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How the U.K. broke its own economy

theatlantic.com

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

#661

Post by gadders »

sdenton4 wrote: post #651
gadders wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brexit was around the same time as COVID, so hard to split the two. >> It's also way higher than it ever was back when Britain was monoracial. Yes, but the immigration model has changed. It used to be "let the best and brightest from around the world work and live in the UK" now it is "let anybody move here that is willing to work for less money".

Well, no, actually. It's not hard to look at the expected effects of brexit and examine whether they are occurring. For example, decline in small forms exporting to Europe due to trades friction. "But the working assumption of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the government's independent official forecaster, is still that Brexit in the long-term will reduce exports and imports of goods and services by 15%…

You mean the same civil service that was against Brexit from the start, still tries to justify it being a bad idea? Amazing.

You even didn't include the paragraph prior to your quote:

"It's also clear UK services exports - such as advertising and management consulting - have done unexpectedly well since 2021."

I realise Brexit was a horrible shock for the middle classes that they are still coming to terms with, but I think long term it will be neutral or positive. Now that we have a more pro-UK president there is even scope of trade deals with the USA replacing some of the "lost" EU trade.

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

#662

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ben_w wrote: post #581
noja wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

UK House ownership rates are pretty high, but they went down right after the global financial crisis, presumably because the banks had tighter lending rules: https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/214874/economics/why-its-... House prices are also way up. Lots of people who own them really like this, but it makes it harder to become a home owner in the first place.

For most people who own houses it's probably not relevant that the value has gone up?

If you upgrade you pay the margin, which is higher. Legal/admin/moving costs tend to be a percentage of house value, so costs are higher.

When you retire you might downsize and release a lot of equity, but that's not going to be true for most house owners (happy to be proved wrong) - downsizing is for the wealthy, if I ever downsize it will be to a cardboard box.

Most home owners will have children, prices being high negatively effects them, and finances tend to be somewhat shared (from 0% upwards...) so prices being high is a problem here too.

Maybe I'm missing something about the situation. I guess my kids will be happy for the money when I die, but it'll be easily eaten up by their housing debts.

So people without dependents; people who are very wealthy. Apart from those groups I don't really see how house value changing after purchase helps

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

#663

Post by idiotsecant »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #268
idiotsecant wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true, on a watt basis. It also ignores the physics of a synchronous grid. You need to produce exactly what you use at any given moment. If you fail to do that by a little bit bad things happen. If you fail by a lot, the grid fails. You need to be able to get power when you need it, not when it's convenient to your generation plant. If you want to compare solar or wind to something more dispatchable you sh…

Sounds like an excellent reason to use massive numbers of highly distributed sources that ramp up and down predictably.

That's what over building is. It also requires massive investment in transmission infrastructure because your core assumption is that power in one place get get to load in another. It turns out that transmission costs many many times what the generation does

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

#664

Post by throwawayffffas »

junto wrote: post #660
throwawayffffas wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Russia, the US and the Saudis, it's Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, etc. honestly Aramco and Gazprom probably have very little influence on decision making in Europe and the US compared to the local interests. > The other aligned narrative is nuclear and I consider it to be Trojan horse to continued reliance on fossil fuels at least for the next 25-30 years whilst countries like Germany would argue with NIMBY’s and…

Fraunhofer Institute did an in depth study into the costs of nuclear. That it is cheaper is a myth. Nuclear is a distraction to defocus from renewables and battery tech. There’s a reason this kind of nuclear propaganda is all over TikTok amongst right wing social media. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/studien... https://www.unendlich-viel-energie.de/projekte/erneuerbar-st...

Never said it's cheaper. What I implied was that if the construction of nuclear reactors had continued in the 90s, today we would be in a position where fossil fuels would be a much smaller part of the energy mix.

In France for example the domestic energy production is virtually free from fossil fuels. [1]

In other parts of Europe, all the capacity that renewables provide has been offset by the shutting down of nuclear reactors. Instead of replacing fossil fuels they replaced nuclear. See Germany's energy mix for example [2].

[1]. https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix (See the second graph) [2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...

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

#665

Post by mytailorisrich »

close04 wrote: post #639
mytailorisrich wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If this is the reference for the definition of a Ponzi scheme then the pension system in general is a Ponzi scheme by design and immigration is not "turning" it into one like OP said. 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 i…

You are being unduly pedantic and argumentive. You should understand that the term was clearly used to mean that population must keep growing forever because the next generation must always be larger than the previous one.

