Uber and Lyft were only able to exist in the first place because of inadequate transit service. Cutting routes at @rideact and killing off @Caltrain will once again present a transit vacuum, otherwise described as a business opportunity to fill a gap in the market. https://twitter.com/dbloom/status/1283908561664307200

See, this is one trope in transit planning that just doesn't make sense, that public services need to "be competitive" with private businesses. No, they don't, we have the state power of monopoly. We can just run them out of business if we want.

Why bother with a "competitive price structure" when you can just have free fare, a thing that is literally impossible for Uber to do. We can also limit where private rideshare autos go, something equally impossible to fight without state power.

The post office charges you just a few cents to mail a letter around the planet. It is impossible for UPS, DHL, etc to even come close to that level of service at that price. That's why they don't deliver mail. It just isn't good economic sense.

Your ISP is almost certainly a private corporation. Someone's making a killing carrying your bits and bytes over copper. If the USPS was an ISP, you could just have free fiber because the state has one power no business can ever hold: the ability to tax.

Taxes paid by everyone means you don't need to go out and convince people to sign up for a subscription to get their money. A whole marketing department, gone. CEO profits gone. No sales bonuses when you can just print sales revenue.

All this fuss about boycotts and strikes when we could just, as a people, choose to exercise monopoly power and outlaw competition in provision of universally used services. Sure a strike is powerful, but bankrupting extractive industries by passing laws is the best kind of high.