361–370 of 524 posts
Turns out climate change means you end up with a lot of rain in a short time followed with long periods of draught. Not a single Northern European country is equipped for this situation.
You have to start building reservoirs up the wazoo.
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Giving how much subsidies farmers get, and they still whine all the fucking time, I would gladly nationalize them all. Corn ethanal? Gone. Crazy EU stuff? Gone.
Collectivised agriculture has gone badly enough often enough that I'm wouldn't risk trying it.
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Their voters obviously don't agree. Not only have they defected to Reform on a massive scale, but Reform recruiting former Tories like Dorries is hugely controversial within the party base, exactly because Tories are viewed as being too left wing.
Within whose party base? If you're saying that the Tories are viewed as too left-wing by Reform voters, then I assume that's true because Reform are further right than the Tories, but so what? If you're saying that Conservative voters find it "controversial" (whatever exactly you mean by that) that Reform is recruiting former Conservative politicians -- well, I'm sure they don't like it, no one likes it when some oth…
If an election were called tomorrow your next government would be Reform with a massive majority of 339 seats. It is the most popular party in the country by far. It would collect 33% of the vote vs Labour's 18% and the Conservatives would get only 17%, translating to their near-total destruction (only 35 seats).
Reform's popularity is driven by the belief that the Conservatives have become so captured by left wing "wets" that they cannot be fixed. Otherwise it makes no sense to split the right, and right wing voters there resisted doing so for a long time. The most commonly cited reason for switching to Reform is a belief that the Tories won't actually enact any right wing policies no matter what they say, and so that's a third of the country saying through their votes they think the Conservatives are a center-left party.
The fact that you believe "pretty much no one other than extreme rightists" has this view and that Labour is seen as a "centrist" party indicates that indeed, your gut feel is correct, and the people you know aren't a representative slice of the population. How many people do you hang out with regularly who read the Telegraph or Daily Mail? Maybe it's none?
If centrism means anything it means trying to adopt mid-way positions that appeal to the majority, but Labour's support for far-left ideology is so intense they're reacting to continuously dropping approval numbers by doubling down. That's not what centrists do, they chase votes, doubling down is what ideological extremists do. They'd rather drive their own party into the ground than compromise on modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration.
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You've heard of "food" I assume?
Not normally considered infrastructure. Food distribution networks might be infrastructure, but POS stores aren't, generally. Drinking water supplies are infrastructure; drinking fountains aren't.
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It's interesting it's at the same rate, I imagine as everyone knows the government would have to bail them out. So the question remains why do it? It doesn't actually benefit the general public then. Increased risk for government and like you mentioned increased hurdles for running the utility. Of course government do that, but they're left holding the bag regardless, so the incentive is very different. These are not…
Why do what? Have private water companies? Same reason for having private food supply, private electricity providers, private communication providers, and in most countries private healthcare providers. They run the business better than the state would, which is itself a benefit to the public. A government bailout means nationalization, which means investors lose everything. That risk doesn't suppress interest rates,…
Your first message contradicts your second, which one is it are they paying government risk level interest rates or business risk level interest rates.
Edit: I just went and looked up their rating with one of the big agencies. CCC rated (junk basically) with a negative outlook, they did get an upgrade on a refinance last year, but from CC (so now lesser junk).
UK's last rating was AA (if you're interested).
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And that's when parliament should step in and pass it as standalone infrastructure under its own bill.
Yeah but don’t forget all the eminent domain shit that happened in the 70s and destroyed neighbourhoods left and right. The power structure set up to make sure that doesn’t happen again are now impeding important progress.
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>This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized The post office in the United States is not privatized and yet has been able to set prices in a way that sustains the business for centuries. You can't simply assume that all public entities will ignore fiscal reality. In fact you may run into the opposite problem: when a utility is public, their debts appear on the government b…
Yes, in theory nationalized companies can set prices rationally and turn a profit. In practice they rarely manage this for long because sooner or later a populist comes along and forces them to lower prices in order to win votes. It's not just water where the UK has a problem with this. Transport for London has also been forced to underprice its services for years by London's socialist mayor, it's a big part of how h…
In the US we have a problem with fantastically underpricing public roads. We don't expect their books to break even, much less generate a profit. Meanwhile everyone asks why train systems are not profitable.
> The US is a very right wing country.
Yeah, at least compared with most of Europe.
> It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls.
You didn't notice when the current president (somewhat successfully) bullied retailers into swallowing tariff-caused price increases, so they wouldn't damage his popularity? That almost seems right-wing socialist.
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The concept of reservoirs and emergency supply seems to be completely at odds with privatisation. What private company is going to spend loads of money to build deep reservoirs that are stressed only once every 5 or 10 years. None. They're going to reach for an immediate supply like a river or aquifer and then raise prices if those sources run low. It's insane to plan out infrastructure on the belief that private com…
I'm inclined to agree that privatisation is bad for long term planning, but the history of the Abingdon Reservoir proposal seems to be counter evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abingdon_Reservoir Looks like Thames Water (a private company) proposed the development nearly 20 years ago, but it was turned down by the Environment Agency , a government body. > Plans for a £1bn reservoir in Oxfordshire to supply more…
The ultimate power, including violence, lies with the federal government. Thames water can't shoot dead protesters or council members but the government definitely can and will.
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I was fascinated on my recent trip to the UK to learn how much of their infrastructure they'd privatized semi-recently. Trains, hm, well it kinda works in Japan so maybe not so bad, but, water and SEWAGE??? In what universe does it make sense to have one of the most critical infrastructure systems, the backbone of health for a city, participate in a marketplace? Insanity. Not to mention the fact that at the end of th…
It’s ironic that after British Rail was privatized, many UK rail services ended up being run by subsidiaries of other European state railways: French SNCF, Dutch NS, Italian Trenitalia, and so on. Turns out the state knows something about running trains after all.
England's population has been rising far faster than it would naturally rise due to immigration. This means giant sums of money need to be borrowed to fund capital-intensive projects including new energy and water sources. They haven't been done enough on the water side. It's incredibly expensive to have the population increase this fast.
[citation needed] Population growth in the UK is roughly in line with other developed countries. The past few years have been a bit choppy due to global events like the pandemic, but the UK is not an outlier in its population growth.