Not sure what your definition of "privatized" is... fully state-owned means it isn't privatised at all.
The issue is one of legal status. In most countries you can be a commercial company or essentially a branch of the government (leaving aside coops and charities).
So in general you have companies (legal status) but they are fully owned by the state, hence "state-owned company". "Privatized" means the government decided to sell most or all the shares to the public.
Counter example is the USPS in the US, which is an agency of the Federal government.
> Not sure what your definition of "privatized" is
Maybe this is a language barrier issue. Companies organized as AG, GmbH etc. under private law, in opposition to branches of the government or special institutions of public law. This is commonly called "Bahnprivatisierung" in Germany.
The Deutsche Bahn was "privatized" in the sense that it was moved from public law to private law based organization.
Now I get it, thanks for the effort of clarifying. I thought it was a misunderstanding of a niche meaning of "privatized" but it turns out, english and german do not share that meaning. Unfortunately I can't edit the comment to change the word anymore.
It seems "privatization" in english is still a very murky word, even though it does not include this meaning :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization
I'll try to stop calling deutsche bahn "privatized" in english.
Its still a private company, well 245 of them, billing each other while trying to cooperate.
This company structure was the result of the neoliberal thinking of having as much free market as possible, with the beneficial side effect of creating many highly payed board chairs for former politicians.
Today, the problems, mainly caused by cutting cost on maintenance, are so close to the surface, that even the most head-in-the-cloud establishment politicians cant spin it anymore, so the new DB ceo (Palla), tasked with "fixing it", came up with a long term plan. For decades, from every side, DB/german governments was critized for not having an articulated goal of the minimum public service that should be provided. The german governments were not directing, so 100% state _owned_ is technically true but obscures the complexity. The former ceo Mehdorn, that started this down trend did exatcly what any short-term-gain ceo would do and is, despite this blatantly failing infrastructure, still well regarded.
Today, one primary goal of this plan to fix it all, is to "reduce delays". Cuting schedules and lines will make this number up too! And so the next round of ceo bonus payments are secured and the shit show continues.
What else could you expect? A solution to fix vital infrastructure and strengthen trust in politicians and governments to cost money?! Haha.
Non-German here. What’s the point of this setup? I guess in some ways this isn’t too different than USPS, which is self-sufficient and doesn’t face tax dollars nor give its profits to the Treasury, but in our case they didn’t bother going as far to separate it as it sounds like DB did.
It is typically midway to full privatisation. It goes from being a public company (not as in publicly traded but actually of public interest) to being for-profit company but state owning all the shares. Then the state sells the majority of the shares and it becomes actually private.
Typically, on the way, there is also a separation between the "good piece" and the "bad piece" of the company, ie the company that operates the trains (and makes profit out of the passengers etc) and the one that maintains the infrastructure. The state then can sell the profit-generating part of the company to the private sector, and continue operating the non-profitable one itself, so the private capital can enjoy the best of both worlds (having a privatised train company, but still having the state eat up the economic burden of maintaining the infrastructure that the former operates on). Not sure where germany stands in this roadmap, but this is what has happened in other places (and no it did not improve the experience of passengers to any degree).
The plan was to sell the DB after privatizing but something (if I remember correct financial crisis 2008) went between it so they (politics) decided to keep the stocks.
After reunification there were two railway companies, and they got reorganized into an AG. At least later, when they restructured the company into a holding and subsidaries, they planned to privatize them completely and disolve the parent company. They never did go through with that however.
Actually, that's surprisingly little roads in the US. The population is significantly larger (more than 3x), so on a per person basis roads in Germany see much more use than in the US. And roads there are in a much better state than in the use despite the higher usage rate.
So also as a consequence of this: If the US were to use the same per person $ amount to upkeep their roads, US roads would have WAY more money to be maintained. Yet, the outcome is obviously worse.
Also more VMT, which would tend to balance the excess roads, because more driving leads to more fuel tax revenue. USA has more than double the VMT per capita of Germany. If the fuel tax was appropriately set, then this factor would compensate for the greater sizes of the roads.
I also liked de_dust more because a well executed T rush to site A was as fun as it got on random servers before voice chat. Was awesome when it all came together and everybody worked together.
I vividly remember the thrill of taking out the entire T rush to site B myself in about two seconds during a clan match (not that high level ;)). It was like dominoes falling down in a neat row. It was quite unexpected to rush to site B; the other four of my team were already at site A.
Because when you're talking about federal/nation level spending it is easier to get people to spend money on a bridge or institution they have some chance of being able to drive to within a day rather than convincing a guy in Montana why he should be paying for native Hawaiian culture in some remote village in the Pacific he can't afford to visit and will probably be kapu'd out of by someone screaming about haoles.
As the nations grow in size you generally end up splitting into states that have more localized incentives and/or you have a more brutal central apparatus like in the large states of China/Russia.
I don't think this is a very good list that should call itself top 100. Maybe anglophone top 100, but even then I'd question some of the choices. I completely ignores a ton of more important works in non-English languages.
The API mandate notably specified what rather than how. "It doesn’t matter what technology [you] use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter." In some ways it's quite the opposite of CEO mandates to use AI, which specify how you must build things (using AI!) rather than what.
The equivalent of the API mandate for AI would be if CEOs were demanding that all products include a "Summarize Content" button. Or that all code repositories contain a summary of their contents in a README. The use of AI to solve these problems would be an implementation detail.
Or if CEOs were demanding that everything be written in Python. Programming language should also be an implementation detail, not something a CEO would worry about. Just like "using AI."
Do you just mean within Amazon? Because outside of Amazon, there was major resistance to AWS/cloud computing in general from older devs highly invested in the status quo. I have spent a significant amount of effort in my career fighting for cloud adoption.
to me this was more about guiding towards a desired outcome. An opinionated bet, but not overly prescriptive. "AI first" is saying do everything with AI and then hope you find some efficiencies, almost by accident.
