When he had finished, he got 72(!) claims for patent infringement, and he was not aware he had done anything unusual.
That's why one of the steps to a sane patent system is setting the threshold of innovation sufficiently high. A solution that someone with appropriate training in the field in question is likely to come up with given the same problem is not worthy of a patent.
And what if those ideas were also applied to medical research, instead of having big pharmas spending up to 30% of their budget in advertising against each other on competing products ?
Erm, do you really want to have medical devices/procedures/substances that are as rigorously tested as products from Adobe, Microsoft or IBM ?
I'd pass. Don't want my pacemaker to BSOD on me. Really.
Monsanto creates higher yield per acre by making the plant grow more grains and make it more resilient.
Monsanto creates higher yield per acre by making the plant immune to the total herbicide they manufacture, which allows for tons and tons of the stuff being dumped into the environment.
Actually, I'm an American citizen, and as such, have a -natural- right to possess guns.
I think that was: Since you're human, you have a natural right to possess all kinds of stuff, and since you're in the US and a US citizen, your government has been explicitly forbidden to mess with that right as far as it concerns arms.
I do not need a king to enforce my property rights.
So when that group of 20 thugs with guns shows up and takes issue in your property rights, you're going to shoot it out with them ?
Unfortunately that won't work; if it's necessary for the invention to be in production within a time limit, the potential licensee can just wait out the inventor and pay nothing; a free market is only free if both parties are able to walk away from the deal if they don't think it's worth the candle.
Well, that's perfectly possible today, just that you need to wait 20 years for the patent to expire.
Also, there's plenty of examples of other goods that will "expire" if not sold or used within a certain amount of time.
If your invention doesn't sell to one licensee, then look for another one (which might have better business plans for profiting from the thing and therefore does not want it to expire), or maybe it wasn't all that valuable in the first place.
The essence of capitalism, after all, is that you can get someone to work for you by giving them money.
And here I thought capitalism was all about private ownership of and private profiting from the means for production (i.e. the "capital").
You can get someone to work for you by giving them money in pretty much any other system that does provide some supply of goods for money, either essential (food, housing, clothing) or luxury (nice vacation, nice car, whatever). It's a bit easier if you make sure that the essential items aren't provided even in the absence of work, but not necessarily impossible if they are (people tend to want to consume above what's essential for their survival).
If you don't like Monsanto's seeds, don't buy them. It's pretty simple.
Ahahahaha *excuse me*.
You forgot to mention that you should, by all means, avoid having any plants on your field being pollinated with pollen from Monsantos plants, because if this happens, one or two of the following might happen: 1) you get slapped with a lawsuit from Monsanto for infringing on their patented stuff, 2) your seeds (yes, in some parts of the world part of the harvest is still used as seeds for the next year) will fail to germinate, forcing you to buy your seeds from somewhere else.
Yep, let's get back to doing that (in anything "anarcho-", there's no government to protect your "rights" to anything. You've got to do this yourself). So, simply put:
1. Someone takes something that you consider your property. You go find them, beat the crap out of them, take your "property" back. Alternatively hire some goons to help you.
2. Someone copies something you consider your idea. You find them, beat the crap out of them, trash their stuff, and threaten to come back to do some more of that if you think they're still copying your idea.
this is how they do it, just as if you put 12 AA's in series you would still get 1.5 volts (but many many more amps)
Erm. If you put 12 AAs in series you'll get 18 volts. If you put 12 AAs in parallel, then, in theory, you could draw a higher current. In reality, you'll just get a big huge mess as the batteries with all-so-slightly different voltages try to charge each other... so don't do that.
And there have been a couple of others that, while (intentionally or unintentionally) not causing any fatalities, were quite successful at terrorizing. Or does a "successful terrorist attack" need to kill at least X people ?
How does the company know that you are giving 4 weeks notice so you can train other employees or finish projects? How do they NOT know that you aren't going to spend the next four weeks setting up timebomb scripts or sabotaging equipment?
Anyone who is malicious and has half a working brain would, of course, do all of that evil stuff before giving any notice. Do they really think that all of their employees are malicious, incompetent, backstabbing morons ?
You could be trying to steal information or recruit your coworkers to your new job.
