Likewise, if a hospital hands you a bill for 30k and you need help, are you really going to be able to negotiate and find a better price?

Healthcare is fundamentally an in-elastic good.

It would be nice to have such an edict, forcing compatibility outside of the ACH system but it will never happen.

For NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...

For Paris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_pneumatic_post

It will be interesting if the economics work in suburban sprawl.

The best part: Even a decade ago, the above was considered neccesary but not sufficient for admission to a top school. Plenty of people with perfect to near-perfect college entrance exams, Intel International Science and Engineering Fair finalists, etc didn't make the cut. Of the few that did, the majority were the lower Ivy's (Dartmouth and Brown).

By way of contrast, my parents live in the mid-west and were plagued between a choice of slow AT&T DSL or expensive but slightly faster Comcast/Spectrum/Consolidated (A terrible overbuild provider) cable internet.

The game changed entirely when Google Fiber started rolling out. First in the inner city, then to inner suburbs and just recently to the outer suburbs after spending the better part of decade fighting city councils that obviously preferred Spectrum and AT&T.

Since then 1. Prices have stabilized and declined somewhat from the incumbent carriers. 2. Spectrum did an in-place upgrade and now 500 Mbps down is standard for a reasonable price. AT&T turned around and built it's own GPON network ahead of Google fiber in areas where Google didn't have service.

Isn't competition wonderful?

1. Who pay's the employer side income taxes. Contractors pay both sides. 2. Not eligible for benefits, you have to go to overpriced open market. 3. The contractor can deduct reasonable expenses they incur. 4. A contract will not necessarily be renewed whereas for an employee, the assumption is the job will be there in perpetuity.

In an ideal US world, where healthcare insurance premiums aren't insane and aren't skewed toward large corporations, then everyone should be a contractor.

The person hiring you sends you payment and you do the work in accordance with your contract. At the end of the quarter, you total up your expenses (as already allowed under existing law) and subtract them from your revenue. You owe taxes on what is left.

With remote work, its really hard to anticipate costs you do not control e.g electricity. Furthermore, even the IRS insists that only subtract expenses that are substantially used for work. Years ago, anyone with a home office would consider their entire mortgage a business expense. Now, its subject to a complex set of rules taking into account the time spent actually working and the relative square footage of your work area relative to your home.

Furthermore, isn't this creeping into the territory of company towns? At what point would it just be cheaper to throw people into barracks, deducting room, board and laundry and simply remit the rest to the worker?

If eBay/non-FBA is a flea market, FBA is a online mall.

The Amazon policy basically says that the vendor must offer free shipping. Coincidentally, nobody can offer shipping for less than what Amazon offers therefore Amazon(FBA) is by default the lowest price. The only other company that can fight this with a logistics network of its own is...WalMart.

Then you have Chinese vendors who sell through networks of dropshippers and resellers at Amazon and other venues. It's why you see many vendors of seemingly the same item.

One thing to note is that it's mostly small and medium vendors of relatively low margin items that are the most hurt by Amazon's policies. Seller's of high margin items just eat into their margins while large vendors push back at Amazon and sometimes win e.g. Toilet Paper that comes directly out of a Georgia Pacific warehouse instead an Amazon warehouse despite being labeled as Prime and sold by Amazon.com, not a third party.