Whether that happens, is up to the electorate.
The infrastructure is for the public.
Why shouldn't the public get to pay for its own infrastructure without a middleman trying to make a buck?
Public utilities receive unfair advantages like preferential financing, tax exemptions, and government infrastructure grants in your definition of subsidies, public utilities frequently receive some form of government support. (unfair as in not apples to apples comparison)
I think a big part of that number is risk, dividends are tied to risk too.
The very idea of investing is that you take risks in exchange for profits. That is, if it fails, you lose your capital, if it succeeds, you become richer. A public provider doesn't work the same way, risk is covered by taxpayer money. If it fails, taxpayers foot the bill, if it succeeds, cheaper service.
From that, NEE pays 43.72% in dividends.
If we multiply these two numbers, we end up at 17.64% in dividends ALONE.
23% is not a really big number by a long shot.
What's the cost of capital on public providers? And on private providers?
What's the energy mix for each of them?
Are both providers profitable? How profitable are each of them?
Are there subsidies involved? Either directly or indirectly via lower than required fee increases due to political pressure.
Frankly it's tiring to always see the same flawed arguments here.
Has Santa Clara diversified their energy and Sunnyvale did not?
Also the "refs" should be in charge. That is to say the working class are the refs and they should be able to build infrastructure without the capital owning class inserting itself as a rent-seeker between them and these services.
But outages, outage response times, infrastructure, investments, etc. are the other side if the equation.
I have no idea. Maybe investor-owned utilities also provide worse service. However, without accounting for that, the article's claims don't mean much.
EU average is almost double, 40 cents per kwh
Well we see how that turned out.
Profit going to capitalist owners who don't do any work is an inefficient allocation, IMO, more than an "inefficient" government.
Government using money to buy capital and then provide services, deadly socialism.
It's always just been about capitalists wanting less competition. That's why they don't want the market to decide and fight for laws to literally outlaw stuff like municipal broadband. If they are so much more efficient, they should be able to offer an equal or better service for the same or better price.
In practice what the "small government" ideology actually does is get rid of all these accountability mechanisms and put scammers and corrupt people in charge instead.
That reminds me, my hometown, the city of Hamburg, bought back the public utilities it had privatized in the 90's, following a public referendum, in 2014.
I recall that one reason was prices for electricity and gas going up after the privatization.
Go figure.
It does not appear to adjust for any of the things that matter. Taxes, cost of capital, generation mix, etc. I think the “insight” is impossible to call an insight with the lack of real modeling.
I mean, both sides claim to have the better quality, so let's see who actually has it.
Bring on the competition!
The referee should not be able to play the game.
We have the most expensive healthcare in the world and some of the worse it is a over regulated industry full of complexity and corruption. Look at industries without government involvement, the less involvement the cheaper and better things get.
healthcare, education, and child care all suck.
tvs, software, and clothes, all cheap and very good.
I love this chart: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Having seen the sausage being made in both, I would say that private utilities are very little for the additional $$$ they extra t for shareholders. I would just as soon see all power production and transmission nationalized.
So the result is Albertans pay more than most other Canadians for electricity. Even if the actual rate is low (which it isn't), the cost of electricity is usually only 10% of my bill. The rest is "transmission" "distribution" etc. It's insanely expensive compared to next door in British Columbia.
Electric production and transmission is interesting from an economic perspective, as the physical infrastructure is almost as perfect an example as it's possible to make for something which should be governmental (or under its direct control). You just can't get working competition there. While the power itself is the perfect example of the opposite, where the market should (according to theory at least) be perfect.
Markets don’t seem to want to solve for outlier situations like extreme weather events or significant hardware malfunctions. Basically I’m talking about what happened in Texas. When it’s a safety issue, it can be hard to align incentives to make planning for outliers worthwhile to market actors.
They're producing some 100GWh/year. Which is not half bad, considering they're typically at or below market price and often pay a ~6% dividend.
