Gotta say, I agree with your main point... But that is kinda the thing people point at when saying the government is inefficient. The large parts of the US infrastructure is decades past it's expected lifespan, and the US government is not allocating enough funds to fix it quickly enough.
That's exactly it, though. All that infrastructure got built when the government would directly build infrastructure. The Interstate System, the Transcontinental Railroad, these got built because the government got them done. It's only since the birth of neoliberalism during Carter's presidency, and supercharged during Reagan's, where infrastructure only gets done through public private partnerships that things stopped being built.
Ya know what was a foundational part of the American dream? Pensions. Ya know which employers still offer them? Counties, states and the federal government.
Private companies exist solely to make the people at the top very rich based on the stolen value of employee labor while dumping catastrophic losses in the public sphere. That's capitalism in a nutshell.
You'd have to be unbelievably gullible, naive, traumatized AND brainwashed to be a diehard for a system like that. But, somehow they've managed it. A deluded nation of Amway top performers just one move away from making their own imaginary millions. All simping for the system.
You wanna know something else? The majority of the world economy is already centrally planned. Not on the national level, on the corporate level. Business is dominated by a relatively few giant corporations with internal economies the size of some nations. None of them run free markets internally. Sears experimented with it, to their demise. Central planning is already the primary way that our economic lives are driven. It's just we let unaccountable billionaires do the planning instead of an elected body.
My government is mostly privatized. We even hired a consulting firm to figure out how the government could lower consulting fees. The consultants found that if we consult less, we will have lower consulting fees. We paid over half a million for that single report:
Government consultant here. The federal government does nothing if it is not military related or medical care in the Department of Veterans Affairs. Everything they produce is done via contract. That includes leadership which is queued up using consulting. Sure, they make the decisions but that's not management or the visionary leadership people think it is. It's all contract management.
Australia is a live example of the fact that they're not. The state and federal governments have privatised a crap load of services and all they do is continue to hike our bills while providing less and less service. Electricity, water supply, employment services and more are now an absolute joke here.
Exactly what's about to happen to employment services in Australia too. They spend more money chasing a hand full of people who don't want to work than just continuing to pay them the pittance they exist on and have people apply to be the CEO of huge corporations who dropped out of high school in order to make their quotas. Government just announced an inquiry with the aim to reinstate control over it.
Yes, if not for when the Labor (sic) party got into power that one time, we'd all still be stuck on ADSL2 at best, and dialup at worst, depending on how close you live to a major-ish city. The NBN was a government infrastructure initiative. One which got gutted and watered down as soon as the Liberals got back in.
Oh, and I've heard industry insiders claim that the mixed technology stack employed in the "new NBN" -- FTTP for some places that already got it, FTTN for everywhere else in the city, fixed wireless or satellite for rural areas -- is more expensive on an ongoing basis due to complications than just rolling out more fibre would have been in the long run.
I've worked for the government both as an employee and a contractor. I've also worked for small and large companies. The government was by far better at accomplishing the actual objective / product. The worst government entity I worked for though was a city government. Those are terrible.
My last trip to the DMV was surprisingly smooth. They finally implemented appointments, and, unlikely private doctors, they didn't make me wait in the lobby for 30minutes to 1 hour and then in the examination room for another 15-30 minutes.
I remember in college we took a course on economic efficiency and the short takeaway is "the free market is extremely efficient, but only when the competing parties start with equal resources. the more inequal the starting position, the less efficient the market becomes." and to my mind that suggests that we should enforce some sort of "rubber-banding" effect so that a company needs to keep competing or else it will "drift" back to the mean over time. Something like aggressive taxes on the uber-rich and comprehensive welfare for the poor, y'know? Capitalism but with safety guards would be pretty cool.
Something like aggressive taxes on the uber-rich and comprehensive welfare for the poor, y’know?
This is why aggressive estate taxes are so incredibly critical. People shouldn't be professional descendants. And of course welfare provides both ladder and safety net. The fools who are trying to abolish one or both are working against social mobility.
That's literally uncomparable. Government does things that ignore profit. That's what government is for. The provide services at a loss. The only "profit" might be things like societal improvement, education, security, and such.
That’s literally uncomparable. Government does things that ignore profit. That’s what government is for. The provide services at a loss. The only “profit” might be things like societal improvement, education, security, and such.
People pay taxes that fund the government. If the money is wasted then services suffer. So it's not profit or loss but they must deliver value. Value is harder to quantify than profit but governments have to figure a way out of doing it and provide incentives to staff to deliver it.
Having worked for both, I would say that most government offices are eternal, whereas private companies can vanish quickly. Sometimes without warning. Its really hard to kill a government office.
Makes me wonder, how did a necessary office survive during a junta or an overthrow? For example, how did the office of a postal clerk change from 1925 to 1955 in, say, Berlin? How does the average Salvadoran DMV worker view the changes in El Salvador since 1980?
How was a tax office run in ancient Babylon versus a modern one today?
I bet there's some weird insights into human civilization to be found in those stories.
My understanding is that the more removed you are from the "top" of the government pyramid, the less you are affected by disruptions of that position. Largely when a new face or party takes over (by force or otherwise) very seldom do they want to rebuild everything from the ground up and will keep most of the bipartisan offices untouched.
If a very violent coup is successful and they're planning punishments for all "government officials" the postman in a rural village is going to be pretty low on that list.
Private companies are why Flint still has lead water pipes, and why Texas doesn't have a working power grid, and why you and I are facing a 30%-50% increase in our cost of living.
Anyone who worked in both private and public would know both are not more efficient than the other.
Public services are chronically underfunded because of corruption. Private companies perform rabbit in a hat trick by making you guess what undisclosed ingredients they put in your food if they're not regulated, just so to save cost and make money for themselves!
I think a big issue is that the government takes a decades long view. This is great because they can plan how to effectively manage our water and other large scale projects with longevity in mind.
Meanwhile, our corporate CEOs take a quarter of a year view. They'd burn the company to the ground as long as it happens after they are stepping down and makes them look good beforehand.
Ah I wasn't clear. I don't mean government as in Democrats or Republicans. I mean government associations like US Army Corps of Engineers or the US Postal Service.
Maybe we should start a US Army Climate Battalion or something to sound cool and get funding 🤔.
One point here: the government doesn't pay out a large chunk of it's earnings to people who did nothing to ensure that the product or service was delivered.
They got paid a large percentage of revenue because they're shareholders.
Tell me again why taking a big pile of money from customers, who are very likely not wealthy (at least for the majority), and giving it to wealthy people, is "more efficient" than the government doing the same job and just, not doing that?
If you cut out the profit, the "business" runs more lean, no matter which way you arrange the numbers. I would argue that a more lean business model is simply more efficient. The dollars going in simply result in more output per dollar. IMO, that's efficient.
While I agree with you completely, the argument for a counter-point would be that exactly because the private company should create as much profit for the owners as possible - it has to be as lean / efficient as possible.
That is not true for "the goverment" as profit is not an encentive to rationalize the work process.
What I find interesting are goverment agencies that operate on both levels. A great example is Ordenance Survey in UK. While they provide a public service, they also sell some of their products commercially to cover some operating costs (hiking maps etc.).
because the private company should create as much profit for the owners as possible - it has to be as lean / efficient as possible.
Yeah but no. It would be if the owner/shareholders weren't skimming of the top. The process may be lean but the pricing is designed to maximize and take as much as the market will bear. Which undoes the benefit the efficiency could bring to a public service.
Except they didn't. Whomever purchased the stock initially did, and often that amount is a shadow of what the stock is currently traded at.
It's also a figure that's been repaid over and over again as dividends have been paid.
With government organizations, the public, aka debt devices, aka the public wallet, pays for the initial investment. Once that investment is made it pays for itself over and over in goods and services over the lifetime of the investment.
Shareholders are basically the landlords of wall street. They contribute nothing and feel like they deserve everything.
Except they didn't. Whomever [sic] purchased the stock initially did, and often that amount is a shadow of what the stock is currently traded at.
This ignores two other very important roles that subsequent shareholders play:
Give initial investors the opportunity re-deploy their capital elsewhere when they choose to do so.
Signal the value of the company’s equity, in real time, on the open market. When the stock is trading above IPO price (as your rebuttal implies), this enables the company to raise more capital by borrowing against its equity and/or selling shares of its own stock.
In light of these critical roles, it’s vastly unfair to say that shareholders contribute nothing to the delivery of goods and services—quite the opposite.
this enables the company to raise more capital by borrowing against its equity
You can always get asset backed loans, even as a company, why should we be welfare for businesses?
Also you would need an uncaptured market for anything you said to even have an effect, when 90% of trades are completed off market not effecting the price on the tape are we really doing anything but getting fleeced by market makers? You aren't signaling anything when your trade data is being bought and hidden from the market using PFOF techniques.
In light of the objective failures of our market it's extremely fair to say shareholders have no contribution to the delivery of goods and services. Could they in a perfect market sure, but I could have everything in utopia, to bad that doesn't exist.
