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A thing I’m mulling about recently is private public infrastructure, which is notionally private-owned/-provided but which is sufficiently ubiquitous that you can plan around the existence of it in the same way that you plan around the existence of the Post Office.
Examples include the large food chains, which function as de facto public access points into a food supply chain, and e.g. the credit card ecosystem.
One of the distressing things about this model is that you can plan around it right until you can’t, and the things which cause that transition are often complex social issues of the sort that aren’t stress-reducing to muse about idly on Twitter.
(I think this is also true about public public infrastructure, incidentally. You’re trivially able to demonstrate your identity to the government and might assume that is true of everyone. It is until it isn’t.)
(That fact, and ones like it, is underappreciated by folks who worry that the private sector practices exclusion when providing infrastructure.)