Furthermore, switching from one provider to another is inherently difficult. There is only one set of pipes leading to your house, how you going to switch to an alternative? Who is going to build the line for the 1 new customer?
And finally, splitting the business across the vertical doesn't work either. Generation of power is tied to grid management, this is tied to transmission maintenance and expansion.
All things considered. Monopoly emerges naturally and rent seeking is pretty much given. There are only two options left. Either the utility is operated by government for common good, or it the monopolist is so heavily regulated and controlled by the government, that it is, in effect, its extension.
But if they saw this they'd immediately like, subscribe, and share broadly with positive commentary.
There's no reason we should want this for ourselves.
Oh, they don't need to buy it, they already inherited from their rich parents. The world is just a set of trading cards to them at this point.
Elon Musk's fake money could buy a new $10 million mansion every single day--every single day--for THREE CENTURIES, and he wants more!
Society is delusional. We can't even collectively agree to tax psychotic money-grubbers who cannot even enjoy the fake wealth they have their names on.
Seattle City Light CEO $340k 8% bonus
Bonneville Power Administration CEO $245k
Avista Energy CEO $4.77 Million
Puget Sound Energy CEO $1.7 Million up to 9 Million (includes bonus ramp targets)
Now let’s play a game of which are public and which are private.
Public owned ones by definition are allowed to run in a deficit and have alternate source of "charges" in government subsidies.
For sure I now pay for all these marketing campaigns: they all offer a cheap first year. So I have to switch yearly to get a good "welcome present" (that the non-switchers are paying for me).
Privatizing a commodity-service, that utilities are (electrons/water/gas -- it's all very standardized) is the most ridiculous to me. The innovation a supplier can bring you is mostly it's marketing campaign.
Most of my free time was spent on the necessities.
Moving to SF and embracing that lifestyle (being able to afford that lifestyle...) freed me up for the pursuit of happiness.
I look at government the same way: public service should assume some of the burdens for the citizenry. utilities should be one of those things assumed by the state, paid for by taxes. The administration of which has a goal of driving down costs for customers, NOT for increasing profit
In your example no one is going to dig a rival pipe because you can't just go around installing pipes under other people's roads and land. The permission to do that is granted to a single entity by the government, further reinforcing the natural monopoly. There is no situation where it is economically feasible to lay more pipe when you have no right to do that.
This is why we say utilities are a natural monopoly. If you have the pipes/wires in place and even a little paid off you can undercut and competitor until they are bankrupt.
Okay sure, and if the utility is public, the public should get to set policies accordingly.
> Public utilities receive unfair advantages like preferential financing, tax exemptions, and government infrastructure grants in your definition of subsidies, public utilities frequently receive some form of government support
Unfair to who? Somebody who wanted to profit off the public? As a member of said public, excuse me for not being the most empathic towards people trying to make a buck off me.
The problem is a lot of companies functionally behave that way but there actually isn’t a mandate resembling anything like this, though it’s repeated so often I’m not surprised a lot of people it’s the case. Fiduciary duty doesn’t translate to “rip up and sell everything that isn’t nailed down, burn all your goodwill, and squeeze the shit out of everyone so you can extract every red cent as fast as humanly possible.” You are allowed to plan for the long-term. We just don’t and we create all sorts of incentives (bonus structures for instance) to chase short-term gains.
The investors aren’t going to rise up in all their fury and haul off a CEO to be guillotined because he invested in a project that spans more than a quarter. But unfortunately, plenty of businesses love operating as if that’s the case, because it gives an excuse to make quick dirty money. So they hide behind this erroneous perception of what constitutes “fiduciary duty.“ In the US’s particular form of capitalism it makes a lot of sense, even if it’s terrible for us as a whole.
A long term plan for a company is _at least_ a decade. If your plan ended today, it started in 2016 so it has had to survive COVID, inflationary periods, several trade wars, the rise of AI and now the side effects of the war in Iran.
