They privatized the postal service in the UK.
It did not go well
And the railways.
That did not go well either.
Although I’ll wager it’s still more useful than the US rail system.
The reason we don’t have a US rail system is because of the constant, unending efforts by automotive industries to dismantle all plans and dreams we’ve ever had for mass-transit. And every other possible public offering or social service that we pay taxes for.
At this point. How could anyone care or take seriously anything Musk or Trump spits. It’s all lies and bullshit.
Privatising literally everything has been their end-goal with ALL of this the entire time. They plaster it with conservative talking points but this entire administration is an effort by corporate forces to dismantle public services, rights and benefits, so that if you so much want to drive to the store you will have to pay a subscription to use the privately maintained roads, so you have a credit-card reader by your faucet and toilet, so that they can tax you on rainwater you’re required to have to collect rain from your gutters. (This is real in other countries.)
The efforts towards killing public services goes way, way back and if you look at every conservative/republican legislation, it all hinges around how “bad” public services are. Public schools teaching evolution, public television for simply existing, and they’ve been massively successful and killing the regulations and oversight on things like media fairness, public health proposals, safety nets and social services, and yes they really, really want to kill our medicare and medicaid, so they can replace them with more bullshit commercial services. They won’t be happy until we stop getting paychecks we can choose how to use and we all just hand our pay right over to a number of subscription services for things they can take away if you miss a payment.
They want us poor, they want us stupid, they want an army of slaves and if they can’t get it via racism and dehumanizing some identifiable group or population, they will just settle for full on serfdom and monarchy. Now get out there and work your lord’s fields!
Lies and bullshit, but with a 50% chance of happening
I mean you have to take their words seriously because they tell you what they’re going to do. Or at the very least what they want to do.
Elon Musk should privatize his face
I disagree. He should make it more accessible to the public. Physically accessible.
No shit, I’m so tired of seeing it
I suggest we deport this Nazi immigrant.
To Atlantis.
I don’t think any other country wants him either, except maybe Russia.
However, he IS a big space enthusiast. Maybe there should be not one, but two Teslas floating in space?
He’ll find those already government run in Russia. Perhaps he should consider relocating to that shithole and leave the United States the fuck alone.
Amtrak technically is privatized. That’s why it sucks so hard.
There’s also the very real issue of rail priority: https://www.marketplace.org/2024/09/10/amtrak-spars-with-freight-train-industry-over-rules-of-the-railroad/
Yeah, I had no idea it wasn’t private. What’s the deal with that?
It was setup by the Nixon administration and that’s all you need to know
Passenger rail was faillling across the country. Pretty much every private rail company was going out of business.
Amtrak was the rescue plan. Sounds good right? Amtrak took ownership of a bunch of money losing routes across the US and were required to keep the nationwide service. No track (except northeast), no reliable government funding. Can’t decrease service. Can’t raise fares much. No way back to profitability.
The additional funding signed by Biden was the way back. Currently Amtrak is profitable on the Northeast Corridor only, and that funds the rest of the system. Even that has several choke points that are over 100 years old. They desperately need upgraded infrastructure in order to function. That funding also included increased service in a few places, to try to make it useful to someone. All too much of Amtrak is useless stuff like one train per day. Of course they’re not selling any tickets
fair
More or less it was set up to be a failure from the start
I knew it was kinda of poorly designed, I remember the rails aren’t smooth enough for commuter traffic but we did it anyway.
It’s fine at slower speeds but the track is so old that the trains can’t go very fast. Also, most of the track in America is owned by private freight rail companies which means AmTrack has to wait for the freight trains to go by and that increases the amount of time a train trip takes.
It also means the tracks owner has no incentive to keep things up enough to make the ride smooth or to allow fast trains. Cargo can be slow and bumpy
fuck no, nationalize spacex and starlink
This but unironically.
Can you imagine a presidential candidate running on the platform of seizing the assets of the billionaire class? They would transcend political parties, they would unify the nation and people would finally gain something from our politics.
And they would probably be found with thirty bullets to the back of the head and it would be ruled a suicide.
The billionaires would also drop every dollar they could into opponents, misinformation, and smear campaigns
Waluigis
Makes a whole lot more sense, honestly.
Not sure if I want Musk to have the amount of liquid cash that would be required to buy him out.
Don’t buy, just seize.
he can be paid in a new crypto we made on the spot for this purpose
oh yeah, he loves crypto, I’m sure that would be a great form of payment.
They already tried this in LA with privatizing the public transportation system back in the 50’s. The big car companies bought it all and dismantled it in favor of selling their cars.
Most of Amtrak loses money except for the NE corridor. So if you privatize Amtrak it means even worse service and eventually no trains where it is not profitable.
Same with privatization of the USPS, it just means less services for a higher price until they decide to close it altogether because email will replace letters altogether. Say good by to any privacy since all email is monitored and capitalized for marketing.
