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Yes I agree that it makes sense for energy generation to be in public ownership. Although they still have to make a business case that it will actually deliver
by 7952 3y ago
Yes I agree that it makes sense for energy generation to be in public ownership. Although they still have to make a business case that it will actually deliver rewards. And be mindful of the costs associated with a dangerous liability. And in most countries it will be money that comes straight from debt.
The truth is that neither government or business have been that good at making these kind of decisions. I think the low recourse debt approach has some merits in that an institution is really forced to put skin in the game. And that due diligence is an integral part of making decisions. A nuclear power station that could be funded by a bank would probably be a pretty good design.
- rayiner 3y ago> Yes I agree that it makes sense for energy generation to be in public ownership You want your power company to run like Amtrak or BART?
- loeg 3y agoSeattle City Light up here (a public utility) is quietly doing a perfectly fine job providing electricity to residential customers at around 13c/kWh.
- fragmede 3y agoYou want your power company to be run like Google? Your neighborhood is getting their electricity shut off because there aren't enough people using enough electricity in it to be worth it to the corporation.
- rayiner 3y agoHaving public services run like Google would be amazing. Imagine public services that actually meet your needs and get upgraded and better with time.
- chfalck 3y agoI mean, they probably would if public services paid their engineers Google salaries. Do you think someone who can make 150k at Google is going to take a public services eng job for at minimum 50% less pay? Of course to have public service jobs like that we’d have to pay more taxes… and thus you end up with overworked engineers who are probably ok at their job but not on the same level as the big private companies
- rayiner 3y agoGoogle-level salaries are a recent thing in engineering. There wasn’t that much of a difference in engineering salaries between public and private sector say in the 1990s. But public services still sucked.
- xyzzyz 3y agoImagine we start paying government employees Google salaries tomorrow. Could we then start firing incompetent employees and replace them with the competent ones lured by high pay? Everything I know about how politics and public sector unions work tells me that the answer is very much no. This means that this “pay them and they will come” plan can only expect to see any success many decades down the line, once enough incompetent workers leave on their own. And this is assuming your plan actually works: who’s to say that the high quality employees won’t get lazy themselves if they get Google pay with public sector job security? Overall, this means that before we entertain your idea, we need to bust the public sector unions and fire the incompetent employees. I suspect that once you do that, you won’t even have to raise the pay so much to get large increase in public sector competence.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]