They can always just turn off 2.5 GW of generating facilities or blackout 2 GW of their country's demand when they don't have enough to go around. So sure, they don't "need" to have a functioning country-wide grid.

And I see that you don't address why France's electricity costs less than Germany's electricity.

They don't have the power to impose a factor of three multiplier on public education. You'll have to look elsewhere for that.

I disagree. of course. The reason is that these transactions all occur at France's convenience not Germany's. The Scandinavian countries with their high reliance on hydro are really the ones making a killing here.

We are already seeing the problems with Germany's system with huge arbitrary surpluses and deficits that have to be pushed into other countries and an electricity cost double that of France.

[...]

What is the price of the electricity that Germany exports versus what it imports? Sure, cheap power from Germany makes French power less profitable. But buying more expensive French power at other times on an impromptu basis makes French power more profitable. And from what I'm seeing, it's a net profit for France.

Which is a typical market maker position and tends to be very profitable.

Unless it doesn't, of course. Let us keep in mind this 1984 experience would still be a public education system. There's already some crazy stuff in public school systems like zero tolerance policies and ideological contamination by political correctness that inhibits a teacher's independence.

You shouldn't. A two-thirds overhead on your education costs is relevant.

[...]

No they didn't. On average, they found they were about the same. In some states, charter schools did consistently perform worse than public schools, but in some states, charter schools consistently performed better. Not an argument for charters schools, but not one against them either.

It's never been a problem before that most of the world doesn't care about me.

Because there aren't any corporate governments out there aside possibly from some local ones.

Let's stop the glib bullshit here. The NSA isn't beholden to corporations. It even acts wildly counter to their interests.

I get that corporations aren't social democracies. What I don't get here is why that is relevant here, especially in governance situations that are neither social democracies or corporations.

Whatever is traded in the market. I've found that even when there isn't a formal currency of trade (or the currency of trade is woefully inadequate for some reason such as a high rate of inflation or inability to use it for most trade in the market), markets tend to gravitate to a informal standard of trade.

And since human life is rarely traded directly, it is a tenuous connection in the marketplace, say to jobs that risk life and limb or in trade offs (such as where to live or what quality of tool to buy) which impose differing degrees of risk to a person's life.

It also happens to be the real world. Human life during a famine in Ethiopia is not as valuable as life in normal India (for example, the Thuggee cult, basically a small sect of serial killers, is supposed to have operated with near impunity for many centuries) which is not as valuable as a life in modern Sweden. This is also reflected in how crime is punished or not in these situations.

Ultimately, the poorer and more desperate a part of society is, the cheaper life becomes.

It's a marginal cost. Reducing the number of people can reach a regime where there is a positive value to people once again.

It is we who choose to make human life valuable or not. And there are easy to conceive global collapse scenarios such as a global famine where human life has negative value - each additional mouth to feed takes food from everyone else and causes more suffering.

My view on this is that the economic mechanisms of trade and private ownership of capital have done far more to make human life valuable than any system of ethics. One can say the same of technology progress, particularly in agriculture, transportation, and labor saving devices.

You went way off the rails here. NSA has already done a lot to undermine corrupt and non-corrupt US corporations and nothing has been done about it. They still get their usual captive revenue stream (which let us note, will flow no matter how unhappy the business world gets about it). Just because large corporations are more useful to the US intelligence community than you are doesn't mean that they're in charge. It just means that the large corporation has some opportunity for profit as long as they continue to play ball. The tail, corporations aren't wagging this dog.

Do you really believe that curbing the power of businesses is going to result in the NSA spying less or hinder the other power grabs that the US federal government routinely engages in?

One of the huge things routinely missed in this topic is that business versus government is the huge informal division of power in democracies throughout the world. Making businesses absolutely subservient to government is another step towards tyranny. Sure, I don't think it's a good idea to let businesses rule our societies. But neither do I think it's a good idea to cripple them so much that they can't help us resist tyranny from the government side.

I can't help but think that you are an unwitting shill for a statist ideology which seeks to knock out the obstacles to rule.