For the kids reading at home, this is what an ad hominem attack looks like—a logical fallacy in which one attacks their opponent personally instead of addressing the merits of their argument.
They are better at maximizing profits at the expense of the employees, benefits, wages, local taxes and infrastructure. They work for the shareholders. They shovel money to the top few percent of the company. That’s what we call “efficiency”.
The government does not profit. They government pays standard government wages along with union wages and benefits. They maintain infrastructure. They are only as efficient as contracts allow.
Corporations do not have the same goals as government. One seeks to extract maximum profits for the few at the expense of the many, the other seeks to return to the many as much as is feasible in societal good - schools, roads, power, water, etc. at no profit.
It's hard to believe that anyone with the mental capacity to lift a spoon to their mouth would vote for the right (who are solely responsible for mass privatisation in Australia anyway, im assuming it's the same elsewhere).
Corporations do not have the same goals as government. One seeks to extract maximum profits for the few at the expense of the many, the other seeks to return to the many as much as is feasible in societal good - schools, roads, power, water, etc. at no profit.
In this case it's the definition of efficiency. Efficiency = (resources used up) compared to (resources taken in). How else would you even calculate it?
Yes the actual work that is getting done by the company or government is important too. Private companies generally do better at efficiency of getting work done (products or services being produced) than government. This is because government agencies are burdened with an unimaginable amount of levels of bureaucracy which kills the shit out of any efficiency. The government is the ultimate bureaucracy.
Anyone who has worked for both the government and private sector can tell you all about this. When I worked for the government it was the most boring job ever and there was so little actual work getting done that I would sit around reading a book on the job, waiting for something to do. At every non-govt job I've had that would not fly because the employer would see the dollars vanishing for my paid-to-do-nothing hours and put me to work doing something productive.
Getting maximum value for minimal expenditure. (In order to maximize profits) But if that thing previously was run at a loss by the government, than running at a profit to someone other than the government is still better as long as the need is simple and competitive so they can't just cut quality or price gauge.
In Germany we are in the process of privatizing hospitals. This will surely go over great in case of you know another pandemic. You can bet your butt that a private company will cut staff numbers, they will reduce the number of hospital beds and they will do the least amount of work they can get away with.
I can't easily go to a competitor, now can I? We only have that one hospital in the city.
If I had my way I'd make as many services public as possible. I cant stand tge fact that I pay taxes and the "public" transportation (train/bus/subway) isn't free. Imagine how much pocket change you would have if energy companies, telecoms (cell/wifi), and transportation were all gov-run? All that said I have no idea how that would translate in practice, its a nice little daydream I had.
I always thought my city's bus system would be more efficient if they didn't have to bother with charging everyone $1.50 for a ticket when they board.
In fact, they did have free fare this summer in an effort to improve the air quality. Ridership was much higher, and the driver didn't have to mess with the finicky cash machine at every stop.
Most of the people who take the bus here are poor and/or disabled, anyway. I'd love it if they could do away with fares, but I know they're doing the best they can with their limited funding.
My bus ride to work shortened by 10 minutes after getting rid of fares. It mostly serviced a poorer area of town to the downtown hub. Notable stops are a grocery store and the public library where 10-15 people swaps would occur.
Boy does this ring true. I worked for years for a giant multinational publisher and one of their biggest sources of income was taking government money for educational stuff for schools and turning that money into absolutely no useful products while making sure no opportunity to hire another middle manager was overlooked.
But surely you must admit that they do extract more wealth from the working classes for people who just move money around. Let's see your profit-less crown corporation do that. Checkmate /s
People forget that 'efficient' in a capitalist sense means that all resources are used. So when you privatize security, prisons, public transport, etc. guess what happens: those companies try to extract as much value as possible and do as little as possible. Because that is what capitalist efficiency is.
A private company is absolutely more efficient than a government. The boss simply says "this is what we're doing" and that's it -- it's just a question of what goal they're efficiently pursuing.
The problem is that intelligent, empathetic, and selfless people rarely rise to those positions. The few that do usually get pushed out of business by ruthless assholes.
I dont think that private corps with tens of thousands of employees can do that at all. Private companies also have committees and working groups and different departments that dont talk to each other (despite the committees), and policies that people follow even though the policy hasnt been good for years.
The boss says "this is what we're doing" and then it takes years for those hundreds of departments and tens of thousands of people to do it. Or they dont do it, because they disagree with the boss and the boss is far away from any work that they have no idea if people are doing it or not. Or they sorta do it, but then a new boss comes in and has a different plan.
Despite the dictatorship of the owner in a private corporation, actually implementing a thing, especially a new thing, does take a lot of time.
Private companies literally paid billions of dollar to dismantle a (more or less) effective government just so that they could say this (and its still wrong).
In my (Australian) public service career I have watched a team of 100 public servants deliver and keep updated a data capture and processing system
A large American service company now does that job with four times the people. It took years to get them to add keyboard shortcuts to their product - the original was entirely mouse driven; and their product didn't meet contrast rules for months
Ugh, I hate the "Government should be run like a business” line. Take recessions. During a recession, businesses will typically engage in belt tightening. But government finances run on entirely different rules. They control the currency, central bank, unemployment insurance, deficit spending, and a number of other levers that can stabilize the economy. It's the role of the government to step in and offset the business cycle. A lot of folks have very rose colored glasses of what life was like before the modern era's governance of the economy.
Famously, the blue guys in Australia, defund our public infrastructure, go 'oh no, broken now, have to sell, only private peeps can run this / it will run better / for everyone's best interests' (simultaneously pats themselves on the back for bringing money in, even though that thing they broke, brought money in, until they broke it) also, spoiler, they sell the things to thier mates.
It's not just that. You want businesses to be able to fail if they are being run poorly. That's something that's a lot harder with government agencies, state owned enterprises, and large companies.
government agencies: People rely on them by design. You can't simply shut down the health care or welfare system because it's being run poorly or corruptly.
state owned enterprises: There is pressure from the ruling class to keep even inefficiently run or corrupt SOE going because they provide jobs and patronage.
large companies: They become systemically important. The loss of a single large business can cascade through the economy. See: Lehman Brothers or the big auto companies during the 2008 crash.
That's a survivorship bias. Running a small group is easier, of course, than a large organization (though I'm not sure how much this get offset by the large organization having more resources and the advantage of size), but I suspect there is something else going on there. When there are small groups, there can be many small groups, and the inefficient ones can die leaving only the successful efficient ones. Large organizations are too often "too big to fail".
Neither is obviously more efficient than the other overall, it depends on the structure and the incentives. People worry about private prisons for example. If you make it so the government sends people to prisons and you pay the prison a fixed rate per prisoner, of course you're gonna get skimping on services by the prisons. If you instead give the prisoner a voucher for a prison and make them pick where they go and prisons get money per voucher they get from prisoners, you're gonna get competition on quality so you'll get high quality prisons. Opposite outcomes with just a change to incentives.
My biggest worry about private prisons is that it incentives making more things illegal, longer sentences, disregard for recidivism rates, etc. There have already been cases of judges taking kickbacks from private detention facilities to hand out longer sentences. I guess this is a case of private companies corrupting government though. Government contracting stuff out to private companies is probably the worst of both worlds.
That is a completely legitimate concern. It's important to note that even if prisons are publicly run, there's still a bunch of private actors in the prison system in the form of the people who work in it. Prison worker unions and police unions lobby for more laws already to protect their jobs. Private prisons might make that aspect worse, but it's not like it's perfect now.
This is something you really can't say one way or the other.
I could cite examples of sick, failing government owned companies that did better under privatization, or simply shouldn't have been governments owned in the first place. On the other hand, I could cite disastrous privatization efforts that should never have happened because they were vital services, or in the national interest. I lived through most of it in the UK when they were privatising stuff left right and centre - some succeeded, others didn't.
And if they stay under the control of government then they need incentivization and means for measuring success. Success doesn't just mean profit but it does mean value and quality of service. And in some ways that would require operating similar to if it were a private company.
In the end privatizing means maximizing for profits and not other quality factors though. It would be great if that would lead to increased value and quality of service, but that's not the reality in our current form of capitalism. Here, it leads to saving costs whereever possible, which finally implies loss of quality.
When it comes to infrastructure like train networks, telecommunication lines or postal services and critical services like hospitals, privatizing is the worst you can do from my point of view. Living in Germany, I see plenty of such examples. Our train service got incredibly worse since it was privatized, hospitals have severe issues on multiple fronts, and let's not forget how we are extremely sucking with the modernization and upkeep of our telecommunication infrastructure.
What do you think have been the successful privatizations in the UK. To my mind none of the big ones. I guess the little ones that work we don't hear too much about.
A lot of subjectivity about what is a success or not, but I would say many nationalised companies (and most were only nationalised for 20-30 years) were absolutely stagnating and/or suffering from widespread union disruption and should have been cut loose. But just picking out a handful of privatisations that went well, I think British Telecom, British Gas & British Airways did much better as privatized companies. Some privatisations went not-so-well - look at steel or coal privatisations or British Rail.
