Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How the U.K. broke its own economy

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 784 posts

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#441

Post by chgs »

robertlagrant wrote: post #419
Jtsummers wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similarly, in the U.K., any individual who sues to stop a new project on environmental grounds—say, to oppose a new road or airport—generally has their legal damages capped at £5,000, if they lose in court. “Once you’ve done that,” Bowman said, “you’ve created a one-way system, where people have little incentive to not bring spurious cases to challenge any new development.” Not directly stated about wind power, but…

> not low for the average person, but not that expensive either I think this is very high for the average person.

But not for someone thinking their £2m house will “lose value”

There are a lot of rich people in the U.K.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#442

Post by tsimionescu »

tempfile wrote: post #384
tsimionescu wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely and utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. Wild bird populations are potentially at risk, and extinction of a population has massive ecological consequences. Commercially raised chickens and the horrors they are exposed to are completely unrelated to that.

I would hardly call it "utterly irrelevant" that in a discussion about "killing birds is bad" someone mentions that it is not usually considered bad to kill birds for food.

Killing wild birds accidentally is completely different from raising and bucthering birds for food, from virtually any point of view I can imagine. People who have no problem with eating meat will still not find it OK to kill a pet pig, and might still consider sport hunting wild boars to be barbaric.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#443

Post by sgt101 »

“To do so, it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do.”

Which is fine if resources were infinite or distribution was equal, but neither are true and the private sector will not safe guard the public sphere of the environment.

In any case, plain as day, the big problem with the UK economy was and is the 2008 financial crisis that chopped 5% of GDP off the economy. Since then every government has been faced with either doing what would be needed to make things right, or doing what is needed to get reelected. They have all picked the second option apart from Boris Johnson's administration through to Truss, who picked electoral destruction through magical thinking (on Northern Ireland and then by raising spending without raising tax to pay for it, precipitating first a crisis of politics and second a crisis of finance).

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#444

Post by M95D »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #295
notTooFarGone wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah of course distributed infrastructure is ... Bad??? Oh no we have no single point of failure, empower people to invest into the grid and have huge redundancies in the grid... Batteries literally solve most of the problems

Don't forget to factor in the possibility of lithium shortages in the next decade. Batteries don't solve anything if you can't build them. https://themarketbull.com.au/2025/02/07/lithium-remains-a-ke...

It doesn't need to be lithium.

Nickel-Iron batteries are very good for this purpose: practically unlimited charge-discharge cycles and overcharging/overdischarging won't damage them. They should be dirt-cheap too, but almost there are very few manufacturers so there's not much competition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#445

Post by quantum_panda »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #385
Peteragain wrote: post #369

This is a conservative (note small c) bit of agi-prop. "Things were better in the old days" before politicians stuffed up. Sows discontent with no discussion of future action. The comments here are far more interesting and important. Bloody MSM!!

I thought that the article would be investigating how Thatcher's policies caused disastrous results. Her right-to-buy policy led to councils not having an incentive to build housing and encouraged landlords to buy up housing and thus contributed to the over-priced housing we see today https://www.ft.com/content/8d5f2952-3c17-11e8-bcc8-cebcb81f1... https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/the-housing-act-from... Fun fa…

An unpopular opinion, but outsourcing abroad the industry, which wasn't working due to permanent strikes anyway, was probably net positive overall. Of course keeping the industry and fixing somehow the issue would have been better, but it's a bit though in a democratic country where unions exist - just take a look at train drivers now - they keep the whole country hostage, and even though they earn comparatively more than in other countries they demand relatively big pay rises every year.

Every British person would probably kill me for saying this.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#446

Post by tsimionescu »

CWIZO wrote: post #388
tsimionescu wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also raised about 110,000,000 birds that otherwise would never have been born. This is completely irrelevant to wind turbines or any other power generation tech - the impact on wild birds is what is of concern, because, by definition, we're not able to raise any number of wild birds we'd like to have.

While indeed irrelevant for the original point. I would encourage you to educate[1] yourself on the life these birds have before you make claims we're doing them a favour by bringing them into existence. [1] https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch

I made no such claim, I was only mentioning that in relation to the fact that population size of domestic birds is not impacted at all by the massive killing, while population size for wild birds might be dramatically impacted by a much smaller number of deaths.

I find the horrors of industrial animal farming horrendous, while not having a moral problem with the idea of raising an animal in decent conditions for slaughter.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#447

Post by nonrandomstring »

byefruit wrote: post #397
pjc50 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As we can see down thread, people have got into a terrible mess of duelling propaganda and gone mad about wind power. We can have cheap clean energy, it requires a small amount of change, oh no, let's destroy everything instead. I'm going to start suggesting that planning should have a local referendum: approve this set of projects and you'll get cheaper electricity. Disapprove and your bill goes up. Democratic choic…

This has already been proposed by the current government for wind farms: https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/new-energy-bill-discoun... And the switch to zonal energy pricing will likely have a similar effect for other sources of generation.

I agree with the incentives for zonal pricing to encourage clean local production. The downside however is that the grid becomes defunded and a tragedy of commons ensues. We invest in common infrastructure precisely because of variance, which in the long run we hope to ameliorate.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#448

Post by fransje26 »

stuaxo wrote: post #375
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #80

The last government intentionally banned the cheapest source of energy, onshore wind, from being built in England, by making it so that a single complaint could stop a project. I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.

Once Solar looked to become the cheapest, Liz Truss gov tried to restrict that too.

She had time for that, before the lettuce wilted?

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#449

Post by chgs »

moooo99 wrote: post #400
littlestymaar wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No product on a real market ever works like that (otherwise all goods of the same kind would cost the same everywhere in a country, priced at the marginal cost of supplying it to the most remote island community, which everyone can attest is not how markets work). Such a behavior only happens on artificial markets that have been designed for that purpose to match an ideological vision of how an “ideal market” should…

> Turns out the “ideal market” is a dystopia instead of the intended utopia. Why? This market is pretty much ideal and sets the right incentives. You have little to no information asymmetry, you need to strike a price that clears the market because you must balance production and demand. Why should sellers of renewable energy be forced to sell at their marginal cost when they are selling a commodity where somebody el…

The incentive is to produce 99 Units at £1 and 1 unit at £100 and sell 100 for £10,000, rather than producing 100 Units at £1

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#450

Post by dan-robertson »

DrScientist wrote: post #436
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #80

The last government intentionally banned the cheapest source of energy, onshore wind, from being built in England, by making it so that a single complaint could stop a project. I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.

I see a lot of irrational online hate for wind power - even going as far as wanting to dismantle offshore farms. I do wonder who is fermenting this - the obvious place to look here is the fossil fuel industry - they have the means, the motive and a track record of flexible morals. A lot of currently very rich and powerful people lose in a world where most countries and even people can generate most of the power they…

I’m not sure this is a fossil fuel industry thing. I think there are just people who really dislike the appearance of windmills in the landscape. Onshore, it is often better to put windmills on hills where they will be more prominent and so any one windmill can be ‘local’ to many people. Offshore, wind farms may ‘spoil’ a view out to sea, though they are also harder to oppose.

P.s. I think you meant to write fomenting

Post reply on HN