Comment by crmd
6 months ago
One of my favorite things here in New York City is how Con Ed gets approval to pass infrastructure upgrade costs directly to consumers, but at the end of the financing period the asset is mysteriously owned by their board of directors, not the public who paid for it.
Point of information: it's not owned by the directors, it's owned by the investors, the shareholders, just like every other private company.
It's still a weird sanctioned monopoly. More places should get over their fear of public ownership.
Public ownership can be extremely detrimental, I think it is even worse than state ownership by a few margins. Especially for setting long term goals required for infrastructure. There are investors for that as well, but they are rare and an exception.
I evade working directly for publicly traded companies like hell or let myself be paid very, very generously. Most often your time will be limited in the first place. Better to be employed as a freelancer in that case.
My power company has the state guaranteeing a monopoly, effectively sets prices, sets safety standards, approves new construction, requires every home be connected to the grid, etc.
Throwing out the corporate management will probably save money simply because they're pointless middle men. They aren't making the decisions that truly matter.
I'm very confused. Public and state ownership are the exact same thing. Public ownership is not the same thing as being publicly traded.
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If a private company builds infrastructure with their profits, should it be owned by the customers "who paid for it"?
My local electricity infrastructure provider is a private company, with the twist that all residents within their area are also automatically shareholders.
They operate "for profit", but profits are distributed amongst shareholders in the form of reduced bills, ie last year we didn't get bills for electricity transport for december, and the year before that there were no bills from august through december.
The "for profit" part pays infrastructure upgrades, so some years we pay the normal prices if there is infrastructure work being done, which in the end benefits all shareholders, meaning me (and other users).
Do you live in Auckland?
It sounds similar to the system I encountered there. I don’t remember all the details, I was only renting for a year.
It didn’t sound like it was NZ wide.
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Why are we letting private companies own public infrastructure?
Politicians lack the will to push for public utilities. That requires asking voters to go along with the government taking on financing, planning, operations, customer service, and being the bad guys who raise prices. It's easier to point to companies as the bad guys who raised electric rates, likely sparked a wildfire, or are taking so long to fix an outage.
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It's either owned by a private company, or public (owned by municipality or similar).
Government bureaucrats are among the hardest to fire, because they rate their own excellence.
Knowing this, there is probably a way to make things better…
Because our political system is rigged to allow the wealthy to make the rules.
Because public operation of infrastructure has often not gone well. And no matter who owns it, there is a cost of capital.
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Yes, of course it should be. You point out of of theain flaws in our system. Those who actually produce things and pay for them never get any ownership. They remain disadvantaged dispite their contributions.
They pay for the thing they get. They exchanged money for product or service. Anyone can start a company and contribute the money required for that company.
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If you have a publicly supported monopoly you shouldn't have a private company.
They are given a de facto monopoly. It’s weird that a private company is building and owning public utilities, but if they’re going to be granted a monopoly, then it’s not unreasonable for that privilege to come at a price.
It does come at a price: they have to pay corporation tax.
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It’s not paid for “with their profits”, it’s a passthru charge directly onto customers’ monthly bills.
Yes
Yes
Most of these things are really liabilities. You have to maintain these things.
The problem is, in the last few years NYC and NYS have mandated all kinds of green energy goals. One of the biggest one that is causing a fuck ton of concern and spending is "no more new gas cars after 2035". Well guess what that means! _infrastructure_ that someone has to pay for and the mandates are unfunded by the state. The city and state have also been pushing various schemes to ban decrease natural gas installations as well, resulting in _surprise_ more electric for heating and cooking.
The other problem we have is moronic NIMBY and environmentalist behavior that led to our only nuclear power plant shutting down and a second one never being allowed to go online at all. The entire Long Island region is still on the hook financially to pay for vetoing a previously approved and built nuclear power plant decades ago. This leads to NY to now depend on imported electricity from other states and Canada at increased rates. And it's only going to get more expensive as datacenters eat up cheap electricity from the same sources.
Isn't it mandated that they do that by the state? The gas companies where I live work this way.
And good luck getting transparency on those asset transfers or executive benefits. It's all buried in regulatory filings that nobody reads except lawyers and lobbyists
Funny how the chef passes his costs on to me, but at the end of the day he owns the restaurant. What Injustice!
If people don't like paying a private entity for a goods or service, the solution is to make it yourself, not complain. Tons of cities, counties, and states do just that
Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?
The place that your analogy falls is that electric companies are private companies operating legal electricity monopolies where much of the infrastructure in question is placed on right of ways across public and private land not controlled by the operator.
Sounds like you have a problem with the state, not the chef.
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>Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?
You're dishonestly compressing a spectrum of regulation down into a binary to advance your point.
There's a spectrum of regulation from black market tamales to the power company. The restaurant is like 45% of the way there. There's a lot of things that they, their landlord, etc, etc, are all but forced to do in certain ways (because of the financial impossibility of proving that any other way is fine) that effectively set cost floors.
I'm sure you're well aware that many states pre-empt county or municipal efforts to develop public utilities like broadband internet or perservice.
funny how the largest most modern power utility and grid infrastructur ever built is owned by the citizens who built it, in China, AND they have some realy fancy privatly owned resteraunts.........almost everywhere
then there are things like the town of Lunenburg having it's own power company https://www.townoflunenburg.ca/electric-utility.html