Internet providers that won FCC grants try to escape broadband commitments

I forgot to add that there's something fundamentally sketchy about the idea of government being lobbied by anonymous or quasi-anonymous entities. It's an invitation to corruption. Suppose you reasonably suspect a politician has been bribed (due to a sudden about-face or laughably poor argumentation for a legislative change); it's much harder to investigate when you can't even identify who is lobbying.

Nitpick: The main job of the insurance company is to make money with the float, not to make money by denying claims. The float is premiums paid that they expect to have to pay out as claims in the future. Until the payout is made, they get to invest that money. Insurance is, in one way, a free loan to the insurance company. Insurance companies will occasionally pay out more in claims than they bring in through premiums just so they can hold the money.

For example: in Berkshire Hathaway's (they own Geico among other insurance business) 2022 activity they noted that they posted an underwriting loss of 90 million. They paid out 90 million more in claims than they collected through premiums. This is fine because their float is ~160 billion plus. When you view it this way, it means they paid 90 million for the opportunity to invest 160 billion. That is a super low interest rate.

Warren Buffet, founder of Berkshire Hathaway, has written extensively about how the insurance industry is really not profitable at all from collecting premiums, but from a high level view it is a great way to borrow massive amounts of money for almost free. The downside is that you don't know when a loan is going to get called in, and if your actuaries got the premiums right.

So really, the main job of insurance companies is to sell as many policies as possible, as close to cost as possible, and then hand the bag of money off to get reinvested. Granted, they are happy to make an underwriting profit, but the main goal is to make an investing profit off your premiums before the money is needed to pay a valid claim.

I had looked at the GIS maps of some of these service areas around me, and it looked like the submission of these bids was from an automated system, that no human had reviewed. There were all sorts of little carve outs by some company on the east coast. I seem to recall some were in parks or wildlife areas inside the city, some were tiny 2 or 3 house areas. Not surprised they are concerned about the costs of serving some of these areas, serving a couple houses in the middle of town is going to be astronomical.

I'm not following. If they couldn't actually build out a network at the given price, why would they put in a bid?

Invisible hand of the market in action, isn't that wonderful.

That philosophy is a problem. The main job of any business to to fulfill their contractual obligations. If the management is so incompetent that they sign up for money losing contracts, the owners should fire them.

Hm, I guess a second-price auction would only help somewhat with that, huh?

How about "fuck them"? Sounds like a much more reasonable outcome to me.

You make a deal, you deliver on the deal. If you failed to predict your costs, that is 100 percent your problem. Especially when you're a giant corporate entity that's supposed to be "sophisticated".

Nah, punishing capital is always the best outcome. You want to privatize gains, take your fucking lumps and/or die as a corporate entity.

> large loss to the government

No, a large loss to the people who paid taxes. Meaning that such an outcome would be terrible.