I'd feel better about this if they weren't charging people thousands for the batteries. As it is, this looks like a scam by utility companies to force their costs onto consumers and charge them for it on top of that. People should be being paid by the utility for storing, hosting, and allowing access to the power company's distributed infrastructure.
It's not as if the batteries people are paying for become their property, or are only for the homeowner's benefit. The utility company has the right to use that power however they want at any time including the "right to use all the energy in the battery". The homeowner also has to allow contractors, subcontractors, or third-parties onto their property. Physical access aside, they also have to allow the utility free access to their network and free use of their internet connection/bandwidth. The utility will not compensate homeowners for any of that.
Homeowners must also agree to install the utility company's cell phone apps/software. I'd bet those apps are collecting data and probably pushing ads too. They have to agree to the “Customer Privacy” terms, which will only be shown to them "upon installation of the Equipment".
The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which, if they were doing their job in the first place, should be extremely rare occurrences), but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.
The utility also requires homeowners to agree to terms that state the utility will not be liable for any damage to persons or property caused by use of/replacement of/repair of/or the utility's failure to repair the utility's equipment and software. The homeowner also "bears the entire risk of loss, theft or damage" to the utility's equipment.
This would be a bad deal even if the utility were paying a monthly fee to homeowners. The fact that they've conned customers into paying the utility for using them, their internet, and assuming all liability/responsibility for the utility company's hardware is insane.
>I'd feel better about this if they weren't charging people thousands for the batteries. As it is, this looks like a scam by utility companies to force their costs onto consumers and charge them for it on top of that. People should be being paid by the utility for storing, hosting, and allowing access to the power company's distributed infrastructure.
I participated in this program early on (currently on year 8 or 9) and I don't think you're giving a fair characterization. First, the batteries took the place of a generator, and have reliable protected my buildings from power outages since. Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead. So there's direct value to having them, particularly in a rural area of a rural state, regardless of any other money. Having a sizable generator isn't free, not just in terms of purchase but in terms of
Second, the utility did in fact pay with a pretty massive discount (around $5-6k per battery at the time IIRC). The amount they were willing to pay wasn't enough to completely cancel out the battery cost back then, but it was like 70-80% of the cost. And in general looking at all the various VPP programs in the region utilities remain very much willing to pay you per kWh, whether it's a lease or BYOB.
There are multiple ways to make a battery work for you in terms of ROI, and the math has changed over the years as various component costs have changed as well as being individual to each person's situation in terms of their own usage patterns and generation. But I don't think this was a scam at all, it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about. In an ideal world neutralizing that carbon pollution would all just be built into pricing so the market could better sort it out, but as it stands I don't feel bad about supporting a shift to some extent too. And even though I'm probably going to just buy my own batteries next time around due to other changes, I'd certainly consider contributing to a VPP again depending. It's been a positive experience.
>The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which if they were doing their job in the first place should be extremely rare occurrences)
This is just really hard in some parts of New England given the history of grid development (we have a lot of really weird legacy layouts), weather, trees, population density, and lack of resources. If you're at the end of a quarter to a half mile driveway in the forest up a steep mountain dirt road and aren't able to bury the lines then it can be tough in storms. Plus other weirdness, last year a pole came down and it turns out bears had been using it as a scratching post and just ripped through the entire thing. Was actually pretty cool but also a power outage.
>but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.*
In all these years it's never once been an issue though. And I don't consider that "fine print" but obvious: if you're participating in a VPP at all, then obviously there will be times when your battery has been drawn down. That's the deal duh. And with the best will in the world they can't predict things like some drunk driver taking out a pole and causing an outage (this happened again not that long ago). It's not impossible that there could be the bad luck of that happening right when the battery happened to be down to a low level. That's the risk. But they do pay you for it. And almost any way you'd make batteries pay beyond power protection entails some risk or else some cost too, like if you want to rate-shift so that you only pay the lowest night time energy rate by charging then and then running off your batteries during the day, then you'll of course be at risk of lower remaining storage if there's then a grid failure too when you were expecting to charge back up again. You can spend money on that risk in turn, but there's no free lunch here.
