• iopq@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    The government, running a service that doesn’t suck? Call me when it happens

      • iopq@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        What is the search engine your government hosts? Or maybe they do email? Do tell

        • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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          3 days ago

          Those are some pretty specific additional qualifiers. Did I hit a nerve?

          I’m responsing to someone claiming governments inherently cannot be good providers of essential services, which is patently untrue.

          The nordics are home to numerous government institutions, providing a variety of services that are perfectly satisfactory, and often excellent.

          Are you claiming that email or search engines not being among them today, means the rest mean nothing, or that they never will be?

          If the current services are anything to go by, those things getting added to the list, will be fucking great.

          • iopq@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            Who said anything about essential services? It’s the nonessential services that I have a problem with

            • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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              3 days ago

              You classify email and internet search as non-essential?

              And what does how they are classified have to do with the ability/inability of government to provide them in a sufficient manner?

              You claimed something that HAS HAPPENED, could not. There’s no comeback here for you to find.

              • iopq@lemmy.world
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                3 days ago

                You think email is a human right? It’s a box to send password resets. If websites all used one time paaswords, I wouldn’t need my email. You don’t actually send messages to people over email, do you?

                We have things like Signal and Matrix to facilitate actually communicating with people.

                Last time I sent an email to someone it bounced. Imagine spending time writing a letter and the mailman returns it to you

      • timestatic@feddit.org
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        3 days ago

        List a country with a decent population of like at least 50 mio people that competes with companies successfully and fairly. Countries with a smaller population don’t have as much of a bureaucratic overhead. But even there… where do they offer a better service in a fair competition with companies

        • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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          3 days ago

          Google neither competes fairly nor provides a good service. We have to endure them because they have made investment in a competitor uneconomical.

          • timestatic@feddit.org
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            14 hours ago

            I have switched away from google mostly. Most people can do so too. Yes they do have a monopoly on search and I think the government should take steps to ensure fair competition but I don’t think the ban hammer should be wielded this lightly. If they pay the fine. Searxng is just a relay search engine and I doubt it is legal for such a big instance to use search engines as back end, have them run it for free and then have the people use Searx instead.

        • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝@sopuli.xyz
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          3 days ago

          You are posting on a social media platform solely funded by the EU.

          But I’ve heard the USPS is not shit either. Publicly funded and run universities in the EU also provide the same or better service as those in the US for pennies on the dollar. Also, a lot of European railways are state run, like a lot of other public transit companies.

          Also, the only space agencies that ever got to the moon were public. So were the ones that put the first man in space, and the first man on the moon, and the one that sent the first satellite into orbit and the farthest man-made object from Earth.

          • timestatic@feddit.org
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            14 hours ago

            Look, the goverment is good at providing a good starter set of things you need for life. Infrastructure has no real competition so the infrastructure needs to be state owned since we can’t have it fail. I would look favorably if the government funded an open initiative to build a FOSS search index… but I think a search engine isn’t something like core infrastructure that can only reasonably exist once.

            Besides… SearxNG is just a relay engine and if every european used it and relayed the search request to other search engines without them getting a dime I don’t think that would be fair.

            Lemmy also isn’t developed by the state. It might get funding from the goverment but thats a very different thing - Core research that doesn’t have a straight up ROI is also one of the things where everyone benefits of it long term falls under something the government should do. I just don’t think the government is good at running an economical business and I can’t imagine living in a country where every company was like state-run with a top-down system. Competition is good, what we have is a lack of competition

            • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝@sopuli.xyz
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              12 hours ago

              You asked me to name a good service a government provides for a large number of people successfully. I named several. I get that you have ideological problems with goverments doing stuff, but governments not doing stuff results in what you can see in the US right now.

              The original post is also not about a hypothetical ideological question, but that the US government was captured and dismantled by its corporations, and those corporations want to continue that societal rot over here. The EU cannot tolerate that.

        • njordomir@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          I would argue that “bureaucratic overhead” is missing in companies at least as much as it is excess in governments. These double checks and regulations help guard against things like companies externalizing environmental and health impacts. They also act as a check on tendencies towards consolidation (or rather should). Consequently, companies appear to operate more efficiently, but we will have to pay to clean up and handle their externalities eventually.

          • timestatic@feddit.org
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            13 hours ago

            I’m all for legislation that properly makes companies price in external effects. What I do not support is the state taking an active role in the market. Legislation is created for a reason but needs to be reformed and slimmed down once in a while. The government does not adjust fast enough imo and I think it should focus on core tasks instead of creating search engines.

        • Blisterexe@lemmy.zip
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          3 days ago

          Hydroquebec, alternative power practically doesn’t exist in quebev because hydroquebec kicks ass

          • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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            3 days ago

            I don’t think anyone could legally compete with hydro not that they could because we invested as a society into exploiting pur natural ressources for the common good of our population rather than the good of some dickhead.

            Result: cheapest electricity price on the continent.

    • Letme@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      You have become normalized to a country that allows a convicted felon to be president

      • iopq@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        I’ve been to half a dozen countries after COVID.

        That included a 16 hour stay in a Canadian hospital because they just don’t have enough doctors to get around to you if you’re not dying