If your long term plan has to adapt to those in real time, is it even a long term plan? Or is it really a series of long term plans cut so short they became short term plans? I can see companies adapting to just drop the long term premise entirely.
FWIW this is a myth.
> Second, absent a limited set of circumstances as defined under Revlon, a board of directors, while always required to act in an informed manner, is not under any per se duty to maximize shareholder value in the short term, even in the context of a takeover.
Or do you want to redistribute the ownership of capital?
The interests of the shareholders diverge quite strongly from the interests of electrical utility customers. It is generally a parasitic relationship where they consume resources that could have been spent improving utility service for the customers, either directly via dividends or indirectly by avaricious behavior on the part of the company in pursuit of their stock price.
Unless the customers are the shareholders, as in a co-op. The article's data seems to show that co-ops provide the cheapest electricity, which makes sense because the owners are the same people as the users, so the incentives are aligned.
I think that's unfair. Do you disagree that companies who go public become myopic and attempt to extract more value until they've hollowed themselves out?
tl;dr Ford wanted to invest profits back into Ford company and Dodge forced them in court to pay dividends instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
> Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than for the benefit of his employees or customers.
For a fuller treatment see:
There are laws that a plumber can't come into your home and smash up your pipes. That law however is not the thing that prevents the plumber from doing that, the plumber naturally works in your common interest. It's the exact same with companies, shareholders elect a board who hires specialists to run the company. Notice the shareholders are at the top.
Allowing outside shareholders in combination with private ownership is going to result in the kinds of short term thinking that lead to the "exits" and other profit-maximizing behaviors.
One "way out" is to make laws that give good public incentives / allow people to easily incorporate as organizations where the employees are the sole owners of the entity (co-op).
Shareholder value (primacy) is one interpretation on the purpose of companies (and a relatively recent one):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
There are others:
* “Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.” ― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._O%27Reilly_III
* “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”[72] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics
If you back to the mid-1900s US:
> In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”
* https://law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-history...
Or further:
> American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither for-profit nor nonprofit in today’s parlance but rather, served a multitude of municipal, religious, charitable, educational, and eventually business purposes in early nineteenth-century New England. The purposes of early American business corporations—rather than maximization of profit to private shareholders— were often overtly public, involving development of local transportation, finance, and other much-needed economic infrastructure. With the rise of factory-based manufacturing, railroads, and other capital-intensive industries in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the advent of general incorporation statutes, the purpose of the American business corporation shifted fundamentally from public to private. By 1860, the stage was set for the modern firm.
* https://repository.law.umich.edu/mbelr/vol9/iss1/2/
The idea that it is some kind of 'legal requirement' is also a myth:
Nope there's no legal requirement. Management is happy for you to believe there is because they get paid in stock.
The only legal requirement is to make decisions that are in the shareholders' interests, rather than the management's. That means short-term-bad, long-term-good decisions are actually strongly encouraged.
As far as I can tell utility companies are pretty bad at "vast profits to shareholders".
Paying for Their Profits: How Ratepayers Foot the Bill for Soaring Utility Profits - https://energyandpolicy.org/utility-profit-report/ - March 12th, 2026
- Some utilities consistently operate at significantly higher margins than the average. The top 10 utilities by average margin over 2021–2024 include MidAmerican Energy (27.22%), Florida Power & Light (23.51%), Nantucket Electric (23.24%), Empire District Electric (22.45%), Florida Public Utilities (20.35%), CalPeco (20.28%), Public Service Electric & Gas (19.44%), Duke Energy Carolinas (19.07%), Alabama Power (18.71%), and AEP Texas (18.63%).
Comparing long term returns using a website like this would help figure out if the businesses are over performing.
I am fairly confident the cohort of those who support investor owned utilities are a vocal minority.
Note that there exists the same incentives for publicly owned and investor owned utilities of voters today wanting lower utility prices at the expense of future utility customers by keeping capital expenses down today.
