I think I was less than clear, I didn’t mean a mandated market. I meant that the market mandates, so to speak, what is optimal, invisible hand and all that. I actually am trying to make the point you are making, altbeit I am did so far less competently.
1 - Descriptions of the trucks
Waste Management
Ace
Allied
Walters
2 - descriptions of the road network
3 - descriptions of the distribution of trash
It’s at people’s houses. They put it in a bin, and roll the bin to the end of their drive way.
4 - description of the dumping site
It all goes to Elk River Land Fill owned by Waste Management.
5 - description of the labor market and other costs
It’s a generic Minnesota city.
6 - description of the capital structure of the trucking companies
Allied Waste
Walters
Wast Management
Veoliaes
7 - description of related (nearby markets) if any
The city of Minneapolis provides collection as linked above.
Thnks.
Any thoughts on how we might describe any of that numerically?
Or what we are referring to when we say “inefficient”?
And as I’ve said before, each of these companies have a model for trash collection. Likewise, in every city that has a monopoly provider, there is a model, pick any of them, that is the model I would use, why? Because it meets a minimum standard and because it’s irrelevant.
What’s significant is that the model I would chose would NOT look like 5 small companies overlapping.
If we had access to the models used by the five companies we could compare them.
If we had access to the models used by two city monopolies, we could compare them.
But that’s not what we’re doing here, which you don’t understand, which is why we are on page 3.
If WM swallowed up by the other 4, I am quite confident they would apply the models they are currently using, expanding it as if they gained 100% of the market share. And I am confident that would NOT look like having 5 mini companies overlapping. That’s the part you can’t seem to understand.
The model used by one company does not look like 5 overlapping versions of a smaller model.
I use ACE, my neighbour uses WM. Right now, one truck gets my trash driving by my neighbour’s. Then a second truck drives past my house to get my neighbours. If WM bought ACE, gaining me as a client, I would expect the WM truck to pick up my trash, then my neighbour’s.
Maybe there is a space-time-continuum issue between our house that I’m not aware of, I guess I hadn’t thought of that. It’s also possible that the WM trucks use adamantium to fight the iron golums, but ACE uses silver to fight vampires. So in the end they’d still need two trucks. Also an issue I hadn’t considered.
Hell, even if I simply switched from ACE to WM, what do you think would happen? Do you think WM would send a second truck, or use the one that goes past my house? That’s what we’re talking about here.
There isn’t a need for a brand new model. A model exists for every city in the country, and currently exists for each of the 5 companies in mine. As as far as I can tell, no individual monopoly decided it was best to break itself into 5 mini versions that overlap providing the same service. Can you think of one? I know you can think of outliers and black swans to justify your answer.
In reality, if WM swallowed up one company after another, or slowly expanded its market share from 20% to 100%, it’s model would expand, not duplicate. When one truck got too full to service an area, the area would be divided for two trucks to service.
The way you describe things, if WM went from 20% to 40%, they would go through mitosis to maintain consistency, completely replicating their business, and arbitrarily dividing the houses between the two. Then do it again when one or both reached 40%.
Well, if you said “all I want is a minimum standard in teh OP” no one would have responded.
Are you suggesting now that you are NOT getting whatever your minimum standard is?
This could all be cleared up if you would just define your terms. Until now you were worried about the undefined :inefficiencies", now all you want is “minimum standards od service”? What are these 2 terms? How are they related?
Why not? That is pretty much how wireless phone service is. Would you rather each phone company has a set of states to itself? Would that be better somehow? they all have overlapping infrastructure in pretty much every neighborhood across the US.
I am not interested in what they think their models are, I am interested in how you express them, because you are the ones deriving insight from your observations of the models.
Neither Sam Stone nor I has asked for the models of the existing companies. We are seeking to help you understand the nature of such models in general.
And your apparent refusal to make an effort is the real reason we are on page 3. How far into it were we when someone asked you to define “inefficiency” for example? How far are we into it now? Why fill 3 pages refusing to answer that?
Oh I understand you are quite confident of that alright.
I just don’t understand the basis for your optimism.
Are you suggesting that if WM rolls up all the others, literally buys the companies, that they will simply dump all the existing equipment and replace it with bigger trucks? Maybe you are, and maybe you will, but what is the basis of that claim, especially if you are saying it is somehow more efficient? More efficient at what exactly? Less secretaries in the office? That is the closes you have gotten to answering the question. Is that all there is?
