The old government nationalized railroads and private roads for this exact reason. When a utility becomes embedded into and it’s needed to even function in society, it needs to be nationalized.

Regulatory capture has made that near impossible now. At least crypto throws another challenger in the ring and can give people and businesses an, albeit inferior, alternative.

> it needs to be nationalized.

I'm not sure trading three owners for one public one is the right direction to go, particularly since there are few limits to the number of providers that could be operating in this space.

The article points this out, too, that it's incredibly expensive and difficult to start a new network from the ground up. This sounds like the thing you actually want to fix.

Yes, realistically, it's not possible at this point. Ideally, it should be done so users have some sort of recourse. Visa/MC can straight up ban you from processing payments without rhyme or reason while they hide behind KYC/AML laws. The government can't hide behind these laws.

> it's not possible at this point.

I think cheap and ubiquitous internet access has changed the game here significantly and it seems far easier to bring new products and technologies into the merchant space than it ever has been before.

> Visa/MC can straight up ban you from processing payments without rhyme or reason while they hide behind KYC/AML law

Yes, but if you had a dozen other providers to turn to, this may not be an issue, and may force the established players to have a more transparent policy.

> The government can't hide behind these laws.

I would consider the "No Fly List" as a terrifying example of where this naivete inevitably ends.

I don't think you fully grasp the ramifications here.

governments will give utilities a monopoly but with requirements such as they must service everyone regardless of profitability or they get fined all to shit.

So why would any utility take that offer? Do you have an example of such a contract between state and private company that you find these terms? I'd like to take a look at the bidding process.

If the government is corrupt or corruptible (and which aren't?) then "service everyone" isn't as objective as it seems.

Meanwhile you can just force all the collective carriers to post their prices and their profits publicly or threaten them with complete loss of license to operate. This has been effective in the past and allows for a more open system with many competitors rather than a state selected contractor.

This is one of those cases where you don't know what you're talking about and you should stop speaking as if you're an authority here.

I love how you throw in bidding as if we're not talking about the government giving a monopoly in exchange for guarantees (it's considered a public good). This exchange of guarantees has made energy one of the most stable long term investments in a way that other investments just aren't. Gee, why would anyone take that deal?

Go educate yourself.

And go read up on Chesterton's Fence.

Where are you referring to? In the US railroads were never nationalized (long-term) and private roads were never much of a thing, and the US has a pretty good (freight) railroad system [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport#Statist...

To expand on your point, the United States Railroad Association only lasted for a little over two years until the Esch-Cummins Act was passed in 1920. Later, Conrail was under federal control for about a decade before it was sold to private investors in 1987, but it had a more regional focus.

Japan famously privatized it's trains/subways. They're now considered best in the world. They appear to have made it a positive feedback loop by letting the train companies own land and business near tracks so that over time, every station is a mini shopping center owned by the train company. Several train companies also run grocery stores at nearly every station. Some run office buildings, department stores, and apartments near the stations. All this means more riders and more riders = more customers for the other business.

This type of company owned adjacent property is not legal in most countries, as it is akin to riders largely existing in a company owned town where said company can extract significantly more rent from each rider than they otherwise would, distorting the market to hurt competition.

It doesn't seem to have hurt Japan and I'm not sure it's the same. The train company doesn't own the entire town so it's not remotely the same as "company owned town". Even if the train station owns a grocery store there are 4 others in the same neighborhood run by other companies. Same with office buildings, apartments, etc....

Also, regional ice cream sales in coastal areas correlate directly with shark attacks. Japan has the best because they see it as a first-class transportation system. America thinks public transit is a D-list expenditure, at best. Now we have D-list service quality, at best. Post-privatized UK bus systems, London aside, are a joke. Being public might not have changed that, but it sure didn't stop it. Boston's public transit is a joke, but improving. Same with their privatized regional rail service. The company took years to get enough snow removal equipment to not cancel dozens of trains in heavy snow. In Boston.

It’s almost like we need to sit down and rethink this system.

Double down?

I often think a full rewrite is needed.

I woke up this morning with an odd thought. User interfaces are hard, they are not many but we have people who are really good at designing those, we also know how to user test them. Election programs are non binding, you can say one thing then do the exact opposite after winning. (Referenda are also complicated.) It doesn't seem to make sense in the modern age to be able to change your vote every x years. It's a great formula for [say] the 17th century.

What if we designed a really neat configuration page for the government and allow people to change whatever settings exposed to them. You check a candidate you like and with each option their choice is the default. If you don't agree with something you simply change it.

Then, one by one we take the topics away from the politicians so that they can focus on the rest of the work.

For choosing the party you get 3 up and 3 down votes that you may spend however you like.

A separate election is held to chose the team to populate and work on the interface so that gradually more and more topics get exposed. Their job would also be to research and estimate how familiar the population is with a topic along with a budget to educate the voter.

