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Responding to this a bit late, but your link is showing me a system that involves a fixed rate for a service if I’m interpreting this correctly?

I would need to be given some sort of argument that this was a cash cow and not a service that is absorbing a massive amount of risk by giving a static price in the face of a constantly changing business world.

Every company I’ve worked at has been massively adverse to any risk because that can scale to infinite. Offering a service for a static price sounds exactly like something that is ignoring the idea of profit and loss as a metric to compare itself to in exchange for making sure everyone has access to the service




See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32260699 for the American situation.

> Offering a service for a static price sounds exactly like something that is ignoring the idea of profit and loss as a metric to compare itself to in exchange for making sure everyone has access to the service[.]

The Penny Post was a profit driven private enterprise. There might or might not have been a more profitable pricing strategy for them, I don't know. Neither me nor business people have perfect knowledge (and don't need it to make markets work).

Compare to how Coca Cola cost a Nickel for 70 years. See eg https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/11/15/165143816/why-...

> Every company I’ve worked at has been massively adverse to any risk because that can scale to infinite.

Keep in mind that prices under a gold or silver standard were more stable in the long run than under modern-day 2% inflation targeting.

(The short run was not necessarily as stable as today.)

> I would need to be given some sort of argument that this was a cash cow [...]

How about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Penny_Post#Takeover_of_... ?

> [...] and not a service that is absorbing a massive amount of risk by giving a static price in the face of a constantly changing business world.

Huh? It's not like the penny post would have been subject to sudden denial of service attacks from the Internet..

They always had the option of raising prices or turning away customers, in case they had temporarily too much demand or their costs would rise.




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