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OwlFancier posted:It really is mad how marketization as an ideology works. Doesn't matter what the problem is, you don't have to find the solution, you just have to tell someone they can get rich off it and they will magically figure out the solution, please ignore all the times they don't and this causes massive collapses to vital services and/or kills people and somehow they still get rich off it, it's a very difficult job after all and we can't expect them to get it right every time. Also if you have more than three days off in a year you're fired by the way, that's vital for productivity. I think my favorite contradiction with it is that it's somehow supposed to save significant amounts of money despite adding in a whole new major expenditure, that of paying the shareholders. Like yeah I could buy the argument that competition drives costs down outside that (I would still argue that it comes with a load of other problems because many of those savings come from cutting safety corners, underpaying staff, etc.) but once you start paying out the massive amounts shareholders demand, as well as grossly inflated CEO packages and the like, then the savings are soon massively outweighed. And then of course a steady return on investment isn't enough, it has to grow each quarter or year, so they have to find ways to give more money to shareholders on an ongoing basis even in industries where that makes no sense whatsoever because it is contstrained by things like static demand (Or rising only as a function of population), natural monopolies, inability to expand things or actually compete (You can't actually just slap a new rail line down from London to Brum like it's Transport Tycoon), etc. etc. etc.. It really is mad.
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May 25, 2022 02:23
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endlessmonotony posted:You know that means you get bitcoins and heated outdoor pools. Free up to a certain (generous) threshold and charged out the wazoo after that. Maybe extra allowances for old folks, new parents, etc. if you want to get all Means Testing about it but ideally the baseline is enough to cover all reasonable cases so nobody has to gently caress about claiming special circumstances and getting hosed by bureaucracy.
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May 25, 2022 07:43
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:They say you should take the best ideas from around the world. I think he should come over here and educate the tories. Boris is way ahead of them on 'eats, shoots and leaves'
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May 25, 2022 07:55
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sebzilla posted:Free up to a certain (generous) threshold and charged out the wazoo after that. Maybe extra allowances for old folks, new parents, etc. if you want to get all Means Testing about it but ideally the baseline is enough to cover all reasonable cases so nobody has to gently caress about claiming special circumstances and getting hosed by bureaucracy.
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May 25, 2022 08:26
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I absolutely do want Boris out, but if it turns out that it's the parties that did it and not his racist columns at the Spectator, time as foreign secretary, cheating on his wife when she had cancer, the 72 virgins book, his part in austerity, the covid mismanagement, conspiring to have a journalist's ribs broken or any number of other things the conservatives have done with him as PM, that's still going to feel slightly poo poo. If Boris doesn't voluntarily make way for his successor, that entity is likely to be concerned enough about a Johnson comeback that some interesting facts are going to mysteriously come to light from an unknown source.
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May 25, 2022 08:46
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Guavanaut posted:A good partial solution would be water and the electric standing charge paid from general taxation and using smart metering to give every household £50/mo or so baseline free. Finally, an actually use case for smart meters.
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May 25, 2022 08:48
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Guavanaut posted:At the very very least the standing charge should be adjusted for property size like water rates. A bare minimal actual solution would be that both water and the electric standing charge should be paid from general taxation. A good partial solution would be water and the electric standing charge paid from general taxation and using smart metering to give every household £50/mo or so baseline free. Free allowance needs to be in kWh not £, and also take into account that less well-off households will probably have more inefficient electrical goods, need to run washing machines more often etc. And be worked out on a per person rather than household basis for similar reasons. Should mean your average middle class empty-nester voter is well under the threshold and gets to enjoy free power with no worries, until they decide to get a hot tub or some other mad extravagance.
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May 25, 2022 08:53
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What even is the standing charge? Is it just the money they're supposed to be using to keep the network up and running with repairs and such as opposed to the actual electricity/water that you use? Because that's a very weird way of charging for that - especially since the energy providers don't even do that as far as I can tell!
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May 25, 2022 08:54
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Miftan posted:What even is the standing charge? Is it just the money they're supposed to be using to keep the network up and running with repairs and such as opposed to the actual electricity/water that you use? Because that's a very weird way of charging for that - especially since the energy providers don't even do that as far as I can tell! Unit cost covers production, cost of transmission and some infrastructure maintenance. Standing charge is for the things they need to do even if you use no energy at all - staff salaries, account management, meter hire and mandated site visits. It's often the case in the business sector that unit costs will come down while standing charges go up, because one is linked to the base cost per therm and the other is chiefly linked to cost of living. Retail customers of course get screwed with across the board increases because you don't get to negotiate.
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May 25, 2022 09:00
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Jedit posted:Unit cost covers production, cost of transmission and some infrastructure maintenance. Standing charge is for the things they need to do even if you use no energy at all - staff salaries, account management, meter hire and mandated site visits. So basically they're charging us a guaranteed amount for all their expenses, and then more (plus profit margin) for the actual electricity/water? And somehow people managed to go bust with this business model??
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May 25, 2022 09:14
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"That's quite an act, what do you call it?" "The Free Market!"
