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Bobby Deluxe posted:It's amazing how quickly fash will turn to book burning. Gonna be very interesting for the first granny who tosses a kindle into the fire for warmth!
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Aug 28, 2022 14:06
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I've never played Disco Elysium, do you also need to make the stark choice between staving off depression with a book or using it as fuel?
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Aug 28, 2022 14:20
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I think you can die to putting on your trousers so while perhaps not specifically it is probably in the milleu.
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Aug 28, 2022 14:23
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Smoke control zones already get ignored. I live in one and in Winter theres always a few houses in the street with smoke from woodburners - though they seem aware enough not to do it until its dark. Its had to find fault when houses 100 meters away are outside the zone, and theres new build estates nearer the urban center that are magically excluded too. Its meant to be hard to get logs and chimneys swept now due to the demand.
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Aug 28, 2022 14:24
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Nationalization: So thinking about this as a thought experiment and if you really didn't care about any of the consequences and were willing to hit the primary legislation button with the Lords in tow then I reckon you could do it in about a week. If you are pinning to 2020 price levels then the difficult thing would arranging in advance with the treasury how to fund the massive public subsidy you've just announced for the industry. That probably takes you to an industry where all the companies are owned by and taking direction from a a government body set up for the purpose. If you made it a maximum effort then probably another year to work out how to consolidate the industry and identify all the redundancies you say you don't want but would obviously happen because there would be enormous duplication, but more importantly to set up a public sector body that can sensibly make decisions about what it the industry should be doing and issuing direction effectively.
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Aug 28, 2022 14:27
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Surely you could announce that you are going to nationalize it for pennies, watch the stock price crater, then buy it at a fair market rate (pennies)
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Aug 28, 2022 14:29
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Alchenar posted:So thinking about this as a thought experiment and if you really didn't care about any of the consequences and were willing to hit the primary legislation button with the Lords in tow then I reckon you could do it in about a week. If you are pinning to 2020 price levels then the difficult thing would arranging in advance with the treasury how to fund the massive public subsidy you've just announced for the industry. So thinking further about this: Public subsidy: dividends not getting paid out would cover some of this though I haven't looked in to the figures involved Redundancies: if the employees are now in the public sector, and given that the public sector seems to be suffering a huge vacancy gap retraining for posts within the public sector and movement between public industries could be implemented eg some may want to train up as nurses or teachers or even police persons. The cost of doing so might be an upfront hit but over 20 years would potentiallly more than pay for itself and lead to increased public satisfaction. OwlFancier posted:Surely you could announce that you are going to nationalize it for pennies, watch the stock price crater, then buy it at a fair market rate (pennies) I thought about this but I'm not sure of the potential for Board of Directors to asset strip in the time between saying you're going to do it and doing it.
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Aug 28, 2022 14:40
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I think this is conflating two different issues: If you want to insulate the public from utility price increases, the government has the power now to implement below-cost price caps and then transfer cash to the companies to stop them going under. Nationalisation is massive overkill. Infrastructure companies make profits (really quite small ones all things considered) because the state is paying them to manage the infrastructure for them. The prices they set are controlled and the amount of profit they are allowed to make is controlled. The state chooses to do this because it is just easier than running them itself and this has generally worked out quite well (important caveat before you rage hit reply: this is only when the relevant government regulator is keeping them on a tight lead. When the regulator is told to stop caring then things tend to go wrong). If you disagree with that in principle then nationalisation is the obvious answer, but you should on principle because you think the industry would be better off directly run by the state rather than because you are chasing some short term policy objective. e: I'll add that 'if you don't care about the consequences' is doing a lot of work in my previous post. If you don't care about the consequences of doing something badly then it's possible to do a lot of difficult things very quickly e2: \/ yeah my understanding is that asset stripping isn't really an issue. The franchises aren't set up like that. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Aug 28, 2022 |
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Aug 28, 2022 14:51
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:I thought about this but I'm not sure of the potential for Board of Directors to asset strip in the time between saying you're going to do it and doing it. What would asset stripping entail? They can't exactly pick up the power plant and flog it off the back of a van in europe. If the government's coming for the infrastructure who would buy it?
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Aug 28, 2022 14:52
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OwlFancier posted:What would asset stripping entail? They can't exactly pick up the power plant and flog it off the back of a van in europe. Depends on the industry and the assets it has I guess. I imagine power plants aren't owned by the electricity suppliers but by the power distribution companies such as Western Power Distribution PLC. So they would have land assets upon which power stations, pylons etc sit. So say it was Arcturus Power Distribution Plc, CEO J Bloggs-Tory, and the Board decided to flog the land upon which power stations and pylons sit cheap to Tory Cronies R Us Ltd (formed: 2023 newly announced CEO J Bloggs-Tory) with a leaseback arrangement at £0000s annual rent, that might be one way. Anyway, it's interesting to work the idea of renationalization through to see all the implications from different viewpoints. Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Aug 28, 2022 |
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Aug 28, 2022 15:04
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OwlFancier posted:What would asset stripping entail? They can't exactly pick up the power plant and flog it off the back of a van in europe. Isn't that what Centrica did with the energy storage they sold off? So we were in that weird position of having both increased prices because of increased demand, and simultaneously having increased supply but at the wrong time of the day so we had to sell some of it off.
