Purely anecdotal, but a lot of people also invested in hair cutting machines and realized that doing their hair themselves isn't too difficult, especially when buzzing the hair quite short. I can imagine that a lot of them will continue to do so, because they like the style, the practicality of it, or the money saving aspect.
You're forgetting that there are some businesses that have a special strategic importance for a country, for example airlines or defence-related stuff. The rules of capitalism don't really apply to those kind of businesses, because governments would like them to be around even if capitalism itself happens to come crashing down.
Also, since a government has to take into account the political fallout from any bankruptcy, e.g. joblessness, the decision to bail out a company can be a rational choice inside capitalism's framework of rules from the government's perspective, especially in countries with a stronger welfare system.
That sounds pretty standard for jobs in Germany, though. I get 30 days of vacation a year (!= sick days) that I'm required to take, otherwise my boss sends me angry mails.
I once interviewed at a major German elevator manufacturer in the department that works on those traffic algorithms and from what I can tell, it is quite a complex problem for larger office buildings where you have a lot of traffic that mostly flows into one direction at various times of the day, such as in the morning or at lunchtime.
But they also told me that one of their main problems is that the optimal strategy often doesn't feel optimal to the customer, so that's why they sometimes use less-than-optimal strategies.
For what it's worth, I don't even need to use qmail. I've been using Postfix for years, which allows this as a configuration option. But I'll check them out for sure.
Maybe also checkout beancount. It's a more opinionated and slightly simpler (h)ledger alternative, but it features an excellent web interface called fava.
* Crawl apartment listings and get notified a lot faster than the official notification channels take.
* Monitor the inventory/promotions of some vendors, e.g. for bikes, that are currently out of stock
* Get notified when there's an peak of interest in a specific topic on twitter. I use this to monitor my employer, my project, and any stocks I own.