France will never agree to the special rules the UK negotiated when they were part of the EU.
We also do not particularly keep the UK (politically speaking) close to our hearts. The Calais situation, pour contact for submarines passed to the UK (and US), etc.
Pour gouvernement is seen as weak when it comes to conflicts with the UK so politicians will need to take that into account as well.
You seem to be making the same flawed assumption that the vast majority of british population does. The EU is not, and has never been, a project primarily driven by economic interests. It is a socio-political union, predicated on the fundamental principle of co-operation between different cultures, who regard each other as equals. But this will always be at odds with the unique superiority complex inherent in the culture of (mainly) white english people. This why UK never actually belonged in the EU and ended up causing endless friction; De Gaulle anticipated this and even blocked UK's membership several times. The reality is the EU was more relieved, than harmed by brexit.
What about losses from federally funded corporations like USPS and Amtrak that are bailed out every year? Amtrak loses over $1 billion/yr and they are still "nationalized." USPS loses multi billions per year.
USPS costs billions, public services don't need to be profitable they just need to be paid for. Taxpayers pay for it with their taxes.
When we sell our public investments for a quick buck we complain when the real cost of the service gets priced in. The trouble is, we pay the same taxes still, they just no longer go to the service we privatised, so we feel it in the pocketbook individually.
Presumably those taxes are going elsewhere now, but I was very happy with them going to core public services.
The USPS is "loosing" money because it was told to prefund it's Healthcare having to set aside $100 billion in 10 years (unlike any other company) . Moreover, it's much more a service than a business, e.g. it can not really set its own prices.
I don't get it. The USPS has lost billions due to government policies and can't enforce prices due to government policies. They are forced to deliver to unprofitable routes and have prices set to inflation due to government policies. Private delivery services like Amazon and Fedex are generally profitable and don't have these issues. Why is a government alternative better?
> They are forced to deliver to unprofitable routes and have prices set to inflation due to government policies. Private delivery services like Amazon and Fedex are generally profitable and don't have these issues.
I, for one, think it's a good thing that people are entitled to their mail regardless of the profitability of their mail route. That's the point of a public service.
A cynic would say Congress's actions, loading the USPS with costs while denying it control over prices, is so that people ask "Why is a government alternative better?"
Is it your opinion that some people simply shouldn’t get their mail, or that people who live in rural areas should pay exponentially more to get their mail delivered? Why is either of those things desirable?
USPS is not a business, and it’s a fundamental mistake to pretend it is, solely for the sake of slandering it.
None of the competitors offer a similar service to USPS.
Among other core competencies, USPS has nationwide daily coverage of the entire United States and centuries(?) of experience interoperating the the respective mail services of every country in the world and then some.
None of the competitors are allowed to offer a similar service to USPS.
That said, the service provided by the USPS nowadays is primarily delivery of paper waste into a receptacle I am obligated to empty because very occasionally they also use the same box for packages.
Welcome to the world of privatising public services. This has been a scheme of free market politicians for years; call public services too expensive, strip them of funding and hamper them in other ways, then call out how they are not delivering on their promise. Then sell the off at bargain prices, often with additional government guarantees on revenue. After privatisation services don't improve and cost never go down, but somehow the public is better off?
We need to rearrange our brains. USPS provides a valuable service to the country. It does not need to make a profit. It should be evaluated based on the value it generates for the people. Why does something like the mail system get treated differently than something like road development, which is not expected to bring in any revenue at all let along a profit?
Amtrak is the least subsidies mode of Transportation. It has to compete with road transport and the subsidies given to highways, roads and parking is orders of magnitude larger then what Amtrak gets.
I think you may have conditioned by HN to assume that any comment is a refutation. I brought it up because it’s an additional piece of the explanation for why amtrack can’t support itself on ticket prices alone.
Mostly because it’s the single biggest thing that keeps me from using Amtrak. The last few trips I’ve taken, we ended up sitting waiting on freight trains for many many hours.
Each big city we came to we had to stop and wait without having any idea how long it would take for “freight traffic to clear”.
I love train travel, and I’m not price sensitive at all, but the delays were completely absurd.
Amtrak, a public rail company gets over a $1 billion in public funding. Private rail lines do not. Amtrak has operated at a loss for decades unlike private rails.