And an example of successful nationalisation - hospitals & doctors were a loose arrangement of private / charitable causes before being nationalised as the NHS. I think we can agree the situation is far better for everyone as a public health service than if it were run for-profit.
I think the way energy markets work is pretty cool, where you have an independent regulatory entity that operates a market, with very strict control measures and compliance monitoring. That way you take advantage of market incentives but you still own it. China's "hold on to the big, free the small" economic policy is interesting as well.
With privatization you need a government agency to oversee it and to account for them making a profit. I have no idea how people thought it would save money
Why wouldn't there be warlords? I'm not sure how this comment follows. Without a government, you get both eggs in one basket, which the original commenter agrees is bad.
Looks at how Canadian ISPs led the world in early internet technology then once privatized, ignored it and allowed Nortel to be infiltrated and shut down by CCP spies, allowing then to steal 5G technology.
Hell, in Vancouver you have the private Canada /RAV line, and the public Skytrain line. One was built in the 1980s and isn't at capacity yet and the private one was finished in 2008 and is already over capacity.
Yeah there really is 0 comparison between public and private.
BC Ferries are so nice to ride on. Feels like a mini cruise. Canadian ISPs / mobile providers really do suck ass, makes the American ones look good some how.
Eh, you can quickly create a new division/bureau/area and hire for the new roll and when it doesn't work out you can fire easily. That ain't possible within government where everything is governed by statue or rule
But government likes to starve the stuff they run to make it look bad so they can carve it up and sell it to their mates. See literally anything Britain privatised.
Anything with no competition trends towards being shit over time.
The government needs to take over things which are not viable for the private sector, but important for society to work.
Lets say privatisation of public transport: In countries where it is completely private, only major cities have reasonable connections. Because those are the most profitable ones. But if you want people to actually use public transport, you need to have a fine and widely spread net of connections. For that to happen either the state completely owns the public transport, or takes off financial pressure and only partially owns it.
Exactly this mechanism enables (partially) state owned organizations to run suboptimal. As explained in the example, this is a desired effect. But it also enables memes like the lazy state employee - which are at least partially true.
E scooter services are a nice example. They are not covered under state-run public transport. You see those in major cities. There, where they are not required as much due to more dense public transport systems. But there, where they would be really useful, in more rural areas, due to a much less dense public transport system, they are lacking. And why is that? Because profits.
I live where the govt gives absurdly large subsidies to bus companies (~500 million dollars per year) and the service as a whole still sucks balls. During peak hours, it's not uncommon for a bus to not stop because you literally wouldn't manage to get in.
One thing to keep in mind is that there are many companies that are little more than state parasites, companies that wouldn't survive against real competition, yet all the blame or any misgivings ends up on the "evil big gubmint" just because.
Certain things, yes. Certain other things, not at all.
As much as I hate Elon Musk the company he owns that does space stuff pretty rapidly got a whole lot of new rockets up and got them to land instead of crashing into the sea. The newest govt produced rocket, the SLS, was years late and billions of dollars over budget, and they expend the rockets.
spaceX did some cool stuff. That being said, fuck Elon Musk, he had nothing to do with any of its success.
Whenever people tout Space X as an exemplar of private efficiency my eyebrow twitches.
They wouldn’t exist if not for the billions spent through public funding of R&D at NASA.
Space X also can take risks governments can’t. Imagine if NASA blew up rockets as often as Space X? The Republicans would gut their funding even more then they already have.
Exactly about the risks. Not having silly uninformed backlash about failures is a big benefit to private companies (at least privately owned). The government and NASA funded SpaceX because they recognized that it was more efficient than developing their own launch vehicle. They tried with Ares, but that fell though and Obama (or his cabinet) decided to let industry try instead. So they funded SpaceX to develop a launch vehicle.
Apolo program with 60s tech: we will send one rocket per mission to the moon, and it will work.
Brain dead idiots parroting off spaceX as some savior: it will only take at least 15 rocket launches per mission to the moon. We will use the worst trajectory possible because we sold the contract for the lander to a company who can't figure out low moon orbit. 2 years out and our rocket still blows up when attempting launches.
But sure spaceX is a marvel of private industry, shudders
The trajectory was chosen by NASA because the Orion capsule on top of the SLS rocket do not have enough efficiency to be on a low regular lunar orbit while landing and bringing back astronauts. This trajectory has nothing to do with SpaceX.
When comparing the one rocket to land on the moon to the 15 launches (thank you for writing launches and not rockets, as Destin Sandlin wrongly did) is because the mass delivered to the surface is gigantic compared to Apollo. Why? Because we do not want to say "we did it!" We want to say "we live there!".
Can people stop saying SpaceX rockets explode? They do not. Super rarely they have, but that's not something that happens on a regular basis and happens as rarely to all other companies. Explosions are either caused by landing first stages (nobody does that, the mission success, they are pushing the limits to reuse parts and they haven't exploded in a very long while, while adding capacity no other company has) and prototypes that are meant to rapidly test limits and new technology explode, that's actually the goal: push further, test, improve, nice on to next new system. It's just a completely different approach from other rocket companies. Instead of spending years and years in research and development, they spend months, test, boom, months, test, boom. What that brings is huge innovation.
When comparing SLS to Starship, check how long has SLS taken and how much it costs while looking at its capacity:
$24B for the first rocket, 4+ per next rocket
$20.4B for Orion
11 years to get the first rocket
16 years to get the first capsule
Can bring 690ft³ of payload
As of now, and evolving for Starship:
$7B cost, 4 from NASA for the first 2 missions
11 years for the first tests, still no rocket
Can bring 220,00lb and 35,000ft³ to the moon
And they still and up with a rocket NASA can continue to use at very low price (less than 25% than SLS per mission)
The trajectory was chosen by NASA because the Orion capsule on top of the SLS rocket do not have enough efficiency to be on a low regular lunar orbit while landing and bringing back astronauts. This trajectory has nothing to do with SpaceX.
Nor did I say it did, I said some brain dead idiots sent the contract off to a company who designed a craft incapable of doing what we have done previously, congrats Lockheed for fucking up our next moon program. It's you who equated that to SpaceX lmaoo
When comparing the one rocket to land on the moon to the 15 launches (thank you for writing launches and not rockets, as Destin Sandlin wrongly did) is because the mass delivered to the surface is gigantic compared to Apollo. Why? Because we do not want to say "we did it!" We want to say "we live there!".
I mean it really doesn't matter are you going to have astronauts just chilling for like a year in orbit waiting for those launches, racking up radiation? Saying the reason we need 15 launches for starship is specifically due to mass is such a cop-out. It's due to how limited the amount of fuel we can send up to refuel in orbit is, it's fucking stupid at our current level of space infrastructure. We still haven't even tested it, what we need another 4 decades for this terrible plan to come to fruition? Take note of what the Apolo engineers stated as far as stepping stones in development. If you take too big of leaps, you will not adequately be able to evaluate what when wrong if something does, take to small of steps and you will never reach the goal. We decided to take such massive leaps with no forethought on its efficiency.
Can people stop saying SpaceX rockets explode? They do not.
No, that is precisely what occurred with starship. You can see the Shockwave from the explosion, which means you had the oxidizer mix with the propelent before exploding during the flip phase, that's a major fucking failure. It was not a rupture like previous issues nor was it terminated, it fucking exploded lmao. The worst part all that lovely telemetry that's gonna help them out gave zero indication of said catastrophic failure so that's gonna be such great info for them right? Just like the first test that failed when they knew the pad wouldn't be strong enough and caused damage to the rocket, meaning they got no actionable data?
As of now, and evolving for Starship:
$7B cost, 4 from NASA for the first 2 missions
11 years for the first tests, still no rocket
Can bring 220,00lb and 35,000ft³ to the moon
And they still and up with a rocket NASA can continue to use at very low price (less than 25% than SLS per mission)
Star ship has not been a proven concept and is still actively in development, these numbers mean nothing right now. With massive issues looming and 90% of what's needed not even tested yet but go ahead keep riding daddy musk as if he isn't killing good ideas with lofty moving goal posts and a complete lack of understanding for what's being developed.
It will never take 1 year for 15 launches... Also HLS will be ready before astronauts are sent to the lunar orbit.
You clearly don't and refuse to understand how SpaceX works. Your arguments show how little you understand any of it and using "lmao" at the end of your wrong arguments to prove how good they are is completely ridiculous.
I will watch your video because I'm always curious to understand other viewpoints and learn things, but I'm not planning on replying any further.
taking risks is exactly why they're more efficient. i wish the public sector could take as many risks without it turning into political circus, but that would never happen.