And yes, the whole economy and benefit systems, including pensions, assume this. This is why it is difficult to face the fact that population cannot keep growing, and in fact it s forecast that will stop growing at global scale by the end of the century. It is even more unsustainable combined with the objective of solving the climate and environmental crisis.

There is a dishonest incoherency with our governments, and just incoherency with large sections of the public.

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

#666

Post by sgt101 »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #500
sgt101 wrote: post #443

“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 eco…

> private sector will not safe guard the public sphere of the environment. In what sense are homes for people to live in not the public sphere of the environment? What do you expect people to do? Go back to freezing in the dark?

I don't expect the private sector to fix it spontaneously if left to it's own devices.

This is (as you flag) a specifically political problem - not a commercial one. There are political fixes which are available, but have not been taken. There are planning reforms, and fiscal reforms, that could change the housing market very significantly - without enabling a free for all that would simply result in the creation of thousands of five bedroom des res's all over the home counties. This would not salve the real social ills that bad and limited housing have created, but it would destroy what's left of the countryside. England is as densely populated as India, and we need to manage what happens to land in our country in a way that Australia and the USA doesn't.

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

#667

Post by Manuel_D »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #429
Manuel_D wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modelling in Australia with simulations that multiply up current wind and solar (using real-time data of actual renewable generation) [1] showed that well over 99% of demand can be delivered with only about five hours of storage, so we're not really talking about days. That's still a gap two orders of magnitude larger than existing standards: > Meanwhile, reliability standards in industrialized countries are typica…

The thing is you can calculate when there will be short falls and you can amount to that perfectly. We now know the weather pretty much 1 day before it happens. adjusting that 1% of course amounts to maintaining natural gas facilities but it's really not that big of a deal.

Using natural gas means climate change still progresses. Not to mention you'll be paying all of the overhead cost of maintaining natural gas plants, but only use them for a fraction of the time. So net cost per watt hour will be very high.

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

#668

Post by have_faith »

quantum_panda wrote: post #633
have_faith wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This doesn't describe council houses I've seen in London and surroundings (e.g. Milton Keynes/Bletchley). 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) -…

My experience is from the midlands, specifically in council estates that were predominantly terraced and semi-detached houses (small blocks of 4 or so houses at a time). No flats so that might be a big distinguishing factor (as well as not being in London...). Definitely had problems but rarely because of the build quality itself, some issues with neglect in some areas.

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

#669

Post by yunesj »

florbnit wrote: post #423
yunesj wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish there were better ways to align incentives here. I have a crazy idea that might work to hold organizations accountable if they never get anything done.

That mentality is exactly what leads to the problem. You want to hold everyone organization accountable for every perceived failing which leads them to optimize towards a state where they can justify existence but do as little as possible to minimize the potential for any perceived failing.

I was talking about market accountability. Companies that don’t get anything done fail.

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

#670

Post by Manuel_D »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #427
Manuel_D wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light. I responded to a comment stating that excess storage can be stored in batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249008 I'd suggest reading the comments people are responding to before calling them bullshit. > You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level. "only" 12 hours of storage i…

12 hours of night time is not 30TWh The world is currently at 26TWh A DAY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption Let's say it is 30Twh a day in 2030 - you can calculate 50% less energy usage during night making it 20 TWh during daytime and 10Twh during night time. This excludes large wind farms that add to base load if you average over the world. There is always wind somewhere around you. Realistic…

> 12 hours of night time is not 30TWh The world is currently at 26TWh A DAY

From your link:

> The global electricity consumption in 2022 was 24,398 terawatt-hour (TWh)

24,398. / 365 is 66.8 TWh of electricity used per day. And again, that's current electricity consumption. Before industrial processes are electrified. Before poor countries adopt air conditioning at the same rates as rich ones. Before transport is fully switched to EVs.

> Let's say it is 30Twh a day in 2030 - you can calculate 50% less energy usage during night making it 20 TWh during daytime and 10Twh during night time

That's not how th consumption curve works. Even in the summer, the ratio of daytime to nighttime energy use isn't so high. And in the winter it's inverted, with nighttime energy use exceeding daytime use.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

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