> First, the batteries took the place of a generator,
The generator would have been yours, and only used for your needs. It wouldn't have involved any data collection, the uncompensated use of your bandwidth, or exposed you to so much liability.
> Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead.
They may do this, but by their own terms they aren't obligated to. The good news is that in the event where a cable is cut/down and they lose the ability to siphon power from your battery you will be sure to get the benefit of whatever power it has stored. It's also nice that they compensate you for the power that they draw, but again, all of that energy is already theirs by right.
The state contracts them to provide the people with reliable power and you pay them for that service. They should be expected to reasonably deliver that in exchange. Installing their equipment inside people's homes can be part of how they manage that responsibility, but it's still their responsibility and they should compensate you for that and not expect you to pay them even more for the privilege of paying their costs and accepting liability.
> it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about.
It's honestly not a bad idea conceptually. It seems like it can have real benefits, but the terms are exploitative. At a minimum they should be obligated to prioritize your power needs above others when it comes to energy stored in the battery on your premises, and they should be obligated to compensate you for power taken, as well as for providing them storage, access, security and bandwidth for their equipment, and they should also assume responsibility for any damage/harm their equipment causes to your property and anyone one on your property as long as it wasn't caused by tampering or improper use. Ideally, you'd also be able to opt out of all personal data collection (not related directly to the use/monitoring of their hardware), and any loss/theft/damage would be covered by their insurance (provided their equipment was reasonably secured), otherwise they'd have to pay you enough to get additional insurance coverage of your own.
I'm glad it worked out for you when you had it, but unless the terms were very different from what they are today you were absolutely cheated and being taken advantage of, even if you didn't feel that way.
A high trust society doesn't cause a monopoly to become efficient. A society where everyone is thinking of the common good is the one where individualism works, because then you have no need for a giant bureaucracy trying to coerce everyone into doing the right thing, since they would do that of their own accord.
But the disadvantage of bureaucratic authoritarianism is even larger in a low-trust society where everyone is in it for themselves, because then you can't trust the bureaucrats not to be corrupt and they're still sitting on a monopoly.
Which is to say, what you always want is a high trust society and what you never want is a monopolist.
Unless you are completely off the grid, you are getting power from a local monopoly. This is baked in. You get your water from one source, send your sewerage to one source, get your power from one source, etc. So then the question is how to make the monopoly well behaved and how to keep them that way.
> Unless you are completely off the grid, you are getting power from a local monopoly. This is baked in.
When you have a "natural monopoly" the thing you want to do is keep it as narrow as conceivably possible, i.e. the opposite of extending the monopoly on wires into authority over generation.
Moreover, the concept of a "natural monopoly" is painted across far more things than it actually applies to.
For example, suppose around half of the people on your street have a solar+battery system and the only reason any of you need a grid connection at all is in case it's cloudy for too many days in a row. Instead of you all paying a central power utility a lot of money, would it be economically feasible (in the absence of adversarial regulations) to run a second set of distribution lines down the existing utility poles or conduits and then install a single large generator that can take care of everyone on your street on those couple of days? Yeah, it pretty well would, and even if you didn't actually do it, the availability of that option would put competitive pressure on the incumbent. So they predictably work to make that economically infeasible through regulatory barriers using fraudulent "natural monopoly" arguments. You don't need an interstate power grid so that a dozen neighbors can share a backup generator.
And if something isn't actually feasible then you don't need to pass a law to ban it, right?
They don't want you messing with their poles/conduits because they don't want you accidentally electrocuting their linemen with shoddy work. There are abusive regulations. I just don't think it's so simple.
Even if you have a licensed electrician to do the work, they still make it an enormous ordeal to install new wires on utility poles. Case in point, what would it take for you to be able to install new fiber? There is no electricity even involved there.
In a high trust society people aren't trying to con you but they're still subject to structural constraints. When Alice has a good idea but Bob has a monopoly, Alice isn't allowed to implement it and Bob doesn't understand it because he's not smart enough to rather than because he's crooked. When a monopolist has a stable source of revenue their management is living in a world where money is available and they start thinking up ways to "help" by spending it, which raises costs even when it's well intentioned and then harms the poor who now have to pay a premium to receive a necessity.
