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Comment by russian-hacker | Hacker News Reader

No one is forcing you to use an electrical company. You could always power your house with a bicycle generator. Therefore, electrical companies shouldn't be regulated as public utilities.

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Yes, you have to use the municipal electricity. You cannot lay your own power lines, it's illegal. And in most urban areas, you can't run your own generator for emissions restrictions. You also can't power your home with a bicycle. Even champion bicyclists output 50-100 watts.

Using Bing, DuckDuckGo, or other Google alternatives are incomparably easier than not using utilities like electricity and plumbing. I struggle to see how one can honestly make this comparison.

Such a tiny, piddling outlook on the world.

You can do everything with water with rain-barrels and buckets. As others have said, you can do power with candles, bike generators, and wood fire.

Is that a realistic solution in a modern society? Hell no.

I struggle to see how anyone honestly can lie to themselves that it is somehow absurd to label something a "utility" just because the technology has advanced beyond cave-man level.

Google deserves their status as a utility - monopolies, effective or otherwise, we have consistently found to be actively harmful.

Furthermore, if a company wants to be a "be-all-everything technological solution", it is actively attempting to usurp the role of government. And when that govt is un-elected, that's a despotic oligarchy, at best. We may well be forced to storm Google HQ and put every Google CEO's head on the chopping block if we want to preserve our liberty.

Or, y'know, maybe just support getting them regulated instead, bit more of a humane solution, dontcha think?

You could just create battery trailer to power your house and drive to the next Tesla charging station with it whenever it runs low. No need for power lines or any power generation in your backyard. Maybe someone should propose that trailer idea to Elon? Tesla already produces everything necessary to take yourself of the grid, it only needs to be bundled up right.

No need for a trailer, since a typical EV already has more capacity than most home battery solutions. Example: A 2021 Tesla Model 3 Long Range AWD stores 82 kWh[0], while a PowerWall 2 only stores 13.5 kWh[1]. So a single Model 3 is the equivalent of up to 6 PowerWalls. All it's missing is official support for vehicle-to-grid connections.

[0] https://electrek.co/2020/11/10/tesla-model-3-82-kwh-battery-...

[1] https://www.smartsolarenergyco.com/tesla-powerwall-review/

You might want to rethink your bike claim; it is certainly possible.

Only as a technicality. Domestic electrical power use varies worldwide from “none” to “tens of kilowatts”. This, for example, is what it takes to run a UK household on bicycle electricity: https://youtu.be/C93cL_zDVIM

No, not even as a technicality. It is possible, full stop.

You can make that decision in rural areas. It costs a lot of money to get wires run to a new house. You might use solar instead with a generator as backup.

In many urban areas you may not even be allowed to opt out of utilities meanwhile. I once delayed paying for the water bill in a new house for a month till I moved in and needed, got a big late bill finally because the fees are mandatory for the house.

Almost like you don’t even own the house.

Creating your own power plant, lugging gallons of oil for power generation, or hiring someone to 24/7 power you home via bicycle all cost a few orders of magnitude more than paying the utility company for service, and creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly. For search engines, it's both easy to switch to a different one as a consumer and it's easy for someone new to come in and create a profitable competitor (see bing, ddg).

> so naturally there's a monopoly.

And, just as naturally, the government actually owns a lot of the distribution network. The producers provide into the distribution network, the customers receive from the distribution network, and the government regulates fair (by some definition thereof) access.

> creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly

So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers?

Also running your own generator with oil isn't a few orders of magnitude (i.e. at least 100x) more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even one order of magnitude more expensive, but maybe just twice as expensive.

I also don't think GP's simile is good, but some of your arguments against it are just blatantly false.

> So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers?

Local governments own most U.S. utility lines and pipes, so a competing for-profit utility would have to go against the not-for-profit public service, leaving low to no room for profit and no reason to even compete.

Fiber/cable/dsl lines are one of the few U.S. utilities with competition because the performance/reliability/features of the service can vary greatly and because almost no local governments ran their own ISP before private companies came in and ran their lines. I can bet that any area with a municipal ISP has a very low chance of seeing xfinity/att run their own fiber if they're not already servicing the area.

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