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Re:California Mayors Join Campaign to Buy Out PG&E by calithrower on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @03:15AM (#21460609)
"The worst form of capitalism is one which bestows all of the benefit to the private sector while forcing all of the risk on the public sector." -- Adam Smith.

Over the past 50 years PG&E has made a game out of mis-managing the transmission infrastructure, selling it to the state, then buying it back at a discount.

California needs to own the entire utility and not just keep giving it un-warranted subsidies and gifts.

All PG&E executives should be imprisoned for the hundreds of people they have murdered in the past decade between their fires and the San Bruno explosion.

It is never in the best interest of the people to give critical public infrastructure to rent seeking flam-flam artists.

Re:California Mayors Join Campaign to Buy Out PG&E by brobdingnagians on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @04:02AM (#21460814)
To my knowledge, in France, the national road systems are private (but weren't always) and charge massive tolls, but maintenance is paid for by contracts from the government. So all of the private owners of the roads also run sister companies that do maintenance. The government pays exorbitant prices to the companies to do maintenance for the roads that they then also make large amounts of toll from.

I'm not saying I fully support private roads or public roads, but the worst combination is a little bit of both...

Re:California Mayors Join Campaign to Buy Out PG&E by ptah on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @08:27AM (#21462258)
"autoroutes belong to the French state and their administration to semi-private companies."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoroutes_of_France

Re:California Mayors Join Campaign to Buy Out PG&E by Leherenn on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @01:13PM (#21465221)
To make it even worse, they were built using taxpayer's money, then sold for peanuts to those companies. It's corruption at an astronomical scale.