Structural constraints aren't exclusively a problem because they enable corruption. There can be incompetence without malice. All it takes is for someone to be well-intentioned but incorrect, or for the system to allocate rulemaking authority to someone without the information necessary to make the best decision.
The classic example is a large hierarchical organization where the line workers have knowledge of the process but no management competence and correspondingly don't know what information is even relevant to pass up the chain, and the top brass have management training but have been put in charge of so many people that they don't have the bandwidth to know what's actually happening on the ground.
I am aware and mostly agree with the dogma about how decision-making power should be delegated to those with the most relevant information to that decision. In fact, that to me seems a bit tautological and beside the point.
My point is essentially that there are situations where a monopoly is the best system available especially if you can rely on those involved to act in good faith. For example, I think the government holding a monopoly on policing power is the best available system. Within that monopoly power can be delegated a whole manner of ways, but ultimately the public good of policing is distributed through a manner of sub-institutions all answerable to a single institution.
I think the real delta in our views is I see the values of the people within a system as of equal or more importance to the structure of the system itself. It seems to me that you reason about this topic in an almost purely abstract manner, attempting to posit a "perfect" system which could work no matter who was actually implementing it, and indeed would be the best no matter who was actually implementing it. I used to think this way, but came to the conclusion that it was impossible.
> A society where everyone is thinking of the common good is the one where individualism works, because then you have no need for a giant bureaucracy trying to coerce everyone into doing the right thing
A society where everyone is thinking of the common good is the one where the bureaucracy's job isn't coercion, simply efficient management and organization.
Authoritarianism is the problem with bureaucratic authoritarianism, not bureaucracy.
In a high trust society there would never be a need for more than one organization responsible for supplying the public with something like power or water. Centralizing those functions to a single organization would eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies reducing the costs necessary to provide the service. In a high trust society that single company's goal would only be to provide a quality service to the public, instead of demanding endlessly increasing personal enrichment at the expense of the public.
> A society where everyone is thinking of the common good is the one where the bureaucracy's job isn't coercion, simply efficient management and organization. Authoritarianism is the problem with bureaucratic authoritarianism, not bureaucracy.
What happens in your non-authoritarian bureaucracy when the bureaucrats make a decision you believe to be in error and you set out to do something inconsistent with it?
If they're allowed to stop you then you can't demonstrate that their policy is in error by doing the opposite to show that it's better. Whereas if they can't stop you then they don't have a monopoly.
Someone doesn't have to be malicious in order to be imperfect. All it takes is for any one of the >300 million people who are all being inhibited from doing it to be better at it than the monopolist.
> Centralizing those functions to a single organization would eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies reducing the costs necessary to provide the service.
Doing that sort of thing suppresses diversity and breeds monoculture, which is how you get catastrophic systemic failures. When an honest mistake is made it applies not to 2% of your food supply but to 100% of it, which is Very Bad.
> What happens in your non-authoritarian bureaucracy when the bureaucrats make a decision you believe to be in error and you set out to do something inconsistent with it?
You follow the process to have the decision reviewed and you make your case. Even if they reject what you propose you're still able to try to convince others that your idea is better and, assuming that you have a democracy, you can have the rules changed.
> If they're allowed to stop you then you can't demonstrate that their policy is in error
I struggle to imagine a scenario where there's no possible way to determine if an error was made or if a change might be an improvement without just doing it anyway. If it isn't plainly obvious that your idea would be better and there are also no facts, research, examples, models, etc. that give support to your idea you should expect to have trouble convincing others of how great it is. When something only impacts you personally, you can blindly try things without any reason to think it might be better all you like, but people who are making decisions that impact large numbers of people, whole communities even, should require some kind of evidence before changing things for everyone. Ideally, there'd be a process in place so new solutions can be proposed, promising ideas can be explored, researched, trialed, tested, then implemented.
