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UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

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Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#171

Post by Latty »

mathverse wrote: post #161
Latty wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NHS is great. I've lived my life with access to it and in a society provided for by it, and wouldn't trade it for anything. Taxes have paid for it, and should continue to do so. What alternative are you offering? Not taxing anyone much leaves us with a society that simply doesn't function, we see that right now. FUD about "well, they could tax the wrong people" is pretty irrelevant when we are already in a situat…

> FUD about "well, they could tax the wrong people" is pretty irrelevant This is not FUD. They always tax the wrong people. We as a society can do many, many things but we simply cant coordinate to do them. And indeed we should consider this lack of coordination (for a lack of a better term) as something we should take into account when making decisions. I honestly dont have a solution to this problem.

The solution: demand taxation that works, and if that fails, general strikes until they get it right, and if that fails, historically the answer is guillotines in the streets—I would never condone violence, but the reality is inevitable if a population suffers enough, violence begets violence, we need to impress upon those that seek to profit at all cost that there is a limit to all things, and they must not start a war.

"We voted in the Tories again and they continued to lower taxes for their mates and screw over the poor" is hardly trying everything. Throwing your hands in the air, accepting suffering and society collapsing while they profit off it isn't an answer.

You are saying you don't think it's impossible, just that no one is willing to do it: we have to create pressure to do the right thing, and demand it, not make excuses and accept it as inevitable.

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#172

Post by TrueGeek »

pydry wrote: post #23
TrackerFF wrote: post #20

Hopefully the current energy crisis (in Europe) will further accelerate development in renewable energy. Seems much of Europe is still chained to LNG, and that demand is even wreaking havoc in countries which have been previously quite self-sustained, or really don't use LNG much themselves - with Norway being a good example.

Unfortunately we'd need another 5 years to really make a difference whereas the gas crisis is going to hit us in months.

The best time to install a solar panel is 5 years ago. The second best time is today.

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#173

Post by AlexandrB »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #152
tankenmate wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the 1750s the average work day was 11 hours, 208 days a year (2288). During the 1860s the average work day was 16 hours, 311 days a year (4976). During the 1920s the average work day was 8 hours, 243 days a year (1944, and productivity was up according to Henry Ford). Most tech employers in China pre COVID, 10 hours a day, 297 days a year (2970). Netherlands pre COVID, 5.8 hours a day, 234 days a year (1357).…

I don't care how many hours a day people work or about your abstract economic figures. What I care about is that when I go to book a driving test, I can get one. I could do that pre-2020. I now can't. This experience has been replicated across the economy. Things have stopped working properly. As far as I'm concerned your "PPP" is intellectual masturbation. The population is unhappy because structural changes, not on…

> What I care about is that when I go to book a driving test, I can get one. I could do that pre-2020. I now can't.

Sounds like a supply and demand problem. The marker solution would be to increase wages for driving testers and attract more candidates to these positions.

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#174

Post by robertlagrant »

Latty wrote: post #153
robertlagrant wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, the idea there is no way to actually tax the rich is absurd, we can do it, we have just had decades of government with no will to do so. Which way is that, other than the ways we already do it?

How extreme do you want to go? - Tax capital gains and dividends that are classically the rates actually paid by the megarich rather than income tax. - Tax wealth directly rather than just income. - Tax much more heavily generally and commit to a significant basic income to ensure everyone has a solid baseline. This is just off the top of my head, we have an entire government of people and a huge field of existing re…

I don't want to go extreme at all; centralising economies has the worst track record of starvation and killing in all of history. I'm just wondering what the plan was :)

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#175

Post by M2Ys4U »

AlexandrB wrote: post #121
cirrus-clouds wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if French citizens were facing energy bills as high as the UK (£5,816, €6850). French citizens would never tolerate such levels. From Reuters: " France has committed to capping an increase on regulated electricity costs at 4%. To help do this the government has ordered utility EDF (EDF.PA), which is 80% state owned, to sell more cheap nuclear power to rivals " (Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/…

Privatizing everything is great when things are going well. When the shit hits the fan it's nice for elected representatives to be able to force essential utilities to lose money.