>I am fairly confident the cohort of those who support investor owned utilities are a vocal minority.
I will be the first to support only publicly owned utilities. But that has nothing to do with using bad logic and numbers to determine outsized margins.
These are their five year stock gains, with the general market for reference.
Market (SP500): 68%
Market(tech): 89%
XEL: +20%
AEP: +51%
SO: +47%
EIX: -5%
CPK: +2.5%
AQN: -64%
NGG: +30%
NEE: -3.5%
Looks like a pretty bad industry for profits, even stacking the dividend on AEP, it still comes up short of SP500.
Utility companies get local monopolies and in exchange their prices are regulated. Consequently they have moderate but stable, essentially guaranteed, returns.
As interest rates go up, investor owned utilities increase their rate of return on equity ask, pushing up consumer electricity prices. A baseline of consumer electric demand is inelastic, and required for life.
But yeah, natural monopolies with inelastic demand (power, water, healthcare, shared infrastructure) should be publicly owned, imo.
Which is to say if the solution was that simple and the fruit that low hanging it'd be done already.
At the end of the day whether profit or not the problem is that there's no consequences for sucking and no reward for not sucking. Government agencies tend toward fiefdom expansion, amassing power and graft. For profit entities tend to try and create situations where they can extract rents on the flimsiest of pretexts. They both seem to suck for energy though perhaps government sucks a tiny bit less. Neither "solves" the problem because neither seems inclined to steadily march toward cheaper/better/faster/whatever-er energy. They both seem to try and increase the suck if left to their own devices.
The study even points this out as a foot-note but then focuses on rate of price increase versus nominal price. It should not come as a surprise that in areas where utilities are less abundant the price will increase faster than in areas where that same utility is plentiful.
I actually think the most interesting factor is listed down in the “about the data” section: “ Most of the gap opened from 2020 to 2023, during the energy price spike: 25% at investor-owned utilities, 11% at public utilities and co-ops. Before and since, both rose at about the same pace.”
So, it might be basically the same story everyone complains about. When there’s a shock, companies tend to quickly hike prices higher than they need to, but after the problem is resolved they’re slow to let prices come down again, if they do at all.
And that detail casts doubt on other explanations because if they were the case we wouldn’t expect to see the divergence be largely confined to the pandemic. There was still a gap before 2020, but it looks like it had been a fairly steady ~1¢/KWh.
For example, in my home state of Massachusetts, for-profit utilities are required participate in the state mandated home efficiency subsidy program, MassSave and add surcharges to the delivery charge, to a state-wide cost of $4.5 billion for 2025 - 2027.
Municipal utilities are exempt.
We’re at the bottom of the list on this post, because it’s looking at recent inflation, but municipal utilities cost much less in Mass. But there are many components to this difference.
except its completely not:
electricity has stability, availability during peak loads, robustness under inclement weather etc.
Water has purity, safety, and flavor. (Austin water in the fall tastes like leaves :gross:)
This is about what we pay here for delivery back to the grid, yes pay, not earn, they don't want our solar, we have too much (yes we can turn them off, and we do).
Why in the world would the cost of electricity be a factor in wanting to separate federally by anyone with the slightest amount of brain tissue?
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...
Which also has this quote: "In Alberta, where electricity is supplied through a competitive retail market, residential prices tend to be slightly higher and more variable over time compared with most other provinces."
Those companies that win big pork filled contracts would never have any incentive to get the company to waste tax dollars.
Adding the profit motive in here definitely helps prevent waste
Also this is not the sole purpose of companies.. SpaceX is a trillion dollar company with 0 profit.
The free market has created everything you use the more we turn the keys over to government's the worse things get.
Companies can't get infinite profits because they will be undercut by other companies COMPETING. The government can get infinite power and control though.. they have no competition.
To establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.
> Also this is not the sole purpose of companies.
Friedman disagrees.
> The free market has created everything you use the more we turn the keys over to government's the worse things get.