So far, we have heard the 5 company model results in more flexible service choices and lower prices. And you are complaining. Why exactly?
Or, if WM provided service that you preferred, then you would simply swtich and the same thing would happen. So what?
Or maybe the trucks they used are sized to meet the demand they have (and can reasonably expect before they can buy newer trucks in the future).
WM would pick up your trash assuming they have the capacity in their truck, and then ACE and the others would try to woo you to switch again. It’s the churn that keeps prices down in lots of markets like that. You switch, you switch again. Others switch the other way. That’s the beauty, it is really hard to increase market share, but easy to lose it, so you have to win on customer service. Why would a single company solution have that incentive?
They won’t, for the same reason that if all the wireless companies rolled into one, life would really suck, and that is why we have regulations to prevent that. Not that there wouldn’t be phone service, but that it would be lesser service than the alternative.
If everybody on your route switched to WM, then they would probably buy the now unused trucks from the other companies, re-paint them, hire the drivers, and continue on. Their current truck does not have capacity to handle 5 times the work. It is sized for the job they have and can reasonably foresee into the near term future (for some value of “near term”).
Well, I already mentioned phone wireless phone services. Pretty much any company or industry that is subject to antitrust regulation has the same issues. Each market is somewhat different, but in general we believe that competition leads to more efficiency in the economic sense.
Precisely.
They would get a second truck of the same small convenient size as I said above, not get a single bigger truck.
Why?
Because within the situation, where there is going to be churn (and maybe limited growth in new housing) then matching capacity to market share is a big deal on the bottom line. It would be crazy to make large capital investments in capacity you can’t use or might lose.
No, I have said no such thing.
I have said that one builds a model that takes into account various parameters, and how they change over time, and provides you with an “efficient” (in a variety of possible senses) plan for how to allocate resources at any given time.
Why would you even think that because they have twice as many pickups that they need twice as much office space?
Look, I appreciate your efforts here, but I am only going to give you one or two more tries. If you are not going to define your terms, or participate in even the smallest bit of model building, I am going to decide that your dick wagging was nothing but posturing, that I have given you enough to mull over some other time if you get curious, and leave it at that.
The definition of inefficient is the same one that is used in conjunction with “government waste and inefficiency.”
Consider this thread about health care.
So your answer is no, I can’t say what is “inefficient” in my OP?
HInt. Here are some things you might have said anywhere in this thread but didn’t AFICT:
1 - I pay more than I should
2 - The roads get damaged from big trucks and the City has to pay to fix it
3 - I get less service than I should
4 - If I call the companies, it takes a long time before they answer the phone
5 - Some trucks spill trash on the street and don’t sweep it up
6 - The trucks are old and noisy
Stuff like that.
Instead all you have really said is:
1 - A few days a week up to 5 trucks roll by once each on my street.
2 - I think more people have jobs as a result of this arrangement than the alternative.
3 - I had to make a one time decision about which trash company to select.
I’m not really seeing the issue and given the care others and I have put in trying to explain it, and your inability or unwillingness to delve into the answers, I wonder if your OP might have been better placed in MPSIMS instead of GD.
In the end, I think your position is that you would sacrifice a few low level jobs to see less trucks on your street, and you might be willing to pay an extra few bucks a month to make it happen.
As I said upthread, whatever your concern is, why not simply take it to City Hall for them to take into account while they manage the contract and prepare for the next one. For all I know, there may be a technical violation in your complaint that can be fixed - not about the jobs, but maybe the trucks need to be off your street by a certain time and they are not. Who knows?
You still don’t get it. I know you think you’re smart, and you probably are, but you still don’t get it.
Last time:
If I switched from ACE to WM, what would be the most likely outcome. Forget marketing, forget weather.
Right now, an ACE truck gets my garbage. If I switched to WM, what would they do? Use the same truck that services my street, or add a second truck to mimic the previous scenario of ACE getting my garbage? What do you think, with all your experience, seems more likely?
Even if there was an issue of capacity, such that the truck on my street was full, what do you think the most likely result would be? Send two trucks to my house, or adjust the overall route the truck drives to put some houses on another truck?
Try applying all that training and experience you have to the situation at hand. What do you think ACE would do if I asked and paid for a second bin? Since you assume the truck is already at capacity. Would they send two trucks to my house? One at 99% the other at 0%?
That’s what we’re talking about here.