Yes, the free market is a cool thing, as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line. Then you should fight it tooth and claw. And you should hang on to moronic employees who can't look for better jobs themselves, but need to be recruited by a coworker. Geez. Some people in charge must really, really think that all of their employees are a bunch of dimwitted morons. Maybe they're right, too.
I can't find anything on the net that says that. Provide references.
I guess he means South Africa during the apartheid. They were lucky enough to sit on coal deposits large enough to make synthetic oil feasible, especially when actual crude oil was unavailable.
Germany synthesized a large portion of its fuels during WW2, but that was with a war economy going on so civilian use of fuels wasn't high on the priority list.
If they run it at a marginal profit, how do they need to increase taxes ? (Especially when their taxable base is larger due to increased economic activity, which leads to larger tax revenues even if the rates are kept the same or lowered ?)
Yes but they no longer have a fleet to maintain or drivers to pay. How can you suggest running at zero profit in the same post that you claim they would have to raise taxes if they no longer offered the services?
Zero profit doesn't mean incurring a loss. It means that the expenses equal the earnings. There's also the possibility of running a marginal profit, i.e. at a positive P/E ratio that would still be unacceptable for any for-profit company.
According to what? If you would like to argue that competition doesn't reduce cost to the customer, feel free, but now you're just pulling excuses out of thin air.
Did you read and undestand what I wrote ? I wasn't talking about cost. I was talking about coverage.
So are you saying that my income is not my property, or that I have no right to my property?
Your income after taxes is your property. The government has the right to tax you. If you have any issues with the amount they tax you for, well, get a better accountant or take your case to court.
Why do these debates always lead to the other person saying "move to another country if you don't like it"? Has your logic simply hit a wall? You can't say your money is not being taken by force at gunpoint when the only choices given are to "move to another country" or be jailed.
Why is moving to another country so bad ? That's why pretty much any non-repressive goverment gives you that option: Get a passport and get outta here (well, if you're from the US, you also need to ditch your citizenship if you want to avoid being taxed abroad. Other countries are not that greedy.). Your money is being taken by force at gunpoint only when you're not given the option to leave, just like it was the case is many former communist countries. If you hate how your city/state/country works so much that you cannot stand it anymore, vote with your feet. It's a perfectly valid choice that many, many people have taken and are still taking today. Don't whine if it's too inconvenient for you.
And that's nice that you have ideas about what your money should be spent on. But you should not expect others to just fork over their money to support your ideas.
Sorry, that's how a representative government works. If you don't like how the money is spent, vote for different representatives. If you can't convince enough people to spend money the way you think is right, then, well, you can grumble or take the option mentioned above.
In the U.S., the Bill of Rights prevents the government from depriving anyone of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
A tax law is perfectly good due process. And the amendment is more about trials and punishments than taxes, anyway. If you have an issue with a tax law, you can take your case to court (also part of due process).
Public buses are cheap because they get the rest of your ticket's cost through taxes.
No, they could also run it a zero profit (not needing any subsidies) or at a significantly lower profit margin than any company could accept. It's not nonsense and not a circle, sorry.
If the city sold off their busing to private companies, the ticket price would probably go up, but taxes would go down.
If the city did that, then economic activity (i.e. taxable stuff) and tax revenue would go down - much more than the city could save by getting rid of their public transportation network. They would have to raise taxes to keep the same revenue stream coming in.
And with privatization comes competition to reduce the price to the customer
... and a network that makes a sieve look perfectly able to hold water.
The point is to stop violating everyone's rights.
Sorry. There's no right not to be taxed. Maybe you want to move to a country where government doesn't really exist and see how you like it there ? And I'd much rather have "government" (a nebulous term. They're fairly elected representative. Maybe you should go back to that, too) spend my taxes on keeping the air I breather somewhat cleaner and the roads somewhat less congestest than on the gazillion of other things "government" usually blows money on.
The government has no right to take by force a percentage of anyone's productivity to make a stranger's bus ticket seem cheaper.
And that's written down where ? (sorry, Ayn Rand books don't count as official documents)
That's a nice fantasy, however I am sure were they able to, the same companies that provide taxi services would also want to provide private busing.
