631–640 of 784 posts
There are too many glaring holes in this article for it to be taken seriously. It's simply not a complete argument if you discuss the UK's current economy and don't mention 1) Brexit 2) Green energy policies
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Seems to be working extremely well in China, to be honest.
They've built entire cities that are completely vacant.
That vacant “Paris” also turned out to become populated later.
Ha ha they centrally planned a city and didn’t move people into it before it was done... like what you do when building a house. That’s effectively what you are alluding to as absurd.
[1] But by that time the Western journalists might not care anymore whistles
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But the quality of what was built was worse than what the commies built in the Eastern Europe. That's quite an achievement!
I grew up in council housing built during this period. It's not exactly premium but it was built fairly well and they sold well when many of them eventually made it onto the private market many decades later. Good sized gardens and I remember the council doing necessary repairs and upgrades throughout my time there. I'm not exactly familiar with buildings from ex-soviet eastern Europe but I'd be surprised if it was a…
What I remember: - small rooms - mould - no insulation - in larger buildings gardens, if any, would be only for ground floor flats - in smaller buildings flats would be split over 3 levels, with each level being rather small - often wired entrance to the flats from outdoor gallery/balcony (in larger buildings) - low ceilings (for my liking)
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> For residential uses, heating, cooling, and refrigeration are the main uses. Heating and cooling can be offloaded into grid peak availability hours relatively easily with the price serving as a reliable trigger. This assumes proper insulation for the most part, but is viable and using the price as an indicator automatically sets up the right incentives. As for refrigeration, the energy use for that in a private hou…
Heating and cooling can only be offloaded in extremely wellinsulated houses. A lot of the ones in the UK do not make the cut. Even some new EU ones do not. If you try to offload it otherwise you just waste power heating/cooling yourself at wrong hours. A boiler in this setup is a thermal battery. These are good, but space consuming and relatively failure prone and expensive to maintain. Inefficient compared to centra…
Tackling climate crisis requires All The Above.
Wind, nukes, solar farms, tidal, whatever, by themselves, aren't silver bullets.
We also need heat pumps, renovations (insulation, air sealing), district heating, etc. That's just for housing.
We could also talk all day about industry and agriculture.
As the saying goes: The opportunities are insurmountable!
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Are you referring to the libertarians who like to see government fail so they have a reason to dismantle it?
Not the OP but look at the difference between what governments can do when there is a sense of urgency (i.e it is wartime or one is in recent memory) vs what they do when it's not. My lizard brain interprets this in the following way: Elites in response to external competition or in the presence of existential threat experience strong incentives to make "real" progress. When there's little external competition, leade…
And real (“real”) progress for whom? Your analysis is completely opaque.
"These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth." I can't find this mentioned anywhere in the article, but the current imbalance of supply and demand and the resulting high prices is quite beneficial for parts of the real…
Why is the answer always more real estate, and not private ownership of housing? If you don’t live in it you can’t have it.
Another issue is that historically low mortgage rates pushed up the maximum price of house that people could afford, and when rates went back up the market stalled out rather than price correct. I don't know how to fix that.
"These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth." I can't find this mentioned anywhere in the article, but the current imbalance of supply and demand and the resulting high prices is quite beneficial for parts of the real…
Why is the answer always more real estate, and not private ownership of housing? If you don’t live in it you can’t have it.
https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/britains-homelessness-...
Yes, getting rid of private landlords would be great but our housing crisis is far, far bigger than that.
Secondly, having a small amount of rental accommodation is useful. If I switch jobs and move cities then having somewhere to rent while I get on my feet is a good thing. I would agree that it's now gone too far though. Perhaps just having a small amount of government rental locations could solve this.
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If we are heating with electricity and cannot use gas storage to make up for the seasons, chemical batteries are nowhere near price effective, or even physically or projected to be available. You can find out how much energy Europe stores in gas fields to get through the winter. You can divide that number by what you think is a reasonable sCOP for your heat pump. That number you can put next to total battery capacity…
Of course burning that gas to generate electricity for use in heat pumps would get you the same heat for half the gas even before you include any wind power (or hydro etc.) That then doubles your storage for gas that you may or may not need to burn depending on the weather. So really the path to fully renewable just goes through a series of win-wins on the journey to fully phase out fossil fuels.
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The are a few more things in the equation. Median age in the UK is ~40 while most immigration is from countries with medians in their 20s. Those families are more likely to have more children especially if they reach a stable and comfortable living situation. So it can be a Ponzi scheme but it can also be an investment.
It is a Ponzi scheme. The Ponzi scheme is that population has to grow forever, which is not sutainable and not possible, and coming to an end globally. So high immigration now is just kicking the ball down the road while destroying your local culture and people in the process.
But I don't really agree this is the appropriate equivalent at least for the "spirit" of a Ponzi scheme. A pyramid scheme exists only when a pyramid is disguised as something else. When it's designed and presented as an actual pyramid it's not a scheme. In the design of the pension system there's no intention of fraud involved (only lack of education maybe), and the system is constantly and very transparently adjusted to widen the pyramid base and narrow the top (increase retirement age, contributor base, or individual contribution).
"These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth." I can't find this mentioned anywhere in the article, but the current imbalance of supply and demand and the resulting high prices is quite beneficial for parts of the real…
Have we tried just taxing land?
We get a lot of dead towns because of speculation on land.