On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 12:00:35AM -0800, David Brown wrote: > On Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 11:04:27PM -0800, SJS wrote: > > >Well, if they prepared the food, they'd be a cafeteria. And I've > >paid the flat-rate for minimally-metered access to a cafeteria. > >It worked pretty well. If the cafeteria at work offered a flat-rate > >plan, I might well take advantage of it. > > A certain famous search engine company is kind of known for having a > free-to-employees cafeteria that serves fairly good food. I know that if I > worked at a place like that it would be very hard to not become quite > large.
But that flat-rate cafetria almost certainly is not self-sufficient. It's almost certainly subsidized by the company that houses it. That's fine, until we start trying to implement such a scheme everywhere. Who subsidizes the cafeterias then? The taxpayer. We pay the same amount for our meals (or, actually, more), we just pay part directly and the rest indirectly via taxes. The "more" is because of the waste caused by entropy in the system... the taxes are collected by people who are paid, and that money is handled and disbursed by more people. All of those people have supervisors, and they all need shiny office buildings to work in, which needs electricity and water and maintenance and toilet paper and more cafeterias. We pay for all of that on top of the amount we'd pay up front. I'd rather pay $10 for my meal than $2 now and another $11 in taxes. -- *********************************************************************** * John Oliver http://www.john-oliver.net/ * * * *********************************************************************** -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
