I’ve been loving worlds beyond number lately. It’s a D&D podcast but very story focused so it could fit into that genre.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

Downvotes with no obvious reason always make me curious. Often they’re directed at an important but unpopular truth.

That sounds like a pretty insane situation that would not be tolerated in most developed countries. Generally lapse of service for essential utilities is considered a major problem that would absolutely be relevant to local elections in my area. It sounds like your government is very poorly run and needs dramatic changes—such changes could be implemented through elections. In the meantime it’s good that private entities are filling the gap but I doubt they are able to provide the same level of service as most people expect from utilities.

What specific services are you referring to? If there are multiple firms and the government competing then that really doesn’t sound like the situation I was describing.

Governments can also be sued though they sometimes grant themselves immunity. But utilities really can’t go out of business, can they? Generally they are providing what are considered essential services, so if they fail, the government will generally bail them out because they are the only provider and the loss of those services would be catastrophic. So there really is very little accountability. Just ask PG&E customers how much say they have in that company’s practices.

As far as government accountability, that’s what elections are for. Do you not have those in your country?

Both will be necessary but it’s worth noting that the more we’ve emitted, the more damaging each additional unit of emissions becomes. So arguably it’s even more important to focus on emissions reductions because it’s too late to completely stop warming at this point. Even a small reduction in emissions may have cause a meaningful reduction in human suffering.

Markets work best when there are a number of firms that must compete with one another. For some goods and services, that level of competition is impractical or impossible because of the high amount of infrastructure required. It wouldn’t make much sense for each company to build a completely separate set of water purification and distribution systems—it would be very expensive and take up a lot of space.

In many areas of the US we have a bizarre setup where there is a government enforced monopoly where a single company can reap all of the profits. This often leads to poor service because the company has very little incentive to provide value to its customers. Government owned services can be flawed as well but at least they are directly accountable to their citizens instead of a board or shareholders.

Flint water was never deadly. That’s why it went unaddressed for so long, it was more a slow gradual level of poisoning. The main harm would be to children’s brain development.

Do you have any research or articles that summarizes these findings?