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Aug 28, 2022 15:09
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keep punching joe posted:I've never played Disco Elysium, do you also need to make the stark choice between staving off depression with a book or using it as fuel? This was the plot of a Red Dwarf episode IIRC.
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Aug 28, 2022 15:11
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Guavanaut posted:Eat a bowl of dog poo poo Jackie. One thing that the 1970s is notable for is (cn: suicide) But this did work, and your graph tells a different story to your interpretation. TW again for suicide.  Overall suicide rates did fall without clear evidence of 'compensatory' rises in other methods. Your graph shows that as well - the 'solids and liquids' rates increased before the gas deaths dropped, so it can't have been that a large number of people switched from dying from gas to dying from toxic ingestions. Similarly the slow increase in hanging deaths to 1985 is much, much smaller than the decrease in gas deaths. The gas example is generally cited as evidence that access to means is an important determinant of suicide rates. See also:  ...which is what happened to paracetamol deaths when pack sizes were reduced by legislation. Access to mental health services - crucically, well-designed mental health services - is of course important too:  But limiting access to common lethal methods does actually have an effect on suicide rates.
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Aug 28, 2022 15:26
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Convex posted:This was the plot of a Red Dwarf episode IIRC. Lister’s guitar
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Aug 28, 2022 15:29
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oxford_town posted:But limiting access to common lethal methods does actually have an effect on suicide rates. The  technique.
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Aug 28, 2022 15:36
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oxford_town posted:But this did work, and your graph tells a different story to your interpretation.  Many less old men, mostly because of the gas change, not a great deal of change over younger bands.  Decreases in older women, but no change at all in younger women until the 1980s, implying that something different was going on there. (And there's a worrying rise in young men at the same time as the decrease for young women.) What that suggests to me is that there's very different motivations and mindsets between the 'lonely old men' and 'troubled young women' and that we're pretty bad (as a society) at talking about either.
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Aug 28, 2022 15:41
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Can't believe the number of people who think if you're on 40% tax you pay 40% on ALL your income. Was trying to write a detailed comment on such a thread on FB and have just given up.
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Aug 28, 2022 16:18
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Guavanaut posted:What's interesting is if you break it down by age and sex, it did work as you suggest for older men, but barely at all for younger women. Well…. if by “younger women” you mean under 25, then yes (they also have the lowest rate of suicide of any age group throughout your graphs). For all other women the rates decrease, and I think if you looked at relative rather than absolute changes it would be more similar that you imply. Regardless - I agree suicide is a very complex phenomenon and interventions to reduce it need to be multifaceted and different for different people. But…. both of our graphs do suggest that banning gas ovens was an effective intervention to substantially reduce suicide rates. Even if it does nothing to treat why people are feeling suicidal.
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Aug 28, 2022 16:30
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in a complete vacuum yes, we could nationalise anything we wanted as quick as the house of commons speaker would let us, but in reality we have a very big country across the Atlantic looking over our shoulder and you better believe that they won’t let a simple “democratic” vote risk any of their investments or profits
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Aug 28, 2022 16:42
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Can't believe the number of people who think if you're on 40% tax you pay 40% on ALL your income. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJL4UT4wAxc Can't find a UK one that isn't just someone monologing, you'd think there'd be some nice simple graphics about it by someone. oxford_town posted:Well…. if by “younger women” you mean under 25, then yes (they also have the lowest rate of suicide of any age group throughout your graphs). For all other women the rates decrease, and I think if you looked at relative rather than absolute changes it would be more similar that you imply. That implies either than the youngest group weren't turning to that anyway, or that there was a fairly level means substitution. There's not the data there to say for certain which is which, so I'm speculating, but judging by moral panics about Sylvia Plath in the 60s and warfarin in the 70s, I'd err more towards the latter. (Although the plural of moral panics is not data.) Either way, whatever intervention worked for young women (and did not for young men) appears to be in the mid-80s, so it'd be interesting what that's likely to be (the common ones I've heard are increased acceptance of talking about mental health helping girls and the wrecking of industrial communities harming boys but that's pretty broad strokes).