I think the problem we’re having communicating on this is that you’re looking at the situation very specifically, and not_alice and I are looking at the issue systemically.
Can you accept that one system can be more efficient than another, even if some isolated parts of it are less efficient? This happens all the time. The hub-and-spoke thing I mentioned before is a good example, and you seemed to miss my point on that.
So let me go over it again. Let’s say you know nothing about hubs and spokes. You don’t know why Fed Ex does it the way they do. You are just observing the behavior of the company in a specific instance.
You give a package to company A and ask for it to be delivered to a city 200 miles away. This company takes the package, puts it on a plane, and flies it in the opposite direction 1,000 miles. The next day, the package leaves that place, and flies right over your bloody head and lands at the proper destination 200 miles away. Total distance: 2200 miles.
You give the package to company B. Company takes it to the airport, puts it on a plane direct to your destination. Total distance: 200 miles.
Knowing nothing else, tell me which one is more efficient? Would you conclude from your observations of this single package delivery that company A was nuts and company B was way more efficient? If someone told you that it was ‘obvious’ to any small child that company B was more efficient because it flew less than 1/10 of the distance to get your package to its destination, what would you say to them?
My guess is that, knowing what you know about Fed Ex, you’d say “I really can’t tell. I have no idea what decisions drove them to that particular way of doing things. I don’t know what other efficiencies they gain by doing that.”
That’s where I’m at with your example. And let me give you yet another example of how this mechanism could turn out to be more efficient.
Let’s say that instead of allowing individual contracts with customers anywhere in the city, these five companies were broken up into five different zones, each one having a monopoly over that zone. Now you get just one garbage truck per zone, and all residents are served by the same company. Is that more efficient?
Well, let’s consider - if everyone is forced to use that company, they might not be willing to do things like use uniform trash containers. They might not bother notifying the company of vacations. If the zone is relatively small, variance in trash pickup might lower the capacity utilization of the trucks. Some neighborhoods might put out more trash than others, but the city might require all the vendors to charge the same amount per person, so inequities develop. If people don’t have an incentive to minimize their trash, overall trash amounts might be higher.
Or, instead of focusing on the five trucks, think of two pickup models. One is that a truck is sent into a neighborhood on a regular schedule and just picks up everything put out front. If it fills up, another one is dispatched to continue. In the other model, routes can be specifically selected per truck based on known amounts of garbage and path optimization algorithms and all the rest. Routes that have small amounts of garbage spread over longer distances can be serviced with small trucks. Routes that have heavy amounts of garbage in smaller areas can be serviced by larger trucks. Perhaps the fact that there’s a ‘mesh’ of trucks that have spread out routes means that it’s easier for one truck to slide into an area and pick up overfill that another truck couldn’t handle, without having to send a truck all the way out from central dispatch. The result could be trucks that drive optimal paths and return 100% full.
If four other companies do the same thing, then you as an observer see overlap and it looks inefficient. Maybe maybe even if it was all done by one company they could improve that aspect of efficiency. But given that there are competitive companies, this might in fact be a very efficient way to do things.
So why not just contract out to one company? Well, because then you lose the competitive aspect, and one thing we’ve learned from markets is that if they are truly competitive, they tend to drive the competitors towards Pareto-optimal results. We want these guys competing. We want them to be innovating to grab customers from each other. Even if it means some local theoretical inefficiency, in the long run it will be better for the consumer than just creating a monopoly and trying to regulate it.
Once again I’m not trying to claim that the method chosen IS more efficient. I really don’t know. Maybe it’s just the situation forced on the companies by the way the city chose to break up trash hauling. Maybe what you’re seeing are infant-market effects, and the process of competition will lead to consolidation. Or maybe everyone is operating under such restrictive rules that the resulting system is truly crazy and your garbage costs will go up.
All I’m saying that the limited information you’ve given us doesn’t really tell us much about overall efficiency.
You did read teh part where I said I do this stuff for a living,right?
And the part where you claimed to be my equali n model building, and where you haven’t been able to state a single thing numerically yet except for 5 trash companies?
Pardon me while I get a tissue for your crocodile tears.
[QUOTE]
All other things being equal, next week their truck stops at your house and your previous company passes by. I’d say that is pretty darn certain, wouldn’t you?
Asked and answered.
Well,if the first truck was full, it would not get to your house at all would it? So you are only going to get one truck no matter what.