> Doing that sort of thing suppresses diversity and breeds monoculture, which is how you get catastrophic systemic failures.
Sometimes, but not always. What you'd call monoculture can be really great. It's why international standards and internet protocols exist and are followed. It promotes interoperability. It'd be a lot easier to write an app to help people keep tabs on their power usage and charges if there was just one company putting out bills and an API. Even with a single company providing a service they can still make good use of diversification to limit their risks. Companies with tons of competitors often take those kinds of precautions to avoid single points of failure within their operations. The last ISP I worked for had over 15 types of modems in the field from a variety of manufacturers. Some were being trialed, some were being phased out, but a firmware problem or failing component impacting one model wouldn't take down every customer. Companies tend to try to standardize where they can though.
There are certainly some trade offs involved with having one organization handling things, and it's not ideal for every type of service, but things like utilities are good candidates because of the scales involved and because the "product" being delivered is the same. When power companies are doing what's expected of them nobody has a preference for the electricity that Company A provides over what Company B delivers. I wouldn't want a single company making all the pizza though, because in that case variety matters.
> Even if they reject what you propose you're still able to try to convince others that your idea is better and, assuming that you have a democracy, you can have the rules changed.
If you have a good idea in a competitive market, your incentive to advocate for it is that if it succeeds you get market share. If a company has a billion dollars in costs and you can reduce them by 10%, that's worth a hundred million dollars, which is a huge incentive to do it when you get to put the hundred million dollars in your pocket, or capture a large fraction of a market whose net profit has a similar number of zeroes in it.
If you have the same idea but the incumbent monopolist doesn't listen to you, how many hours can you justify advocating for it? Your share of the efficiency as a customer is e.g. $50/year.
> I struggle to imagine a scenario where there's no possible way to determine if an error was made or if a change might be an improvement without just doing it anyway. If it isn't plainly obvious that your idea would be better and there are also no facts, research, examples, models, etc. that give support to your idea you should expect to have trouble convincing others of how great it is.
Models can't give you empirical evidence.
Suppose the monopolist has been doing something a particular way for 100 years. The equipment they use is expensive and lasts 30 years, as is the equipment you want to use instead. Their argument is that they want all their equipment to be uniform and don't want to be stuck with something experimental for the entire service lifetime, so they don't even want to invest in a small trial because if the benefits aren't large they'd either have to replace the trial equipment early or support two types of equipment for three decades. Your argument, which they reject, is that it's worth risking a moderate amount of capital to do a trial with 5% of the installed base.
If there is no monopoly then you risk your own time or money to do the small trial and reap the benefits if it works out. But with a monopolist who says no to the attempt, you can't show that your solution is better because they've declared that the cost of finding out isn't something they're willing to pay, and the option to take the risk onto yourself is taken away.
> It's why international standards and internet protocols exist and are followed. It promotes interoperability. It'd be a lot easier to write an app to help people keep tabs on their power usage and charges if there was just one company putting out bills and an API.
Except that those sort of things don't have anything enforcing the monopoly, and in many cases don't even have one. For example, gzip and lzma both have published formats but they essentially compete with each other, and that's good, because lzma has better compression ratios but gzip is faster and uses less memory. And the existence of either one doesn't prevent the introduction of zstd, which manages to get compression ratios competitive with lzma while still being pretty fast.
And having multiple algorithms doesn't impede interoperability because nobody is forced to use any particular one. A server can use zstd with newer clients that support it and gzip with older ones that don't. If you want to transfer a file you can use https, ftps or sftp. There is a published standard for the telnet protocol and nobody is prevented from replacing it with ssh.
> Even with a single company providing a service they can still make good use of diversification to limit their risks. Companies with tons of competitors often take those kinds of precautions to avoid single points of failure within their operations. The last ISP I worked for had over 15 types of modems in the field from a variety of manufacturers.
At which point you're abandoning the "benefits" of uniformity and scale and then why forego the benefits of a competitive market?
> When power companies are doing what's expected of them nobody has a preference for the electricity that Company A provides over what Company B delivers.
