Re: Diesel 9,5$/gl in Norway

On May 22, 2:00=A0am, Tom Plunket <to...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> trader4 wrote:
> > Yep, great idea. =A0 Trust government to be able to make the right
> > decisions and produce fuels economically instead of private
> > industry. =A0 =A0With the track record the govt has, I'm sure they
will =
be
> > real efficient at producing the right fuels.
>
> Are you actually suggesting that the profit motive makes companies
> interested in something besides profit?

No, never suggested that at all.   Profit is exactly what companies
are supposed to be interested in.



>=A0Advancing the technology that
> we use to trans****t ourselves around could only cut the profits, so why
> would any profit-motivated cor****ation want to do that?

For the same reason every other advancement in every other commercial
field has taken place.   Advancing technology is how you increase
sales and stay in business.   If you have a better product at a better
price, people will buy it.   This is economics 101.


>
> There's as much bloat in the private sector as there is in government.

That's laughable.    Of course that isn't true, because with
government, there is no competition.  I see the results here in NJ
every day.   They just spent millions to redesign a local traffic
circle into a roundabout.   Now, to me, and to most people, they are
the same thing.   After spending 6 months and lots of money, they have
something remarkably similar to what was already there.  No bigger, no
more lanes, just slightly different approach angles into it.   The
result:  just as many accidents and what was a 2 minute delay at rush
hour is now an 8 minute one.    But this is perfectly acceptable.   No
one will lose their job.   They'll just bit it out to do it again to
their political hack connected buddies, who are paying them both
legally through campaign contributions and illegally through kick
backs.    They have done exactly that at another major intersection
where two four lane highways meet.   Twenty years ago, it was a
traffic circle.   Then they changed it into a intersection with a
traffic light, at a cost of millions.   But where the roads met, it
resulted in a big bump, causing accidents.   So, 10 years later, more
millions are spent redoing the whole thing.   That took the hump out,
but left the roads not exactly aligned, so now there were more
accidents.   Next plan is to spend millions more to realign it
again.    A local fellow wrote into the newspaper asking why they
can't just build an overpass so one 4 lane highway goes over the
other.   Answer:  That would cost $100 million.  That's right, $100mil
for a simple overpass to take one highway over another.

That level of incompetence would never exist in the private sector,
because the business would have failed long ago.  Why do you think
institutions like public schools are dead set against voucher
programs, which would allow parents to use them to decide where to
send their kids?



> The difference is just that shareholders are happy regardless of the
> cost in private industry as long as the company makes a profit, whereas
> the same expenditures in public industry are labelled as "waste".
>
> -tom!
>
> --

No, the difference is that in the private sector if you have a big
bloated company with waste, a competitor in search of making profit
and that is better run will force them to either get competitive or go
out of business.   Do you see what happened to the likes of AT&T and
their spinoffs, like Lucent?   How about companies like Digital
Equipment that ignored technology change and new ways of selling
product?     Even IBM was in perilous straights in the 80's because
upstart competitors were offering better, cheaper solutions.   That's
how competition in the private sector works.   In the govt sector, you
have no competition.