How the other truck is told to arrive depends on some complex modeling. I can’t venture a guess. But I am sure you will.
My training and experience is to build a numerical model. I do believe I have been trying to apply that during the entire thread. Do you suggest otherwise?
Assuming you are allowed to, they would use some of the excess capacity (10% excess was bandied about before, I am fine with that as an example) and move along merrily.
If on a given week, EVERYONE on the ACE route needed a second bin, and they didn’t know ahead of time, the truck would fill early on and they would have to deal with it. It is probably not common that a truck overfills (it will take a lot less than all of you to fill it, maybe 1/9th of you is all it takes).
This actually happened to me once. I was moving and downsizing, I had a basement full of old papers and recyclables. I put out easily a whole years worth all at once. When the driver go there, he refused to take it. He said it would fill him up and then he couldn’t complete his route. I told him, not my problem, sorry for your troubles, but call the dispatcher and work it out. He wasn’t happy, but in exchange for my helping with the heavy lifting, he did it. What happened much further down the route when the truck actually filled up, I have no idea. He very well may have had to dump, and circle back for a second trip.
If yours was really the one that put it over the top, and they didn’t expect it, then they would get a second truck, irrelevant as to available capacity as long as it is enough, or dump the load and return. Unless as someone mentioned, there is a provision for them to skip a house, possibly under some penalty they are willing to accept occasionally.
How can I know how your trash companies work when you are the one who says you have observed them for 7 months at least, but you won’t give us any details?
You already played gotcha games with FedEx, and I got the answer right, didn’t I? So why do you think I am wrong in suggesting you are not providing anywhere near enough information?
Really? from your OP I was to infer that, if some poor soul put out a trash can that a full truck couldn’t accept, and another truck would have to come, that that is some evidence of economic inefficency?
How often do you think that happens?
And you further think that that is not already accounted for in the (descriptions of) models that you have been presented here by both me and Sam Stone?
In case it was NOT clear, let me say that any proper model would take into account how often you are willing to accept that service can’t be completed. Once an hour, once a day, once a year, whatever. No big deal, it is standard in this type of model.
Here is an example form real life: When I worked at Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute in the earliest days, I worked on scientific instrument scheduling algorithms. I won’t bore you with the details, but the requirement was to schedule 6 months worth of observations at a time. There would be several months to calcualte that once all the scientific proposals were in, so we knew what we would be looking at. Many of the scientists would do their observations when the schedule told them, not when it was convenient for the scientist. You can bet the schedule was loaded to 100% capacity all the time.
Now, even given such a complex schedule calculation, the sky is a funny thing. sometimes tuff happens unexpectedly I am not an astronomer, but I use to say “maybe a star goes supernova”, more formally we called it a “target of opportunity”. in that case, we had (IIRC) 24 hours to reconfigure the remaining schedule so the TO could be viewed immediately with as little disruption to others as possible.
This is a VERY non-trivial problem, especially when you take into account the nature of the satellite itself and the firmament as constraints.
But the point is, having to change the schedule on the fly is almost always part of any model. That is why you do sensitivity analysis. You end up sacrificing some overall efficiency in routine operations to cover unexpected stuff (like traffic jams!). How much is up to you, and based on what you find important otherwise.
For example, you could have one small truck for every house if never missing a house was the most important thing. Where you accept tradeoffs from there, each user of a model is different.
This is an important point - one there is competition, you don’t really want one guy to get a leg up, either by better service or by acquisition in order to maintain efficiency.
Let’s say that initially everyone is assigned a trash company at random so every one has the same market share.
But via marketing, they are allowed to try to get people to switch.
Every week, people will switch. Some will leave Company A, some will arrive, this is called churn.
For our purposes, this means that a truck driver will almost never drive the same route twice. Oh he will be on the sme roads, but the houses he picks up form will change, and maybe there is a cul de sac that he skipped before that now he has to go in. Every week will be different, even for a driver of a trash truck.
So the company need is a process to figure out the new route in enough time, and to convey it to the driver, and to hire drivers on the ball enough to be flexible.
Note that maye those kinds of drivers tend to be quicker, more predictable in their timing, smile more to custoemrs and ptential customers, and so better overall for the city.
Now, maybe Sam Stone and I sense a possibility - one city alone can’t justify paying us to create this model and conveyance to driver system, but if enough cities across America liked it, then maybe it would be worth it to build and market. Similarly maybe if we could bundle it with garbage trucks themselves.