No, they don't want to. Because a taxi service has way, way higher profit margins than a busing service. Lower fares aside, just think about the additional logistics: Where are you going to park a fleet of buses in a large city ? You can probably make more revenue off that space if you rent it out/turn it into offices/whatever than using it as a bus parking lot.
There are plenty of private bus companies where I live, but none of them provides regular service within a city - you call them when you need a bunch of people moved several tens to hundreds of miles. Sometimes (in times of heavy demand) the city contracts them to augment the fleet of line buses, though.
Why can't a private company offer bus and subway services?
Because they cannot reap the monetary benefits of running a solid public transportation system that a city can. Hence they need to make all of their money from fares and maybe some advertising, and a private company needs to be _profitable_ (i.e. no loss, but not profit is still not acceptable). Hence they'll be way to expensive, and their network will have huge holes in it (since they need to leave out areas that are less profitable), etc.
A city can run a public transportation network on a not-for-profit basis and still reap huge benefits (increased economic activity, being more attractive for people and businesses, etc).
And a private subway service ? With all the infrastructure built by the company itself ? That's a sure way to be out of business before even starting the service. These networks take years, heck, decades to build. Try doing that as a company that mostly looks at the next quarter.
What better way to get more buses on the road than to allow busing by competing private companies.
Pick a city of your choice that doesn't have a public transportation network yet (I'm sure there are some) and start a bus company if you truly believe in the economic viability of such an idea. Hey, you might even be the first company in that city and not have to deal with any pesky competitors for quite a while.
We currently pay about $3.50/gal in the US which is the highest it's ever been.
An we pay about 1.50€/l at the pump here. At an exchange rate of $1.55/€ and 3.78l/gal, this comes out to roughly $8.79/gal - and still, the gasoline itself costs the same, because the 1.50€ can be divided into:
Wholesale price + profit is 0.605€/l, which comes out to about $3.54/gal (and this is for premium gasoline, which most cars around here use). If the exchange rate wasn't as completely out of whack as it is right now, that last number would be significantly lower (for most stuff, a realistic exchange rate would be about $1.10/€, with the current rate, pretty much everything in the States is a real bargain right now for anyone from the other side of the pond).
Any person who can extrapolate from past and present data that you're much, much more likely than not to end up with poor, superstitious, backwater shithole country than an wealthy, educated libertarian paradise if you do.
Yet another unsupported assertion. If the parents want them to go to school, they will make sure they are actually going. It is not the responsibility for the government to take care of everyone's kids.
Your reply has nothing to do with my "assertion". There's enough parents who just wouldn't care, or want the kids to earn their own living when they turn 8,... and if your parents were that type, then it means you just lost the lottery and end up as an unskilled worker in a shithole ?
Yet more unsupported assertions. Your common sense might make you believe such, but that is not evidence.
Oh... do you have any hard evidence of the contrary ? I can back up my assertion with plenty of examples from the past and present. Education's optional, country is a shithole with lots of crime. Works in the majority of the cases.
Another unsupported assertion. The way you talk, one would think that there were no such things as taxis, chauffered limos, etc, or that there is some huge monopoly on these services. No profitability, no competition, right? Clearly you're wrong somewhere in your logic.
No, I can do the math. A 6.50 € public transportatition ticket can get me to hundreds of interesting places withing a 20 km radius from where I live (and back again), a 6.50 € taxi ride can get me... uh, maybe to some place I could easily walk to.
Think again.
Rainless summer don't mean more hours of sunlight per day.
Just less rainfall.
You must be living in a weird place where it can be overcast for days without a drop of rain... most places aren't that way.
We've had a pretty much rainless summer a while ago, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky for weeks. Output from PV panels during those two months was exceptionally high. Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, had to operate with reduced power since they were reaching the limit on how much they're allowed to heat the river they draw their cooling water from.
Care to provide an example, as you are the one making the assertion?
I'm reluctant to, because what follows is usually a whole list of whines about how statistics are useless, this and that statistic isn't a useful indictator, that the site is biased and whatnot. That's why I will usually give people the freedom to chose their own source of information and see what they come up with. There's plents of sources available, pick the one you consider most trustworthy.