Yeah that's why we were supposed to have made it back to Mars this year with SpaceX right? Thats why it took them over 3 minutes to even realize their ship blew up most recently, but that telemetry that took 3minutes to realize a catastrophic failure occurred is really gonna make this great, right? That's why Apolo sent one rocket per mission to the moon and with that amazing SpaceX tech....we need to send at least 15 per mission? The public sector did take risks and by doing so in the past we got the Apolo program. Today we have constant failures by spaceX being touted as successful missions with about 10billion in public funding being evaporated. Now, it's more important that private business sells you on some bs hype train to rake in funds till they drop the next hype train without realizing their earlier goal and distracting you about it with leaks about hype train 3.
Where are the fully reusable falcon 9s? That second stage is still not reusable, the crew capsule will never be landing without parachutes now, and they still take about the same amount of time to turn around that the space shuttle did. SpaceX is objectively a failure, selling the next big thing as a means to hide what did not come to fruition. If you honestly think the new rocket is gonna be flying in under a decade or before spaceX goes bankrupt. You're an idiot.
Fully reusable falcon 9 have been scrapped a very long time ago because they realized it wasn't the right hardware for that. Starship will be and way way more capable. The test flight that exploded never intended to survive. Hoped? For sure. Intended? Absolutely not. It was a test prototype, not a rocket in the sense you make it.
Turnaround for space shuttle was 54 days at best before the explosion of challenger, 88 days since. Falcon 9 is down to 32 and keeps going down. 32 vs 88 is not almost the same. Second stage will never be reused neither will parachutes on Dragon landing. SpaceX wanted propulsion landing, NASA refused. One day they might change their mind (NASA) with starship.
You keep pointing at possibilities that might have been discussed or even said at some points, and I understand your frustration, but none of these were signed deals, they were possibilities or goals to try to achieve while developing the technology, then realising a better solution works (like catching the fairing halves vs. grabbing them from the ocean).
The timeline that's over confident is for the sales pitch, that's for sure.
Exactly. The libertarian talking point that the market and private entities self-regulate because consumers "vote with their wallets" is nonsense. If people are misinformed or not informed at all, then people don't have any choice at all in what is supposedly a free market! As I mentioned in another comment, we know many companies do not disclose what they put into their food products, and this is in spite of regulations also still existing! The Tesco supermarket chain in UK turned out their beef meat has horse meat and none were the wiser until it's too late!
I mean, I'm not arguing for private companies, but our government is quite spectacularly inefficient at anything except generating prime ministers! Mind you, they may be trying to be worse than the private sector so they cna claim the private sector is more efficient than the government, I guess...
They're doing their best to deal with that small issue, in between ruining everything else. The other side are also crap but are objectively better at everything except number of prime ministers and amount of harm done to the country
If private companies were more efficient than the public sector then you'd want to privatize the armed forces. The fact that no serious person argues for this tells you all you need to know.
I'm talking about the grunts who sign up and get owned by the state, which is clearly inefficient. Be far better to have some kind of subscription model with multiple armies offering different levels of protection from various threats /s
Hi, Academi (formerly Blackwater) rep here, would you like to further privatize your war endeavors?
The argument against private armies has less to do with efficiency and more to do with dealing with coups from wannabe tyrants. If even "loyal to the state" armies can have internal schisms and take over the government, what can someone expect from an army whose sole reason to exist is "money"?
Yeah there are very good reasons why it's a stupid idea. It's equally stupid to privatize areas of strategic economic importance, such as energy, transport, core infrastructure etc. Which happens all the time. Arguably the army is the most important service for a state. If the private sector was innately more efficient you'd have thought the neolibs would be queueing up to flog it off.
I work for my local government and everybody means well but are hampered by a lack of funding. I complete a statutory required role, that is one of the two key performance indicators and it needs 2 people full time and I'm the only person on it.
I'd prefer a self-managed company, the whole rises with the top, i find hard to believe that a lack of democratic control in the workplace is the best option over the thousands of different (hybrid )forms of self-management.
Worse than c.e.o.s is those who earn money while sleeping, simply for investing(, you can buy a.n house/debt/action and sell it at a higher price later if you find a buyer, but you've not "earned" a rent from real workers in the meantime, that's a (parasitic/useless )theft i.m.o., maintaining a class of non-workers above the others).
And where's the free&fair competition ? That'll lead to monopolies, and there's more inequalities among the salaries from private entreprise's than public ones, which also have(had) better advantages/'working conditions', because back then we considered that social benefits and working conditions ought to improve, not regress like we're assuming nowadays by saying we lived beyond our means in the past. And even if private interests were solely guided by the need to invest more productively(, they should be controlled and ~punished when they don't, if we want the theories to work), there should be a control to verify that their decisions are virtuous, since you can often make more money by giving up on doing good(, negative externalities).
I think a good example of the tradeoffs between government and private companies would be lunar landing programs. If you throw cold war nuclear money at the problem, you can do things fast and ambitiously like Apollo. But nowadays for Artemis, the urgency is a lot less, so there's all sorts of games with Congress (putting things all over the place that don't make sense, lunar gateway etc) to make sure they keep funding. That results in a much more expensive much less capable rocket (SLS) than something like starship that has a whole lot less political constraints like starship. NASA can and has gotten things done well, but the funding and incentive structure makes it harder.
Even if the are more efficient, they earned the regarding profit for a small number of people, who has to much. For the society it is a loose loose. The services become more expensive and it lead to a redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, whitch is even worse for the society and the economy.
SpaceX does one thing though... Well, three things. Rocket development, launch services and starlink.
NASA does a whole lot more, they have 10 times as many employees and far more suppliers than SpaceX does. SpaceX is basically a service provider for NASA.
This is kind of like saying that Lockheed Martin is more efficient than the department of defense.
Ok... So what does NASA do that overlaps with SpaceX? Apparently nothing. NASA is 100% dependent on private rockets. Are we supposed to call that a win or a loss?
Definitely more efficient than NASA today. But private companies wouldn't have been able to pull off the moon landing, which was NASA's great accomplishment.
There's a place for government programs and enormous piles of money.
Well one metric would be cost per kg to get something into space. I also recall a lot of people dying when NASA first started going into space, of which SpaceX has not had any rockets explode with people in them, but I'm not impaired enough to make that false equivalence like you did with Mars.
Of course my comment is false equivalence, because the initial assertion is false equivalence.
You can't compare NASA and Spacex because they have different goals. NASA even contract many of their payloads to Spacex, which they wouldn't do if they were in the same business.
Making money for shareholders
at the expense of everybody else
Government famously failing to deliver infrastructure.
That was definitely sarcastic. OP posted a very anti-private industry meme, I doubt they are like, "except roads, though, I love toll roads."
It was sarcastic to be clear.
I just did a quick google of ‘major private infrastructure projects with cost blow outs’ and lo and behold there were thousands of examples.
Gotta say, I agree with your main point... But that is kinda the thing people point at when saying the government is inefficient. The large parts of the US infrastructure is decades past it's expected lifespan, and the US government is not allocating enough funds to fix it quickly enough.
That's exactly it, though. All that infrastructure got built when the government would directly build infrastructure. The Interstate System, the Transcontinental Railroad, these got built because the government got them done. It's only since the birth of neoliberalism during Carter's presidency, and supercharged during Reagan's, where infrastructure only gets done through public private partnerships that things stopped being built.
Ya know what was a foundational part of the American dream? Pensions. Ya know which employers still offer them? Counties, states and the federal government.
Private companies exist solely to make the people at the top very rich based on the stolen value of employee labor while dumping catastrophic losses in the public sphere. That's capitalism in a nutshell.
You'd have to be unbelievably gullible, naive, traumatized AND brainwashed to be a diehard for a system like that. But, somehow they've managed it. A deluded nation of Amway top performers just one move away from making their own imaginary millions. All simping for the system.
You wanna know something else? The majority of the world economy is already centrally planned. Not on the national level, on the corporate level. Business is dominated by a relatively few giant corporations with internal economies the size of some nations. None of them run free markets internally. Sears experimented with it, to their demise. Central planning is already the primary way that our economic lives are driven. It's just we let unaccountable billionaires do the planning instead of an elected body.
My government is mostly privatized. We even hired a consulting firm to figure out how the government could lower consulting fees. The consultants found that if we consult less, we will have lower consulting fees. We paid over half a million for that single report:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-federal-government-kpmg-consulting/
Next step: hire a consultant to figure out how to consult less.
Government consultant here. The federal government does nothing if it is not military related or medical care in the Department of Veterans Affairs. Everything they produce is done via contract. That includes leadership which is queued up using consulting. Sure, they make the decisions but that's not management or the visionary leadership people think it is. It's all contract management.
Australia is a live example of the fact that they're not. The state and federal governments have privatised a crap load of services and all they do is continue to hike our bills while providing less and less service. Electricity, water supply, employment services and more are now an absolute joke here.
Yep because what's more important than efficient, cost effective services? Spoiler, it's profit.
Profit for their mates and fellow shareholders, not profit for the country either.