My point is that the competitiveness springs from innovation far from the source. You get better trash service because some guy like me decides to market some modeling services to trash truck manufactueers to build in their trucks to make them more competitive.
Then companies that buy those trucks market themselves as more competitive to Cities.
And the Cities make their residents happy with more predictable and better services.
Why? Because each step of the way someone saw an opportunity in innovation.
And it need not be as fancy as scheduling algorithms, it could be as basic as investing in keeping the trucks shiny and clean. That might mean some industrial hose company is going to be a source for at least some of the increase in efficiency in a competitive trash market.
Heck, where I live, I will tell you what we need - a better wheel/axle system on the carts. They seem to break a lot, I guess when the truck puts the barrel down. That shouldn’t happen. But we only have one company and so people just have to deal with it. A new company marketing with “wheels that don’t fall off” would do fine here!
Assuming that they all get full up they are covering up to five times as much territory to do so. This means gas, this means man hours this means inefficiency.
Like I said, in my area every homeowner contracts for their own garbage pickup and there is a natural monopoly as those companies that already pick up half most of the garbage in my subdivision can offer everyone a better price than a company that only picks up a few homes. After they get their monopoly, they only have to charge less than a competitor would charge to pick up the first home and they get to keep their monopoly. The HOA around here is packed with qseudo-economists who think that this is the free market and I can’t convince them that they are better off taking bids every year for the garbage pick up for the whole HOA than to let one that has developed a natural monopoly to continue to charge a dollar less than their nearest competitor will charge to pick up the first house.
Your case would be more convincing if you lived on a cul de sac or if your particular street makes for horrible through traffic.
Natural monopolies can develop out of any high barrier to entry not only high fixed costs. In this case it is high variable costs that creates the barrier to entry. Once I have am picking up all the garbage in the area, I can charge less to every household on my route than you could charge any one of them because you would have to send a truck out of its way especially to pick up that one guy’s garbage. I am already in the area and the marginal costs to me for each successive household in the area is less and less. I can distribute just enough of those savings that a new garbage company simply cannot compete in that neighborhood but I would still be charging more than I would be willing to accept if I had to compete for a contract that covered the entire neighborhood.
And it is still a redundancy. The question is whether that redundancy is justified by the benefits of competition. IF you can gain the benefits of competition without the redundancy then…
The more companies you have the more partially empty trucks you will end probably up with. Poor routing doesn’t just mean more gas, it means more man hours and more equipment depreciation.
Ahh so it is a bit like a cul de sac
Well, THATs the question isn’t it? IN the healthcare arena, we know that medicare has a 2% overhead while private insurance companies have a 30% overhead. Does the benefit of a private insurance market (more market segmentation is the only thing I could think of) justify this additional overhead? How does the fact that medical provider overhead is higher because of multiple payors play into the calculus (For example, private doctors frequently pay 10% of their gross receipts to companies that specialize in dealing with insurance companies). Having a health system that is largely reliant on private insurance companies for people under 65 means that they have an incentive to push off medical costs until you qualify for medicare. Can’t we at least make an argument that health insurance might be better administered by a single government payor but allow for a private sector for those who want something better than what the government will provide? Heck, we do it with our schools, why not with our hospitals?
Yes if everyone in the private sector is competent and everyone in the public sector is incompetent, then you are correct, we are probably better off with whatever inefficiencies we might encounter in the private sector.
Oh, I quite agree but I think you really overestimate the effect.
If competition was better than monopoly, why would the government ever be involved in anything? Wouldn’t competition provide better police service? Military? Courts?
[quote=“CannyDan, post:81, topic:545719”]
You in fact need to construct some rather esoteric circumstances and some pretty specific assumptions…This suits your philosophical bent, but doesn’t comport well with the actual circumstance here.[/'quote]
You act as if you never met a Libertarian before.
You should try shopping for mattresses. Simmons manufactures a different mattress for every retailer, the main difference is often that the label on the mattress has a different name on them and perhaps a sheet of paper of plastic is inserted somewhere in between the coils and the padding.
My neighborhood has lots of options but there is only one trash company that operates in any one neighborhood
companies will buy trucks to match predicted demand plus room for some growth. Then, with growth, (if growth) they will budget to increase capacity at that time.
No truck need ever be too empty, that would be a waste. But you don’t need the biggest truck to start.