They may have no preference for who generates the electricity because electricity is a fungible commodity, but they certainly do have a preference for a company that can supply it more efficiently at a lower price, and many customers will also have preferences on things like green energy, redundancy/reliability vs. cost, the trade off between having a consistent bill vs. paying live rates that might be lower on average but higher in specific months, etc.
About the only time you have a product where every customer wants the same thing is when you have a product where there is only one customer, e.g. the US military. And those tend to be the things where having a single supplier is extremely bad, since you don't want the single point of failure.
A high trust society wouldn't even have an agreement like the terms this company asks customers to agree to.
Companies in the US have violated the public's trust so often and so brazenly that consumers are forced to treat them as adversarial. Companies insist that we live in a low trust society because they want to take advantage of us, and they aggressively oppose consumer protection laws and efforts to regulate them in ways that would allow us to have more trust.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
It's not as if the batteries people are paying for become their property, or are only for the homeowner's benefit. The utility company has the right to use that power however they want at any time including the "right to use all the energy in the battery". The homeowner also has to allow contractors, subcontractors, or third-parties onto their property. Physical access aside, they also have to allow the utility free access to their network and free use of their internet connection/bandwidth. The utility will not compensate homeowners for any of that.
Homeowners must also agree to install the utility company's cell phone apps/software. I'd bet those apps are collecting data and probably pushing ads too. They have to agree to the “Customer Privacy” terms, which will only be shown to them "upon installation of the Equipment".
The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which, if they were doing their job in the first place, should be extremely rare occurrences), but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.
The utility also requires homeowners to agree to terms that state the utility will not be liable for any damage to persons or property caused by use of/replacement of/repair of/or the utility's failure to repair the utility's equipment and software. The homeowner also "bears the entire risk of loss, theft or damage" to the utility's equipment.
This would be a bad deal even if the utility were paying a monthly fee to homeowners. The fact that they've conned customers into paying the utility for using them, their internet, and assuming all liability/responsibility for the utility company's hardware is insane.
xoa · · focus · HN ↗
I participated in this program early on (currently on year 8 or 9) and I don't think you're giving a fair characterization. First, the batteries took the place of a generator, and have reliable protected my buildings from power outages since. Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead. So there's direct value to having them, particularly in a rural area of a rural state, regardless of any other money. Having a sizable generator isn't free, not just in terms of purchase but in terms of
Second, the utility did in fact pay with a pretty massive discount (around $5-6k per battery at the time IIRC). The amount they were willing to pay wasn't enough to completely cancel out the battery cost back then, but it was like 70-80% of the cost. And in general looking at all the various VPP programs in the region utilities remain very much willing to pay you per kWh, whether it's a lease or BYOB.
There are multiple ways to make a battery work for you in terms of ROI, and the math has changed over the years as various component costs have changed as well as being individual to each person's situation in terms of their own usage patterns and generation. But I don't think this was a scam at all, it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about. In an ideal world neutralizing that carbon pollution would all just be built into pricing so the market could better sort it out, but as it stands I don't feel bad about supporting a shift to some extent too. And even though I'm probably going to just buy my own batteries next time around due to other changes, I'd certainly consider contributing to a VPP again depending. It's been a positive experience.
>The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which if they were doing their job in the first place should be extremely rare occurrences)
This is just really hard in some parts of New England given the history of grid development (we have a lot of really weird legacy layouts), weather, trees, population density, and lack of resources. If you're at the end of a quarter to a half mile driveway in the forest up a steep mountain dirt road and aren't able to bury the lines then it can be tough in storms. Plus other weirdness, last year a pole came down and it turns out bears had been using it as a scratching post and just ripped through the entire thing. Was actually pretty cool but also a power outage.
