There are currently over 22 million people who worked for the US government. This including federal, state, and local (but excludes military). Here is a list of companies whose combined employee count reaches just over 10 million - less than half of this number. Walmart Amazon Home Depot Target Kroger Berkshire Hathaway FedEx JPMorgan Chase IBM Wells Fargo Microsoft CVS Health Bank of America Walgreens Boots Alliance Comcast Raytheon Technologies General Electric General Motors Oracle Apple Boeing AT&T Johnson & Johnson Tesla Intel Lockheed Martin Verizon Procter & Gamble General Dynamics Northrop Grumman Pfizer Coca-Cola American Express Merck HP Goldman Sachs McKesson Chevron Uber Netflix eBay Airbnb Lyft Morgan Stanley Sources:

Statista

Total government employees U.S. 2023| Statista

In 2023, around 19.58 million people were working for state and local governments in the United States.

Companies ranked by number of employees - CompaniesMarketCap.com

Ranking of the world

Writing up a guide for how to create a Fedimint federation. Should be ready by this weekend. Stay tuned!

Running fedimint

Went to a dispensary last night and bought some CBD. They mentioned that if I paid by card it would cost a few dollars extra in fees. I paid with my debit card and noticed later that the charge showed up as an ATM withdrawal. Their point-of-sale device looked pretty normal, definitely not like an ATM. The place was fairy upscale - not shady at all, so I figured there must be a good reason they accept payments this way. After some research I found out that they do this because banks will often reject payments to dispensaries since weed is still federally illegal, and performing an ATM withdrawal for the exact amount needed allows for dispensaries to bypass this. I paid $5.50 in fees for a $40 purchase. Accepting Bitcoin seems like a great pitch to these businesses! Even if they billed the exact same price to customers, they could bypass the ATM fee for Bitcoin payments. For my purchase that would have saved almost 15%, and it'd save even more for smaller payments!

@Chris walked me through the design of a NIP he wrote. I learned a ton about Nostr under the hood and am more bullish than ever on the protocol - especially on the "other stuff"!

"I love you and I hate the state" - my wife