Listen, the home owner can own the pipe going to his house and a share of the pipes in his neighborhood. There is absolutely no need for the water company to own the pipes or the power company to own the power lines, or the phone company to own the data infrastructure. The developer can put them in and charge for maintenance and access. In fact, letting the supplier own them is very stupid because, as you've said, it's a conflict of interest of epic proportions, and all the regulation in the universe could never make up for it. Also your connection costs are way off base and do not reflect reality. If you believe running 100 feet of 3/8" HDPE costs $5,000, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Also looking at the cost of 12" vs 8" pipe is nutty, because most of your costs are labor to dig a trench and bury the pipe.

Either way, is actually very expensive.

Compared to a cheeseburger maybe, but not compared to a house! Connecting a house to a line in the road with buried cable or pipes would cost around $500. That's nothing compared to a monthly cable bill of $50 or a monthly electric bill of $100. Of course, this is all beside the point because as I pointed out the electricity provider does not even need to own the power lines.

If I threaten to quit a company with a thousand employees, they're faced with losing 0.1% of productivity

That's assuming there is no worker specialization. In reality losing some employees will have a much larger impact. For example, if you lose a key engineer it can cause an entire project to fail. On the other hand, some employees actually bring down productivity and losing them will increase the companies income.

You are wrong about the core cause of this imbalance. The real problem is that most people need to work for a large corporation or they will literally starve to death. If people could work for themselves and get by, the individual and the corporation would be on roughly equal footing, since either of them could afford to walk away.

areas where competition is impractical, such as water/electricity to the house

Why does everyone believe this? First of all, running power cables and water lines isn't particularly expensive. Secondly, people could own the lines going to their house, and simply pay for the power or water separately to allow for multiple providers. The idea that this couldn't be a competitive market is simply a myth peddled by proponents of big government and government sponsored monopolies.

How many humans have complex thoughts by human standards?

Pretty much all of them, but not all the time.

The whole point of the concept of evolution is that every separation we make between species is arbitrary.

Any definition we make is arbitrary. That doesn't mean our definitions don't reflect the real world. There are a lot of very real differences between people and other animals.

The reason you will be exposed to such information is people like to use other peoples secretes against them. Eventually, you should learn to ignore it and move on. It's like how you (hopefully) learned to be in a locker room and not stare at everyone's junk.

You call it extortion, they call it standard operating procedure.

There's only so far they can go with that. Eventually people will just figure out that everyone's shit stinks and move on with their lives.

It probably means you are overcooking them.

He should have just explained that he wanted to read his texts without being shot.

stopping just short of burying our own cable

You're willing to go as far as talking to people? You sound pretty dedicated to the cause. . .

some animals have small brains and simple thoughts and other animals have complex brains and complex thoughts

No animals have complex thoughts by human standards.

Vegetarianism is about the minimization of cruelty and suffering.

To me it's about trying to apply abstract human concepts to animals who don't even know or care about them. But even if the terms do correctly apply to animals, who is to say that slaughtering does not involve the minimal amount of cruelty and suffering? You are making lots of assumptions about what it's like to be slaughtered, but you could not possibly know the truth.

You're not going to make much of a scientist until you spend years memorizing what's in those textbooks that scientists have written and are able to parrot it back.

Reading textbooks has nothing to do with being a scientist. I don't even know where you'd get that idea? From reading a university curriculum maybe? But even if you're at the university, most of the educators you'll meet there will tell you that having a PHD doesn't make you a good scientist.

Journalists take heed: Your coverage has consequences. All those media outlets who trumpeted the global warming "pause" may now be partly responsible for a documented decrease in Americans' scientific understanding.

Scientific understanding is the ability to apply the scientific method. It is not the ability to parrot back claims scientists have made, or the claims others have made about what scientists have claimed. That's just regular "knowledge".

In recent years, kidney exchanges—in which pairs of living would-be donors and recipients who prove incompatible look for another pair or pairs of donors and recipients who would be compatible for transplants, cutting their wait time—have become more widespread. Although these exchanges have grown rapidly in the U.S. since 2005, they still account for only 9% of live donations and just 3% of all kidney donations, including after-death donations. The relatively minor role of exchanges in total donations isn't an accident, because exchanges are really a form of barter, and barter is always an inefficient way to arrange transactions.

Or you could find a way to make barter more efficient perhaps? It wouldn't really be that hard to set up a "kidney exchange" where a family or relative who is willing to donate but incompatible could put their kidney on the exchange and in return get one that is compatible. It's not exactly rocket-science. It never ceases to amaze me just how far behind the times economists and other so-called experts really are.