I’m guessing that a good chunk of that usage is coming from the TrueNAS VM.

The market can never provide <product> because it’s too cost-effective

Except that’s the exact opposite of the problem with rail. The cost of construction is too high, and if you charged the fare that it would require to recoup those costs in some reasonable amount of time, your ridership would drop, making you need higher fares, etc.

It’s not cost effective from the perspective of a private person who builds/owns/operates the railroad. That’s why the private sector has such a hard time extracting wealth from it. It only becomes cost effective from a government perspective, since the government would benefit from all economic activity the railroad facilitates.

There is never going to be a 1:1 ratio between labour value and compensation. Even in a non-profit employee-owned cooperative, there will be external costs that will have to funded from somewhere.

It becomes exploitation when that ratio becomes disproportionate and the ownership starts extracting more than their fair share. Capitalism definitely does nothing to discourage this, but it’s not a mandatoy feature.

That only works if the entity doing the saving on wages is the same entity that builds/maintains the railroad. Even then, in order to scale the wage savings up to the cost of building that railroad, you would need that entity to have millions of workers. Which means that the railroad should be built and owned publicly.

Yeah! Why don’t we just switch to one of the other economic systems we’ve used in the past that was completely free of exploitation?

Wait…