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[McTraveller]

I should probably read more detail on what the Biden administration is supposedly planning for anti-trust...

I wonder if we'd have more success at antitrust if, instead of fining companies, we fined executives and board members. Or something like "if you are convicted of this, you are no longer eligible to serve on a board" or something.

I mean if you fine a company out of existence, that doesn't benefit anyone and often hurts employees and the public (by making supply more expensive). If you fine the folks who are making the deals, that may actually have an impact.

This would also potentially avoid the issue of fining a company that is "bankrupt" so has no funds, because the funds were all paid to executives / board members.

The late-night thought process was "even if you break up a company, the people that made the company that abused market position are still able, without consequence, to try and make another abusive company."

[LordBaal]

providing infrastructure is producing something.

Yes, services. But through private enterprises.

[Teneb]

Yeah uh... government should absolutely provide essential services, not the private sector. Otherwise, why does the government even exist?

To give an example: here in Brasil, registries (unsure of translation, places where documents get verified as true) are private. This means that when my father died, I had to pay money, a lot in fact, to declare him legally dead.

So fuck private enterprise in essential services.

[LordBaal]

But that is a administrative service, which by all logic should be only goverment issue. I meant infraestructure like roads, and such, while administrative and security services should be done by the goverment because thats like the only reason they should exist anyway.

[MrRoboto75]

Private companies building roads means roads take for-fucking-ever to actually get built, they never bother to maintain old roads, and you end up with ugly, traffic clogged suburbs with useless cul-de-sacs everywhere because that's cheaper to build and maintain and easier to sell to idiot housewives.

[LordBaal]

No with proper management. You hand out a licitation (dunno the word in english) with very clear definitons on how long can it take, how long it must last under normal use and of the company takes too much to build they get fined, if the road fails under proper use before it should they have to repair it, if they overshoot they budget they have to come up with the money.... you get the drift. The idea is you make a lousy work yoy lose money.

Public companies here on the other side gets paid daily the road advances or not, so, they belong to the goverment so they dont answer to anyone... there is a hole in the street by my building that has not been covered in like 8 years or more, despite several billboards stating the street have been repaired over the years.

[MrRoboto75]

No with proper management. You hand out a licitation (dunno the word in english) with very clear definitons on how long can it take, how long it must last under normal use and of the company takes too much to build they get fined, if the road fails under proper use before it should they have to repair it, if they overshoot they budget they have to come up with the money.... you get the drift.

A) We end up with shitty road contractors because gov wants to save money, that's why this shit's privatized in the first place.  And yet again privatization was penny wise but pound foolish, just like healthcare is.

B) If you need to micro manage so much just to get a basic job done right, why not just hire them as gov workers and do it normally?

[LordBaal]

And you end up with yet another bloated gummit and a damn hole in your street for a decade or more. Bravo!

[Cthulhu]

Outsourcing jobs to private contractors doesn't shrink gummit, it just moves it around.  Nobody has an incentive to do a good job on these things.  You pay for the road whether or not you use it and unless you live in a city center not driving isn't an option.

Remember when California contracted companies to move debris after the Big Fire (just pick one, doesn't matter) and they filled their trucks with soil and concrete from house foundations cause they were paying by the pound?

[ChairmanPoo]

You operate on the misapprehension that bloat inefficiency is both universal in the public sector and inexistent in the private one. Both are clearly untrue.


And before you give me a "no, but in the private sector inefficiency is weeded out" yadda yadda: no it isn't. That's largely what corporate bloat is about. In a small business, public or private, leeches will be outed soon. In a large one, public or private, burocracy is convulted enough  that many remora (and a few lampreys) can hitch a ride.

[MrRoboto75]

And before you give me a "no, but in the private sector inefficiency is weeded out" yadda yadda: no it isn't. That's largely what corporate bloat is about.

The horrors of middle management.

[ChairmanPoo]

And before you give me a "no, but in the private sector inefficiency is weeded out" yadda yadda: no it isn't. That's largely what corporate bloat is about.

The horrors of middle management.

You dont know half of it

[Jopax]

My favorite part of that sort of bloat is when they try to improve and modernize a thing or a process, so they hire someone new whose only knowledge of the thing is theoretical and completely out of touch with the reality of it. Which leads to the always fun exchange of listening to a lecture on how things 'should' work before going "Yeah, nah, that's impossible for us"

[nenjin]

12 people in a meeting, only two of them doing any actual work. That's my world.

[Kagus]

What's the name of that city in India where they tried doing everything via private actors?

I seem to recall it ending up as something of a catastrophe, when all the various companies refused to cooperate with their competitors in a given utility. So you had like 3-4 different sewer systems, none of which were connected to each other, all of them just terminating at the first available "not-my-problem" location at the edge of their subscriber base. Same for the roads.