>but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.*
In all these years it's never once been an issue though. And I don't consider that "fine print" but obvious: if you're participating in a VPP at all, then obviously there will be times when your battery has been drawn down. That's the deal duh. And with the best will in the world they can't predict things like some drunk driver taking out a pole and causing an outage (this happened again not that long ago). It's not impossible that there could be the bad luck of that happening right when the battery happened to be down to a low level. That's the risk. But they do pay you for it. And almost any way you'd make batteries pay beyond power protection entails some risk or else some cost too, like if you want to rate-shift so that you only pay the lowest night time energy rate by charging then and then running off your batteries during the day, then you'll of course be at risk of lower remaining storage if there's then a grid failure too when you were expecting to charge back up again. You can spend money on that risk in turn, but there's no free lunch here.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
The generator would have been yours, and only used for your needs. It wouldn't have involved any data collection, the uncompensated use of your bandwidth, or exposed you to so much liability.
> Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead.
They may do this, but by their own terms they aren't obligated to. The good news is that in the event where a cable is cut/down and they lose the ability to siphon power from your battery you will be sure to get the benefit of whatever power it has stored. It's also nice that they compensate you for the power that they draw, but again, all of that energy is already theirs by right.
The state contracts them to provide the people with reliable power and you pay them for that service. They should be expected to reasonably deliver that in exchange. Installing their equipment inside people's homes can be part of how they manage that responsibility, but it's still their responsibility and they should compensate you for that and not expect you to pay them even more for the privilege of paying their costs and accepting liability.
> it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about.
It's honestly not a bad idea conceptually. It seems like it can have real benefits, but the terms are exploitative. At a minimum they should be obligated to prioritize your power needs above others when it comes to energy stored in the battery on your premises, and they should be obligated to compensate you for power taken, as well as for providing them storage, access, security and bandwidth for their equipment, and they should also assume responsibility for any damage/harm their equipment causes to your property and anyone one on your property as long as it wasn't caused by tampering or improper use. Ideally, you'd also be able to opt out of all personal data collection (not related directly to the use/monitoring of their hardware), and any loss/theft/damage would be covered by their insurance (provided their equipment was reasonably secured), otherwise they'd have to pay you enough to get additional insurance coverage of your own.
I'm glad it worked out for you when you had it, but unless the terms were very different from what they are today you were absolutely cheated and being taken advantage of, even if you didn't feel that way.
testing22321 · · focus · HN ↗
God forbid we live in a world where sharing and helping others is OK.
miroljub · · focus · HN ↗
I think there are better ways of sharing and helping.
lmz · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
But the disadvantage of bureaucratic authoritarianism is even larger in a low-trust society where everyone is in it for themselves, because then you can't trust the bureaucrats not to be corrupt and they're still sitting on a monopoly.
Which is to say, what you always want is a high trust society and what you never want is a monopolist.
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DFHippie · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
When you have a "natural monopoly" the thing you want to do is keep it as narrow as conceivably possible, i.e. the opposite of extending the monopoly on wires into authority over generation.
Moreover, the concept of a "natural monopoly" is painted across far more things than it actually applies to.
For example, suppose around half of the people on your street have a solar+battery system and the only reason any of you need a grid connection at all is in case it's cloudy for too many days in a row. Instead of you all paying a central power utility a lot of money, would it be economically feasible (in the absence of adversarial regulations) to run a second set of distribution lines down the existing utility poles or conduits and then install a single large generator that can take care of everyone on your street on those couple of days? Yeah, it pretty well would, and even if you didn't actually do it, the availability of that option would put competitive pressure on the incumbent. So they predictably work to make that economically infeasible through regulatory barriers using fraudulent "natural monopoly" arguments. You don't need an interstate power grid so that a dozen neighbors can share a backup generator.
And if something isn't actually feasible then you don't need to pass a law to ban it, right?
DFHippie · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
Even if you have a licensed electrician to do the work, they still make it an enormous ordeal to install new wires on utility poles. Case in point, what would it take for you to be able to install new fiber? There is no electricity even involved there.
irenaeus · · focus · HN ↗
Actually it very literally does.
