least bit awkward they pull out their phone and avoid it. Starting real life conversations is seen by the current generation as "intruding". The result is kids are about 5 years behind in social development. The societal and personal costs of this are enormous. Young men that were starting to date at 20 and get married at 25 are now starting to date at 25 and get married at 30. The window for having healthy children starts to rapidly close at those ages. I'm all for banning phones in school--particularly during lunch and breaks between classes--that's where most socialization happens--and arguably that's more important than anything else that happens in school.

Most people don't understand that established businesses are WAY more worried about losses than they are interested in growth. It doesn't take very many people voicing concern/worry and companies hit pause and pile up cash. It's not a surprise then that the tariff talk/threats instantly shut down the growth plans/investments of established companies all over America. The soft labor market reflects that lack of investment

That's about right. Duffield knew what he was doing and when Oracle did a hostile takeover of his company he had a pile of cash, a wealth of knowledge and a lot of motivation to take the market back from Oracle.