411–420 of 524 posts
When a resource becomes restricted and is at the same time foundational to life would it not be reasonable to say that it cannot be held for profit?
The Soviet Union had constant problems with insufficient food production. The successor countries didn't.
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Unlike the others this is a natural monopoly. 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 r…
There's no contradiction. Thames and gilts both pay ~5.8% on average. This is about the same as "Baa" (moderate risk) corporate debt. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAA Thames' debt costs are normal for a company of its type, but for a government this bond yield is danger-level high. That's why there's so much talk in financial circles now about the UK needing another IMF bailout, although I have grave doubts abo…
Thames' debt is C-grade because it recently defaulted on its debt. How is that possible given that its debt servicing costs are not unusually high? Normally you'd expect interest costs to go up well before default. Well, on the surface level because it couldn't raise more money from investors to meet rising costs. It couldn't do that because Ofwat keep fining it for "underperformance" whilst also refusing to allow prices to catch up with where they used to be in the past. Investors refused to put more money in unless a 40% price rise was allowed by the government, but the government likes to boast it has forced prices 45% lower since the 1980s (in real terms). Government doesn't budge, investors go on strike = default = downgrade.
There was waste under state ownership but probably not half of every pound spent, which is what forcing prices to nearly halve would have required.
Under the Tories it seems to have been believed by investors that eventually Ofwat would be reigned in and the financial pressure on UK water companies would ease. That didn't happen, instead the Tories imploded and Labour won. Both ratings agencies say explicitly that this is the reason they consider Thames' outlook to be either stable (at best) or negative:
"We revised down our assessment of TWUL's business risk profile to satisfactory because we now consider that U.K. water companies will operate in a less supportive regulatory environment"
Less supportive regulatory environment is ratings-speak for "because we think the left will shaft Thames and its investors".
This outcome is the opposite of the fantasy being peddled in this thread where investors have been extracting great wealth from Britain. It's the opposite: investors are getting hosed by the government. They're literally losing the money they put into Thames Water because the government forced Thames to spend it all on making water artificially cheap in an unsustainable manner.
As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources. What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992. So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of i…
When it comes to things like utilities every penny of profit comes at the expense of the public. Either prices are raised so that a small number of people can stuff their pockets with extra cash above what it costs to deliver the service and maintain the system or they get that extra money by failing to deliver the service or they do it by failing to maintain the system itself. I think the neglect and failure to inve…
You said correctly that the private utility monopolist can choose from the menu of raising prices, delivering a subpar (cheaper) service for the same price, or can "defer" (aka skip) maintenance indefinitely. All ways they can extract cash to pay shareholders or even worse, pay management fees to private equity.
But the government-owned utility that we idealize, which provides the reasonable service at a breakeven price, may not be realistic. Government has its own incentives: Some politicians want to take funding from your utility to pay for their pet project. Others (political operatives or even civil servants) may sneak in a corrupt overpriced contract to benefit their corrupt associates. Public unions are known for negotiating unreasonable work rules and contracts that preserve jobs that are not actually needed.
All of the above together create a drain on finances of a government-owned utility, which is the public counterpart of the drain on finances that "the need to make a profit for the owners" places on investor-owned utilities.
I hate my local investor-owned utilities with a fiery passion and can't believe most governments could do worse, but I think we shouldn't overlook how easy it is for nationalized entities to engage in similar amounts of shenanigans.
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Tesco's is infrastructure?
You've heard of "food" I assume?
That isn't really the case with water and power (or even internet access). Water is water. Electricity is Electricity. There's no artisanal organic Electricity made from the finest ingredients that powers your stuff any better. You either have a safe, functioning product or it isn't. Everyone needs the exact same stuff, it makes sense for the government to supply it. Not everyone needs, or even wants, the same foods.
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Sewage doesn't have to be dumped. Simply separate your black water and grey water. Storm drains can go to rivers (if the rivers have capacity – if not, it's sometimes easier to give the river more capacity than to build more sewers), and the amount of water in sewage pipes will be independent of the amount of rain. Sure, the sewers might not currently be designed that way, but that can be changed. (It's a logistical…
This is such a pedantic point. How does it add anything to the conversation?
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> My provider is Thames Water. They are losing money. Are they losing money because costs exceed revenue, or are they losing money because they are servicing massive loan interest on money they already distributed to shareholders?
Page 10 of their 24/25 annual report says they only pay 8% toward interest payments, the largest outgoing is infrastructure, then opex. https://www.thameswater.co.uk/media-library/l13deqmw/thames-...
Poor shareholders, mainly Ontario Municipal retirement fund pensioners, who are the biggest ones (32%) and retired British academics (20%).
It looks like we will be forever looking for solutions when we keep on ignoring animal farming in these conversations. Not even a single mention of the orders of magnitude more of water that is required for animal agriculture vs just growing plants directly for human consumption. Would it solve everything? No. But it would solve a whole lot and the fact that someone that specialises in environmentalism doesn't even m…
I don't get it. Cattle eat grass. Grass is extraordinarily efficient at using water. It's what would normally be growing there without humans! 70% of the UK is farmland and I'm willing to bet much of that is non-irrigated pasture.
A lot of it (most of it, likely) would be forest.
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Always the immigrants. Weird that they are to blame, even though water abstraction has been trending downwards for close to 30 year.
It's not always the immigrants. That comment's just as intelligent as actually believing it's always the immigrants. If the population were growing rapidly due to everyone having larger families, that would be the reason, but it's not. If you add millions of people over the last 25 years (say) then of course water will become much scarcer. And it's not like, say, food supply, which scales up and down relatively nicel…
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Governments don't pay for infrastructure by saving up surplus tax revenue in a piggy bank. They take out loans to pay for it, same as the water companies do. The UK pays around 8% of its spending on interest payments and that's rising rapidly, despite the fact it can print money. British water companies are in lots of debt because they aren't really private. They're forced to spend huge sums to repair Victorian-era i…
>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…
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I looked after the IRIX boxes. I made small talk with meteorologists and presenters whilst fixing their machines. When the adverts that go with the weather are for the likes of Land Rover or British Airways, you know the deal.
So you were rounding down temperatures, or colouring maps deceivingly or what?
As for colours, we had those graphic designers that wanted to do their own 'mark' on the product, so the maps made by them were artist impressions with stupid colours such as blue for land and yellow for the sea. This makes things difficult if the animated gifs for the icons use yellow and blue, for things like the sun and the rain and it is your job to encode those gifs. That one was resolved by sacking the designer and making base maps the more scientific way, with AVHRR vegetation index, a bathymetry dataset and so on.
You would not believe the battles that have to be had to have maps that are fit for purpose rather than 'graphic designed'.
Other mundane tasks included setting the clocks at 2 a.m. twice a year, which would be easy, had it not been for the clocks costing £40k each, with them paired up for redundancy, and that pair paired-up for even more redundancy.
The clocks worked fine, however,timings could move around during the changeover from summer time since the clocks try and correct themselves. Change one and the other clocks would gang up on it and it would acquiesce. Costing £40k the clocks obviously did not show the time as that would be too obvious, there was just the timecode on wires going around the building. Then the only way to adjust them was to solder your own lead, plug it into a laptop and then telnet in.
As for deception, look at weather forecasting as more like gambling. Forecasters have gambling mentality and a very different way of understanding the weather to mere mortals. The behind the scenes chat on a daily basis is what you want, not the forecast. You get the bigger picture listening in to their chats.