As I pointed out, they actually do provide a service with it. They own it, so repairs are free, and because it's a public (i.e. government owned) corporation, service happens quickly with someone who actually knows what he's doing.

The downside of course is that you are paying for something that you might not ever need. It depends a lot on your financial situation and risk tolerance. If your water heater can be replaced for 300 dollars that's different than 1300 too. Depends on a lot of factors.

Boy will you be laughing at yourself in a couple of years when you look back on how you thought a few dozen TB of data a month was like, some big deal.

Boy will we all be laughing at you a decade from now for predicting that Windows would expand to fill any hard drive ever invented, unless you're the kind of person where no-one can see inside your house because your collection of yellowing newspapers has taken possession of every vertical surface.

There will come a day where rendering a ROTK tribute will be an afternoon school project. That decade is not this decade.

We're at the point where we should be measuring bandwidth in dBA where 10x energy is perceived as 2x loudness.

The hot water heater is monitored/owned by the local utility, and they monitor your water usage (total) as well. Ontario canada, several cities, and it was the same in New Brunswick when I was living there briefly, this procedure has worked in. Also, when the liner of my mothers hot water heater disintegrated and there were liner bits spewing out of the taps she just called the local utility and they just came over and replaced the heater later that day. No (added) cost.

We have the same for electricity and natural gas (methane). Occasionally the guys who check the meters for electricity or methane read the wrong one, or read the meter wrong and we get called too. The meters are read remotely and if there's an unexpected spike we get a phone call, but they come and check on them to see that they aren't tampered with a couple of times a year.

If we have a leaking hot water tap the water company notices after a full month after it started and calls us as our hotwater usage spikes and our bill is way up.

How many users know the difference between 10TB and 10MB? Legal fine print is there for a reason, for those of us who actually do know the difference. For everyone else confusing the issue is unlikely to be helpful.

Still different pots at different tax rates.

You can make a serious discussion out of which income groups are hurt more or less by federal versus state expenditure in different places.

Every major country in the world has various levels of government, even the UK which is relatively centralized still has city, county and now the national but sub national parliaments in wales and scotland.

The feds pay the state, the state pays the county, the county pays the city. Yes, if you're a taxpayer from anywhere outside of Utah or one of the areas attached to their grid it doesn't really matter to you where exactly the money is being spent. But if you're the poor dude in area of this facility where you'd be asked to subsidize a federal facility because it's in your district (including potentially the employees who work there), you'd much rather it be spread around to more people.

In general though a private company will have guaranteed deals, they will have a contract controlling the price increases they could face for some period of time, and they (like the feds) can always leave. The federal government like a megacorporation can also play political hardball, and say you know what, we're willing to spend 20 or 30 million dollars (or 300 million or 1.5 billion) to relocate this facility to save 2.4 million a year and we'll take all those jobs and all the development you got and leave you with nothing.

What does this story have to offer?

The world is a competitive place, except when it isn't. And why is that, exactly? Why do social insects exist? Why, for that matter, do social mammals exist? We wouldn't even have social networking unless the roots of cooperation in our genetics and culture are nearly as deep (and indispensable) as nature red in tooth and claw.

Competition will never not be present, which provides an excellent enclosed gondola for all the slippery-slopers out there. How nice is that? You can never be entirely wrong arguing that competition will always exist. Safe! Secure! You'll never say anything insightful, either, about how competition self-regulates into ritualized displays of dominance/submission without goring every participant.

You are free to ignore a congressional subpoena and tell us about the experience.

It does go through the attorney general and a grand jury, so you can try and defend yourself though.

Congress has lawful subpoena power in the US.

Failure to comply would be a contempt of congress

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress

Tell that to the thousands of people walking around with them. Not released to the general public, not released at a price for the general public, still in a prototype phase they are still in the wild and could pose a threat to public safety. Imagine if they had a serious risk of catching fire for example.

Congress can still compel them to provide anything they ask for as part of their powers to make laws.

Drone strikes aren't any place.

They're any place that won't shoot back, either because they are unable or have agreed not to. Drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have to this point been done with the (sometimes secretive) consent of the host country.

If the US tried to launch drone strikes in Saudi or India or the like they might get one off, before the Saudi's or Indians started shooting the drones down.

I need a robot to help me proof read my forum posting.

depends how much more crap we have.

Not just design, but sales too. Think about the narrow world of video games. There are more video games than you have time to play, if you want to play video games at all. There's huge potential in having lots of sales expertise on aggregating what kind of game(s) you personally might want to play. What kind of car/toast/dishwasher/clothes etc. to buy.

Who gets to decide how much is too much?

Point me to any country where you can identity any small group with sole authority for this kind of decision, and I'll wager they mainly discuss among themselves the problem of too much being not enough. In societies where decisions are reached by a process (in which many people can participate and where chance also plays a significant role) there's at least some potential for antitrust legislation to pass which enacts a ceiling low enough to echo-locate.

Really, America had it right before they repealed the estate tax. It should have been called the hereditary git tax, to remind Americans of what their forefathers were so intent on escaping in the first place. Since when did it become an American value for the children of privilege to cruise through life on daddy's deep pockets without earning it themselves, generation upon generation? Just wondering.

I think I am actually.

Design.

Value added is in telling the robots what to make and that would suit other peoples needs. The less labour we need per thing made the more things we have per person, the more time we need invested in buying the right things for us and for servicing them.

And I'm sure my grandparents found them very delicious.

in the US, in 1900 41% of the labour was involved in agriculture, in 1930 it was 21.5%. Today it's between 2 and 3%. Europe is something similar.

And that's to say nothing of the 10's of millions of farm animals that worked in the same period and were replaced as well.

To an extent you're right though, people are still needed to oversee the robots, to replace and repair robots etc. The modern car factory even though it may have thousands of workers is very different than a car factory of thousands of workers before. That doesn't mean an end to work, it just means an end to a lot more manual work.

With opens then next possible revolution in industry. Customization. Rather than 10 different models of cars you can have 10 000 all for the same price and only a tiny marginal cost in deciding which one is best for you. That certainly happens now with cars, the marginal cost is just too high for a lot of it. But that will apply to a lot more goods likely, a lot more 'service' jobs that are are about deciding what you want the robots to do, and telling them how to do it, and fixing them when they fail.