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A natural monopoly occurs when the most efficient number of firms in the industry is one.

A natural monopoly will typically have very high fixed costs meaning that it impractical to have more than one firm producing the good.

The author gives as an example of a natural monopoly, tap water. Sure, one could have multiple water companies each with its own very expensive set of pipes provide water competitively, but it would be in net more inefficient and costly than having a single provider. And each additional provider competes over a fixed slice of market, quickly becoming unprofitable.

In my view, actually having a natural monopoly is a strong argument against using a market solution and it is fundamental to a lot of situational anti-market arguments. But OTOH, markets are really useful in general. If one can figure how to make a natural monopoly not so, then that allows us to use this powerful tool.

So how can we turn a natural monopoly into something else? One way is decomposition. One doesn't actually eliminate the natural monopoly, but instead separate out the part that isn't competitive from the the rest. For example, in our tap water example, maybe the full piping can't be replicated economically, but it can be separated out from the supplying of tap water. One would then need to replicate water mains (so that one is guaranteed to receive water from the desired source) along with some sort of switching system to be able to shift water from one main to another. The rest of the plumbing either becomes its own natural monopoly or owned by the parties receiving the water.

It still could be too costly for multiple parties to compete, but the cost of infrastructure and barrier to entry has declined considerably.

Another way is to make costs of entry and operation much cheaper. If laying those pipes becomes an insignificant cost, then suddenly multiple firms could compete even with completely duplicated systems. The pipes become a minor economic issue rather than a primary and effective obstacle to competition.

So let's look at those two approaches with respect to the high speed rail problem. Arik made great observations, such as:

And when you have a monopolistic good (as train tracks are, there's a tremendous initial investment to clear and construct lines, it makes no sense to do the whole thing *twice* plus they would have to cross each other at times) you have the best argument for collective ownership.

or here

Like I say, just imagine trying to complete a transcontinental railroad without using monopoly (state) power.

Forget about completing it, try to just purchase the land necessary. Remember, no government handouts, no eminent domain, you have to come to a deal with each and every landowner on the path. If one says no, then you have to backtrack and reroute to avoid him. Each time you reroute you have to go to a less desirable route. If you have to do it often, you wind up with a snake track instead of a nice straight line.

Here, decomposition can come to our rescue. Acquiring land for a rail system is a hard problem, but it's a hard problem that only needs to be done once. The government needs to be involved at this stage, but they don't need to be acting for a single party (themselves or others). So instead of merely acquiring land for a single rail system, acquire it to accommodate multiple rail systems. Government can also reuse the various other right of ways they have (roads, aqueducts, etc).

Second, with actual competition in such markets, we have an opportunity to attack the cost of the infrastructure. Currently, there's at best weak incentive in lowering the cost of high speed rail. Most customers will spend the same money whether they get a lot of train or very little. Any private customers would either have niche markets (like say Disney World and some airports) or have to worry about competing head on with a subsidized government version.

A few of the most dysfunction projects have no incentive to deliver a working system at all. The California project is a great example, since it is likely that it will be discontinued before anything concrete is done, just due to the lack of funding sources and the huge length of time before any serious urban areas are connected to the rail system.

To summarize, markets are such a powerful tool, it makes little sense to rule them out completely even in a natural monopoly situation. Instead, it is better to structure the system in such a way that parts which can't be reduced to a competitive market are separated from the parts that can be so reduced.

I called the nursing home where I and my father had visited my aunt a year ago, to ask if she was still there and how she was doing. They would tell me nothing. Claimed that HIPAA forbade that. But HIPAA says no such thing. They are wrong. I called back and tried to inform them that by HIPAA rules, it was okay to answer. They were rude. Tried to hog the floor, and when I would not go along with that, talked over me, then hung up. I called again.

They changed their story, said the privacy requirement was actually in the contract with their residents. Proudly claimed that they take their privacy seriously. I began to wonder if they were covering up something. I called the police and asked them to do a welfare check. The police did so, and told me my aunt was still there and seemed to be okay.

Having come from the Unix world, 25 or 30 years ago, it was obvious to use Linux on PCs. I had Windows as well, and some years I used Windows more, other years Linux more. Frankly, both sucked, in different ways. In the early days, Linux driver support was pretty awful. Meanwhile, Windows was pretty much a rattle-trap catastrophe with malware and bluescreens. Both have improved over the years. Probably 10 years ago, I decided to go basically full-time Linux, except for Adobe applications and games.

With Steam, even most of my games now work on Linux, and I thankfully no longer need any Adobe applications. I haven't booted into Windows for months.

So...is Linux trying to drive me back into the arms of Microsoft? A couple of months ago, I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04. On both of my machines, Ubuntu now starts up with error messages, some system problem or other, and asks if it should report this to Canonical.

Installed printers randomly appear and disappear. Plugging in external hard drives or other devices - sometimes they appear, sometimes not. Re-plug and pray. Just now, I rebooted my PC after an update (which seems necessary more and more often - shades of Redmond), only to have the machine freeze. Hard reset, reboot, and it seems to be back. On my laptop, suspend/resume no longer works, even though it worked just fine under previous versions.

Where's that Linux reliability? I just want to get stuff done - I don't have time or desire to switch to a different distro or fiddle with settings or chase driver problems. I just want it to work.

When the shooting at the Highlands Ranch, CO, Stem school happened, the world reacted in shock and horror that yet another student used a firearm to hurt or kill other students in a place that is supposed to be one of the safest places for your child to be.

News agencies across the country immediately took action, and activist groups began planning events to promote gun control. One such event occurred at the very location the shooting occurred. Students were duped into attending, believing it was a vigil of some kind, but walked away when they found out that the atrocity they endured was being politicized.