Exactly what's about to happen to employment services in Australia too. They spend more money chasing a hand full of people who don't want to work than just continuing to pay them the pittance they exist on and have people apply to be the CEO of huge corporations who dropped out of high school in order to make their quotas. Government just announced an inquiry with the aim to reinstate control over it.
Yes, if not for when the Labor (sic) party got into power that one time, we'd all still be stuck on ADSL2 at best, and dialup at worst, depending on how close you live to a major-ish city. The NBN was a government infrastructure initiative. One which got gutted and watered down as soon as the Liberals got back in.
Oh, and I've heard industry insiders claim that the mixed technology stack employed in the "new NBN" -- FTTP for some places that already got it, FTTN for everywhere else in the city, fixed wireless or satellite for rural areas -- is more expensive on an ongoing basis due to complications than just rolling out more fibre would have been in the long run.
Not to mention the state of ISPs in Australia. I believe you pay more for less than almost every country. Two exceptions being the US and Canada.
Only someone who has never worked for a large corporation could hold the belief that corporations are efficient at making their product.
They're very efficient at funneling money to their executives and owners though.
Only someone who has never worked for the government could hold the belief that they are more efficient at doing anything at all at any time.
I've worked for the government both as an employee and a contractor. I've also worked for small and large companies. The government was by far better at accomplishing the actual objective / product. The worst government entity I worked for though was a city government. Those are terrible.
My mom mockingly said once "do you want your doctor visits to be just like the DMV?"
Nope, I want my doctor visits to be more like the USPS. Compare their numbers to UPS or any of the others and it's night and day.
My last trip to the DMV was surprisingly smooth. They finally implemented appointments, and, unlikely private doctors, they didn't make me wait in the lobby for 30minutes to 1 hour and then in the examination room for another 15-30 minutes.
My answer would be "yes, because that'd be an improvement!"
I remember in college we took a course on economic efficiency and the short takeaway is "the free market is extremely efficient, but only when the competing parties start with equal resources. the more inequal the starting position, the less efficient the market becomes." and to my mind that suggests that we should enforce some sort of "rubber-banding" effect so that a company needs to keep competing or else it will "drift" back to the mean over time. Something like aggressive taxes on the uber-rich and comprehensive welfare for the poor, y'know? Capitalism but with safety guards would be pretty cool.
This is why aggressive estate taxes are so incredibly critical. People shouldn't be professional descendants. And of course welfare provides both ladder and safety net. The fools who are trying to abolish one or both are working against social mobility.
Because they think social mobility is wrong and bad for society
There is a reason why the European/Scandinavian economic model works so well.
Give it 10 or 20 years and we'll basically be the US, but with really high taxes
You gived 10 years 7 times in a row
Yeah, mixed economy undeniably works!
I think just don't allow other companies to buy others. Mergers should be illegal.
I mean, they are (at making profit), but funnily enough, you can't run a society when everything is profit driven 🙄
That's literally uncomparable. Government does things that ignore profit. That's what government is for. The provide services at a loss. The only "profit" might be things like societal improvement, education, security, and such.
I think that's exactly the point they're making
People pay taxes that fund the government. If the money is wasted then services suffer. So it's not profit or loss but they must deliver value. Value is harder to quantify than profit but governments have to figure a way out of doing it and provide incentives to staff to deliver it.
They are often on purpose, as political decision. So that it is easier to push for privatization
Having worked for both, I would say that most government offices are eternal, whereas private companies can vanish quickly. Sometimes without warning. Its really hard to kill a government office.
Makes me wonder, how did a necessary office survive during a junta or an overthrow? For example, how did the office of a postal clerk change from 1925 to 1955 in, say, Berlin? How does the average Salvadoran DMV worker view the changes in El Salvador since 1980?
How was a tax office run in ancient Babylon versus a modern one today?
I bet there's some weird insights into human civilization to be found in those stories.
My understanding is that the more removed you are from the "top" of the government pyramid, the less you are affected by disruptions of that position. Largely when a new face or party takes over (by force or otherwise) very seldom do they want to rebuild everything from the ground up and will keep most of the bipartisan offices untouched.
If a very violent coup is successful and they're planning punishments for all "government officials" the postman in a rural village is going to be pretty low on that list.
Same as any other large organization, I suspect.
Private companies are why Flint still has lead water pipes, and why Texas doesn't have a working power grid, and why you and I are facing a 30%-50% increase in our cost of living.
There needs to be MORE regulation. Not less.
Anyone who worked in both private and public would know both are not more efficient than the other.
Public services are chronically underfunded because of corruption. Private companies perform rabbit in a hat trick by making you guess what undisclosed ingredients they put in your food if they're not regulated, just so to save cost and make money for themselves!
If these last few years have taught us anything.
They are putting undisclosed ingredients into the food even if they are regulated.
Slim Jim - now flavored with microplastics and preserved with forever chemicals
Slim Jim's were the original forever chemicals. You ever seen one go bad?
They're efficient at maximizing profits for shareholders, usually at the dire expense of literally everyone else.
I think a big issue is that the government takes a decades long view. This is great because they can plan how to effectively manage our water and other large scale projects with longevity in mind.
Meanwhile, our corporate CEOs take a quarter of a year view. They'd burn the company to the ground as long as it happens after they are stepping down and makes them look good beforehand.
You mean four year term view? They dont give a shit about what happens next. If they did they would do something against climate change
Ah I wasn't clear. I don't mean government as in Democrats or Republicans. I mean government associations like US Army Corps of Engineers or the US Postal Service.
Maybe we should start a US Army Climate Battalion or something to sound cool and get funding 🤔.
Or if they have a golden parachute.
One point here: the government doesn't pay out a large chunk of it's earnings to people who did nothing to ensure that the product or service was delivered.
They got paid a large percentage of revenue because they're shareholders.
Tell me again why taking a big pile of money from customers, who are very likely not wealthy (at least for the majority), and giving it to wealthy people, is "more efficient" than the government doing the same job and just, not doing that?
If you cut out the profit, the "business" runs more lean, no matter which way you arrange the numbers. I would argue that a more lean business model is simply more efficient. The dollars going in simply result in more output per dollar. IMO, that's efficient.
Am I taking crazy pills here?
While I agree with you completely, the argument for a counter-point would be that exactly because the private company should create as much profit for the owners as possible - it has to be as lean / efficient as possible.
That is not true for "the goverment" as profit is not an encentive to rationalize the work process.
What I find interesting are goverment agencies that operate on both levels. A great example is Ordenance Survey in UK. While they provide a public service, they also sell some of their products commercially to cover some operating costs (hiking maps etc.).
Yeah but no. It would be if the owner/shareholders weren't skimming of the top. The process may be lean but the pricing is designed to maximize and take as much as the market will bear. Which undoes the benefit the efficiency could bring to a public service.
But the shareholders didn’t do nothing, they provided capital.
Except they didn't. Whomever purchased the stock initially did, and often that amount is a shadow of what the stock is currently traded at.
It's also a figure that's been repaid over and over again as dividends have been paid.
With government organizations, the public, aka debt devices, aka the public wallet, pays for the initial investment. Once that investment is made it pays for itself over and over in goods and services over the lifetime of the investment.
Shareholders are basically the landlords of wall street. They contribute nothing and feel like they deserve everything.
This ignores two other very important roles that subsequent shareholders play:
In light of these critical roles, it’s vastly unfair to say that shareholders contribute nothing to the delivery of goods and services—quite the opposite.
You can always get asset backed loans, even as a company, why should we be welfare for businesses?
Also you would need an uncaptured market for anything you said to even have an effect, when 90% of trades are completed off market not effecting the price on the tape are we really doing anything but getting fleeced by market makers? You aren't signaling anything when your trade data is being bought and hidden from the market using PFOF techniques.
In light of the objective failures of our market it's extremely fair to say shareholders have no contribution to the delivery of goods and services. Could they in a perfect market sure, but I could have everything in utopia, to bad that doesn't exist.
Who said anything about welfare?
Okay, I'm not getting into a debate about organizational behaviour, economics and finance with an unarmed person.
Good day to you sir/madam.
For the kids reading at home, this is what an ad hominem attack looks like—a logical fallacy in which one attacks their opponent personally instead of addressing the merits of their argument.
I'm just tired, and the context of your statements show a dramatic lack of understanding for how business operates.
Good luck tho. 👍
Ignorant AF.
They are better at maximizing profits at the expense of the employees, benefits, wages, local taxes and infrastructure. They work for the shareholders. They shovel money to the top few percent of the company. That’s what we call “efficiency”.
The government does not profit. They government pays standard government wages along with union wages and benefits. They maintain infrastructure. They are only as efficient as contracts allow.
Corporations do not have the same goals as government. One seeks to extract maximum profits for the few at the expense of the many, the other seeks to return to the many as much as is feasible in societal good - schools, roads, power, water, etc. at no profit.
Well said.
It's hard to believe that anyone with the mental capacity to lift a spoon to their mouth would vote for the right (who are solely responsible for mass privatisation in Australia anyway, im assuming it's the same elsewhere).
