I don't see how any of these things change my point. If Walmart could offer desperate people any wage and hours they want, there would be no reason for them to pay over the minimum wage, offer raises, or help their employees get benefits they're entitled to. They do all of these things because their employees do have other options and they need to do enough to make a job at Walmart at least as attractive as other jobs or non-jobs (going to school, not working).
I guess I'm confused how you reconcile the view that this would definitely happen with the fact that we've run the experiment and it doesn't happen. The minimum wage in the United State is $7.25 and overtime pay at that wage would be $10.88, but Walmart doesn't pay anyone less than $11 per hour*. If they actually had the leverage you think they do, they could make all of their employees work huge amounts of overtime and still pay them less than they actually do in reality.
I think the problem is that you're assuming employers don't compete for jobs, but they do, and they also put in effort to retain workers (it's a waste of money to hire someone for low pay and then have them quit and switch to your competitor once they're trained). It's true that there are some people that companies don't want to hire at all, but if a company doesn't want to hire you in the first place, why would they want to hire you for long hours?
I don't think this works. You're going from a thought experiment with exact numbers that would agree with me, then throwing them away to use a heuristic and saying that somehow pay would go down.
Your thought experiment doesn't really match the current situation, since >8 hour days aren't actually banned, they just cost 50% more, but assuming there was an actual ban...
Specifically, the problem is that when the 8 hour work day is abolished, the supply of hours that cost $x stays exactly the same, while the supply of hours that cost $2x and $3x increases. The additional supply of more expensive hours doesn't help the employers' negotiating position at all. Or to be specific, the fact that Walmart now has a much larger supply of people willing to work for $24 per hour doesn't help them hire people for $12.
One way this could effect things is to increase income inequality, if some people are 4x as productive, it would be better to hire them for as many hours as you can get than to hire additional lower-productivity people, but it's weird to talk about this in terms of businesses exploiting people since total pay would actually go up.
I think a lot of what you're saying depends on the price of hours of work decreasing as the supply increases, but hours of work don't have a fixed supply in the same way that goods like oranges do (hours of work are constantly traded-off with hours of leisure), and most people raise the price of each additional hour of work.
Working 1 hour total is much easier than working 1 additional after after an 8 hour shift; or looking the other way, having 1 hour free at the end of the day is much more valuable to me than having 1 hour additional free at the end of a period of 8 hours of free time. So even though I'm willing to work an additional hour for some amount of money, a clone of me with no job would be willing to work that hour for less.
So, even if you got rid of the 8-hour work day, we wouldn't all suddenly be working more hours for less money. Companies that tried to raise hours without raising per-hour pay would lose workers to companies that kept the old schedule (and in most cases on the low-end of the pay scale, keeping hours reasonable is a pure-win, since companies would rather have more people working fewer hours for redundancy reasons).
I agree that the math puzzle is interesting.
I'm still skeptical that this algorithm is useful any real-world situation, although I was hoping I might get comments with counter-examples. Even in the examples you gave, you already have another machine that clearly has far more memory than you need to implement the set algorithm but for some reason you have to write this algorithm to run on a toaster and talk to your dramatically more powerful server over the network? I'm not saying it's impossible, but I hope you can see why I'm skeptical.
I disagree that that intentionally going on dates is "spiritually toxic". You don't really need to be able to discern compatibility quickly (you can always go on another date).
I approached dates as "doing something fun with a friend who thinks I'm hot", and even though I didn't end up seriously dating most of them, they were still fun experiences (having conversations at coffee shops and restaurants, hiking, paddlingboarding, etc.).
I do think dating people in your community is easier than online dating, but my experience is that finding a community is much harder than finding someone to date. Maybe this is a case of which one you're better at though.
For what it's worth, in my friend group, half of us are dating or married to people we met though online dating, and the other half are with people they met in college. I only know one person married to someone they met in other ways and their method isn't helpful (be so hot that people will hit on you at the gym).
One issue with making features optional is that it's usually harder to write plugins/addons than core features (since you also need to design and maintain an interface for your plugin, and then constrain yourself to using it). In some cases this might be long-term beneficial (better encapsulation), but it's additional work.
The GNOME people used to talk about this a lot: the reason there's so few settings or plugins in GNOME is that it makes it much harder to write and test applications, so they strip out options so they can give the best experience for the cases people care most about.
There's also issues with plugin interface overhead, which normally aren't a huge problem but are a problem if the whole point of the plugin is to improve performance.
If you're building this on land, wouldn't railroads be easier?
I have a similarly-diverse number of things I might want to charge and was able to reduce the number of cables and chargers by getting a few USB-C to other-things adapters, like:
You might find that similar lightning adapters make your kit simpler.
(I start with USB-C because it's the fastest for charging and data, and also I care less if the old things I want to charge with other cables are charging at max speed)
The post is about testing vegans for deficiencies specifically so the author could provide (presumably vegan) supplements to people with deficiencies. It would be very strange to read this as an argument that you can't solve deficiencies in a vegan diet with supplements.