Look at the bottom of the list (lower mortality is better, at least as far as I'm concerned). Among the 30 countries, I count 20 that I know have public healthcare. The other 10 I have no real information about.
What evidence do you have that public healthcare increases overall longterm health,
Pull up any halfway meaningful health statistic you like, and look at the top 20 or 30 countries. Count how many of them have some form of public healthcare.
What is different about paying the schools directly for their services, other than being forced to pay through taxation?
If you make school mandatory, then you'll have to force people to pay for it... somehow. Doesn't make a really big difference if it's through taxes or fees, just that you might end up with different amounts in different locations if you don't force the schools to keep their fees at a certain level.
If you make school optional... well, you'll end up with a lot of uneducated people who'll just skip school for some reason or another (don't care, don't want to pay for it, would like to attend but cannot pay for it, etc). Having a mass of uneducated people is generally bad for an economy (because they're less productive and more prone to becoming criminals), and you'll end up with enough of them to cover the low-wage crappy jobs even if you make school mandatory.
As for public transport... why can't a private company offer the same services?
Because a private company needs to make its profits from the fares alone. A city can accept to make little or no profit from the fares, because it reaps additional benefits from running public transport (increased economic activity of businesses in the city (which leads to higher tax revenues even if the tax rates are kept the same), less wear of the roads (which means less cost for maintenance), etc).
Are you saying it's impossible for a private company to make buses and put them on the roads and fill them with people, or for them to make a subway system?
No. But the problem isn't building the infrastructure, it's running the system once the infrastructure is up.
No, nobody wants to pay for them because they're already paying ridiculously high taxes, and can only imagine the corresponding private services costing even more, despite the fact that competition reduces the cost to the customer. There is no competition in the arena of public services.
If there are no profits to be made, there will be no competition. Ergo, no privatized public transportation, everyone has to drive cars again, wastes a lot of time being stuck in traffic and looking for parking lots, is forced to spend money on car upkeep if they want to get farther away from their home than walking/biking distance, etc.
And you should take them to court if they do so - they will be punished and you will be compensated. What you should not do is petition the government to violate everyone's rights for the sake of proactivity.
Great. So once you've got cancer or something similarly nasty (I assume that your body is your property, but the air anywhere outside the land you own isn't, and even on the land you own it's somewhat questionable if it is), then you can sue, hope that survive long enough to see the end of the lawsuit, hope that your lawyer is more competent than their lawyer, and die as a rich (or poor, depending on the outcome) person.
Thanks, I'll rather have some degree of proactivity. Some things just simply cannot be compensated for with the payout from a lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
... wants to have the cake and eat it, too.
That's why one of the steps to a sane patent system is setting the threshold of innovation sufficiently high. A solution that someone with appropriate training in the field in question is likely to come up with given the same problem is not worthy of a patent.
Erm, do you really want to have medical devices/procedures/substances that are as rigorously tested as products from Adobe, Microsoft or IBM ?
I'd pass. Don't want my pacemaker to BSOD on me. Really.
Monsanto creates higher yield per acre by making the plant immune to the total herbicide they manufacture, which allows for tons and tons of the stuff being dumped into the environment.
Here, fixed that for you.
I think that was: Since you're human, you have a natural right to possess all kinds of stuff, and since you're in the US and a US citizen, your government has been explicitly forbidden to mess with that right as far as it concerns arms.
I do not need a king to enforce my property rights.
So when that group of 20 thugs with guns shows up and takes issue in your property rights, you're going to shoot it out with them ?
Well, the outcome was that the farmer in question got sued by Monsanto, and Monsanto won. Neat how this works, huh ?
Well, that's perfectly possible today, just that you need to wait 20 years for the patent to expire.
Also, there's plenty of examples of other goods that will "expire" if not sold or used within a certain amount of time.
If your invention doesn't sell to one licensee, then look for another one (which might have better business plans for profiting from the thing and therefore does not want it to expire), or maybe it wasn't all that valuable in the first place.
And here I thought capitalism was all about private ownership of and private profiting from the means for production (i.e. the "capital").