You are comparing completely different services, though, right? Private freight lines versus passenger? Amtrak runs on lines owned by the freight companies. I've been on an Amtrak train that had to sit on a siding while a freight train passed. The passenger service has to have a published, predictable schedule. The freight moves when it is needed and breaks the Amtrak schedule, leaving a crap passenger service.
I think the extent to which freight shoves aside passengers varies from region to region. My worst experience was going to West Virginia from DC. I find the Vermonter keeps its schedule pretty well.
A "loss" here is just a politicized framing of the fact that government pays Amtrak to do something of use to society.
You might as well say that the US military makes a $1 trillion loss per year. No, they supply something which is required by the govt and which has a cost.
My experience of American railways as a tourist is having to show my passport to book a ticket from Davis to Sacramento (I assume I also did that on other trips like to SFO but don't remember), and it being expensive.
My experience in the UK and Germany is show up, pay, go, and it being cheaper.
US consumer rail way is a quasi public corporation (Amtrak) that has lost money for decades and is still funded to the tune of over $1 billion per year. You are confusing that with private US rails.
US private rails own the railways and, while in theory they are required to give way to passenger rail, are so long and take so much time to cross that in practice passenger rail is forced to adhere to the time-schedule of private rail.
This is arguably illegal and only exists because the govt refuses to enforce the obvious interpretation of the agreement.
Meanwhile, the US DOT has historically always taken the approach of "the solution is more highways. What's the problem?", losing far more than $1B/year.
There are 3 million rail cars moved per day that haven't produced apocalyptic skies and chemical rain. You misrepresent the overall safety of private rail lines.
We're talking about passenger rail here, not cargo. Amtrak has a legally mandated monopoly, so you can only compete with them by building your own rails or using a different travel mode (e.g., bus or air).
If you find their service to be good and cheap, I can only assume you've never ridden a train in Europe.
Thames Water's CEO has a $1.5 million pay package which is lower than CEOs of corporations of the same size. The funding for public unions in the UK is $233 billion. Great comparison there.
> The funding for public unions in the UK is $233 billion
That’s a pretty amazing figure, how was that calculated?
Are you seriously arguing that that the Thames Water CEO was underpaid? They have been mismanaged extraordinarily. Their debts, losses, costs, service and environment records are so poor that nationalisation is being discussed. They have been paying dividends and bonuses throughout.
CEOs of corporations of the same size quite often have to find and retain customers in competitive markets - which is hardly the case with Thames Water?
What is your point? $1.5 million is used to attract a CEO who can manage a large corporation. That is less than many players on second tier English clubs who are riding the pine. That is a rounding error when considering $233 billion paid to unions.
Yes they do, from rival businesses, superior and new technology, just look at Chat-GPT potentially putting programmers out of work, or telegrams being made redundant by pagers, and text messages and email.
@arethuza
>CEOs of corporations of the same size quite often have to find and retain customers in competitive markets - which is hardly the case with Thames Water?
Water companies are delivering a minimum standard of water, call it the least toxic form of water considering the energy constraints and logistics of delivering water en-masse compared to other methods of obtaining water.
Mains water from a very young age always made me sick, so where possible I use bottled spring water in the kettle, but am currently considering a reverse osmosis water filter, to deionise the water in the house as much as possible.
Deionised water is the best tasting, sweetest tasting water I've ever experienced, and if I listened to the medical experts I should be dead on numerous counts of their assertations. So two fingers up to them as well! LOL
I don't think you understand what these companies do if you believe Thames Water is in competition with Evian or Brita. Remember they're not just providing drinking water but handling the treatment, recirculation and safe disposal of wastewater too. So in addition to having inadequate fresh water storage for some parts of England and cutting back maintenance to the extent that they lose an enormous amount in leaks, one of the bigger problems is how they're failing to adequately dispose of wastewater. As a consequence of this there are some rivers, lakes and beaches in England + Wales that are now unsafe but which weren't before they were privatised.
> As a consequence of this there are some rivers, lakes and beaches in England + Wales that are now unsafe but which weren't before they were privatised.
Carefully chosen words, someone has done their research!
Thats what happens when new standards come into force and improve upon the old standards.
"The purpose of this dataset is to present a summary of bathing water compliance in England between 1988 and 2014 against the old bathing water directive (76/160/EEC), which was repealed on the 31/12/2014"
However I'm not against better standards, but I am against some of the "engineered" methods used to gain those standards....