It would be enlightening for the candidates as well.

Eventually we can shut down the legacy system and have one or more nudgeable robot overlords.

Don't worry, I'm sure the dream will fade in a few hours.

Seems like you've independently invented a form of liquid democracy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy#:~:text=The%2....

It basically lets each citizen choose between direct or representative democracy, per issue, and does away with arbitrary things like election dates and even candidates (you can "elect" any other citizen to vote on your behalf, as can they). The only reason we don't have it is because it's basically impossible without software. Even very complex ranked choice voting can be tallied manually.

We also don't know if the outcomes would be preferrable. Do we need to move democracy into a high-frequency trading kind of world to do the things we want to?

The interesting thing in the moment was not the formula necessarily but the idea to start with the interface.

If you are dealing with such monstrosity of an application all battles are lost at the interface level. It has to work for everyone, there is no room for excuses about dumb users, they are the target audience.

While in the US the number seems infinite, in the Netherlands we have roughly 140 000 laws that each could have a series of check boxes and sliders. Say we all do 4 per day, that would be only 1460 annually. It would take 100 years which seems to long. At 40 per day it would require to much effort.

If the interface is to work as desired a large amount of law needs to go.

We should burn the books most worthy first. Experts can compete finding the most nonsensical laws. Short videos can be made to explain why the law exists.

We assign a good number of test subjects to pick the least likeable ones until we have a good list of candidates unlikely to survive.

There must be a good feedback report of the terrible implications after a law is deleted.

I can see it already, naked people around camp fires, drinking booze in public, selling food after sundown, making music without a license, singing songs insulting the monarch.

How about you make a database of questions related to voting history. The algorithm matches the candidate whose history aligns closest with your selections.

The IRS now provides free tax filing.

>The IRS now provides free tax filing.

For federal taxes only... and with silly limitations that exist... because lobbying? And oh by the way, the IRS isn't actually offering anything, they'll refer you to third parties that will then make money off of you if you have anything beyond the most basic filing, and also if you want to file state taxes.

So no, they don't actually do that.

The IRS is piloting directfile.irs.gov this year, if you live in CA you can use it.

> For federal taxes only

Why would the IRS provide a filing service for state income taxes? Go ask your state government to provide this if you want it. The IRS isn't the one collecting those taxes

The problem still remains that they have a number in mind about what I owe and I'm not allowed to know it until I file. Just tell me what I owe and give me the option to approve it. The IRS provides free filing, but if your taxes are complex good luck. If you are the one who prepared them you absorb the liability when the IRS comes after you. The likes of TurboTax are still in favorable positions despite the free option now being available.

> The problem still remains that they have a number in mind about what I owe and I'm not allowed to know it until I file.

They can't. Too much of the tax code is subjective and based upon claimed circumstance. If they did know this, they wouldn't need auditors.

> If you are the one who prepared them you absorb the liability when the IRS comes after you.

The liability is typically just the difference between what you paid and what you owe. It's hard to believe most people are so bad at taxes their efforts would be mistaken for willful criminal fraud.

I'd imagine anyone who can even figure out the various forms needed and what to fill out wouldn't even get far enough to accidentally give the impression of criminal intent. It's less about the money and more about the time cost of login back and forth with the IRS. Three years ago I started a business and my taxes were very complex. LLC filing, HSA and partial savings liquidation, investments, contractors, payroll, and so on. My tax return was 4 months late over $40-something dollars, and they knew exactly what it was they just refused to tell my accountant. So we did the whole "here's what I have, is this what you want" dance. Such a complete waste of resources.

I think this sentiment is wrong.

The reason we don't have free tax preparation software (or a tax system that doesn't require that) and don't have free health care is because of competence issues. Taxes seems like a different dimension of problem, so let's leave it aside for the moment. Do we really believe that the people that work in the government here (in the US) are actually competent enough to administer a public health care system? I don't. I'd like to be convinced otherwise. Maybe you mean to say that we'd, I don't know, outlay lobbying and redirect that economic activity toward paying market salaries to people who are, in fact, competent enough to administer a public healthcare system.

I find it a bit dishonest to claim that healthcare cannot be publicly administered because of trust issues when it's cheaper everywhere else and administered publicly even in places with high corruption like Russia.

It's cheaper everywhere else because it's so incompetently (or corruptly) regulated here. If you can't demonstrate an ability to solve that problem here, putting more of the system under the same regulators seems like doing things out of order.

Pointing to Russia on costs also points to the other side of the problem: Their healthcare system is severely under-funded. That's one way to make it cost less.

>Do we really believe that the people that work in the government here (in the US) are actually competent enough to administer a public health care system? I don't. I'd like to be convinced otherwise.

Sorry for the late reply.

Belief is unnecessary. The US government has been administering Medicare[0] since 1965 -- longer than I've been alive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)