>Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business?
Many government owned companies actually make a profit until private industry lobbies them into ineffectiveness. The US Post Office was profitable until a change lobbied by Fed-Ex and UPS forced them to keep 100% of their pensions available at all times.
Various crown corp electric companies were profitable in Canada and SaskTel, a crown corp telecommunications company is the last bastion of non-insane cell phone plans though I'm sure Rogers and Bell are working on it.
People just hate seeing the government make money. They see that things are good, say "hey, why should the government get this money" and then shut down the system that's working and complain when everything costs more because private industry is trying to squeeze every last cent out of them.
I think this is an overly simplistic (and I've seen this argument on the internet a lot) argument. It's true that there are a lot of people, especially in Anglo countries, who oppose any policy that could allow the State to be enriched. But it's also true that there are many crappy state-owned enterprises. My family came from a developing country that used to have _most_ things run by the state, and there was widespread corruption in the government which kept service bad and prices high.
I do think it would be useful for economists to analyze the conditions under which state-run entities create good outcomes, but in the currently charged political climate, it probably won't happen.
Provision of services is usually corrupt and high cost in less developed countries regardless of who’s providing it: public or private sector. That is my personal experience.
> People just hate seeing the government make money.
No, this is too generic - name the correct groups: Conservatives, neo-liberals and the rich elites hate see "the government" or government-owned/ran entities make money.
Everyone else sees that government-run services usually provide decent service at affordable prices, and that after privatization, service quality goes downhill and the cost keeps rising.
That's incredibly wrong. Nearly every conservative I know feels that government services should be ran like a business, as also profitable like a business (at least self-sustainable). What they disagree with is funding those services with tax money. Which obviously follows.
> What they disagree with is funding those services with tax money.
Without massive governmental subsidies, many services - especially public transport, postal service, libraries - would simply be unaffordable for wide parts of the population.
This is one of my favourite things. It's an incredibly old, historically important text in a dead language and it's just a customer complaint.
>"You have put ingots which were not good before my messenger and said, 'If you want to take them, take them. If you do not want to take them, go away'.
3750 years ago some dude was still showing up and trying to rip people off and pull the "cash in hand" choosing beggar play.
> 3750 years ago some dude was still showing up and trying to rip people off and pull the "cash in hand" choosing beggar play.
It wasn't so much a scam, but a dispute over quality control of all things. Other tablets were found along with that one that included a customer complaining that he was tired of receiving low quality ingots. They knew enough about metallurgy six thousand years ago to have legal disputes over impurities!
It should literally remind you of the east coast cod fishery in Canada which was once the most productive fishery in the world and is now basically nothing.
It got wrecked by giant all in one factory trawlers out competing local boats, causing a feedback effect where to complete you needed trawlers as well helped along by a corrupt government that was willfully ignorant of the situation until (almost literally) one day there just weren't any fish left.
That destroyed an entire region's economy (a region I happen to be from), and has led to generational depression, joblessness and frankly hopelessness.
That’s not quite what happened, Canada banned foreign fishing well before the collapse. Unfortunately, they simply set the allowed catch vastly to large, ignoring internal recommendations to half it, and caused a near total collapse almost a decade later.
>- A friend of mine, when showing him the statement 'x = x + 1' was confused; surely, x cannot also equal x+1.
I think the best thing that my CS 101 prof did was always refer to the assignment operator as "gets" so you'd say "eks gets eks plus one" out loud. It really helped divorce assignment and equality in my mind.
There is an implicit and optional 'Let' statement preceding variable assignment BASIC, which was originally derived from FORTRAN (along with the practice of not using it.)
It is less jarring to see:
Let x = x + 1
because it could be read: we have a given value for x, now let us replace that value with x + 1.
Another helpful thing is how many programming languages have "assignment" and "comparison" operators.
I remember TI basic has "=" for comparison, and "<-" for assignment, like, 'A<-5'. That one, to me made, the most sense. "Put the value of 5 in something called A."
iirc in TI-BASIC, assignment goes the other way so you could have "B + 5 -> A" which also helps seeing that the expression would be evaluated before storing (the button to input -> on the calc is STO, short for store).
Similarly, I had a prof that referred to it as "becomes" which made great intuitive sense to me. "x becomes x plus one" makes me think of the variable transforming to the new value.
I dreamed myself a sci-fi miniseries and it was extremely weird so it's not just you. I work in games/entertainment so I assume it's just how my brain organizes stuff.
>Seems like you need some kind of divine recognition, as otherwise you're just a dictator.
I'd argue you have it backwards there. You start as a dictator (you and a bunch of people who agree with you take over some part of land, congrats you're the King) then the legitimacy comes from you and your family holding on to it till everyone's used to it.
>There is an (appointed) upper house in Canada and the UK at least, that in theory can act as a check on parliament.
If anything needs reform it's the fucking Senate. Basically the same problems as the US Supreme Court has where whoever's in charge when people die get to pack the upper house of government. I'd happily take at least term limits but I feel like it should either be elected or produced somehow via vote share during the parlimentary election.
Many government owned companies actually make a profit until private industry lobbies them into ineffectiveness. The US Post Office was profitable until a change lobbied by Fed-Ex and UPS forced them to keep 100% of their pensions available at all times.
Various crown corp electric companies were profitable in Canada and SaskTel, a crown corp telecommunications company is the last bastion of non-insane cell phone plans though I'm sure Rogers and Bell are working on it.
People just hate seeing the government make money. They see that things are good, say "hey, why should the government get this money" and then shut down the system that's working and complain when everything costs more because private industry is trying to squeeze every last cent out of them.