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Comment by jack_riminton | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Fake competition in utilities and services makes no sense. The "privatisation" of the UK railways is a prime example. I use quotation marks because it's just privatising the profits and socialising the losses.

"from March 2020 to February this year, the Government paid out more than £7.3 billion in operational support to private train operators" - https://bylinetimes.com/2021/05/18/7-billion-covid-bailout-f...

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The train operating companies are a particularly bad failure because like e.g. the water companies they get to channel the revenue but unlike the water companies they don't own the capital intensive bits but bid on how much they'll return during the franchise period. As a result, the capital need to start a train operating company is tiny in proportion the revenue flow, and their returns look modest related to revenue, but the return on investment looks decidedly less than modest. And so their parent companies can afford to risk outright failure of the franchise because the risk reward were tilted heavily in their favour even before the covid bailouts. The incentives for them are really perverse.

And one of the worst ironies is that some of our franchises are run by the state rail companies of other countries. Meaning we are subsidising rail travel in foreign countries.

Indeed, we do have a lot of state owned rail in the UK, just not UK state owned. I believe at one point even a majority of the franchises were held either by companies either wholly or partially owned by foreign state owned rail companies. Fewer now, but still.

You guys should hold a referendum to see if you could break off relations with those other countries, so you don't have to subsidize them any longer!

Even in markets with competition, competition from the public sector is an excellent way of exerting market discipline on dysfunctional markets.

If you compare the average quality of housing in, for example, Singapore (where 90% of housing is public) and the UK it's like night and day. UK private landlords are among the laziest and most entitled in the entire world, the land use efficiency is terrible and the building quality is abysmal. Thames water wasn't the only victim of the cult of privatization.

Alas, the one UK politician that tried to fix this was treated like the a cross between the antichrist and a terrorist by the UK media oligarchs and that was enough to prevent him from fixing anything.

If anything the NHS is probably in the crosshairs of the investor cult.

My favorite example of this is telecoms in Canada. Both public competition and dysfunctional markets.

Saskatchewan has SaskTel. It’s a public telecom that provides internet (DSL, fiber, wireless)/POTS/cellular. They and their subsidiaries (e.g., SaskTel International) provide all sorts of other services.

When the CRTC removed rules about charging for data overages and things, they didn’t implement any additional charges because their mandate is to serve the people of the province not extract the most profit for shareholders.

They contribute money back into the government coffers every year while also being the sole telecom covering large swathes of the province, working through a FTTH rollout, etc.

When I went to sign up for a cellular plan with a different provider, the person on the phone kept telling me the plan didn’t exist—they had the same plan, but it was $30/mo more than what I was telling them.

Because they had the wrong province selected. All of that provider’s plans were 30-50% cheaper in my province due to the competition from the (profitable) public telecom.

I’ve been away a while, it’s probably gone to shit by now (when I left the government was trying to sell it off for a quick buck _again_), but at the time it was magical to live in the only place in the entire country with an even relatively sane cellular market.

I will never forget what the media did to Corbyn. Absolute joke.

i always cringe when i see Singapore used as a comparison point with developed nations. it's a single city and has an authoritarian government. how is that at all an apples to apples comparison?

Because the reason they implemented the HDB mass housing program had nothing to do with them being authoritarian or a city state. They are just nice commieblocks.

Lee Kuan Yew was afraid of the domestic communist opposition. This was a popular policy of theirs and they were getting dangerously close to power,so he ripped it off. It's a formula for staying in power that served him well.

Back when western leaders were deathly afraid of communists they used to build public housing as well. Then they stopped. Singapore continued.

Margaret Thatcher of all people didn’t believe privatising railways would do a darn thing and always refused to do it.

The railway infra is run by a Non-departmental public body; it's not privatised. Its customers are rail companies which run the trains.

It was, rail track was a private company. They had to roll that one back because trains kept crashing.

But is the most economically efficient number of deaths on trains really zero?

If a million people get to work a few minutes faster every day for 40 years, is that worth one life?

No, but I have actually heard this argument before and regard it as unhinged.

Fight club.

Just overcommitting the tracks to maximize profit :)

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