Objectively they are not profitable. If you count gas taxes that are collected, we're only covering about a quarter of the cost to maintain them.
Roads are not generating direct revenue, which is how you determine profit. There's no model where roads are profitable.
Additionally, we've been moving goods and services by rail for approximately two centuries in the United States - long before a car was on a road. Roads are not a requirement to move goods around.
That same argument should apply to public transport then. You can't on one hand argue that roads don't need to be profitable in the traditional sense because of their benefits and the turn around and ignore the same for public transport.
I remember pointing this out to someone who said public transportation was unprofitable and his response was "I don't care".
People tend not to point it out because most don't actually care about the profitability at all, it's just a meme opinion they present because they prefer cars and look at it like a competition. Other meme opinions that get used:
- disabled people need cars and you want to take cars away from them! (fake disability advocacy - disability advocates who have spent 10 minutes thinking about this know that disability is a spectrum and that many disabilities prevent people from being able to use cars or they are unable pay for the necessary modifications to be able to drive; also no one said anything about taking cars away from people)
- cyclists are a danger to pedestrians and cars! (rhetorical trick to get people to think bikes pose a greater danger to pedestrians than cars)
- buses are ugly! (so is your car)
- it increases traffic (so does your car)
- not everyone wants to ride a bike/walk/take the bus (no one said you have to)
They say these things even in non-adversarial contexts. Like in a discussion about wanting more pedestrian infrastructure and bike paths, they will say "just use [existing bike path], some of us have JOBS and ERRANDS to run" as if people only walk/bike for leisure. No, you don't understand, I'm trying to get as far away from the horrible drivers with Texas/Florida plates as possible!!
I'm not entirely convinced that this entire thing isn't an experiment at throwing a complete dev / release cycle at some AI engine in some sort of weird marketing ploy.
"See, we built, announced and marketed an entire piece of software from our CLI prompt!"
I'm a recent convert from Gnome. Mostly cause Gnome seemed to have too many mysterious crashes—waking from sleep, switching between windows when video was playing—so much so that it was just easier to switch to something modern (as opposed to sway/i3) and not have to learn/rewrite keybindings.
No, KDE is KDE. Awesome is awesome. You can use awesome as the window manager for KDE (I have in the past), but you can do that with GNOME, Xfce, or LXQt as well.
This, sometimes it's enough for things to just work as you expect so you can do your actual work. I don't really understand why so many people are unpaid part time evangelizers.
Personally, I want projects I like to survive, and drawing attention to them is one way to attempt to contribute to that, for not-exclusively-but-primarily egoistic reasoning.
1. Owner[s] sell their stock to the company
(note the company needs to be fairly successful to have the cash to buy the shares. Sometimes it's bought all at once, but often on some sort of multi-year payment plan. Bob's Red Mill took approx. 10 years to buy out Bob and his partners.)
2. The company puts the stock into a trust held for the benefit of employees.
3. A portion of shares may be immediately distributed to employees based on key status, years of service, etc.
4. The shares are used as part of benefit packages. It's sort of like a 401k that the employees don't actually have to pay anything to participate in. The longer you're there, and the more important your role (generally), the more you end up owning, and it's generally treated like employer 401k matches in terms of income tax.
Usually after you reach a certain threshold, you're allowed to sell your shares to others or back to the company in order to diversify.
On the other hand, we update irreplaceable spacecraft billions of miles away with new software.
It should be fine to push software updates out, as long as the correct safety and fallback procedures are in place. It simply has to be designed to handle failure and procedures need to be in place to mitigate risks.
It sounds like that wasn't the case here. Also, why wouldn't you have a small initial release pool when you have such a large potential for disruption?
