Every firm only has so much money to spend on such things as maintance. That's regardless of whether the firm is owned by the stockholders or the people - i.e. the state. There will always be pressure to spend less - the alternative is to increase prices, which is even less popular if the state owns the utility rather than a private company. Unfortunately the only solution to inadequate expenditure on maintaince is micro-management by regulation; state ownership won't make a difference.

For a demonstration of what happens when the state fails to maintain a utility, look at the history of the railway lines of Africa after independence. It was politically impossible to increase fares or to get money out of the government - most of that was getting looted by the President and his cronies - so railways got less and less safe until services ended. That was a 'socialist' solution.

Of course if power companies are owned by the state in the West they are merely competing for money with welfare, defence and tax cuts, and not, usually, the President's cronies' Swiss bank accounts. But even so they will tend to lose out and expenditure will be insufficient...

If so, the person identified as the author deserves the prize. If it wasn't, who cares.

Thank you

'Clearance rates for murder were much higher in the 1960s, with no video cameras, than they are now.'

I think this may be because in the 60s there was far less violent crime, so the only murders out there were domestics which are trivial to solve. It would interesting to test the idea.

As other companies sell the same things and all of them compete the price down. Of course the software industry has done a great job of preventing this from happening; Microsoft and Apple ensure that operating systems haven't got cheaper etc. etc. By contrast the crippling of the US car industry by foreign companies demonstrates how even the most apparently secure can be humbled, and the fading of such past giants as IBM is similarly a warning.

Seems to have been a spontaneous event after the crowd listening to the dictator started shouting him down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The same is probably true of the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall; the people just took advantage of the confused messaging from the East German rulers and over it went.

What's needed is clarity about what the acceptable top speed / horsepower of ebikes should be before they are treated as motor bikes. The problem then is enforcement; the UK has such rules, but also a vast number of illegal e-bikes which are especially popular with food delivery couriers. What we don't want is a licencing regime for all bikes with electrical support, or, even worse, all push bikes requiring licencing.

If the organisation employed low quality people with no up to date experience, then those people are not really to blame. Likewise if the request for more funds was refused by the 'board', then shooting the messenger is unfair. Overall, there needs to be accountability - but of those really responsible!

Then the taxpayer should fund it. (corrected that for you...)

I suspect that we need to think a lot harder about what school education should look like, and that probably won't conclude that the present approach is fit for purpose. One of the more interesting options is - and don't freak at its origin - the 'Accelerated Christian Education' approach, which has each kid working on their own with a computer that teaches them the ideas and then tests whether they've got it. If they're struggling they can either ask for help - and do something else until the teacher arrives - or help will arrive when the software realises that they're stuck. For kids who can learn like that, it seems to work extremely well; the term 'Accelerated' doesn't seem to be inaccurate because, as you say, the motivated / interested kid will keep pursuing what they want to pursue. Meanwhile hopefully the teacher will be able to get the strugglers up to speed.

https://www.acediagnostictest....

Multiplication tables, history dates, state and country locations on the world map, Chemical formulae including the Periodic Table, Physics equations, foreign language vocabulary and reading set texts in English. There is no virtue in learning / doing those in school time.

To a large extent however this debate is avoiding the main issue; why are we spending vastly more on education than lots of other countries and achieving far less...

You assert that without offering any reasoning ;)