You're going to have to do a bit more than hand-waving about a bathing water directive being repealed back in 2014 and dumping a couple of links. If you want to make a point, make it.
There's lots of factors at play here, it could be brexit related because the beachs have become soiled so people go to Europe for a break, we dont know who is invested in Thames water, are these british pension funds or other types of investors. Is this a sexism thing, what with a female ceo, has she been wrongly advised, manipulated with data presented in a particular way.
There's so many factors potentially at play here and some of it we wont get to ever know about, but life has taught me there is manipulation in many guises.
Wait before you were certain I was some sneaky trickster doing wordplay and that you had a slam dunk of a response, now “there’s lots of factors at play here”?
Nothing has changed, I simply didnt document all my thoughts on here straight away because its not a Rorschach test, besides I let google suggest some of the links, because I've noted how manipulative it is at shaping public discourse.
In the examples here, no, CEOs don’t face real competition. Water companies are sold off public utilities. They way they make profit is to degrade service and raise prices. No one is going to install a competing water system. No AI is going to do that anytime soon.
The Economist has a political bent, but they are clear on how privatisation has gone: ‘Dogmatic adherence to privatisation in the face of its sustained failure suggests ideology, not pragmatism, was the motivation.’
> Water companies are delivering a minimum standard of water
No they aren’t. That’s a key point in the article.
> They way they make profit is to degrade service and raise prices. No one is going to install a competing water system.
So that other technologies, like rainfall capture systems and water filtration systems can be become financially viable through economies of scale. If you have a roof you can top up water tanks, water filtration systems clean the water and can recycle the water. Reverse Osmosis filtration which deionises the water is about as pure as you can get, so pure nothing can grow in it, which is why colony forming units (CFU's) aka TVC's are so low, lower than spring water.
Not long to go.... standby for some more "engineered" news.
>The Economist has a political bent,
Whilst its easy to say, privatise problems, Thames water has its own unique problems, but when looking at something like the coal miners, what did it do? It shifted people away from using coal to other less large airborne particulate laden forms of fossil fuel, the latest being air source heat pumps 1w in 4watts out at best, solar power 15-22% efficiency, and nuclear with the debate over the use of different nuclear fuels, like plutonium and thorium. Sort by Specific Energy (MJ/Kg) at this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_nuclear_reac...
Anyway some things are engineered including things in the news like Thames Water.... Someone's getting a shake down!
I'm in Scotland so I have perfectly pleasant tasting water from the state-owned Scottish Water whose CEO get paid a small fraction of what the Thames Water CEO gets paid (~£295K plus
bonus).
"Paid to unions"? Do you mean paid to staff who might be members of unions? And if so why you are comparing money paid to a specific company to money paid to union members across the entire public sector?
I don't think you want to point at English football clubs if we're talking about sensible compensation, not least since one of the issues highlighted in the article are the debt load of these English and Welsh water companies.
This is a nonsense delineation in systems thinking. That railroad shareholders are also the public doesn't justify ripping them off.
Unions are beholden to the same impulses towards monopoly and rent-seeking as corporations. Swap members (i.e. sellers of labour) for shareholders (i.e. sellers of capital) and employers (i.e. buyers of labour) for customers (i.e. buyers of goods and services) and union management starts looking remarkably like its corporate analog, churning undifferentiated workers into a differentiated and thus premium block of labour as truly as a mill grinds forests into houses.
This is such a propaganda piece. NYC has a per capita murder rate of 5.5 according to its latest report. There were 40 states with a lower murder rate [1]. The highest murder rates are all in blue cities [2]
Except we're not talking about overall murder rate, but rather about violence (both individual and systemic) specifically targeted at gender, sexual, and racial minorities.
Most of those cities on the less than 100k list have Dems in government as well, but imo this isn't a Dem-GOP issue and more of a "urban" versus "rural" issue - specifically these are all cities that have been left behind due to an oversized population of minorities (eg. Anchorage+Fairbanks for Native Americans, Memphis+Pine Bluffs+Monroe+Alexandria+Little Rock for African Americans, ABQ+Lubbock for Latino Americans) and severely deindustrialized (eg. Memphis, ABQ, Lubbock, Little Rock, Danville) due to bipartisan support of globalization in the 1990s and the collapse of the energy sector in the 1990s-2000s
