Re: Photographing kids sporting events

sk8terg1rl wrote:
Hi Scott,

On 3 Apr, 12:12, Scott <blackh...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
You haven't thought this out. A quarter of million cars enter the London
congestion zone each day. The tube alone carries an average of 2.7 million
a day. 440,000 passengers use SWT trains every day, mainly into and out of
London's Waterloo station.

I was thinking mostly about roads instead of rails between cities.
Granted as a city's density grows and roads become too congested, you
either build more road flyovers or tunnels.


I think you'll find as a city's density grows you have no choice but to use a public transport system. In London you would need to increase the number of roads by a factor of at least 10 if you had no tube or train service and that is simply impossible.


I take it by not opposing monopolies you're okay with TfL slapping
Londoners with rising bus/Tube ticket prices and congestion charges
just because Londoners have no other option and they thus can?
It's called paying for a free market. You were in favour of free markets just a
few sentences ago. Of course it would have been cheaper not to go for PPP.

It isn't a "market" when there's only one seller!


I'm sure the PPP contract was put out to competitive tender. Like all privatisations you have to pay for shareholders profits, but it's even worse; because you can't do without a tube network they can't be allowed to go bankrupt. Therefore their profits are guaranteed. Like Railtrack, when the firm went bust the government compensated the shareholders so that when you include the dividends they had actually made a profit.

Deregulated buses are a disaster. The largest company, Stagecoach, simply runs at a loss until the competition is put out of business - then they increase the fares.

Whenever there is a free market the largest player will buy out the smaller ones until you are left with just one or two suppliers. At that point they are so large and dominant in the market that no smaller company can enter to compete. They can set the price and even more important lobby for legislation to benefit the few players left and creat barriers to others entering the market.

No...welfare must be *given freely*, and not forced out of people.
British people must be of good enough heart that we *want* to help the
less fortunate in our society.
No pensions then. (Just because you call then pensions doesn't mean they're not
welfare).

Yes. I think people should be prudent enough to save for their old
age. E.g. if they invested faithfully into dividend-paying stocks,
they would have a pension by the time they retire. Or rent through >1
property. This way the pensioners are financially independent.


I wouldn't want to live in that sort of 'dog eat dog' society. If you're too poor to save you starve in your old age. What you seem to be advocating is a plutocracy.


A system which has failed in the US. With all this deregulation, free trade and
globalisation, why does the average American work longer hours, for lower wages
today compared to 25 years ago?

And yet the US' GDP adjusted for PPP is 3rd in the world. We are 17th.


GDP is almost irrelevant. What matters is the median income. Consider the following two cases:
Country A) GDP per capita $40,000. But 99% of the wealth is owned by 1 person.
Country B) GDP per capita $20,000. But all the wealth is evenly distributed.

The US is more like case A.




The HNS happens to be one of the most cost effective health care systems in the
world. The US private health care is one of the least efficient.

Cite?


From 'Working Knowledge for Business Leaders' by the Harvard Business School.

"U.S. healthcare currently costs about $2 trillion per year. Of this, more than $600 billion (31 percent) is never seen by recipients. It goes for administration. On a per capita basis, it is roughly $280 billion more than is spent for administration in the other twenty-one countries whose life expectancies exceed those in the U.S., all of whom have some form of taxpayer-financed, single-payer system, the kind that used to be referred to by detractors as "socialized medicine." Worse yet, the current system leaves more than 40 million Americans without health insurance."

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5645.html

Or more dramatically
http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php

It costs far
more per treatment and it treats fewer.

Because my idea of improving the price elasticity of a privatised
healthcare system has not been implemented.

Unless I've missed something I don't see any difference between what you have suggested and what already occurs in the US.

The infant mortality rate, which is a
fair measure of the state of any health care system puts the US 36th at 6.63
deaths for every 1000 live births.

Of course, it is a fact that if you throw enough money at a problem,
you can mitigate it. How about we raise taxes by 25% more so we can
bring our mortality rate down from 5.16 to 4? Obviously diminishing
returns applies somewhere...

The infant mortality rate in the US is down to the 'third world' healthcare provision for poor. Once you get beyond the basic level of spending I don't see any correlation between healthcare spending per capita and life expectancy.
.

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