Fuck fElon Muskrat.
Not just LA, all over the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
No.
Not everything should be privatized so some asshole oligarch can have another toy.
Exactly, we have UPS, FedEx, DHL and bunch of others.
Leave USPS the fuck alone.
They’re all shit too. Fat lot of good privatization would do. USPS was Cool and Good until DeJoy was dropped in to throw wrenches into the cogs.
UPS is actually fairly reliable. FedEx is hit and miss depending on the driver coverage area you’re in, DHL and others just don’t even exist.
USPS has always been great, but primarily for handling “last mile” where a lot of customers need reliable delivery of low monetary value packages like letters that UPS isn’t set to handle, but carry some of the most important lifelines of information to rural and poor Americans.
UPS has always been hit or miss at best in my experience, but of the three, I’ll concede that it’s the least garbage. The other two have delivered packages to the wrong house—not as in like, “next door” wrong house, but as in “some house miles away” wrong house—or they sometimes just flat out don’t deliver a package and return it to the sender. If they do deliver a package, it’s rarely on time.
As for USPS, nowadays, my wife has tracked packages to see that they are brought to our local mail sorting facility, but then for some bizarre, inexplicable reason, they’re sent off elsewhere, even to another state, before being delivered here days later than the estimated delivery date. I have no idea what the hell is happening, but it’s insane and insanely stupid. And I know who is to blame, at least with this service anyway.
DeJoy got rid of around 1/3 of the mail sorting machines, so now they have to fake it or something. They cannot keep up with the volume of mail, is my guess.
that’s their goal, crush the public service competition
This. Alternatives mean that they can hold monopoly and jackup prices on a whim.
I’d bet he wants to take over Amtrak so he can replace it with that stupid Las Vegas car tunnel.
Or replace it with nothing, because “railways and mass transit are obsolete” (translation: “they’re hurting my car sales”).
Everything that has been privatized, has ended up costing us more for shittier service. This will not be different.
I dare say everything should be nationalized as a civil service.
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The usps is a government SERVICE. These parasites look at that and say “but nobody profits from that” and somehow they just can’t let that happen.
The thing is they did generate a profit until they were fucked with by Republicans to make them look unprofitable.
There isn’t a functioning part of our government that the regressives wont destroy for private profit.
I still can’t get over the idea of for profit prisons. incentivized incarceration is beyond stupid.
Except the taxpayers benefit from it, who are the ones paying for it anyway!
What Chancellor Musk means is that no oligarch is getting rich from it, so he is unable to understand its purpose.
we already have FedEx for that.
In my country since the government privatized a part of postal service, the quality of service heavily declined to the point that now is almost guaranteed that they will “lose” your letter if you send it in a place that will cost too much to deliver
Same.
this is almost what has been happening in my country.
Someone punch him in the face, please
I think a much smaller object with much much greater velocity it’s referable.
You know who wants to replace the postal service? Amazon. They have delivery vehicles, lockers, and so on. They have been building towards it for years. I’m sure an attack on the postal service would leave Amazon on top, and I bet it’s a plan in the works.
As for Amtrak, maybe musk wants to swallow it up with his boring company.
Actually they don’t, they want to replace fedex and UPS.
No one wants the business of daily letter service.
What people who want to gut the postal service don’t understand is that it’s a fucking service.
The USPS does last mile delivery for all courier agencies. FedEx and UPS won’t pay a driver to deliver your dildo out to your cabin in bumfuck Nebraska, but the USPS will, along with your tax documents, bank statements, and anything else you need.
If you get rid of USPS, you’re cutting anyone who isn’t in a major city off from not only packages, but critical documents.
It is insane to me when people complain about the failure of a public service to turn a profit as if that’s some kind of bad or unexpected outcome.
Services cost money to operate for the benefit of those using them. That is literally the point.
Yes, the Republican con has been to compare government to a household budget and/or corporations, and it’s just so very stupid.
nah, they’d then require someone else who takes on the private company to do it, give them 10 billion dollars to ensure the infrastructure remains and the service is provided, and then they would still refuse to do it but somehow use all the money anyway.
I had to ups a document recently certified delivery but the company i was doing business with refuses to receive usps mail. It cost me $50 to send a fucking letter. I was so pissed.
I remember seeing an interview with Margaret Thatcher where she said that rail could never be successfully privatized. Just as a reminder of how extreme Musk’s ideas are.
Thatcher’s successor, John Major, oversaw the privatisation of British railways between 1994 and 1997.
It only took 30 years for them all to completely collapse in 2024.
British Rail Service is so bloody expensive as well. Seems like you guys have these, essentially, per-track monopolies.
They more or less did that here in the Netherlands. Once the government let go, things slowly started getting worse and we’re now at the point where I’d say things are expensive, occasionally sporty and suboptimal…
Japan seems to have done it, no idea what the people over there think about its service and affordability though.