Which is why we have never needed government regulation of things like food, air, water, shelter, work safety, accessibility, or anything else. The free market provides.
> The government can get infinite power and control though
Which is why in a free society the government is answerable to the people.
This might be your personal ideological creed, but it is not a self-evident axiom you can just assert with zero backing.
> Companies can't get infinite profits because they will be undercut by other companies COMPETING
Then why haven't they?
> The government can get infinite power and control though.. they have no competition.
Are you aware other countries with their own governments exist?
And it got there in part through the evisceration of NASA.
> The free market has created everything you use the more we turn the keys over to government's the worse things get.
Government funds research that has brought us such advances as moon landings, computers, and the internet. What an odd example you chose in SpaceX
Maybe small difference in finances too, very often public sector struggles with basic tools. I "feel" that private sector is a little more prone to renew that part (to satisfy the efficiency gods). That said it often backfires because they will also replace perfectly good tools or software to get the latest shiny.
Then there's mass.. but large private corps will have the same issues.
I think part of the success of this message is that it’s so obviously silly that people feel silly questioning it.
The only reason cities are having issues with water and electricity is because we cut taxes on the rich. Wages went down and service quality got cut to make the CEOs richer. The US has been coasting on all the infrastructure built in the 50-60s when we had a 90% federal income tax rate and CEOs were capped at making the 2026 equivalent of 5 mil a year. Tax dodging was stopped, everything was funded and life was affordable.
Or are they just reselling access to some ahared legacy infrastructure? In which case any "competition" is very likely an illusion.
There is only one public water system, every house connects to it. The state tasks specific companies with its maintenance (these are often not utility providers themselves, just construction/maintenance companies).
Consumers attached to that system have a metered connection, but water just flows as long as there's enough overall. Your utilities company doesn't have to move any physical water at all. They just have to eventually "settle" the amount of water that they sold to their customers. They do so by buying and then forwarding options contracts. The electricity and gas companies are the same. They compete on
- trading (who knows best when to buy how much?) and
- consumer-facing marketing
This is how a lot of the modern economy works. Through the power of abstraction, you can run an online store without producing or shipping any items yourself and a delivery restaurant without cooking any meals.
does every house have 4+ water lines, gas lines, etc. running to it?
if not, i'm not sure what you mean.
The main reasons for this arrangement are political -- debt stays off the government's balance sheet, and labour disputes aren't "the government's fault".
Those are completely different activities, with completely different competency requirements, economical and political characteristics.
Also, bundling them is an anti-competitive measure. What is important for generation in particular, that is a competitive market where you can have private companies.
A deregulated market should provide choice, if it provides monopoly the gov should step in either by breaking up (forcing choice) or making public (forcing good).
Go google "natural monopoly" please. No one is arguing that work is not happening to provide a service.
We're arguing that capitalism clearly fails to achieve good outcomes for optimizing the quality and cost of that service in the case of natural monopolies.
A natural monopoly is one where a product or service is:
- Widely considered fundamental to the public good (and in most cases, has very inflexible demand, meaning that people will often pay any sum to access it)
- Whose cost overheads are either fixed or grow slower than the variable costs (meaning that the investment required to scale the service not accounting for costs that scale with individual usage benefit from economies of scale)
- Easy to be gamed for profit in the hands of a profit-driven entity (either in the form of extortionate pricing directly, or cost-cutting on things like infrastructure maintenance; a good example here is how PG&E has infamously failed to maintained their power lines in California, leading to large-scale wildfires)
In the modern day, the best example of these are public utilities: water, power, road networks, public transit.
In these cases, the latter two points are used to justify public ownership, which in turn defeats the third point.
At the end of the day it will be about tradeoffs. CA/TX and others "deregulated" electricity by splitting the public-side (transmission and distribution) as heavily regulated from the generators and consumer purchasing sides. In TX, nominally, this lowered rates, though it has been some time since I researched this space. What it also did was cause pretty bad second order effects for transmission providers since they can't exclude use of their owned networks due to the physics of grids. It also caused underinvestment in the grid, causing the major freeze-outs and near-collapse of the natural gas delivery pipelines that made the news.