When listing what they sacrifice to maximize profit you forgot to mention service quality and customer satisfaction.
Just enough service to keep you from leaving, because you know the nearest competitor will treat you just as badly.
That's a complete perversion of what corporations were supposed to be for, by the way.
Efficient at what, making profit for themselves?
Why is profit an only measure for efficiency?
Because we live in a capitalistic society.
In this case it's the definition of efficiency. Efficiency = (resources used up) compared to (resources taken in). How else would you even calculate it?
Yes the actual work that is getting done by the company or government is important too. Private companies generally do better at efficiency of getting work done (products or services being produced) than government. This is because government agencies are burdened with an unimaginable amount of levels of bureaucracy which kills the shit out of any efficiency. The government is the ultimate bureaucracy.
Anyone who has worked for both the government and private sector can tell you all about this. When I worked for the government it was the most boring job ever and there was so little actual work getting done that I would sit around reading a book on the job, waiting for something to do. At every non-govt job I've had that would not fly because the employer would see the dollars vanishing for my paid-to-do-nothing hours and put me to work doing something productive.
Efficient at using up all resources and extracting as much value from them as possible.
Getting maximum value for minimal expenditure. (In order to maximize profits) But if that thing previously was run at a loss by the government, than running at a profit to someone other than the government is still better as long as the need is simple and competitive so they can't just cut quality or price gauge.
In Germany we are in the process of privatizing hospitals. This will surely go over great in case of you know another pandemic. You can bet your butt that a private company will cut staff numbers, they will reduce the number of hospital beds and they will do the least amount of work they can get away with.
I can't easily go to a competitor, now can I? We only have that one hospital in the city.
Oof. As an American, my heart goes out to you. I wouldn't wish our healthcare system on anyone.
If I had my way I'd make as many services public as possible. I cant stand tge fact that I pay taxes and the "public" transportation (train/bus/subway) isn't free. Imagine how much pocket change you would have if energy companies, telecoms (cell/wifi), and transportation were all gov-run? All that said I have no idea how that would translate in practice, its a nice little daydream I had.
I always thought my city's bus system would be more efficient if they didn't have to bother with charging everyone $1.50 for a ticket when they board.
In fact, they did have free fare this summer in an effort to improve the air quality. Ridership was much higher, and the driver didn't have to mess with the finicky cash machine at every stop.
Most of the people who take the bus here are poor and/or disabled, anyway. I'd love it if they could do away with fares, but I know they're doing the best they can with their limited funding.
My bus ride to work shortened by 10 minutes after getting rid of fares. It mostly serviced a poorer area of town to the downtown hub. Notable stops are a grocery store and the public library where 10-15 people swaps would occur.
Fare free is a great move towards equity too.
Man I wish I had better public transit where I live. Gotta drive cars everywhere, seeing a bus is like seeing a unicorn.
I'm a private sector worker slacking off and shitposting on reddit/lemmy all day....
We are DEFINITELY NOT more efficient than the public sector
Possibly, but they have different incentives.
They're more efficient at getting money from the state and paying it out as bonuses or dividends
Boy does this ring true. I worked for years for a giant multinational publisher and one of their biggest sources of income was taking government money for educational stuff for schools and turning that money into absolutely no useful products while making sure no opportunity to hire another middle manager was overlooked.
But surely you must admit that they do extract more wealth from the working classes for people who just move money around. Let's see your profit-less crown corporation do that. Checkmate /s
Since companies usually have an autocratic structure, i guess they are.
Note: more efficient doesn't mean better for the people or better at all. It just means that they skip a few important steps.
People forget that 'efficient' in a capitalist sense means that all resources are used. So when you privatize security, prisons, public transport, etc. guess what happens: those companies try to extract as much value as possible and do as little as possible. Because that is what capitalist efficiency is.
That's any service where the service provider has the customer over a barrel.
A private company is absolutely more efficient than a government. The boss simply says "this is what we're doing" and that's it -- it's just a question of what goal they're efficiently pursuing.
The problem is that intelligent, empathetic, and selfless people rarely rise to those positions. The few that do usually get pushed out of business by ruthless assholes.
I dont think that private corps with tens of thousands of employees can do that at all. Private companies also have committees and working groups and different departments that dont talk to each other (despite the committees), and policies that people follow even though the policy hasnt been good for years.
The boss says "this is what we're doing" and then it takes years for those hundreds of departments and tens of thousands of people to do it. Or they dont do it, because they disagree with the boss and the boss is far away from any work that they have no idea if people are doing it or not. Or they sorta do it, but then a new boss comes in and has a different plan.
Despite the dictatorship of the owner in a private corporation, actually implementing a thing, especially a new thing, does take a lot of time.
Private companies literally paid billions of dollar to dismantle a (more or less) effective government just so that they could say this (and its still wrong).
In my (Australian) public service career I have watched a team of 100 public servants deliver and keep updated a data capture and processing system
A large American service company now does that job with four times the people. It took years to get them to add keyboard shortcuts to their product - the original was entirely mouse driven; and their product didn't meet contrast rules for months
can you call a government that allows itself to be turned into a caricature of itself efficient?
People: "Government should be run like a business"
Government: "Speed enforcement is now done by a private business. You're welcome."
People: "They're now trying to squeeze every less cent out of us with speed enforcement!"
Business: "Efficiency!"
Ugh, I hate the "Government should be run like a business” line. Take recessions. During a recession, businesses will typically engage in belt tightening. But government finances run on entirely different rules. They control the currency, central bank, unemployment insurance, deficit spending, and a number of other levers that can stabilize the economy. It's the role of the government to step in and offset the business cycle. A lot of folks have very rose colored glasses of what life was like before the modern era's governance of the economy.
Famously, the blue guys in Australia, defund our public infrastructure, go 'oh no, broken now, have to sell, only private peeps can run this / it will run better / for everyone's best interests' (simultaneously pats themselves on the back for bringing money in, even though that thing they broke, brought money in, until they broke it) also, spoiler, they sell the things to thier mates.
I think the issue is large organizations are inefficient and inflexible, be they government or corporates.
You want small lean groups with a lot of autonomy.
It's not just that. You want businesses to be able to fail if they are being run poorly. That's something that's a lot harder with government agencies, state owned enterprises, and large companies.
That's a survivorship bias. Running a small group is easier, of course, than a large organization (though I'm not sure how much this get offset by the large organization having more resources and the advantage of size), but I suspect there is something else going on there. When there are small groups, there can be many small groups, and the inefficient ones can die leaving only the successful efficient ones. Large organizations are too often "too big to fail".
Our corporate structures and limited liability not only make these massive orgs possible, but incentivize some truly insane megacorps.
Yep, the US government used to break up monopolies and it greatly benefitted the boomers.
Depends on the situation I'd say.
More efficient at what though?
Offshoring profit
Getting money into the pockets of the responsible ones
Private companies are efficient at making oligarchs richer and everybody else poorer.
Neither is obviously more efficient than the other overall, it depends on the structure and the incentives. People worry about private prisons for example. If you make it so the government sends people to prisons and you pay the prison a fixed rate per prisoner, of course you're gonna get skimping on services by the prisons. If you instead give the prisoner a voucher for a prison and make them pick where they go and prisons get money per voucher they get from prisoners, you're gonna get competition on quality so you'll get high quality prisons. Opposite outcomes with just a change to incentives.
My biggest worry about private prisons is that it incentives making more things illegal, longer sentences, disregard for recidivism rates, etc. There have already been cases of judges taking kickbacks from private detention facilities to hand out longer sentences. I guess this is a case of private companies corrupting government though. Government contracting stuff out to private companies is probably the worst of both worlds.
You don't need private prisons for that. 90% of prisons are government run, and police unions have been lobbying for decades to keep shit illegal.
That is a completely legitimate concern. It's important to note that even if prisons are publicly run, there's still a bunch of private actors in the prison system in the form of the people who work in it. Prison worker unions and police unions lobby for more laws already to protect their jobs. Private prisons might make that aspect worse, but it's not like it's perfect now.
This is something you really can't say one way or the other.
I could cite examples of sick, failing government owned companies that did better under privatization, or simply shouldn't have been governments owned in the first place. On the other hand, I could cite disastrous privatization efforts that should never have happened because they were vital services, or in the national interest. I lived through most of it in the UK when they were privatising stuff left right and centre - some succeeded, others didn't.
And if they stay under the control of government then they need incentivization and means for measuring success. Success doesn't just mean profit but it does mean value and quality of service. And in some ways that would require operating similar to if it were a private company.
In the end privatizing means maximizing for profits and not other quality factors though. It would be great if that would lead to increased value and quality of service, but that's not the reality in our current form of capitalism. Here, it leads to saving costs whereever possible, which finally implies loss of quality.
When it comes to infrastructure like train networks, telecommunication lines or postal services and critical services like hospitals, privatizing is the worst you can do from my point of view. Living in Germany, I see plenty of such examples. Our train service got incredibly worse since it was privatized, hospitals have severe issues on multiple fronts, and let's not forget how we are extremely sucking with the modernization and upkeep of our telecommunication infrastructure.