You can get someone to work for you by giving them money in pretty much any other system that does provide some supply of goods for money, either essential (food, housing, clothing) or luxury (nice vacation, nice car, whatever). It's a bit easier if you make sure that the essential items aren't provided even in the absence of work, but not necessarily impossible if they are (people tend to want to consume above what's essential for their survival).
Ahahahaha *excuse me*.
You forgot to mention that you should, by all means, avoid having any plants on your field being pollinated with pollen from Monsantos plants, because if this happens, one or two of the following might happen: 1) you get slapped with a lawsuit from Monsanto for infringing on their patented stuff, 2) your seeds (yes, in some parts of the world part of the harvest is still used as seeds for the next year) will fail to germinate, forcing you to buy your seeds from somewhere else.
Yep, let's get back to doing that (in anything "anarcho-", there's no government to protect your "rights" to anything. You've got to do this yourself). So, simply put:
1. Someone takes something that you consider your property. You go find them, beat the crap out of them, take your "property" back. Alternatively hire some goons to help you.
2. Someone copies something you consider your idea. You find them, beat the crap out of them, trash their stuff, and threaten to come back to do some more of that if you think they're still copying your idea.
3. Someone does something you don't like. See #2.
Welcome to anarchy.
Erm. If you put 12 AAs in series you'll get 18 volts. If you put 12 AAs in parallel, then, in theory, you could draw a higher current. In reality, you'll just get a big huge mess as the batteries with all-so-slightly different voltages try to charge each other ... so don't do that.
The news seem to disagree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents%2C_2002
And there have been a couple of others that, while (intentionally or unintentionally) not causing any fatalities, were quite successful at terrorizing. Or does a "successful terrorist attack" need to kill at least X people ?
Anyone who is malicious and has half a working brain would, of course, do all of that evil stuff before giving any notice. Do they really think that all of their employees are malicious, incompetent, backstabbing morons ?
You could be trying to steal information or recruit your coworkers to your new job.
Yes, the free market is a cool thing, as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line. Then you should fight it tooth and claw. And you should hang on to moronic employees who can't look for better jobs themselves, but need to be recruited by a coworker. Geez. Some people in charge must really, really think that all of their employees are a bunch of dimwitted morons. Maybe they're right, too.
Rumor has it that step 4 has something to do with becoming a highly-paid consultant for the old company.
I guess he means South Africa during the apartheid. They were lucky enough to sit on coal deposits large enough to make synthetic oil feasible, especially when actual crude oil was unavailable.
Germany synthesized a large portion of its fuels during WW2, but that was with a war economy going on so civilian use of fuels wasn't high on the priority list.
If they run it at a marginal profit, how do they need to increase taxes ? (Especially when their taxable base is larger due to increased economic activity, which leads to larger tax revenues even if the rates are kept the same or lowered ?) Yes but they no longer have a fleet to maintain or drivers to pay. How can you suggest running at zero profit in the same post that you claim they would have to raise taxes if they no longer offered the services?
Zero profit doesn't mean incurring a loss. It means that the expenses equal the earnings. There's also the possibility of running a marginal profit, i.e. at a positive P/E ratio that would still be unacceptable for any for-profit company.
According to what? If you would like to argue that competition doesn't reduce cost to the customer, feel free, but now you're just pulling excuses out of thin air.
Did you read and undestand what I wrote ? I wasn't talking about cost. I was talking about coverage.
So are you saying that my income is not my property, or that I have no right to my property?
Your income after taxes is your property. The government has the right to tax you. If you have any issues with the amount they tax you for, well, get a better accountant or take your case to court.
Why do these debates always lead to the other person saying "move to another country if you don't like it"? Has your logic simply hit a wall? You can't say your money is not being taken by force at gunpoint when the only choices given are to "move to another country" or be jailed.
Why is moving to another country so bad ? That's why pretty much any non-repressive goverment gives you that option: Get a passport and get outta here (well, if you're from the US, you also need to ditch your citizenship if you want to avoid being taxed abroad. Other countries are not that greedy.). Your money is being taken by force at gunpoint only when you're not given the option to leave, just like it was the case is many former communist countries. If you hate how your city/state/country works so much that you cannot stand it anymore, vote with your feet. It's a perfectly valid choice that many, many people have taken and are still taking today. Don't whine if it's too inconvenient for you.