There CAN be advantages to bringing in private enterprise, but, they need fairly strict oversight to not cash out/distribute the funds needed for infrastructure O&M/new build to shareholders.
I'm all for multiple city bus operators.
For an example of the opposite, you can unfortunately look at the Canadian telcom oligopoly.
The problem with public ownership is that it drives price is too low because it allows people to vote on prices. Your average age 60+ voter doesn’t care if lowering the water bill now means that the system will be in bad repair 30 or 50 years from now.
At the end of the day, there is no magic policy bullet to fix problems with the people. Public infrastructure in the US sucks whether it’s publicly owned or privately owned. But I bet if the Japanese trains were publicly owned instead of privately owned, they would still be pretty good.
The fixed service fee cost $40/month which was more than the natural gas consumed every month but Jan/Feb. They also make cancelling difficult, I was put on hold for 40 minutes without an music so I didn't know if I had been disconnected or was just on hold.
Electric is run by one company and their service fee is $15/mo. Their customer service is also much better.
The rest of your point I agree, but good maintenance is not a given regardless of private ownership or government ownership.
InsidiousWombat•1h ago
toomuchtodo•1h ago
Utilities have made $200B+ in profit since 2021, new report says - https://www.utilitydive.com/news/utilities-have-made-200b-in... - March 17th, 2026
That's $200B that could've, in some parts, gone into grid investment and lower electrical costs. Instead, it's the rake for financially engineering being a middleman.
I'm confident this is solved for in the long term with more coop and muni ownership of grids, alongside rapid deployment of solar and batteries so folks can go off grid if they want, as is happening across Pakistan [1] [2]; in the interim, it's annoying though, and for those who cannot afford to be squeezed for these profits, painful.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070915
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50145248
(non profit, coop, and muni grids can go to the bond market just like an investor owned utility to borrow for grid investment capital, so this is not an excuse for investor owned utilities to exist)
https://www.electric.coop/electric-cooperative-fact-sheet | https://www.electric.coop/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/2026_NC... [pdf version]
testing22321•1h ago
That’s because under capitalism, waste and inefficiency are touted as the ultimate evil. Making profit is the entire purpose of the whole system, so it’s inherently good, and “the right thing”.
Especially in the US, even talking about a reduction in profit is akin to blasphemy, and quickly gets one labeled a quack.
toomuchtodo•1h ago
Just like China is cramming down legacy auto export TAM through their EV exports (BYD has surpassed Ford in international sales as of this year, as is constrained by not having enough marine vessels to export more), solar and batteries will come for investor owned utilities as well.
[1] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...
x187463•1h ago
CGMthrowaway•1h ago
At the low end, the GAO estimates of federal spending, 3-7% is fraud, 3% is improper payments, 7-10%+ is legal but wasteful (e.g. zombie programs) - totaling 13-20%.
In the middle, DOGE (don't smite me, just citing multiple sources) estimated 30-33% was waste.
And at the high end, the American public according to Gallup polling perceives 59% to be waste. https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-say-federal-govt-wastes-...
javcasas•49m ago
From that, NEE pays 43.72% in dividends.
So we can say that 17.64% of the amount paid for energy to this company is wasted in dividends ALONE.
Just to put some numbers on the waste on the private side.
Synthetic7346•31m ago
lgcmo•1h ago
CGMthrowaway•1h ago
Under a government-granted monopoly, that threat is legally banned (except for maybe water trucking)
bluGill•55m ago
Because the bad has to be unrealistically bad before someone can compete nobody sane will.
CGMthrowaway•48m ago
Bad water or water service is not unrealistic.
It took FIVE YEARS for Flint Michigan's water to be re-declared "safe to drink without a filter." The solution involved FEMA and the National Guard.
That can't have been the best way.