makomk

22 ms·

211.
by makomk 4y ago
It's not that stupid (and the EU even did the same thing first ... it's just that most of the British media reporting on how much more effective their windfall taxes were downplayed or omitted the fat that most of the money was co
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by makomk 4y ago
Yeah, it's just that people are unlikely to realise this because the British press has spent the last year or so lying about this for both partisan reasons (most of them hate the party currently in power) and environmentalist ones (the
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by makomk 4y ago
The author of this tool is even aware of that argument and just dismisses it with no real justification: https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1622360994579357696
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by makomk 4y ago
It's even stranger if you think about another common anti-Brexit argument: that many of the "EU laws" which caused people to vote for Brexit were actually created by the UK and Brexit supporters were tricked into blaming the
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by makomk 4y ago
That article seemed to me like a microcosm of what's wrong with UK journalism since Brexit. Every one of those issues is shared with Europe as a whole (or in the case of "the ability to defend its skies against the level of missil
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by makomk 4y ago
"Looks like" is very much the right way of describing it - it's largely a matter of appearances. Especially since Brexit, a lot of the British media pushes only the downsides of any option the government chooses and only the
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by makomk 4y ago
i don't think this argument actually makes sense. The rate at which money arrives in people's pockets via income such as wages and becomes available for them to spend - what you call the half life of money - is effectively what pe
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by makomk 4y ago
Absolutely. For example, take this quote from the article: "The opposition Labour Party estimated in November that at least £576 million had been lost nationally in levelling up funds due to inflation. A frustration to those on the fro
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by makomk 4y ago
The whole "wealth gap" framing is a bit dubious. A big chunk of the UK's wealth is high house prices, and this has substantial downsides - obviously people don't get much direct benefit from the fact that their own home
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by makomk 4y ago
If anything it's the other way around - the 1% are going to be OK pretty much no matter what, it's everyone else that this matters for. Right now the US and most of the developed world does not have workers to spare for weird and
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by makomk 4y ago
There is no fiducary duty to maximise shareholder profit. It doesn't exist, it's basically made up. (There is a duty not to intentionally screw over shareholders, but that's far narrower.) In particular, most US corporation
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by makomk 4y ago
That would still ultimately be spun as greed and proof they were getting pay increases when everyone else was suffering - at least, that's what happened in the UK when a bunch of CEOs didn't get their normal bonuses during Covid.
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by makomk 4y ago
This is definitely overstating its case. The problem I've seen isn't so much that there isn't research taking into account problems like this, it's that research which ignores the hard parts of the problem and comes to t
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by makomk 4y ago
I don't think they're just missing the point; rather, their entire worldview and politics center on insisting that it does not exist. There's this idea that's been fairly widespread for a while that whatever views are he
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by makomk 4y ago
A lot of people who think along these lines, especially younger people, don't think of wealth as something that can be created or destroyed at all. They just believe that there's some fixed amount out there, and that if ordinary p
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by makomk 4y ago
If by "off the charts" you mean about the same as the EU then sure. (Germany is particularly badly affected - which is interesting because the British press has been pointing to their higher levels of healthcare funding and larger
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by makomk 4y ago
Talking about personal carbon footprints gets in the way of the narrative that fossil fuel companies were the main beneficaries of the fossil fuel era and they were the ones who'd lose out if fossil fuels weren't available, that m
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by makomk 4y ago
OPEC is an alliance of state-owned oil producers in the Middle East, and their influence on global oil prices were seriously curtailed when the US started producing more oil - if attempts by global warming activists to limit oil production
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by makomk 4y ago
The thing is that some of those options (especially building more storage) might actually be more expensive and less practical than just building even more wind and letting a lot of the power from it be "wasted".
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by makomk 4y ago
No, we didn't. I looked up the specs when the topic came up and I think the data part was something like 2Mbps shared by everyone. The big "broadband" content that BT were hoping would fund the whole thing was analog pay TV,
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by makomk 4y ago
Absolute molecular weight is important. Can't remember why off-hand but if I recall correctly there's a pretty substantial efficiency hit from using heavier gas molecules and conventional Stirling engines have a similar issue.
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by makomk 4y ago
The calibration for quartz crystal variance in these watches is done much, much later in the manufacturing process using solder bridges on the PCB - people have reverse engineered it. I think there are watch oscillator chips out there with
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by makomk 4y ago
This feels like it assigns too much competence and control to the CIA and not enough to the unnammed "NATO ally" country or countries with the means and motification to make a whole bunch of Russian military infrastructure go kabo
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by makomk 4y ago
Almost certainly not in an FTTP configuration. BT experimented with that but the problem was that the ONTs were too expensive at the time to install one in each house. The way that they originally hoped to pay for some of the costs was by r
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by makomk 4y ago
There are plenty of instances which forbid you from talking about specific topics, and no shortage of ones which block any kind of interaction with other instances which refuse to forbid specific topics - meaning that if you use that instan
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by makomk 4y ago
It's not a weird description at all. Imagine that one day you had what you thought was a valid cause to sue some dodgy corporation over some dispute you had with them, only to discover that your ability to sue had been taken away becau
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by makomk 4y ago
I don't think the Supreme Court actually ever ended up ruling on whether the Texas law's attempts to do an end-run around constitutional protections were allowed; Roe v. Wade was overturned entirely before that ever had a chance t
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by makomk 4y ago
That probably has very little to do with it. The immediate cause of all the problems was that Lloyds TSB was forcibly split up in order to try and increase competition and the Lloyds half kept the IT department, and when the TSB half tried
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by makomk 4y ago
The article is part of the problem. UK politics and the media narratives around it have beeen utterly wrecked by the fight over Brexit and the attempts to give its creators the boot. For example, take this claim: "Investment is down an
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by makomk 4y ago
Not really. As I understand it, the floating LNG terminal is much more expensive to operate and has much less capacity than the fixed LNG terminals which Germany still needs. It's basically a pricy partial stopgap.

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