And that's nice that you have ideas about what your money should be spent on. But you should not expect others to just fork over their money to support your ideas.
Sorry, that's how a representative government works. If you don't like how the money is spent, vote for different representatives. If you can't convince enough people to spend money the way you think is right, then, well, you can grumble or take the option mentioned above.
In the U.S., the Bill of Rights prevents the government from depriving anyone of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
A tax law is perfectly good due process. And the amendment is more about trials and punishments than taxes, anyway. If you have an issue with a tax law, you can take your case to court (also part of due process).
No, they could also run it a zero profit (not needing any subsidies) or at a significantly lower profit margin than any company could accept. It's not nonsense and not a circle, sorry.
If the city sold off their busing to private companies, the ticket price would probably go up, but taxes would go down.
If the city did that, then economic activity (i.e. taxable stuff) and tax revenue would go down - much more than the city could save by getting rid of their public transportation network. They would have to raise taxes to keep the same revenue stream coming in.
And with privatization comes competition to reduce the price to the customer
The point is to stop violating everyone's rights.
Sorry. There's no right not to be taxed. Maybe you want to move to a country where government doesn't really exist and see how you like it there ? And I'd much rather have "government" (a nebulous term. They're fairly elected representative. Maybe you should go back to that, too) spend my taxes on keeping the air I breather somewhat cleaner and the roads somewhat less congestest than on the gazillion of other things "government" usually blows money on.
The government has no right to take by force a percentage of anyone's productivity to make a stranger's bus ticket seem cheaper.
And that's written down where ? (sorry, Ayn Rand books don't count as official documents)
No, they don't want to. Because a taxi service has way, way higher profit margins than a busing service. Lower fares aside, just think about the additional logistics: Where are you going to park a fleet of buses in a large city ? You can probably make more revenue off that space if you rent it out/turn it into offices/whatever than using it as a bus parking lot.
There are plenty of private bus companies where I live, but none of them provides regular service within a city - you call them when you need a bunch of people moved several tens to hundreds of miles. Sometimes (in times of heavy demand) the city contracts them to augment the fleet of line buses, though.
Why can't a private company offer bus and subway services?
Because they cannot reap the monetary benefits of running a solid public transportation system that a city can. Hence they need to make all of their money from fares and maybe some advertising, and a private company needs to be _profitable_ (i.e. no loss, but not profit is still not acceptable). Hence they'll be way to expensive, and their network will have huge holes in it (since they need to leave out areas that are less profitable), etc.
A city can run a public transportation network on a not-for-profit basis and still reap huge benefits (increased economic activity, being more attractive for people and businesses, etc).
And a private subway service ? With all the infrastructure built by the company itself ? That's a sure way to be out of business before even starting the service. These networks take years, heck, decades to build. Try doing that as a company that mostly looks at the next quarter.
What better way to get more buses on the road than to allow busing by competing private companies.
Pick a city of your choice that doesn't have a public transportation network yet (I'm sure there are some) and start a bus company if you truly believe in the economic viability of such an idea. Hey, you might even be the first company in that city and not have to deal with any pesky competitors for quite a while.
Yes it is. Let me demonstrate below.
We currently pay about $3.50/gal in the US which is the highest it's ever been.
An we pay about 1.50€/l at the pump here. At an exchange rate of $1.55/€ and 3.78l/gal, this comes out to roughly $8.79/gal - and still, the gasoline itself costs the same, because the 1.50€ can be divided into:
0.501€ Mineral oil tax
0.24€ Value-added tax
0.154€ Eco-tax (yup)
0.51€ Wholesale price
0.095€ Profit
Wholesale price + profit is 0.605€/l, which comes out to about $3.54/gal (and this is for premium gasoline, which most cars around here use). If the exchange rate wasn't as completely out of whack as it is right now, that last number would be significantly lower (for most stuff, a realistic exchange rate would be about $1.10/€, with the current rate, pretty much everything in the States is a real bargain right now for anyone from the other side of the pond).
