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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

#671

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

taneq wrote: post #610
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Australia, there are 227 sitting Members of Parliament, of those: one in three federal politicians (71) own two properties; one in three (77) own three or more properties, and about one in three (67) own one property. Eleven federal politicians don't own a home, at least not in their name, and of those only one is known to be a renter. I don't know why we call it Parliament House, it should be call the House…

And somehow this group, in the name of 'affordable housing', keeps coming up with ways to enable people to pay more and more for houses, rather than coming up with ways to make home ownership less expensive. I guess it's just one of those mysteries we may never solve.

Here's some more Recreational Statistics (a branch of Recreation Mathematics):

There are about 11.1 million residential properties in Australia, 30% of which, some 3.25 million residential properties, are held by investors.[1]

There are 25 million people in Australia, about 17.5 million of those are adults aged 25 years or older, of which about 12.8%, or 2.25 million, own one or more investment properties.[1,2]

Let's assume the majority of investment property owners also own their own home.

So, about 13% of Australian adults own about 60% of the housing.

Does that sound reasonable? I don't know if there's some alternate timeline where housing is more evenly distributed and life is better, or how to get there if we think that's a good idea.

1. https://realtyai.com.au/inside-australias-property-boom-how-...

2. https://realtyai.com.au/inside-australias-property-boom-how-...

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

#672

Post by kragen »

DrScientist wrote: post #655
kragen wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's correct. All you need is to enrich uranium, which is found everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Occurrence says: > Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low levels in all rock, soil, and water. It is the highest-numbered element found naturally in significant quantities on Earth and is almost always found combined with other elements.[12] Uranium is the 48th most abundant…

Mining rock is energy intensive - I think I read somewhere about 15% of the worlds electricity is spent on mining activities. There is a danger that if you spend 300x more energy to enrich your uranium then you might achieve netzero - but not in a good way.

It doesn't affect the amount of energy required to enrich the uranium once it's been extracted from the rock, just the amount of energy required to extract the uranium from the rock. It just requires leaching the uranium from a larger amount of material.

I understand that you might randomly spread FUD like this if you haven't bothered to do any calculations at all because you don't care whether what you're saying is true or false. You're off by orders of magnitude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Nuclear_reactio... says uranium as burned in a breeder reactor yields 80TJ/kg; if your soil contains 10ppm of uranium, you're getting 800MJ per kg of soil. Lignite coal is 10–20MJ/kg, so regular soil yields 40–80 times as much energy as a source of uranium as coal does as a source of carbon.

Or, looking at it a different way, to supply a given amount of energy from uranium, you only have to mine about 2% as much random soil as if you were mining coal from an open-air coal deposit. (Subsequent processing is somewhat different, involving leaching with sulfuric acid.) Since mining coal requires significantly less energy than the coal yields, uranium mining is not close to net-zero on its energy return anywhere in the world.

Nuclear reactors are not economically competitive with solar and PV, but that's a different issue.

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

#673

Post by cupcakecommons »

hedora wrote: post #270
cupcakecommons wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don’t need to ask grok. Here are high-ball numbers for going off the grid; 2000 sf house in California: - 30 panels ~ 10kw: $20K - batteries ~ 10kwh: $8K. - permits + labor: $20K (California...) - 100+kwh EV with v2h bidirectional charging: $50K - comparable ICE car (offset): -$40K - heat pump water heater $1.5K - heat pump furnace: $15K - induction range: $2K That adds to: $76.5K. Typical PG&E bills are $500-1000…

Grid scale power is being discussed here, not your house project (which is totally great)

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

#674

Post by cupcakecommons »

viraptor wrote: post #253
cupcakecommons wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

LLMs should not be used as a reliable source of numbers for research like that. You keep saying how obvious this is and trivial to research. Maybe just post a quality research link instead in that case?

I am suggesting it as a way to do a back of the envelope calculation that can be thoroughly checked manually. It's very easy to check the numbers yourself.

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

#675

Post by Manuel_D »

moooo99 wrote: post #412
Manuel_D wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see the breakdown of electricity usage here: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect... For residential uses, heating, cooling, and refrigeration are the main uses. For commercial electricity use: computing, refrigeration, cooling, and ventilation. For industrial electricity use: machine drive (lathes, mills, etc.), process and boiler heating, facility heating and cooling, electrochemical…

> 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 cannot be easily load shifted. Daily fluctuations in energy production aren't the only forms of fluctuations. Seasonal fluctuations are large, too. And the seasonal variation has the unfortunate tendency to line up with periods of high energy demand. "Just don't heat your house in the winter" is not a viable form of demand shifting.

