The answer is you build a team that builds tools to make optimization easier for everyone in the engineering organization. One individual team can't optimize every application, but if you make it easy for every engineering team to profile their applications and debug performance problems, you've enabled every team to continuously optimize the low-hanging fruit. In effect, you're no longer solving one-off 8-figure problems, you're optimizing the time of other engineers which is something that pays off in perpetuity.
Good large engineering organizations have these teams, and understand their value. For smaller companies, it's not as clear if you can reasonably fund a team for that kind of work.
This Mill guy is the gift that keeps on giving. With any luck he’ll still be around to explain how the soon-to-be-released Mill 1.0 cpu would have avoided the year 2038 problem.
Can you actually spend Bitcoin in physical stores outside of the Bay Area? Bitcoin just seems like an investment vehicle/security rather than a currency. How many people actually use Bitcoin for buying toilet paper?
I can speak for Seattle/WA state-- it is very common to find BTC ATM's in recreational weed shops. The main driver of this seems to be that the stores have a near impossible chance of being banked and deal in cash only.
The crypto ATM's allow you to purchase with a CC and in turn pay the store for product, all while avoiding cash. To the store this is a much safer alternative.
For the crypto anarchists watching the big banks/fed opening up about their feelings and fears about crypto, it seems like they are pushing a near billion dollar industry to find ways to accept payment outside of the beloved USD.
There is plenty of Bitcoin debit cards, which will sell Bitcoin proportionally to the amount of USD/EUR/whatever you purchased for. One of them being TenX.com.
This allows you to spend at any store which accepts cards in general.
That said, there are stores which accepts plain Bitcoin. As one anecdata, the electronics chain webhallen.com in Sweden accepts pure Bitcoin-transactions.
Do you remember the multi-million dollar pizza? Today, nobody wants to be the thousand dollar toilet paper guy. I believe most people buy it as an investment, with no intention to every make an actual purchase with it. What gives it value then? What will happen with the price when there are no new people who wants to buy bitcoin?
Bitflyer (Japan) has partnerships with bic camera (electronics store like best buy) to offer Bitcoin payments. Though I believe you cannot use it for over $1000 purchases
But it isn't progressive, right? An individual in CA who makes 50k gets less in Federal funding to projects that would benefit them, than if that same individual moved to another state, and made the exact same amount.
Not saying I agree with the conceit that a state should have the level of economic autonomy argued for the the original post, but your argument doesn't hold water.
I think the implication is that countries that espouse their "free market"-ness end up with a lot of regulatory capture. This, telecoms, healthcare.
A bunch of people with a lot of money have been able to lock in their positions. It sure feels like pulling out of the church of laissez-faire economics would let us, say, pass laws with things like price controls (or just nationalizing the whole industry!).
An aside: complicated taxes aren't the opposite of "free market". For example, giving tax incentives to new companies can help make a market more free by reducing the cost of entry.
Sorry, you're never going to have a society where the government is a 100% neutral referee and everybody else is a part of the 'free market'. As long as there is an incentive to rig the game, people are gonna rig it.