Frustrated, crying and angry, #STEMschool shooting victims hold an impromptu vigil in the rain Wednesday after leaving a gun-control vigil they felt inappropriately politicized their trauma. (They asked that I not photograph their faces close up, and I respected their wishes.) pic.twitter.com/cksRXGtYQA

        — Trevor Hughes (@TrevorHughes) May 9, 2019

Facebook posts from concerned people dotted the social media site and Twitter was ablaze with anti-gun rhetoric once again.

And then it all suddenly went silent.

Now, the media seems far less interested in the shooting. An odd turnaround for the media who take every opportunity to hammer home the idea that guns are the problem in this nation, not something else. Why? It’s because the identity of the shooters was released, and it doesn’t fall in line with any of the approved columns for a media-based attack.

They found that one of the shooters is gay and another is transgendered and biologically female, as NBC reported in the update about her. Even NBC buried these facts in their own report about it, choosing instead to call the gay shooter a “bully” instead of highlighting their identities and backgrounds first:

The suspected shooter, Devon Erickson, “would whisper, like get really close and kinda put his arm around you, and whisper in your ear, ‘don’t come to school tomorrow,'” said Kevin Cole, a former student of STEM School Highlands Ranch, during an interview on “Today.”

        Erickson, 18, and a juvenile, who police identify as a girl but who prefers male pronouns, are accused of entering the K-12 school with handguns Tuesday. NBC News is not identifying the juvenile suspect.

One of the shooters also expressed his hatred for Christians according to Heavy, which is also unfitting for reports as Christians are always the bad guys in the story.

“You know what I hate? All these Christians who hate gays, yet in the bible, it says in Deuteronomy 17:12-13, if someone doesn’t do what their priest tells them to do, they are supposed to die. It has plenty of crazy stuff like that, but all they get out of it is ‘ewwwwww gays,’” wrote Erickson in a Facebook post.

There was even anti-Christian messaging spraypainted on the shooter’s car before the attack, and the words “F*** SOCIETY.”

Car towed from #stemshooting suspect's home apparently has "F*** SOCIETY" spray painted on the side. Also "666" and a what looks like a pentagram sprayed on the hood. pic.twitter.com/e6QX3lq4v3

        — John Fenton (@higuysimjohn) May 8, 2019

Worst of all, the shooter appeared to be a Democrat who posted memes and messages from the hard-left Facebook group “Occupy Democrats.”

None of this falls in line with what the shooter is supposed to be according to what the media likes to tell us. For mainstream press, the shooter is supposed to be white, male, straight, extremely right-leaning, and bonus points if he’s supposedly Christian. However, both of these shooters fall into their most protected groups.

Judging by how the media coverage and subsequent fallout from school shootings have gone in the past, the media seems absolutely silent in comparison now, but it’s easy to see why. All of its usual strawmen have been stripped away and its left with nothing but the cold reality that there was something mentally wrong with the two shooters.

All the shooters throughout history, when put together, are a diverse lot. They range from white to Middle-Eastern, to black. They’re left, right, white-supremacists and anti-Christian, gay and straight, women and men. While some killers tend to share more similarities with other killers, the point is clear: It’s not just what your background is.

There was clearly something wrong in the heads of the people who engage in these murders. However, the media doesn’t seem to be interested in investigating the demonstrable fact. They’ve now, for the most part, walked away from the Denver Stem school story. The students don’t seem to be as into making a political spectacle as some of the Parkland students were, and the shooters don’t fit the narrative.

The media loves bloodshed, but not bloodshed it can’t use. It doesn’t care about how safe you are, and I’d venture to say that it waits with bated breath for the next opportunity. I wish I was being hyperbolic, but the media has clearly demonstrated that I’m not.

https://www.redstate.com/brandon_morse/2019/05/11/medias-sudden-disinterest-denver-stem-school-shooting-proves-greater-interests-agendas/

A reminder of why we're here., my comments on the infamous Beta.

Feel free to post your motives for bailing on "that other site" below.

There are many reasons. Who owns who is unclear.

Some people in a rural area say they keep a cat because: "it keeps the vermin down".

What does that mean exactly?

1. the cat reduces the population of vermin?

2. the cat has a remarkable ability to not vomit up the vermin?

The google definition of vermin, and especially the google images page for vermin, would suggest that meaning 2 is what is intended by that "keeps the vermin down" phrase.

Since the story has already hit the HoF, I assume you lot are relatively aware of what went down with aristarchus and myself regarding his "control the narrative and push other discussion down the page with lots of top-level AC posts that nobody can tell are all by the same person" tactic and me modding the posts Spam for it.

Well, martyb/Bytram gave me a good chewing on and reversed the mods because that particular type of spam isn't covered in the moderator guidelines. And he's absolutely correct. I maintain that it definitely should be and something covering it may very well be added to the moderator guidelines soon but it was not there when I did the moderating.

We'd barely finished discussing it in a private, unlogged staff channel when Azuma Hazuki was out in the main channel assuming that I did the moderating and that I wouldn't be held accountable for it even though she got mod banned for misusing the Spam mod by myself earlier. She actually had something of a point mixed in all the angry. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. So I mod banned myself.

Feel free to have a good laugh at me and look for a story on the moderator guidelines in the next month or two.

I heard someone talking about The English Channel?

Then I realized. My cable package does not include The English Channel!

Is there somewhere it is available streaming online? (for free, of course, because socialism, and/or entitlement)

If I lived in England and did not get The English Channel I would be so mad I would swim South all the way to France!

(for extra credit one could try swimming North all the way to France)