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
In a high trust society people aren't trying to con you but they're still subject to structural constraints. When Alice has a good idea but Bob has a monopoly, Alice isn't allowed to implement it and Bob doesn't understand it because he's not smart enough to rather than because he's crooked. When a monopolist has a stable source of revenue their management is living in a world where money is available and they start thinking up ways to "help" by spending it, which raises costs even when it's well intentioned and then harms the poor who now have to pay a premium to receive a necessity.
irenaeus · · focus · HN ↗
In a high trust society people are not, generally, trying to con you whether or not they are subject to structural constraints.
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
The classic example is a large hierarchical organization where the line workers have knowledge of the process but no management competence and correspondingly don't know what information is even relevant to pass up the chain, and the top brass have management training but have been put in charge of so many people that they don't have the bandwidth to know what's actually happening on the ground.
irenaeus · · focus · HN ↗
My point is essentially that there are situations where a monopoly is the best system available especially if you can rely on those involved to act in good faith. For example, I think the government holding a monopoly on policing power is the best available system. Within that monopoly power can be delegated a whole manner of ways, but ultimately the public good of policing is distributed through a manner of sub-institutions all answerable to a single institution.
I think the real delta in our views is I see the values of the people within a system as of equal or more importance to the structure of the system itself. It seems to me that you reason about this topic in an almost purely abstract manner, attempting to posit a "perfect" system which could work no matter who was actually implementing it, and indeed would be the best no matter who was actually implementing it. I used to think this way, but came to the conclusion that it was impossible.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
A society where everyone is thinking of the common good is the one where the bureaucracy's job isn't coercion, simply efficient management and organization. Authoritarianism is the problem with bureaucratic authoritarianism, not bureaucracy.
In a high trust society there would never be a need for more than one organization responsible for supplying the public with something like power or water. Centralizing those functions to a single organization would eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies reducing the costs necessary to provide the service. In a high trust society that single company's goal would only be to provide a quality service to the public, instead of demanding endlessly increasing personal enrichment at the expense of the public.
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
What happens in your non-authoritarian bureaucracy when the bureaucrats make a decision you believe to be in error and you set out to do something inconsistent with it?
If they're allowed to stop you then you can't demonstrate that their policy is in error by doing the opposite to show that it's better. Whereas if they can't stop you then they don't have a monopoly.
Someone doesn't have to be malicious in order to be imperfect. All it takes is for any one of the >300 million people who are all being inhibited from doing it to be better at it than the monopolist.
> Centralizing those functions to a single organization would eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies reducing the costs necessary to provide the service.
Doing that sort of thing suppresses diversity and breeds monoculture, which is how you get catastrophic systemic failures. When an honest mistake is made it applies not to 2% of your food supply but to 100% of it, which is Very Bad.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
You follow the process to have the decision reviewed and you make your case. Even if they reject what you propose you're still able to try to convince others that your idea is better and, assuming that you have a democracy, you can have the rules changed.
> If they're allowed to stop you then you can't demonstrate that their policy is in error
I struggle to imagine a scenario where there's no possible way to determine if an error was made or if a change might be an improvement without just doing it anyway. If it isn't plainly obvious that your idea would be better and there are also no facts, research, examples, models, etc. that give support to your idea you should expect to have trouble convincing others of how great it is. When something only impacts you personally, you can blindly try things without any reason to think it might be better all you like, but people who are making decisions that impact large numbers of people, whole communities even, should require some kind of evidence before changing things for everyone. Ideally, there'd be a process in place so new solutions can be proposed, promising ideas can be explored, researched, trialed, tested, then implemented.
> Doing that sort of thing suppresses diversity and breeds monoculture, which is how you get catastrophic systemic failures.
Sometimes, but not always. What you'd call monoculture can be really great. It's why international standards and internet protocols exist and are followed. It promotes interoperability. It'd be a lot easier to write an app to help people keep tabs on their power usage and charges if there was just one company putting out bills and an API. Even with a single company providing a service they can still make good use of diversification to limit their risks. Companies with tons of competitors often take those kinds of precautions to avoid single points of failure within their operations. The last ISP I worked for had over 15 types of modems in the field from a variety of manufacturers. Some were being trialed, some were being phased out, but a firmware problem or failing component impacting one model wouldn't take down every customer. Companies tend to try to standardize where they can though.