> For boiler heating and facility heating and cooling the same applies as for commercial and residential uses.

Note that this refers to "process and boiler heating". There's plenty of industrial processes that need to be kept at temperature for long periods of time, otherwise the batch is ruined. Titanium smelting is one example. I've yet to see a breakdown of what specific industrial processes can be shifted.

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

#676

Post by cupcakecommons »

marcosdumay wrote: post #304
viraptor wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they get destroyed by weather We get anything from storms to hail few times a year here. My patio roof got holes in it from the ice balls, but the panels are fine. Are you missing some qualifiers on that one? > get dirty You clean them every few months or monitor for issues per group of panels. > require significant maintenance Just like every other device out in the real world. Coal, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, the…

What I think the GP is blowing completely out of proportion is: > they get destroyed by weather A few of them, every year. It makes a visible dent on their average longevity. But I don't think distributing them has any impact on this. They just create a risk situation that nobody seems to be insuring and that large farms will self insure without problems. (Anyway, with the price going down the way it is, that will so…

We were originally discussing offshore wind. These things have to function in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. We don't really fully understand how weather patterns will change over time with climate change. The idea that these factors won't represent serious risks to output over 50-year lifespans is delusional. We should be building modern nuclear reactors. Small scale distributed solar in sunny environments is fine - the rest of this stuff is just a massive waste.

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

#677

Post by WalterBright »

keybored wrote: post #632
WalterBright wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've built entire cities that are completely vacant.

Like building transport infrastructure to nowhere, hmm? And then they build all the other infrastructure around it.[1] Because with such central planning you don’t need to build around and on top of existing infrastructure—you can build like in Sim City. 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…

google "vacant cities in china"

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

#678

Post by mantas »

Symbiote wrote: post #507
mantas wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if EU parliament is not full of clowns too. At least local parliament has some windows to break close by. - citizen of EU member, not happy with either national or eu parliaments :D

The EU parliament is elected with a much fairer system than the British one, half of which isn't even elected but nominated in return for bribes or being a bishop.

Common theme in EU parliament seems to be that people send politicians who shit the bed on national level for an expensive vacation to do next to nothing. Or being a celebrity in an unrelated field.

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

#679

Post by Manuel_D »

specialist wrote: post #634
AstralStorm wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you arguing for or against offshore wind? 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!

Nuclear power is indeed a silver bullet. France supplied > 85% of its electricity demand with nuclear (with the rest being filled by pre-existing hydroelectricity). As is hydroelectricity and geothermal power for those countries with the appropriate geography. E.g. Norward produces 100% of electricity through hydro. Non-intermittent sources of energy don't need to be supplemented by alternative sources of energy.

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

#680

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

sgt101 wrote: post #666
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Australia does sort of have a land constraint problem too, insofar as there aren't a lot of places in Australia where anyone would really want to live.

Agriculture in Australia accounts for about 55% of land use.[1]

About 70% of Australian land is arid or semi arid.[2]

About 87% of the population lives within 50 kilometres of the coast.[3]

About 0.5% of Australian land area is used for housing.[4]

About 50% of Australian land area is suitable for and used for grazing.[4]

Dryland cropping, dryland horticulture, irrigated pastures, irrigated cropping, irrigated horticulture, intensive horticulture and animal production, account for about 5.14% of Australia's land area.[4]

New housing development in Australia is largely done by encroaching on some of the best land for growing food, where there used to market gardens, crazing, vegetable cropping, etc, close to towns and cities, that production is being pushed further out.

New housing development is largely captured by businesses and companies that can afford to develop the land and cope with all the regulatory burden. Even in the regional areas, a block of land suitable for building a house goes for about $280,000[5] - about 5 years median income.[6] Then you'll probably want a build a house on that land, and that's going to cost you about $300,000.[7] For a total of about $550,000.

Even in the fairly average, fairly ordinary area I live in, house prices are up about 110% since about 10 years ago.

I don't know if there's some alternate timeline where housing in Australia is more evenly distributed, or if that would result in a better life for the majority of Australians, or how to get there if we think that's good idea.

Also see my other recent comment here[8] for a breakdown of ownership of the housing stock.

Thanks for motivating me to put this comment together, I had been meaning to review this data since the last time I look at it over five years ago.

1. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/products/insights/snap...

2. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/land/rangelands

3. https://soe.dcceew.gov.au/coasts/pressures/population

4. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/aclump/land-use

5. https://hia.com.au/our-industry/newsroom/economic-research-a...

6. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-workin...

7. https://www.residentialattitudes.com.au/building-advice/the-...

8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43257766

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