Actually I read that a different way. It is just a small block, maybe on a grid, maybe not, but still, if a truck has no customers, it need not go there.
I think what would really blow OP’s mind is if ALL of the people on the block had chosen on company, and the others still passed through because it positioned them optimally for where they did have nearby customers.
yeah, we have asked him to elaborate probably a dozen times and he won’t.
That sounds like a fine topic for another thread. Different industry, different structure, different parameters.
Generally the Govt tries to stay out of everything except natural monopolies and safety-type regulations, and some services that are deemed either essential, or public goods (forensic psychological services for retarded folks, for instance, and basic research for another, and education for a third)
there was no ideology expressed whatsoever. Only descriptions of modeling processes, which derive from the same mathematics we all learned in school - we learned how to figure the area of a square for instance. Well, with longer recipes, but not really overly complex individual steps, we can accomplish a lot more and show a lot more. It is not rocket science, it is available to everyone if only they want to learn. I am sure there are ample course material on the internet these days from top universities for anyone to peruse for free.
Politics has nothing to do with it, it is simply applying the tools of math to describe a system, just like when I described the scheduling algorithms for Hubble. I did a similar one once to schedule kids at a summer camp, subject to rapid changes if it rains. What are the politics of those models? None at all I say.
I think we can get a half size smaller bin but the cost is actually the same as the larger one. Guess which 95% of the people have (based on my dog-walking excursions)?
Really, what do you think a commodity means?
For the sake of argument, lets say salt is a commodity. I go to the store and every company sells salt in different size packages. One sells 10 oz package, one sells 11 oz package, one sells 12 oz package, and one sells a 13 oz package. Does the size of the packaging make the salt any less of a commodity? Maybe its not a perfect analogy but it seems like its not totally off base.
No, a package of salt is not a commodity to you in that way. It might be a kitchen staple, but not a commodity. This is good enough for my purposes right now.
It depends but in the case of commodities where the product is basically indistinguishable, economies of scale are usually enough to make the one large company a better option.
Like trashy pickup in a cul de sac.
I’m starting to think you really don’t get it. 5 trucks means 5 investments, 5 crews, more gas than one truck would consume and more traffic than one truck would produce.
Yeah the trucks that pick up in my neighborhood operate something like a zone defense, that sort of dynamic coordination can be pretty efficient. BUT 5 trucks from 5 different companies are not coordinating and if they are then they are not really 5 different companies are they?
My company promises that they won’t charge me any more than they charge any of the other people in my division, and if they make everyone the same promise then that means they don’t charge me any less either.
Yes this town is awash in white papers.
Sam Stone is one of our resident libertarican/Republitarians. We might be reading stuff into what he says.
The auction process isn’t perfect either. These guys employ all sorts of game theory to carve out advantages. For example, AT&T and Verizon colluded to purchase bandwidth in a specific range and that caused a lot of smaller carrier to spend all their money buying bandwidth in that same range so that their network would be compatible with their phones. Then AT&T and Verizon bought up the entire bandwidth in another range effectively leaving the small carriers without any phones (noone makes phones for some podunk carrier). If a competitive marketplace for phone carriers is important and reducing the barriers to entry are important in the cell phone industry then I would say, no I don’t think it is ideal.
I can see how each company might end up with a stub truck that doesn’t get filled at the end of the day.
Lets say it was a cul de sac, can’t you see any metric by which you could say that one company would be more efficient than 5 companies knowing only that there are 5 trash companies coming into the cul de sac?
Ands I’m saying that trash collection can easily develop into a natural monopoly if run privately.
If all kitchen salt is the exact same combination of atoms then why isn’t it a commodity? Is it because it is in different size packages, I know commodity contracts have standardized sizes.
Yes, this is exactly our problem, more on this later.
Yes, I fully get this. I feel like you assumed at the start that I felt my block was inefficient, and so the whole system was. You bring up the hub and spoke model as a counter to that.
But that’s where you keep going the wrong direction, that’s not my issue. That isn’t what I’m seeing, or why I brought this issue up. I see 5 companies with hub and spoke systems, all working just fine. Each individual company is doing great, we have 5 Fedexes running at peak performance.
But because there are 5 that overlap, and provide essentially the same service, I see redundancies that wouldn’t be there if it was just one company. Which is why I keep mentioning the “what if Fedex bought out mini-Fedex?” What would be the logical flow?
