They buy most power from TVA, the rate city council controls is the fixed rate markup they charge on top. Our power is $0.07/kwh by the time you pay for it.
Deliberately underfunded or mismanaged, maybe. It's been like this since the 90s at least. But I don't think they need any intent for a buyout for it to suck. Afaik, there is zero interest from any private buyers for our utilities.
If I had to point to a specific failure, it's that the rates are set by city council, and raising them is wildly unpopular. Everyone who proposed it loses re-election. We have some of the cheapest power in the world but fat lot of good that does when it's not on.
Tbf, my city has a publicly owned utility company and it suuuuucks. Literally writing this comment on my phone during a 12 hour power outage during perfect weather.
I've played thousands of hours of TM in Linux back to the TMNF days, works great. Honestly Uplay causes more problems than TM itself.
Come on man I don't like google either, but SEO exploitation has been a cat and mouse game since search engines were invented. They're all varying levels of suck the last few years. It's not an easy problem to solve, and AI has made it far more difficult.
My entire subscription feed is hundreds of edutainment channels pretty much. It's my alternative to the discovery/history/science channel for the modern age (and tbh it's higher quality too in many cases)
It's also really really good for learning practical skills like home repairs and automotive maintenance.
Some favorite channels:
Nilered
Styropyro
Practical engineering
Technology Connections
Breaking taps
The thought emporium
I'm definitely not disagreeing with that, my point is like you said, both good AND bad changes come out of drastic shakeups, and you don't know which one you're going to get.
Important to note here, the status quo is the status quo for a reason. Incremental evidence based change happens slowly. It cannot happen fast, and that's good. Slow is stable. The clear vision is "the system we have but marginally better tomorrow. And then the day after tomorrow, marginally better than that." It's foolish to vote for anyone who promises drastic change, left, right, up, or down. It's a trick. It's like changing 5 variables at once in a science experiment and expecting any sort of result better than random chance. We don't have a perfect system but rolling the dice on a wannabe fascist dictator is obviously not the way forward if you have two brain cells to run together, but an alarming amount of people seem to just not get it.
I have some bad news
A couple percent of the housing market is also going to always be vacant due to turnover as well. That accounts for a large portion, if not the majority of that 16M.
Those people can speak for themselves. I like getting plastered then walking around shirtless in below freezing temps. Makes me feel alive.
Gallon Ziplocs with folded over cardstock sheets for labels, also keeps them rigid so bags of cables that aren't full don't get buried. I have two bins, one with common stuff in my office and the other stays in the basement with all the weird cables.
Or like most of human history. People have been alcoholics far longer than capitalism has existed.