Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "" video.

  1.  @raylexa  nice idea to pay a nominal amount, but a millenium of law says you cannot do it. as for fines, for most companies, that is viewed as just the cost of doing business. again you would need to change the law so that the figures for profit and loss did not include fines, which would then be deducted from the amount used to pay bonuses and dividends, and you would also need to bar them from passing the cost of fines on to customers. every system of management for companies has strengths and weaknesses, and you need to find which ones you are comfortable with, and figure out how to change from one to the other within the constraints of econ9m8cs and law.
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  2. the fines should be much higher, and should be deducted from the dividend and bonus pot after taxes are paid. they should also have to be placed prominently in the report for shareholders, so that they have to see why their returns on investment are down. they should also not be allowed to get the money from customers by just adding the fine amounts to prices. some form of generalised anti profiteering legislation probably would not hurt either.
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  3. actually, the rail and bt showed how it should be done. keep the infrastructure which has to be shared as a nationally owned private company to make sure it gets investment from the customer facing part, and require all customer facing businesses to buy access from the infrastructure part. it worked very well for bt, not as well implemented for trains. as has been pointed out, regional companies for infrastructure do not provide any competition, and it just does not work. the only solution to that is for the government to have to become a majority shareholder so that they can hold the board to account, which is where the problem is. then you change the law, to make it so that problem parts of the network are held to standards, and any part which persistently fails to reach good enough standards can be compulsorily purchased by the infrastructure company, or their competitors if the infrastructure company does not do it, which can then bill the customer facing part for the services provided. apart from the renationalisation part, this is how wired telecoms, electricity, and rail all work, providing real investment in the infrastructure.
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  4. fine, how do you pay for it? and bear in mind that the shareholders have a legal right to get paid for their shares, and every penny you use to buy the shares is a penny you cannot use to upgrade the infrastructure you have now bought. whether you like them or not, those policies were brought in to try and address major structural issues with how nationalised industries were owned, managed, and run. they had to get every penny either directly from the customer, giving high prices, or compete with everyone else trying to get a piece of this years budget allocation. neither approach worked at all, so you had decades of chronic under investment. turning then into private companies gave them the ability to borrow for capital investment. making them public limited companies was torymdogma, which has been mentioned as not really working, but simply renationalising them is very expensive and does not really solve the structural problems.
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  5. you are mixing up being nationalised where it cannot borrow money and privatised where it can versus being a private company owned by the government where there are no shareholders and being a plc where there are some. both nationalised companies and plcs have the issue of an overly short term mindset due to their organising principles for funding. most infrastructure services like water and electricity have short term costs with long term benefits, which don't fit with the short term rewards for chancellors, directors, or bankers.
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  6. you need to distinguish between the three states an industry can be in, and the problems and advantages that go with them. pure nationalised industries in the uk can get their money directly from the customer, or have to fight for their share of money from the budget every year. as they cannot borrow money for capital spending, it leaves them chronically under funded, which lead to their privatisation in the first place. plc's traded on the stock exchange have by law to try and maximise the returns for their shareholders, which can result in them draining as much money out of the business as possible. the directors don't have much choice, as they will be replaced if they do not deliver enough dividends, and in return they get generous bonuses. this is what lead to a lot of the nationalisations in the first place, as these husinesses were viewed as too important to be allowed to fail. the other option is a simple private company, where the government is the sole owner. this has the advantages of a plc, without the disadvantages, but chancellors love selling them off for short term gains. to make these work long term, you would need some form of legislative constraint on what you can do with the private company or plc, to avoid short term policies.
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  7. the problem with just renationalising them is that there are two problems, under investment, and excess bonuses and dividends. nationalisation only solves the second one, while making the first one a lot worse.
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