Fuck me, it took four pages but THIS is the discussion I am trying to have. This is the issue at hand. Does competition drive competitors towards Pareto-optimal results?
This is what gets brought up in all of the public vs private debates. I’m quite confident that all over Canada and the US, city councils have a guy stand up and suggest that they make garbage collection private. And they says, “competition in the long run will be better for the consumer.”
This is a case study to that effect. Like you, I would never have believed a city existed where 5 competing companies collected residential trash.
Well, now that we’re on the same page, what information do you really need?
What measures can we use for efficiency? not_alice scoffed, but this thread is based on the assertion that “government is wasteful and inefficient.” In hindsight I suppose I should have challenged that notion as veraciously as not_alice attacked this concept.
If it’s cost, I think I’m paying slightly more than near-by residents that have city collection, and I’m pretty sure I chose the cheapest.
For the record, this is not a cul-de-sac, and I don’t give a flying fuck how many trucks drive on my street.
I realize I described the situation badly at the start by saying, “I see trucks on my street.”
What I was trying to explain was that 5 trucks make pickups on my street, to the 10 houses that are on my street. I’m sure lots of garbage trucks drive up and down my street not making stops, I don’t care about those, I don’t see those as being efficient or inefficient.
This statement sums it up best:
This is the debate we’re supposed to be having. Somebody, I’m not going to say who, got a little bogged down in the details.
What’s funny, is that if you take that statement apart you get:
- redundancy is inefficient
- redundancy between 2 competing companies is competition.
- redundancy is competition
**4. competition is inefficient. **
That is what I am trying to get at.
Now back to the start: my neighbourhood has 5 waste companies providing a service. I believe that service is interchangeable, undifferentiated, a commodity if you will.
Replacing the 5 companies with 1 would eliminate the redundancies, continue to provide exactly the same service, and thereby be more efficient.
What does efficient mean? Lower cost for one, since we’ve eliminated redundancies. I’m not going to pretend to care about the others, but yes, there is pollution, damage to roads, etc.
Yes you do otherwise you wouldn’t be harping on how if there was one company there would be less trucks.
Maybe your city is the size and shape of a tic-tac-toe board or something. Otherwise, we don’t have enough data. You might, but you ain’t sharing.
You believe wrong. The services are differentiated, you described the differences yourself. I linked to the definition of commodity, so please don’t use terms of the art incorrectly anymore if you want to be taken seriously.
So all of your assumptions here are wrong. Might that lead to an equally incorrect conclusion?
Yet the world is full of algorithms that determine just the opposite. How do you explain that? You think we are lying?
So the most important thing to you is to call a system efficient because the costs are operation costs are lowest on YOUR street? That ought only interest you if you own part of the bottom line. Because nothing forces the trash co to pass that savings on to you. Especially if there is no competition.
It would have to be a mighty big cul de sac to start talking about economies of scale. But at that point, is it really a cul de sac?
We mentioned that. None of that proves any thing, those are jsut some of the parameters of a model. Maybe smaller trucks are more efficient. Heck, maybe competitive companies hustle and hedge their fuel costs well (hello Southwest Airlines). Maybe small trucks have less labor and maintenance, same if they are new. Modern small trucks need only a driver, the lifting is done by joystick inside the truck. So you have a minimal crew, and less insurance than driving a big truck perhaps. More nimble in traffic, saves time making turns on corners, etc.
None of what you suggests means 5 trucks can’t work better - they can.
They don’t need to coordinate. Look at baseball teams - 30 teams each coordinating their own travel, but in the end, I bet the global travel model is pretty close to optimized. they don’t need to consult with each other to fly the best routes individually, nor do they seek each other out to share trips where they can.
The internet and your library certainly are. These have been areas of active research since at least WWII.
You might be, but you would be wrong. I am no Repblican, but I am in the same field, and I assure you there is not one iota of anything “agenda” in anything he wrote in this thread. It is pretty straight shooting. I would tell you if it was otherwise.
You don’t think the US wireless market has been and is competitive?
No one is interested in jsut the culdesac - if some company wants to specialize in cul de sacs, I say let 'em! Maybe tey can make a profit with only one truck.
OTOH, if the residents there are so convinced, they can collude to all use the same service, and then, problem solved, only one truck!
If you are buying raw salt of standardized quantity and quality on a market exchange, which you quite possibly need never take possession of before you can sell it, then you probably have a commodity on your hands.
What you get at the supermarket, not so much. That is a finished product.