What do you think have been the successful privatizations in the UK. To my mind none of the big ones. I guess the little ones that work we don't hear too much about.
A lot of subjectivity about what is a success or not, but I would say many nationalised companies (and most were only nationalised for 20-30 years) were absolutely stagnating and/or suffering from widespread union disruption and should have been cut loose. But just picking out a handful of privatisations that went well, I think British Telecom, British Gas & British Airways did much better as privatized companies. Some privatisations went not-so-well - look at steel or coal privatisations or British Rail.
And an example of successful nationalisation - hospitals & doctors were a loose arrangement of private / charitable causes before being nationalised as the NHS. I think we can agree the situation is far better for everyone as a public health service than if it were run for-profit.
I think the way energy markets work is pretty cool, where you have an independent regulatory entity that operates a market, with very strict control measures and compliance monitoring. That way you take advantage of market incentives but you still own it. China's "hold on to the big, free the small" economic policy is interesting as well.
Even if it was more efficient on average it still would have major costs associated with privatization, namely ceding control from the public.
With privatization you need a government agency to oversee it and to account for them making a profit. I have no idea how people thought it would save money
Corruption is the issue when governments are involved with capital. Social inequality is the issue when private owners control the capital.
My view is that having an army and control over the capital is too many eggs in the same basket.
So... Without a government, there just wouldn't be armies? Rich and powerful private citizens wouldn't form their own armed forces?
Why wouldn't there be warlords? I'm not sure how this comment follows. Without a government, you get both eggs in one basket, which the original commenter agrees is bad.
East India company would like to speak to him
looks at ICBC, BC Hydro and BC Ferries.
Looks at how Canadian ISPs led the world in early internet technology then once privatized, ignored it and allowed Nortel to be infiltrated and shut down by CCP spies, allowing then to steal 5G technology.
Hell, in Vancouver you have the private Canada /RAV line, and the public Skytrain line. One was built in the 1980s and isn't at capacity yet and the private one was finished in 2008 and is already over capacity.
Yeah there really is 0 comparison between public and private.
BC Ferries are so nice to ride on. Feels like a mini cruise. Canadian ISPs / mobile providers really do suck ass, makes the American ones look good some how.
Having worked on both sides. Private industry has the ability to quickly maneuver and change tact.
Imo
It depends on the industry. Huge publicly traded organizations are basically as bad as government
I've peaked inside large private companies. They're no better than public companies. Turns out, being large means you can't move very fast.
Eh, you can quickly create a new division/bureau/area and hire for the new roll and when it doesn't work out you can fire easily. That ain't possible within government where everything is governed by statue or rule
The government should not be efficient. The faster it moves the faster it can oppress.
But government likes to starve the stuff they run to make it look bad so they can carve it up and sell it to their mates. See literally anything Britain privatised.
Anything with no competition trends towards being shit over time.
The government needs to take over things which are not viable for the private sector, but important for society to work.
Lets say privatisation of public transport: In countries where it is completely private, only major cities have reasonable connections. Because those are the most profitable ones. But if you want people to actually use public transport, you need to have a fine and widely spread net of connections. For that to happen either the state completely owns the public transport, or takes off financial pressure and only partially owns it.
Exactly this mechanism enables (partially) state owned organizations to run suboptimal. As explained in the example, this is a desired effect. But it also enables memes like the lazy state employee - which are at least partially true.
E scooter services are a nice example. They are not covered under state-run public transport. You see those in major cities. There, where they are not required as much due to more dense public transport systems. But there, where they would be really useful, in more rural areas, due to a much less dense public transport system, they are lacking. And why is that? Because profits.
I live where the govt gives absurdly large subsidies to bus companies (~500 million dollars per year) and the service as a whole still sucks balls. During peak hours, it's not uncommon for a bus to not stop because you literally wouldn't manage to get in.
One thing to keep in mind is that there are many companies that are little more than state parasites, companies that wouldn't survive against real competition, yet all the blame or any misgivings ends up on the "evil big gubmint" just because.
I am not saying that throwing money at the problem solves it.
But if you want public services to also cover non-profitable areas/groups, the government needs to step in with certain measures.
You should see the companies in charge of the mexican government.
If you believe this, a year working at a Fortune 500 should cure you of it.
Certain things, yes. Certain other things, not at all.
As much as I hate Elon Musk the company he owns that does space stuff pretty rapidly got a whole lot of new rockets up and got them to land instead of crashing into the sea. The newest govt produced rocket, the SLS, was years late and billions of dollars over budget, and they expend the rockets.
spaceX did some cool stuff. That being said, fuck Elon Musk, he had nothing to do with any of its success.
Whenever people tout Space X as an exemplar of private efficiency my eyebrow twitches.
They wouldn’t exist if not for the billions spent through public funding of R&D at NASA.
Space X also can take risks governments can’t. Imagine if NASA blew up rockets as often as Space X? The Republicans would gut their funding even more then they already have.
Exactly about the risks. Not having silly uninformed backlash about failures is a big benefit to private companies (at least privately owned). The government and NASA funded SpaceX because they recognized that it was more efficient than developing their own launch vehicle. They tried with Ares, but that fell though and Obama (or his cabinet) decided to let industry try instead. So they funded SpaceX to develop a launch vehicle.
Seems like it worked
Apolo program with 60s tech: we will send one rocket per mission to the moon, and it will work.
Brain dead idiots parroting off spaceX as some savior: it will only take at least 15 rocket launches per mission to the moon. We will use the worst trajectory possible because we sold the contract for the lander to a company who can't figure out low moon orbit. 2 years out and our rocket still blows up when attempting launches.
But sure spaceX is a marvel of private industry, shudders
The trajectory was chosen by NASA because the Orion capsule on top of the SLS rocket do not have enough efficiency to be on a low regular lunar orbit while landing and bringing back astronauts. This trajectory has nothing to do with SpaceX.
When comparing the one rocket to land on the moon to the 15 launches (thank you for writing launches and not rockets, as Destin Sandlin wrongly did) is because the mass delivered to the surface is gigantic compared to Apollo. Why? Because we do not want to say "we did it!" We want to say "we live there!".
Can people stop saying SpaceX rockets explode? They do not. Super rarely they have, but that's not something that happens on a regular basis and happens as rarely to all other companies. Explosions are either caused by landing first stages (nobody does that, the mission success, they are pushing the limits to reuse parts and they haven't exploded in a very long while, while adding capacity no other company has) and prototypes that are meant to rapidly test limits and new technology explode, that's actually the goal: push further, test, improve, nice on to next new system. It's just a completely different approach from other rocket companies. Instead of spending years and years in research and development, they spend months, test, boom, months, test, boom. What that brings is huge innovation.
When comparing SLS to Starship, check how long has SLS taken and how much it costs while looking at its capacity:
$24B for the first rocket, 4+ per next rocket
$20.4B for Orion
11 years to get the first rocket
16 years to get the first capsule
Can bring 690ft³ of payload
As of now, and evolving for Starship:
$7B cost, 4 from NASA for the first 2 missions
11 years for the first tests, still no rocket
Can bring 220,00lb and 35,000ft³ to the moon
And they still and up with a rocket NASA can continue to use at very low price (less than 25% than SLS per mission)
Nor did I say it did, I said some brain dead idiots sent the contract off to a company who designed a craft incapable of doing what we have done previously, congrats Lockheed for fucking up our next moon program. It's you who equated that to SpaceX lmaoo
I mean it really doesn't matter are you going to have astronauts just chilling for like a year in orbit waiting for those launches, racking up radiation? Saying the reason we need 15 launches for starship is specifically due to mass is such a cop-out. It's due to how limited the amount of fuel we can send up to refuel in orbit is, it's fucking stupid at our current level of space infrastructure. We still haven't even tested it, what we need another 4 decades for this terrible plan to come to fruition? Take note of what the Apolo engineers stated as far as stepping stones in development. If you take too big of leaps, you will not adequately be able to evaluate what when wrong if something does, take to small of steps and you will never reach the goal. We decided to take such massive leaps with no forethought on its efficiency.
No, that is precisely what occurred with starship. You can see the Shockwave from the explosion, which means you had the oxidizer mix with the propelent before exploding during the flip phase, that's a major fucking failure. It was not a rupture like previous issues nor was it terminated, it fucking exploded lmao. The worst part all that lovely telemetry that's gonna help them out gave zero indication of said catastrophic failure so that's gonna be such great info for them right? Just like the first test that failed when they knew the pad wouldn't be strong enough and caused damage to the rocket, meaning they got no actionable data?
Star ship has not been a proven concept and is still actively in development, these numbers mean nothing right now. With massive issues looming and 90% of what's needed not even tested yet but go ahead keep riding daddy musk as if he isn't killing good ideas with lofty moving goal posts and a complete lack of understanding for what's being developed.