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May 25, 2022 09:23
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Miftan posted:So basically they're charging us a guaranteed amount for all their expenses, and then more (plus profit margin) for the actual electricity/water? And somehow people managed to go bust with this business model?? The companies that went bust weren’t energy companies. They were hedge funds. One was literally a teenager in his bedroom playing Captain Stockmarket.
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May 25, 2022 09:34
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smellmycheese posted:The companies that went bust weren’t energy companies. They were hedge funds. One was literally a teenager in his bedroom playing Captain Stockmarket. Which one was that as a matter of interest?
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May 25, 2022 09:42
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Which one was that as a matter of interest? Avro iirc.
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May 25, 2022 09:47
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Seems like Ricky Gervais is Doing A Transphobia multiple times in his latest special so Twitter was kind enough to let me see Nish Kumar calling him out in 2019 https://twitter.com/cowboyacaster/status/1386980286211166215 and I already know the James Acaster on-stage call-out of Gervais but this trans day of visibility vid he made last year is also sweet https://twitter.com/cowboyacaster/status/1429916696140263430
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May 25, 2022 09:49
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smellmycheese posted:One was literally a teenager in his bedroom playing Captain Stockmarket.
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May 25, 2022 09:49
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British Thermal Unit sounds like another term for a gammon
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May 25, 2022 09:57
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Tesseraction posted:Seems like Ricky Gervais is Doing A Transphobia multiple times in his latest special so Twitter was kind enough to let me see Nish Kumar calling him out in 2019 A very correct message but God he's hard to listen to. Not as hard as listening to Gervais though, where he's physically repulsive and he makes you feel retroactively dickheaded for liking one comedy special he did 20 years ago
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May 25, 2022 10:08
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https://twitter.com/joemcadam/status/1529153942738784257?s=19 Here's some good Ricky Gervais awkward comedy, a mystery why it's the only one of the "Meet Ricky Gervais" shows not on 4OD. Edit: woops I got confused with my Gervais embarrassments, the first episode of Meet Ricky was pulled because of Jimmy Savile. Gonzo McFee fucked around with this message at 10:22 on May 25, 2022 |
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May 25, 2022 10:17
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Glad to say I've though that Gervais is a talentless oval office since the 90s.
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May 25, 2022 10:30
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Miftan posted:So basically they're charging us a guaranteed amount for all their expenses, and then more (plus profit margin) for the actual electricity/water? And somehow people managed to go bust with this business model?? Yes, because only the infrastructure owners are actually selling their own power. The companies that went bust were in essence buying energy from the Big Six at the lower corporate rates and selling it on to the customers. Their profit margin came from being able to undercut the consumer rate. For example: the May 2022 consumer electricity unit rate from British Gas (which is fairly typical, as they're all capped) is 28.34p/kWh. My employer is being charged 17.38p/kWh on domestic supplies, which is a national procurement rate and should be considered to be the absolute floor. However, last year the average consumer rate was 18.9p/kWh and the national procurement rate was 15.23p/kWh. This is where the problems started for the energy resellers. Most of their customers were on Direct Debit contracts that guaranteed a unit price for the duration of the contract, but suddenly that price was below the floor price that they were buying at and the ones that were on the narrowest margins went straight to the wall. Some of the rest were able to hold out for a while in the hope of absorbing the losses until the current contracts came up for renewal and revision, but ultimately they couldn't survive because the Big Six were no longer selling to them at a price they could make a profit on.
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May 25, 2022 10:38
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Gonzo McFee posted:https://twitter.com/joemcadam/status/1529153942738784257?s=19 That's great, just casually destroying him while pouring a cup of coffee, what a king
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May 25, 2022 10:49
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keep punching joe posted:Glad to say I've though that Gervais is a talentless oval office since the 90s. I don't normally judge people by something like what TV they watch or whatever but if someone likes his comedy, that at the very least merits suspicion, even if it doesn't make them a bad person by default (it might do, I don't have enough data yet)
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May 25, 2022 10:55
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https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1529194578959548416?t=dUNH_kokUt1nlCk5iY0Gqw&s=19 It's not Jermery meets Gerry, but somewhere out there the worst people are getting mad about this picture
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May 25, 2022 10:58
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Ms Adequate posted:I think my favorite contradiction with it is that it's somehow supposed to save significant amounts of money despite adding in a whole new major expenditure, that of paying the shareholders. Like yeah I could buy the argument that competition drives costs down outside that (I would still argue that it comes with a load of other problems because many of those savings come from cutting safety corners, underpaying staff, etc.) but once you start paying out the massive amounts shareholders demand, as well as grossly inflated CEO packages and the like, then the savings are soon massively outweighed. Bringing those two thoughts together - I spent a lot of my childhood (not at all wasted, I promise) playing Railroad Tycoon II, which had - for the time - quite a sophisticated in-game model of capitalism with investors, shareholders, dividends, bonds, etc. etc. One of my perpetual frustration was that your virtual shareholders always wanted More Growth, All The Time. You could stitch together a perfectly sized, sustainable rail network monopolising the Midwest, carrying grain and cattle into Chicago and processed food and manufactured goods back out, with no effective competitors and a steady 5% dividend every year and if you just kept things ticking along like that your shareholders would eventually get angry and overthrow you - GAME OVER. So you'd always end up getting pushed into doing something stupid and unsustainable like building a transcontinental railroad over the Rockies or expanding into an area that an equally-powerful and rich competing company already had sewn up, ensuring that you would never be able to attract profitable traffic. When your grand new route to some backwater swamp on the west coat opened the share price would soar (Growth! Change! Potential! New Route Mileage! Shiny New Trains!) and then after a few years when it turned out to be a huge loss-making boondoggle and your railroad was now running at a loss, the stock price would crash and you'd get turned on by the shareholders - GAME OVER. Of course, as per the game's title, the way to win was to pay yourself a huge chairman's salary, invest that in competitors while doing nothing to hurt their own profitability, amass a vast personal fortune and take your own company private so you could enjoy a personal net worth of several billion dollars in 1890s money. You could also do shady poo poo like pay dividends from revenue and take out loans to service interest on existing loans. For a game that was mostly about playing with choo-choos, it was a remarkably accurate Gilded Age Capitalism Simulator.