Privatise the profits and socialise the losses.

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#176

Post by Schroedingersat »

Someone1234 wrote: post #123
Schroedingersat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COP is not efficiency. Efficiency is what you did / what you had the resources to do in an ideal world. That makes thermal chemical heating 20-50% efficient, thermal electric heating 10-30% and heat pumps 50-70% efficient (depending on where you draw the boundaries). You could also draw the limit at reduced carnot efficiency rather than reversibility, in which case heat pumps can be close to 100%

This is such pointless pedantry. Heat pumps having an efficiency greater than 1/100% is well known, well publicized, and you're trying to make some artificial distinction here that added nothing to this thread/context/discussion. See: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/489467/can-a-hea... https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/06/heat-pumps-work-miracles/ I won't be further responding to this sub-topic, since it ha…

Characterizing them as >100% efficient is poor communication. It doesn't map to any intuitive understanding, it does not communicate anything about how much heating could be done with that energy (thus leading to people believing absurd claims), and it does not map to either the colloquial or technical meaning of efficiency in any other context.

Efficiency as a concept doesn't go over 100% and just because confusing and misleading explanations are the norm doesn't mean they should continue.

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#177

Post by throwaway22032 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #151
throwaway22032 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General attitude is obvious, people just don't care as much about their jobs as they used to. The WFH thing is an example - people have started to treat going to work as some sort of optional annoyance.

This is pure anecdote. Any evidence of this besides personal experience? I've had a WFH job since before COVID and everyone seems very engaged in what they're doing.

Yes, the evidence is my life. I don't need to convince you, why should I?

What does your one job have to do with the general situation of the country? The issues with waiting lists are well publicised.

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#178

Post by jjgreen »

Symbiote wrote: post #29
rvieira wrote: post #18

I live in the north of England where temperature varies from 38F in Jan to 57F in August. It's pretty chilly for me, so I tend to spend a considerable amount of gas throughout the year. I'm renting a house, so deep work like insulation gets complicated. My point is that even with a comfortable salary, I will feel ~£600/month in energy. I can only fear for people that earn much less than me.

Why have you converted the temperatures to Fahrenheit? It hasn't been used in BBC weather forecasts in Britain since the 1960s.

Used to be that Brits commonly used a dual temperature system, cold weather in Centigrade (brr, -5 outside), hot weather in Fahrenheit (phew, 85 today, what a scorcher!).

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#179

Post by robertlagrant »

mvc wrote: post #139
robertlagrant wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of that is still paid for by consumers, and we already tax profits. Where do you think the money (including the profit taxes) comes from? Consumer prices.

They are making record profits https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62382624 Not from any particular clerverness. Or increase in productivity. Purely because of abnormal market conditions due to a war waged by a dictator they have collaborated with for the last 20 odd years.

That doesn't mean that taxes would lower prices, or keep them the same. Taxes raise prices.

Also, that article doesn't make sense to me. What stopped the prices rising before?

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#180

Post by throwaway22032 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #173
throwaway22032 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care how many hours a day people work or about your abstract economic figures. What I care about is that when I go to book a driving test, I can get one. I could do that pre-2020. I now can't. This experience has been replicated across the economy. Things have stopped working properly. As far as I'm concerned your "PPP" is intellectual masturbation. The population is unhappy because structural changes, not on…

> What I care about is that when I go to book a driving test, I can get one. I could do that pre-2020. I now can't. Sounds like a supply and demand problem. The marker solution would be to increase wages for driving testers and attract more candidates to these positions.

Yes, across the entire economy, because it's not just driving tests, it's everything.

What we actually did, is to print money and give it to people for not working.

And so, as in the article, 20% inflation. Oops!

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