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Serhei's avatar

This technological fiasco is particularly irritating for me to follow as here in Toronto, Canada the government (specifically the fantastically opaque and self-congratulating provincial transport agency Metrolinx) had replaced a perfectly reasonable plan to electrify the commuter rail system with dithering about studies about hydrogen trains that are supposedly existent any day now in Germany and will shortly cause electrical catenary to become obsolete, because it is old technology and hydrogen is new technology, and therefore better, and therefore electrical catenary is not worth building. Meanwhile in Germany….

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Rikard's avatar

Some things, you can have as privately owned and paid for-profit ventures and as public goods at the same time. Grocery stores f.e. Hairdressers. Plastic surgeons. Taxis.

And some things, you can have one or the other but not both, and not at the same time - trying to do the latter leads to you having neither good of either, and the bad of both.

But: since economy is measured in increase in money per person, any venture that increases this measurement is seen as good.

So: privatise and subsidise various schemes for power production/distribution in such a way more money is created in the form of profits for the owners, measured as increased stock value and "market share".

If any power actually is produced, or what it is used for, or what the cost for the citizen or the nation is, is not relevant: the citizen is a human resource only counted as a unit of production/consumption, and the nation is simply a geographically defined area of resource management and business-options.

It is called capitalism and is functioning exactly as intended.

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