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Aug 28, 2022 16:47
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Depends on the industry and the assets it has I guess. I imagine power plants aren't owned by the electricity suppliers but by the power distribution companies such as Western Power Distribution PLC. So they would have land assets upon which power stations, pylons etc sit. It's an interesting problem to work through, as it's not as immediately simple as rolling up with a big stamp that says "Nationalised" on it and applying it to everything you can get your hands on. Before I start, I ought to put in a disclaimer that the following opinions are mine alone and aren't those of my employer... The power transmission and distribution companies don't own power stations. They're generally owned by energy companies in a separate entity (for example, E.ON own a bunch of wind farms through E.ON UK Climate and Renewables Ltd), or by wholly independent entities (for example, Calon Energy, which owns 3 gas-fired power stations). There's five different broad roles here: Supply (buying from the wholesale markets and dealing with end-customers); Generation (producing electricity and selling on the wholesale markets); Transmission (bulk movement of power at 230 kV and above); Distribution (movement of power at lower voltages, including dealing with the cables that go into domestic promperties); and Non-Physical Traders (buying and selling power without ever taking delivery, along with trading with other countries over interconnectors). So I guess the question becomes "what exactly are we nationalising?" If we're just going to nationalise the Suppliers, and mandate that they don't increase prices, that's relatively easy. An energy supply business consists broadly of a bunch of IT infrastructure, a database of customers, and a workforce who can service those customers. The problem we then have is that the Suppliers need to buy electricity and gas to sell to their customers. Suppliers have been purchasing this in advance (well, agreeing to purchase from Generators and middlemen. This means that the prices the newly nationalised supplier has to pay is going to be vastly above the income that they're going to get in from their customers, so that's a huge black hole in their accounts that's going to have to come from the Treasury. The alternative is for the newly nationalised suppliers to announce that, in fact, they're not going to abide by these contracts and there's going to be an administered price of electricity in line with the price cap, and the generators are going to have to make do with reduced incomes. This would lead to legal shenannigans and the government being simultaneously sued by about 100 different generating companies. Assuming that we win those court cases (as we've got Parliament on our side to declare what we're doing legal), you'd end up with a bunch of upset but coping generators that don't rely on sourcing fuel from outside of the UK (wind, solar, nuclear, some gas where that gas is supplied from UK gas fields). Unfortunately, we'd find that a bunch of gas-fired generators who are sourcing their gas from overseas via interconnectors or LNG suddenly can't afford to generate. They have a choice between generating and going bankrupt as the power price doesn't cover the cost of the gas that they need; simply selling back their gas contracts and not generating (and not selling energy to the nationalised suppliers); or getting a massive subsidy from the Treasury to stop them going bust. Neither is a great option. Let's explore what we can do about nationalising the Generators too. The majority of British electricity generators currently operating were built after privatisation. Off the top of my head, the only assets built by the CEGB are three coal power stations, two of which are on their last legs (Ratcliffe-on-Soar and West Burton A) and one of which is doing sterling service attempting to burn all of the forests in the United States having been converted to biomass on 4 of its 6 generating units (Drax); along with the five remaining operating nuclear power stations, which the government sold its 66% shareholding in to EDF in 2008. All this means that we're confiscating a bunch of privately-built and owned assets. If we do so at less than market rates, there'll be inevitable comparisons with Venezuela, and we'll kill future capital investment into the country. Once we've nationalised the Generators, we land up in the same scenario as the previous one where we'd torn up our contracts and mandated a price of power. If we want the lights to stay on this winter, we're going to have to source gas from the international markets to burn in the gas-fired power stations that make up over 50% of our winter generation. This means we're going to have to pay, or we'll find that the LNG ships don't arrive and the interconnectors stop blowing gas into the country. This is going to require a massive subsidy from the Treasury, as before. Nationalising the transmission and distribution companies is unlikely to have a significant effect on the price of power and gas supplied to customers. They make a small fixed return on their assets, which is not the cause of the most recent cap increases. In conclusion, we could nationalise large parts of the energy industry. Will it help? Maybe. Will it be bloody expensive even if we do? Yes.
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Aug 28, 2022 17:01
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Or just pass a law that energy companies aren't allowed to make profits during a crisis so no dividends and executive pay is capped until it's resolved and all that money has to go towards reducing bills for households. You're allowed to pay your employees up to a cap and that's it.
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Aug 28, 2022 17:36
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Guavanaut posted:Imagine four buckets on the edge of a cliff. Ah, I’d missed the context of the original tweet being “mental illness in young people didn’t exist in the 70s”, a premise which most people would dismiss as blatantly untrue, but which our data shows certainly to be wrong. (By the way - “a few thousand middle aged and senior people” dwarfs the absolute number of young people suicides, which in those graphs were - thankfully - rare). An interesting question is whether the currently increased visibility of young adult mental illness currently reflects increased awareness/detection of hitherto unrecognised mental health issues, increased frequency of those issues, or medicalisation of normal emotions. (Probably the first two, maybe a tiny bit of the latter.)
