rglullis

> Most UK large companies had cafeterias in the 1980s now they don't and you have to go out to get lunch

And FAANG companies famously provide everything in campus (food, laundry, gym clubs) as perks. What's your point?

> Much cheaper to do non of these

That's a textbook example of the Doorman fallacy.

> It is much cheaper for a company to do NO training.

Only if someone else is footing the bill.

> If it has that is an obvious cost to cut.

When it costs tens of thousands per year, yes. If training became 10-100 times cheaper, "training" becomes as expensive per employee as the cost of offering cafeteria food or "gym memberships". Training would be on par of offering any other type of employment benefit, and you don't see shareholders asking for big companies to get rid of any of those.

> The results have been higher energy prices for European households.

Under state-owned infrastructure, you simply can never know the real cost of any of the services, because state-owned companies depend a lot more on subsidies that come from tax revenue than actual revenue from the service itself.

> Get rid of corporations rent-seeking on our infrastructure.

Get rid of corporations altogether. I firmly believe that any company (state owned or not) with more than 150 employees should be broken down.

> And when GP claimed education was expensive because it is done by the government

Not what I said. Read again.

This is just another way of saying that people go to school to buy access to the network, not for education itself.

Really?

Do we have 20 years already since people are allowed to set up a solar panel in their backyard and sell excess capacity to the grid?

Do we have 20 years where farmers can grow their own biodiesel to (at least) power their own machinery, or does the state giving them subsidies to let them keep growing vegetables, wine and beef without having to compete in the global market?

The way to solve this is not by giving the monopoly back to the state, but by the state enacting regulations thay allows smaller players to join the grid.

> Are trains running cheaper?

You are picking the textbook example of a natural monopoly as a way to argue against how free markets don't work?

> If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now.

Food. Consumer goods. Telecommunications services. Transportation. Clothes. All things that have gone down in absolute prices and relative amount of family income to be provided.

Education / Housing / Healthcare: all deemed "up to the State" and that takes increasingly more from people at ever diminishing returns.

We can have a long and serious conversation about how hard the Government should be involved in regulating these things, and how we could set up systems that ensure that these become universally available and not just for middle/upper class. We can even have a conversation about things that should be controlled by the Government even if it means a high cost to society. But to deny that things managed by the State are more expensive overall is a clear sign of ideological blindness.

It is the other way around. Education/Training is only expensive because it is subsidized by the State.

Seems like you read the first paragraph of my comment, but forgot to read the second.

Automation moves the bottleneck to the amount of available capital that can be deployed.

> without the human factor

Less and less humans will be needed to support these businesses.

> There is a reason no (successful) company ever said "we finished the app, now fire all the engineers and collect money forever."

1) software is very easy to get duplicated and commoditized. So the margins get tighter and tighter and companies with "finished software" will have less and less money to be collected. Big companies need constant reinvention not because customers need improvements, but to keep their lines going up in the chart.

Remember Skype before being bought by Microsoft? It was as close as I can imagine from being "finished". It could be run forever with a skeleton crew and they could be collecting a few millions of dollars forever for their service. Do you think that MS paid 7 BILLION USD because of the "finished" software?

They are not "run-of-the-mill", but they are still amoral.

They have more power and can be more damaging to society than most corporations, but they are not guided by any specific ideology other than "how can we get more money/power to ourselves?".

"Effective Altruism" is deeply ingrained in Anthropic's DNA and that makes them way more dangerous than any of the run-of-the-mill amoral corporations.