It will never take 1 year for 15 launches... Also HLS will be ready before astronauts are sent to the lunar orbit.
You clearly don't and refuse to understand how SpaceX works. Your arguments show how little you understand any of it and using "lmao" at the end of your wrong arguments to prove how good they are is completely ridiculous.
I will watch your video because I'm always curious to understand other viewpoints and learn things, but I'm not planning on replying any further.
Sources are from Wikipedia articles for both starship and Orion as well as an article from the planetary society on the cost of SLS.
taking risks is exactly why they're more efficient. i wish the public sector could take as many risks without it turning into political circus, but that would never happen.
Yeah that's why we were supposed to have made it back to Mars this year with SpaceX right? Thats why it took them over 3 minutes to even realize their ship blew up most recently, but that telemetry that took 3minutes to realize a catastrophic failure occurred is really gonna make this great, right? That's why Apolo sent one rocket per mission to the moon and with that amazing SpaceX tech....we need to send at least 15 per mission? The public sector did take risks and by doing so in the past we got the Apolo program. Today we have constant failures by spaceX being touted as successful missions with about 10billion in public funding being evaporated. Now, it's more important that private business sells you on some bs hype train to rake in funds till they drop the next hype train without realizing their earlier goal and distracting you about it with leaks about hype train 3.
Where are the fully reusable falcon 9s? That second stage is still not reusable, the crew capsule will never be landing without parachutes now, and they still take about the same amount of time to turn around that the space shuttle did. SpaceX is objectively a failure, selling the next big thing as a means to hide what did not come to fruition. If you honestly think the new rocket is gonna be flying in under a decade or before spaceX goes bankrupt. You're an idiot.
Fully reusable falcon 9 have been scrapped a very long time ago because they realized it wasn't the right hardware for that. Starship will be and way way more capable. The test flight that exploded never intended to survive. Hoped? For sure. Intended? Absolutely not. It was a test prototype, not a rocket in the sense you make it.
Turnaround for space shuttle was 54 days at best before the explosion of challenger, 88 days since. Falcon 9 is down to 32 and keeps going down. 32 vs 88 is not almost the same. Second stage will never be reused neither will parachutes on Dragon landing. SpaceX wanted propulsion landing, NASA refused. One day they might change their mind (NASA) with starship.
You keep pointing at possibilities that might have been discussed or even said at some points, and I understand your frustration, but none of these were signed deals, they were possibilities or goals to try to achieve while developing the technology, then realising a better solution works (like catching the fairing halves vs. grabbing them from the ocean).
The timeline that's over confident is for the sales pitch, that's for sure.
I'm just gonna leave this here as you want to buy into all the bullshit surrounding starship lmao
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5GevpAGDWE
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=K5GevpAGDWE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The entire capitalism system relies on the capitalists being honest. The problem is that most of them are not.
Exactly. The libertarian talking point that the market and private entities self-regulate because consumers "vote with their wallets" is nonsense. If people are misinformed or not informed at all, then people don't have any choice at all in what is supposedly a free market! As I mentioned in another comment, we know many companies do not disclose what they put into their food products, and this is in spite of regulations also still existing! The Tesco supermarket chain in UK turned out their beef meat has horse meat and none were the wiser until it's too late!
Typically this is something I hear more commonly within businesses.
Unsurprisingly the business thinks business is the most efficient way to run anything.
Private companies are master at screwing customers for profit. Lefts not try to be private companies.
I mean, I'm not arguing for private companies, but our government is quite spectacularly inefficient at anything except generating prime ministers! Mind you, they may be trying to be worse than the private sector so they cna claim the private sector is more efficient than the government, I guess...
Your government used to be quite good at providing healthcare.
They're doing their best to deal with that small issue, in between ruining everything else. The other side are also crap but are objectively better at everything except number of prime ministers and amount of harm done to the country
Looks at Argentina
Yeah, sure buddy
If private companies were more efficient than the public sector then you'd want to privatize the armed forces. The fact that no serious person argues for this tells you all you need to know.
What are defense contractors? Seems like privatized military production to me. Or are you taking about mercenaries?
I'm talking about the grunts who sign up and get owned by the state, which is clearly inefficient. Be far better to have some kind of subscription model with multiple armies offering different levels of protection from various threats /s
Edit: Even relying on private providers is a dodgy idea. See e.g. the Great Shell Scandal https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Crisis_of_1915
Hi, Academi (formerly Blackwater) rep here, would you like to further privatize your war endeavors?
The argument against private armies has less to do with efficiency and more to do with dealing with coups from wannabe tyrants. If even "loyal to the state" armies can have internal schisms and take over the government, what can someone expect from an army whose sole reason to exist is "money"?
Yeah there are very good reasons why it's a stupid idea. It's equally stupid to privatize areas of strategic economic importance, such as energy, transport, core infrastructure etc. Which happens all the time. Arguably the army is the most important service for a state. If the private sector was innately more efficient you'd have thought the neolibs would be queueing up to flog it off.
Which government?
It sort of depends on what the company is doing.
I work for my local government and everybody means well but are hampered by a lack of funding. I complete a statutory required role, that is one of the two key performance indicators and it needs 2 people full time and I'm the only person on it.
Honestly I was expecting more dogshit takes in the comments. Anyway everyone should read Elizabeth Anderson’s book “Private Government”
I'd prefer a self-managed company, the whole rises with the top, i find hard to believe that a lack of democratic control in the workplace is the best option over the thousands of different (hybrid )forms of self-management.
Worse than c.e.o.s is those who earn money while sleeping, simply for investing(, you can buy a.n house/debt/action and sell it at a higher price later if you find a buyer, but you've not "earned" a rent from real workers in the meantime, that's a (parasitic/useless )theft i.m.o., maintaining a class of non-workers above the others).
And where's the free&fair competition ? That'll lead to monopolies, and there's more inequalities among the salaries from private entreprise's than public ones, which also have(had) better advantages/'working conditions', because back then we considered that social benefits and working conditions ought to improve, not regress like we're assuming nowadays by saying we lived beyond our means in the past. And even if private interests were solely guided by the need to invest more productively(, they should be controlled and ~punished when they don't, if we want the theories to work), there should be a control to verify that their decisions are virtuous, since you can often make more money by giving up on doing good(, negative externalities).
I think a good example of the tradeoffs between government and private companies would be lunar landing programs. If you throw cold war nuclear money at the problem, you can do things fast and ambitiously like Apollo. But nowadays for Artemis, the urgency is a lot less, so there's all sorts of games with Congress (putting things all over the place that don't make sense, lunar gateway etc) to make sure they keep funding. That results in a much more expensive much less capable rocket (SLS) than something like starship that has a whole lot less political constraints like starship. NASA can and has gotten things done well, but the funding and incentive structure makes it harder.
Even if the are more efficient, they earned the regarding profit for a small number of people, who has to much. For the society it is a loose loose. The services become more expensive and it lead to a redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, whitch is even worse for the society and the economy.
Needs the random letters
But mail
Look at spacex they are more efficient then nasa
SpaceX does one thing though... Well, three things. Rocket development, launch services and starlink.
NASA does a whole lot more, they have 10 times as many employees and far more suppliers than SpaceX does. SpaceX is basically a service provider for NASA.
This is kind of like saying that Lockheed Martin is more efficient than the department of defense.
SpaceX gets shit into space cheaper than NASA. Let's just compare the services that both provide and not move goal posts.
Yeah, but NASA hasn't even had launch capabilities since what, 2006?
Ok... So what does NASA do that overlaps with SpaceX? Apparently nothing. NASA is 100% dependent on private rockets. Are we supposed to call that a win or a loss?
SpaceX would never exist if there was no NASA. Before government programs that can pioneer and not have to be "profitable" no company can exist.
There's no way to test that. You can't really see what didn't happen.
Definitely more efficient than NASA today. But private companies wouldn't have been able to pull off the moon landing, which was NASA's great accomplishment.
There's a place for government programs and enormous piles of money.
Anything is more efficient without cost+ contracts, where the cost is covered + a fixed percentage profit on top.
Those kinds of deals make the cost explode somehow. Who would have thought.
there's an exception to the rule
What do you base that on?
Spacex has had zero successful missions to Mars. NASA has landed 5 rovers.
Well one metric would be cost per kg to get something into space. I also recall a lot of people dying when NASA first started going into space, of which SpaceX has not had any rockets explode with people in them, but I'm not impaired enough to make that false equivalence like you did with Mars.
Of course my comment is false equivalence, because the initial assertion is false equivalence.
You can't compare NASA and Spacex because they have different goals. NASA even contract many of their payloads to Spacex, which they wouldn't do if they were in the same business.
R u talking about musk?
How dare u!
My guy. The government can't even make a budget and gave trillions of dollars away to commit genocide. They're both bad but the government is worse.
Self-realization for 500, Alex
Consider USSR.
And...?
"I made a meme depicting your claim with a mocking Spongebob, therefore your argument is invalid."
It's preaching to the choir but it's not wrong.