The Moonwalkers from Shift Robotics from 2022 come to mind, but are noticeably different. Or the Dephy Exoboot: https://www.dephy.com which is also 'the first'
The nature of a free market is that someone wins the competition, and the winner is then happy to figure out ways to prevent anyone from competing at all (this kind of action doesn't require a complete winner either, but I'm focusing on a thought experiment here).
Ergo, if you care about maintaining a free market, then you care about limiting what kind of moves you can make in the free market, in order to preserve a free market. A truly free market with no rules has an end state where it is not a free market, more like a much more sophisticated version of the nobles of the land owning everything. So we declare many activities that make it difficult for others to compete that are not simply about manking a better product, "anti-competitive" and illegal.
Other than capital what prevents a new player entering the smartphone market? In the US Apple is at ~50% market share and Samsung ~30%. These are not colluding entities so there must be enough theoretical freedom to create a smartphone that claims significant market share.
Other than capital does a lot of work in that argument. Companies will not pop up and optimize much less micro optimize the tradeoffs. This isn’t a stock exchange; it’s a real capital intensive product.
Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have plenty of “capital” and they couldn’t create their own ecosystem for their own phone and convince software developers. The hardware is not really an issue. Any company with a few million can sell their own phone and get a Chinese ODM to customize it for them and white label it.
Outside of Apple and Samsung (only because they make a lot of their own parts), the phone market is a commodity race to the bottom
Amazon, Meta and Microsoft tried their hand at making competitive devices and enter the market, to varying degrees of effort but practically identical degrees of failure. All this to say, it takes a lot more than just capital.
Constantly. They added a bunch of scripting extensions so a lot of fillable forms render a message telling you to use Acrobat until all of that stuff executes.
Those are probably PDFs with XFA forms. Not very common in general but if you often get PDFs from sources that use that then yeah you'll see it all the time. Good news it that it was deprecated, it's not in PDF 2.0.
As noted by sibling comments, the arm of the Healthcare company that wons the doctor's office wants to collect as much as possible, while the insurance arms are anyway capped at how much they can make. Incentives (conflict of interest) are towards paying more.
You make it sound like the newspapers/companies are un-culpable for that effect. I believe it to be the case because I've seen cases were a newspaper presents a narrative as fact when those involved know very well it's just someone's spin for their own benefit. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect>.
> Evaluation and Additional Services. In some cases, we may permit you to evaluate our Services for a limited time or with limited functionality. Use of our Services for evaluation purposes are for your personal, non-commercial use only.
In other words, you're not allowed to trial their services while using the outputs for commercial purposes.
I really don't know what you're talking about. There's nothing about commercial use in section 11 (nor does the language you quoted above appear anywhere in the Searching "business" and "commercial" makes it easy to verify this).
You must be looking at something other than the terms of service you linked, because section 11 has no point numbering (and just in case, the fourth paragraph of section 11 says nothing of the sort).
> My rule of thumb as a contractor is to take the hourly rate x2100 to get an equivalent full-time salary plus benefits, 401k, vacation, etc.
I thought you meant to include everything on top of salary. Reading it again after this thread, maybe you meant to this is the calculation for hourly from full time salary, and then you need to also do ("plus") a calculation for everything else.
Why? It's not obvious that an employee works 2080 hours, for example, because they take vacation (or work extra), so charging a 2100th of salary doesn't cover vacation benefit. Also, the employer will pay part of health insurance, and that isn't included in the salary number, so why would it be covered by a calculation from the salary.
Once again, this relates to total comp not base salary alone. Total comp includes salary and benefits which can include vacation time.
So it's not 1/2100th of a base salary, it's the hourly rate x2100 to get the total comp.
Do you know what your preferred total comp is? Take the hourly rate being offered, multiply by x2100, if it meets that then it's a decent offer.
It's a useful rule of thumb but it's just a rule of thumb. It's not meant to be perfect but I find it easy to understand and calculate so it's served me well in my ~20 years of contracting.
2080 hours is way over estimating the hours worked per year IMHO. The way I calculate it is something like this:
2080 hours is 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks per year. There is no annual leave or country-specific holidays in this calculation. I'd argue that very few workers hit 2080 hours per year, and those that do are probably minimum wage and working every hour possible just to survive.
In the UK, 25-30 days holiday is typical, plus another 9 days of public holiday, so I usually reckon on 45 weeks maximum of full-time work per year, which is 225 days or 1800 hours as an upper bound. I know in the US 10 days vacation and 10 days federal holiday and maybe a bonus couple of days for Thanksgiving and Christmas would put that around 235 or 1880 hours.
As an aside, while in the US 8 hours is normal, in the UK 7.5 is more typical (and very occasionally 7), so those 225 days are now 1687.5 hours per year. But personally, I only think in daily rate, not hourly, so I don't concern myself with that.
From the 225 nominal working days, there's also paid sickness time (maybe only 0-3 days per year for me) that I'd be paid for in a salaried job but not contracting, and other days when I might be doing work related things but can't invoice it. So, maybe I'd roll that down to 220 nominal days per year.
Then there's additional taxes. In the UK, you can either pay yourself a salary and pay both employee and employer taxes on it, or pay corporation tax on company profits and pay dividends (and the personal tax that arises). Dividends worse out slightly more tax efficient, but there's not a lot in in. On average, I'd say probably 10% more in tax compared to a salaried job. So, let's call it now 200 nominal days per year.
Then, you have to consider days you can't work - between contracts, and on occasions, I've arranged a contract for when I return from holiday and then client has asked to delay for another month to help their cashflow. It's hard to quantify this, I'd say on average I've had maybe 10-15 days per year where I could have worked, but didn't because I wasn't in contract.
There are days that you might consider free or fun as a salaried employee, such as day-time work parties, conferences (and expense accounts), all of which not only aren't free in terms of time, but also come out of your income. For instance, to attend the conference I used to go to with a previous employer would cost approx. 5 days income for tickets, flights and hotels, plus the 5 days of lost income.
You've then got all the other things that are more important in the US, but are just perks here - I don't do healthcare when contracting, because the UK's free service is good enough, but I took it as an employee when it was free and I just paid the tax liability on it. Many companies include gym memberships, snacks etc.
Other costs of contracting are accountancy fees (for me about 2 days income), insurance and indemnity (for me about half a day income), heating and electricity costs for multiple computers when remote working (it's a lot of hassle to bill it to the company just to save a bit of tax by calling it a company expense rather than paying personally), etc.
There's the risk of being out of work when you weren't expecting it - not finding a contract when the previous one ends, etc. I've even had the case where I've negotiated a contract to start when I return from holiday, and on the starting date the client asked if I could delay a month because of cashflow issues.
Taking into account all these, I'd say the 200 days should be reduced to at most 180 assuming no gaps in work, and maybe 150 assuming that you might not be working for 6 weeks.
I've actually heard several people say they assume 100 working days per year for straight salary to day-rate comparisons, assuming that while they might be able to make it work on a lower day-rate, using 100 days guarantees that it's worth doing. It's hard to get that kind of mutliplier in the UK though and 150 days is about where most contracts seem to be offered at by companies compared to salaries offered for similar roles.
150 days is also conveniently 2/3 of 225 days of maximum full time load in a salaried job, which converts to a simple 50% premium over a salaried job to cover the additional work, expenses and risks of contracting.
TLDR: add 50% to the salary for comparison, or multiply daily rate by 150.
So this is straight up false?