Any person who can extrapolate from past and present data that you're much, much more likely than not to end up with poor, superstitious, backwater shithole country than an wealthy, educated libertarian paradise if you do.
Yet another unsupported assertion. If the parents want them to go to school, they will make sure they are actually going. It is not the responsibility for the government to take care of everyone's kids.
Your reply has nothing to do with my "assertion". There's enough parents who just wouldn't care, or want the kids to earn their own living when they turn 8, ... and if your parents were that type, then it means you just lost the lottery and end up as an unskilled worker in a shithole ?
Yet more unsupported assertions. Your common sense might make you believe such, but that is not evidence.
Oh ... do you have any hard evidence of the contrary ? I can back up my assertion with plenty of examples from the past and present. Education's optional, country is a shithole with lots of crime. Works in the majority of the cases.
Another unsupported assertion. The way you talk, one would think that there were no such things as taxis, chauffered limos, etc, or that there is some huge monopoly on these services. No profitability, no competition, right? Clearly you're wrong somewhere in your logic.
No, I can do the math. A 6.50 € public transportatition ticket can get me to hundreds of interesting places withing a 20 km radius from where I live (and back again), a 6.50 € taxi ride can get me ... uh, maybe to some place I could easily walk to.
You must be living in a weird place where it can be overcast for days without a drop of rain ... most places aren't that way.
We've had a pretty much rainless summer a while ago, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky for weeks. Output from PV panels during those two months was exceptionally high. Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, had to operate with reduced power since they were reaching the limit on how much they're allowed to heat the river they draw their cooling water from.
I'm reluctant to, because what follows is usually a whole list of whines about how statistics are useless, this and that statistic isn't a useful indictator, that the site is biased and whatnot. That's why I will usually give people the freedom to chose their own source of information and see what they come up with. There's plents of sources available, pick the one you consider most trustworthy.
But, here's one:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_mat_mor-health-maternal-mortality
Look at the bottom of the list (lower mortality is better, at least as far as I'm concerned). Among the 30 countries, I count 20 that I know have public healthcare. The other 10 I have no real information about.
Pull up any halfway meaningful health statistic you like, and look at the top 20 or 30 countries. Count how many of them have some form of public healthcare.
If you make school mandatory, then you'll have to force people to pay for it ... somehow. Doesn't make a really big difference if it's through taxes or fees, just that you might end up with different amounts in different locations if you don't force the schools to keep their fees at a certain level.
If you make school optional ... well, you'll end up with a lot of uneducated people who'll just skip school for some reason or another (don't care, don't want to pay for it, would like to attend but cannot pay for it, etc). Having a mass of uneducated people is generally bad for an economy (because they're less productive and more prone to becoming criminals), and you'll end up with enough of them to cover the low-wage crappy jobs even if you make school mandatory.
As for public transport... why can't a private company offer the same services?
Because a private company needs to make its profits from the fares alone. A city can accept to make little or no profit from the fares, because it reaps additional benefits from running public transport (increased economic activity of businesses in the city (which leads to higher tax revenues even if the tax rates are kept the same), less wear of the roads (which means less cost for maintenance), etc).
Are you saying it's impossible for a private company to make buses and put them on the roads and fill them with people, or for them to make a subway system?
No. But the problem isn't building the infrastructure, it's running the system once the infrastructure is up.
No, nobody wants to pay for them because they're already paying ridiculously high taxes, and can only imagine the corresponding private services costing even more, despite the fact that competition reduces the cost to the customer. There is no competition in the arena of public services.
If there are no profits to be made, there will be no competition. Ergo, no privatized public transportation, everyone has to drive cars again, wastes a lot of time being stuck in traffic and looking for parking lots, is forced to spend money on car upkeep if they want to get farther away from their home than walking/biking distance, etc.
Great. So once you've got cancer or something similarly nasty (I assume that your body is your property, but the air anywhere outside the land you own isn't, and even on the land you own it's somewhat questionable if it is), then you can sue, hope that survive long enough to see the end of the lawsuit, hope that your lawyer is more competent than their lawyer, and die as a rich (or poor, depending on the outcome) person.
Thanks, I'll rather have some degree of proactivity. Some things just simply cannot be compensated for with the payout from a lawsuit.