Which industries would you re-nationalise?

[alchresearch]

Do you know how pathetic I feel to ring up about jobs and such, to say, well I have to fit you in on 'this' day, because I can't afford to get to the city centre.

 

I wouldn't be telling any potential employer that if I were you.

 

I wouldn't re-nationalise any industry. I think we're looking back through rose tinted specs, I don't recall any being particularly good in the past.

 

Although Warrington Council run their own buses and the service is clean, efficient and reliable.

[Wildcat]

Some information on the links about how private sector involvement in public services not only costs us financially, but also reduces accountability and our democracy.

 

http://www.publicnotprivate.org.uk/index.php?option=com_docman&Itemid=72

 

http://www.publicnotprivate.org.uk/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=4&Itemid=72

[anywebsite]

Public transport (trains, busses, etc, not air or sea), bt openworld (the part that owns the lines), water, transco, national grid. I think that's all, for now.

 

There are some industries which are most efficiently served by a monopoly, due to their cost structure, that should be a public monopoly. Competition should be encouraged wherever possible, but it makes no sense to have multiple competing water companies all with their own pipes, or multiple bus companies with their own buses competing on the same routes.

[L00b]

OK, so then look at exactly that same scenario, but consider 100 companies all doing R&D in the same area.

In Real Life™, they don't.

 

There may be a few researching the same development at any given time, but certainly not '10s', never mind '100'. Any big Pharma corp hedges its bets across multiple developments, for sure, but not in areas where it knows a competitor is more proficient/experienced: there's no business sense in throwing money at playing catch-up with others in a particular area, much better to spend money keeping ahead in area(s) it is more proficient/experienced than others.

 

Not wanting to teach you to suck eggs, like, but this is "Competing in business 101"

How does the maths add up when unified?

Redundant question, see above

Medicine should be done by an international cooperative.

How much more would we learn if all that research was shared instead of being kept secret?

It already is. It's called Universities and the sharing is done by publishing research papers (after patent applications have been filed). Papers are often published literally the day after the first patent filing (and the patent applications are automatically published as well, some time later). There's not much at all 'secret', if anything at all.

[spooky3]

...

Not wanting to teach you to suck eggs, like, but this is "Competing in business 101"

...

 

So your saying there's no choice in this world. That just because one company is researching something, no-one else will. How many alzheimer, cancer, etc, treatments are coming on the market all the time?

 

Sorry, I don't see you answer as holding up.

[spooky3]

Just watching RT, there's a report about nano technology, this guy's recently won a Nobel laureate for a substance called graphene, it then stated lot's of others were researching and competing for it.

 

Graphene wiki, have you seen how many research references there are listed...

 

EDIT:

 

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2010/press.html