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May 25, 2022 11:16
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Failed Imagineer posted:That's great, just casually destroying him while pouring a cup of coffee, what a king If you haven't seen the whole thing you should - as a review I read puts it, Shandling relentlessly fucks with Gervais the whole way through which is hilarious because Shandling is apparently Gervais's comedy hero and yet is just constantly insulted and demeaned and looked down upon.
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May 25, 2022 11:37
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Tesseraction posted:Seems like Ricky Gervais is Doing A Transphobia multiple times in his latest special so Twitter was kind enough to let me see Nish Kumar calling him out in 2019 To add to the list of good comedians slagging off Gervais, Frankie Boyle from last year. https://youtu.be/vEB05qsPJwY There is something to be said about just ignoring Gervais at this point, he went into this special with the specific goal of trying to get cancelled cos even he knows his stand up comedy doesn't create any buzz by itself. Mega Comrade fucked around with this message at 11:46 on May 25, 2022 |
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May 25, 2022 11:40
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Mega Comrade posted:To add to the list of good comedians slagging off Gervais, Frankie Boyle from last year. Frankie Boyle is a oval office who openly mocked Jordan's disabled son. He doesn't get to take the high ground here.
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May 25, 2022 11:48
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To some extent, the problem the electricity companies face is that they’re in the business of predicting the future price of oil & gas years in advance and actually nobody can do that right. You’d get a similar problem with a socialist system I think; a hypothetical communist UK would still have the problem that it needs more energy than we generate locally, and demand for energy > supply. The difference would be that the pain would be shared around more fairly (or at least, in accordance with what whoever was in charge of the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy-equivalent thought was more fairly).
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May 25, 2022 11:52
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Can't believe Boris has effortlessly wriggled his way out of this one
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May 25, 2022 11:59
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https://twitter.com/joncstone/status/1529414319338934273?s=19 I can't believe a bunch of Eton dickheads would behave this way.
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May 25, 2022 12:02
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lol good Mrs Merton reference from Keith there
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May 25, 2022 12:09
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Beefeater1980 posted:To some extent, the problem the electricity companies face is that they’re in the business of predicting the future price of oil & gas years in advance and actually nobody can do that right. Well, we used to maintain extensive storage facilities, so we could buy gas up when it was cheap and then use that during periods when it got expensive. Those facilities have all gone now, for some reason.
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May 25, 2022 12:34
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May 25, 2022 12:39
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ugh yeah had to close PMQs the Tories are getting more and more unhinged first Johnson saying that Starmer tried to get "Vladimir Corbyn" elected, some old oval office ranting about how socialism ruined our country and then another saying that how dare Labour complain about Johnson's taxes when the 2019 manifesto would have RAISED TAXES HIGHER THAN EVER BEFORE Have to take a few minutes to let the Stalin moustache fade from my face
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May 25, 2022 12:39
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the sex ghost posted:
Helping them ...to die?
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May 25, 2022 12:42
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an old colleague regularly laments the day many years ago that she spotted boris walking down the flight of stone stairs next to the Duke of York monument on the Mall and didn't push him. a real diverging timelines moment
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May 25, 2022 12:45
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kecske posted:an old colleague regularly laments the day many years ago that she spotted boris walking down the flight of stone stairs next to the Duke of York monument on the Mall and didn't push him. a real diverging timelines moment I saw Michael Portillo at an airport once back in 1999 and didn't kick him down the escalator and have kind of regretted it since
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May 25, 2022 12:46
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IMO the best part of all this is really making it plain to see how complicit and corrupt the police are. I don't think anybody at all is surprised that Boris Johnson lied yet again, but there's probably quite a few who believed the police investigation was fair and impartial and basically above reproach.
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May 25, 2022 12:47
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Sue Grey report just dropped https://twitter.com/Kevin_Maguire/status/1529424718759174150
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May 25, 2022 12:49
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