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Aug 28, 2022 18:13
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*Grips temples and stares intently* what if we made being cold illegal?
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Aug 28, 2022 18:21
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Drink water recovered from sewage, it's good for you. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/28/britons-need-to-be-less-squeamish-about-drinking-water-from-sewage-says-agency-head
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Aug 28, 2022 18:57
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Astronauts do it. Are you saying you're better than an astronaut???
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Aug 28, 2022 18:59
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Pretty much all drinking water was sewage at some point in its existence surely
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Aug 28, 2022 19:01
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I don't trust privatised companies to do it properly.
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Aug 28, 2022 19:03
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If its clear, Don't go near. If its brown, chug it down.
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Aug 28, 2022 19:04
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e; ^ lmfaoJaeluni Asjil posted:I don't trust privatised companies to do it properly. Yeah it's not that there's anything inherently wrong with it, it's that if it's how the water sector decides to proceed it'll take a week before we're begging for the water quality of Flint, MI.
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Aug 28, 2022 19:08
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happyhippy posted:If its clear, Don't drink lager, drink brown ale... got it. 
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Aug 28, 2022 19:09
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Miftan posted:Or just pass a law that energy companies aren't allowed to make profits during a crisis so no dividends and executive pay is capped until it's resolved and all that money has to go towards reducing bills for households. You're allowed to pay your employees up to a cap and that's it. This wouldn't work, all the good employees would leave to work elsewhere and the industry would not be as affectively and successfully run as it is now.
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Aug 28, 2022 19:10
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:I don't trust privatised companies to do it properly. i drank water out of a cholera laden water pump on broad street when i was a lad and it never did me any harm
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Aug 28, 2022 19:10
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NotJustANumber99 posted:This wouldn't work, all the good employees would leave to work elsewhere and the industry would not be as affectively and successfully run as it is now. Then just pass a law saying they can't leave and also they can't gently caress up at work or be lazy *dusts hands* my work here is done
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Aug 28, 2022 19:16
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Jel Shaker posted:i drank water out of a cholera laden water pump on broad street when i was a lad and it never did me any harm This just made me remember that iirc cholera is actually quite difficult to catch, the problem is when you have a contaminated water source that you're using every day for a long time. Which I guess actually strengthens your point lol. I'm so glad I live in Scotland where afaict the water quality is really very good. I realise the natural environment up here does facilitate that a lot but I'm fairly sure the fact Scottish Water is a nationalised company is also a pretty crucial factor. Just thinking out loud really, not making any particular point beyond what anyone else is saying.
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Aug 28, 2022 19:20
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NotJustANumber99 posted:This wouldn't work, all the good employees would leave to work elsewhere and the industry would not be as affectively and successfully run as it is now. How many employees do you think get dividends and executive level bonuses? Like, the bottom 90% of the employees do all of the work. This isn't "don't pay undersea wielders high wages" or even "cut the pay of middle managers". It's focused on the central leadership so divorced from a worksite they don't do any of the work. There is sense in saying in gas & electricity supply has lots of moving parts, but the cost increases fundamentally come from one place - the skyrocketing price of natural gas. And if we were fully reliant on imports for gas, then yea we'd have to pay international market prices or freeze. But the UK produces 50% of it's own gas, and the production costs of that have not gone up since last winter - so there's no reason that the price should have either, except the profiteering extractors get more money by selling at the international market price. Given that this is a crisis situation caused by war, why shouldn't the government slap price controls on domestically produced gas - "you can only sell at the November 2021 price at maximum, and you must sell to domestic suppliers over international". Some subsidies will still be needed for imported gas, but this alone would keep the market prices much lower, and reduce how much the government would have to pay for foreign gas supplies.
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Aug 28, 2022 19:21
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Nothingtoseehere posted:profiteering extractors get more money by selling at the international market price. Given that this is a crisis situation caused by war, why shouldn't the government slap price controls on domestically produced gas - "you can only sell at the November 2021 price at maximum, and you must sell to domestic suppliers over international". Some subsidies will still be needed for imported gas, but this alone would keep the market prices much lower, and reduce how much the government would have to pay for foreign gas supplies. If we are producing the gas domestically, it is owned by the citizens, we should nationalise extraction as well
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Aug 28, 2022 19:55
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Love that voting Tory has got the english drinking poop and swimming in poop.
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Aug 28, 2022 20:03
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The gas we import and use is cheaper than the gas we produce.
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Aug 28, 2022 20:11
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I only drink water strained through artisinal english floaters it's only a matter of time kecske fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Aug 28, 2022 |
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Aug 28, 2022 21:26
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