Re: Diesel 9,5$/gl in Norway

trader4 wrote:

> > Advancing 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.

Economics 101 makes assumptions that are not true, then.  We /have/
advanced technology in many areas, but the companies don't have
incentive to release them when the present technologies have a higher
margin.  This is real life, not some utopian textbook vision.

> > 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.

Perhaps ironically, in California the road construction is done by
private cor****ations (and I thought it was this way around the country).
People don't want "better," they want "cheaper."  You buy the cheapest
product available and you're still surprised that it sucks?

> That level of incompetence would never exist in the private sector...

LOL, ok, I guess I've worked in different companies than you have.

> ...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?

Ok so we agree that public school sucks.  The solution then is to cut
their funding?  I don't see how we can assume that we're going to turn
out people worth hiring in the private sector if we don't care to
educate them.

....unless you admit that only those who come from money are worth
educating, but that would just mean that you would prefer that "the
poor" turn to more crime against you.

> > 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".
> 
> 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.

There is no law that says one cannot have competition in the government
sector.  But- people want it as cheap as they can get it.  You can't get
"cheap" at the same time you get "good," which seems as much Economics
101 to me as I can figure.

Your examples prove this out, in fact.  Americans would rather buy junk
made in China than junk made in the US, and they'd rather buy junk in
general than anything of any quality.  But again- at least lots of
people are making lots of profit, the world and our communities be
damned!  (Not my vision of a utopian society!)

-tom!

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