There are certainly some trade offs involved with having one organization handling things, and it's not ideal for every type of service, but things like utilities are good candidates because of the scales involved and because the "product" being delivered is the same. When power companies are doing what's expected of them nobody has a preference for the electricity that Company A provides over what Company B delivers. I wouldn't want a single company making all the pizza though, because in that case variety matters.
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
If you have a good idea in a competitive market, your incentive to advocate for it is that if it succeeds you get market share. If a company has a billion dollars in costs and you can reduce them by 10%, that's worth a hundred million dollars, which is a huge incentive to do it when you get to put the hundred million dollars in your pocket, or capture a large fraction of a market whose net profit has a similar number of zeroes in it.
If you have the same idea but the incumbent monopolist doesn't listen to you, how many hours can you justify advocating for it? Your share of the efficiency as a customer is e.g. $50/year.
> I struggle to imagine a scenario where there's no possible way to determine if an error was made or if a change might be an improvement without just doing it anyway. If it isn't plainly obvious that your idea would be better and there are also no facts, research, examples, models, etc. that give support to your idea you should expect to have trouble convincing others of how great it is.
Models can't give you empirical evidence.
Suppose the monopolist has been doing something a particular way for 100 years. The equipment they use is expensive and lasts 30 years, as is the equipment you want to use instead. Their argument is that they want all their equipment to be uniform and don't want to be stuck with something experimental for the entire service lifetime, so they don't even want to invest in a small trial because if the benefits aren't large they'd either have to replace the trial equipment early or support two types of equipment for three decades. Your argument, which they reject, is that it's worth risking a moderate amount of capital to do a trial with 5% of the installed base.
If there is no monopoly then you risk your own time or money to do the small trial and reap the benefits if it works out. But with a monopolist who says no to the attempt, you can't show that your solution is better because they've declared that the cost of finding out isn't something they're willing to pay, and the option to take the risk onto yourself is taken away.
> It's why international standards and internet protocols exist and are followed. It promotes interoperability. It'd be a lot easier to write an app to help people keep tabs on their power usage and charges if there was just one company putting out bills and an API.
Except that those sort of things don't have anything enforcing the monopoly, and in many cases don't even have one. For example, gzip and lzma both have published formats but they essentially compete with each other, and that's good, because lzma has better compression ratios but gzip is faster and uses less memory. And the existence of either one doesn't prevent the introduction of zstd, which manages to get compression ratios competitive with lzma while still being pretty fast.
And having multiple algorithms doesn't impede interoperability because nobody is forced to use any particular one. A server can use zstd with newer clients that support it and gzip with older ones that don't. If you want to transfer a file you can use https, ftps or sftp. There is a published standard for the telnet protocol and nobody is prevented from replacing it with ssh.
> Even with a single company providing a service they can still make good use of diversification to limit their risks. Companies with tons of competitors often take those kinds of precautions to avoid single points of failure within their operations. The last ISP I worked for had over 15 types of modems in the field from a variety of manufacturers.
At which point you're abandoning the "benefits" of uniformity and scale and then why forego the benefits of a competitive market?
> When power companies are doing what's expected of them nobody has a preference for the electricity that Company A provides over what Company B delivers.
They may have no preference for who generates the electricity because electricity is a fungible commodity, but they certainly do have a preference for a company that can supply it more efficiently at a lower price, and many customers will also have preferences on things like green energy, redundancy/reliability vs. cost, the trade off between having a consistent bill vs. paying live rates that might be lower on average but higher in specific months, etc.
About the only time you have a product where every customer wants the same thing is when you have a product where there is only one customer, e.g. the US military. And those tend to be the things where having a single supplier is extremely bad, since you don't want the single point of failure.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
Companies in the US have violated the public's trust so often and so brazenly that consumers are forced to treat them as adversarial. Companies insist that we live in a low trust society because they want to take advantage of us, and they aggressively oppose consumer protection laws and efforts to regulate them in ways that would allow us to have more trust.
rcxdude · · focus · HN ↗