236 points

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95 points

Making money for shareholders

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41 points

at the expense of everybody else

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-18 points
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16 points

Government famously failing to deliver infrastructure.

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8 points
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3 points

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.

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94 points
*

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.

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16 points
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Yesterday an American accidentally admitted that they tip their landlord. It was at that point I said to myself “man you fuckers deserve to suffer under whatever republican you end up voting for next election because we all know that’s what you dumb ass motherfuckers are going to do”

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2 points

I’m a big proponent of letting people suffer for their bullshit, but please let the rest of us out

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5 points

Telecommunications Act. 1996. The Great Brainwashing where the Party began telling you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears.

The best part? …if you endorse force and shick therespy to fix this fucking shit even the “leftists” will call you a violent fascist. Everyone got brainwashed.

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75 points

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.

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14 points
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People’s Republic of Walmart, a very good book which goes into detail about how successful corporations use communist-styled organization and how we could have that for ourselves if we all decided to stop funneling all our hard worked dollars up billionaire noses.

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62 points

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/

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31 points

Next step: hire a consultant to figure out how to consult less.

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2 points

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.

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58 points

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.

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20 points

Yep because what’s more important than efficient, cost effective services? Spoiler, it’s profit.

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10 points

Profit for their mates and fellow shareholders, not profit for the country either.

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14 points
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9 points

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.

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7 points
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6 points

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.

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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.

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