makomk

30 ms·

271.
by makomk 4y ago
The sneaky, dishonest trick that articles like that one use is that although share prices - and with them the wealth of the worlds' richest - dropped massively when the pandemic hit, this mostly happened before it was officially declar
272.
by makomk 4y ago
Stocks, bonds, government gilts, even stuff like used cars and houses are looking a little less solid than they used to in many places.
273.
by makomk 4y ago
Europe is basically deindustrialising right now due to a lack of sufficient energy supply: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/business/europe-energy-cr... It's not even a case of Europe missing out,
274.
by makomk 4y ago
Hah. There's actually an interesting UK-specific quirk that the comment you're replying to has missed: if a previous UK government had built more wind power in the 2000s using more subsidies that wouldn't actually save us mon
275.
by makomk 4y ago
Also, prior to Google throwing vast sums of money at phone companies, Bing was paying off many EU mobile phone providers to install Bing as the default search engine on all their Android-based devices and lock users out from changing it to
276.
by makomk 4y ago
There is not some fixed amount of money in the world, though, and there hasn't been since at least the point the world abandoned the gold standard. We don't have to worry about someone sitting on all the money and stopping the eco
277.
by makomk 4y ago
> Nearly every country in Europe has been invading its neighbors for centuries, Which was horrendously destructive, and the two World Wars fought using more modern weaponry were particularly awful. In fact, avoiding similar wars in Europ
278.
by makomk 4y ago
Any definition of "approprite" is going to be in the context of some set of moral beliefs. Why should we treat religious ones differently than secular ones? For example, there's a secular set of beliefs held by all the righte
279.
by makomk 4y ago
The whole emphasis on the closure of Rough is a good example of what's wrong with the UK media coverage actually. Rough is just natural gas storage - it's only any use if you can buy the natural gas to fill it at a lower price and
280.
by makomk 4y ago
Basically, the entire European green and anti-global warming movement was either delusional or bought off and there was (and still is) not really much of a counterbalance to this within the mainstream. They pushed for renewables that requir
281.
by makomk 4y ago
Our government has come up with a solution though - they'll cap consumer energy prices at the current below-market rate and subsidise businesses, and pay for the cost of doing it by running up a debt repaid over the next decade or two.
282.
by makomk 4y ago
The reason things were becoming tight for EDF in the first place was mainly that the French government made them sell electricity at below-market prices for political reasons though.
283.
by makomk 4y ago
The problem is that the extra payments to renewable energy providers under the non-CfD model are a pure windfall for them that doesn't help to incentivise increased supply, since they're not likely to be there in a few years - con
284.
by makomk 4y ago
The UK's CfDs are adjusted for inflation each year, so that's not an issue, and the cost of specific renewable energy installations is much more predictable than natural gas - most of the cost is paid up front to construct them in
285.
by makomk 4y ago
Spain has a fairly substantial shantytown outside Madrid. There are also urban areas there (including, I think, some fairly touristy ones) which just discharge all their raw untreated sewage into the rivers and sea because somehow none of t
286.
by makomk 4y ago
It's not just that small garden birds are very common, in general they've co-evolved with predators similar to cats and have adapted to deal with that (for example by nesting at height, having large broods, etc). There's some
287.
by makomk 4y ago
I'm pretty sure your example just demonstrates the point that I was making originally though. Assume there is a massive shortage of food workers, food prices increase and the food industry starts pulling people from other industries li
288.
by makomk 4y ago
"you won't get funding if you go around saying there's no such thing as a labor shortage in a market economy, even though this is entry level economic" The Economics 101 answer is clearly wrong or at least incomplete in
289.
by makomk 4y ago
Which is to say that it's determined by both the supply and demand side: if the price were lower there would be people willing to buy at that price but not enough to sell them, and if it were higher there would presumably be people wil
290.
by makomk 4y ago
Meanwhile over here in the UK, the press is blaming the energy crisis partly on the fact that our government didn't spend loads of money on solar and onshore wind like Germany. We're even worse situated to benefit from solar than
291.
by makomk 4y ago
A substantial proportion of renewable capacity is already lost to curtailment in the UK, and supposedly this could be reduced by storage. This happens well before renewable generation hits 100% even some of the time for various reasons (tra
292.
by makomk 4y ago
The difference, of course, is that electricity is a commodity: every unit of electricity is essentally the same as every other unit, it's not really practical or useful to distinguish between them (they literally use the same wires), a
293.
by makomk 4y ago
I'm not sure how the Austrian system works or what homes are like there or in the Netherlands, but a lot of older homes in the UK can apparently only reach a D even after all the standard insulation retrofits are done. This is especial
294.
by makomk 4y ago
More precisely, the government has cost the people who would've built those privately funded renewable energy projects billions. The way the UK energy market and pretty much every other energy market globally is structured, every provi
295.
by makomk 4y ago
I don't think anyone's tried to push mRNA vaccines for polio yet, and if they did it would be a really obvious swindle - they'd run right into the same problems with the vaccines not being sterilizing that we already did with
296.
by makomk 4y ago
Also, in the real non-hypothetical world, the previous forced vaccination campaigns were the precident that lead to Buck v. Bell and forcible eugenic sterilization of people deemed unfit to have children in the USA. Which, in turn, directly
297.
by makomk 4y ago
A lot of the news coverage dances around the issue, but the direct cause of this actually seems to be a catastrophically failed attempt to switch away from the previous polio vaccine. Vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks used to be pretty r
298.
by makomk 4y ago
The trouble is, the economics only worked out that way because natural gas was cheap - it's not anymore, and countries have been rolling back their coal shutdowns as a result. There's a good chance it never will be again. The same
299.
by makomk 4y ago
Even if the water companies were state owned, dealing with the pollution would still cost money and there are a bazillion other demands on the state's finances which are more pressing than keeping rivers clean, such as providing health
300.
by makomk 4y ago
Oh yes. There's a comment elsewhere talking about how the Blair-Brown years had heavy NHS investment and how they used PFIs to fudge the numbers, and that's exactly how it worked - instead of paying the upfront cost of, say, a new

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