Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
I see four obvious options:
1) Increase retirement age much quicker. A bit unfair on those under 67, but makes things more sustainable.
2) Increase the charges for health and social care, even if cashflow is deferred and paid from assets when they pass away. Thereby stopping the increasing tax burden from falling on the economically productive part of the population.
3) Wealth taxes to achieve a similar goal to point 2 but shared across more people (but still biased to older generations). Abolishing NI and making part of income tax has a similar effect.
4) Continue to put all the tax burden on an ever shrinking working population as the economy gradually gets less productive and slowly decline into a shadow of our former self.
I predict that number 4 will be chosen.
No, we need more of a stand alone NI to pay for health and social care, contributory unemployment benefits and the state pension as NI was set up to do
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
English urban middle classes lefties, mostly Corbyites.
If polling is to be believed, urban, middle class lefty English people are actually more unionist than right-leaning working class, leavers.
Pre Brexit maybe not post Brexit. While in Scotland Remainers are more likely to back independence than Leavers, yet in 2014 it was working class Scots who voted Yes to independence and middle class Scots who voted No.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
I see four obvious options:
1) Increase retirement age much quicker. A bit unfair on those under 67, but makes things more sustainable.
2) Increase the charges for health and social care, even if cashflow is deferred and paid from assets when they pass away. Thereby stopping the increasing tax burden from falling on the economically productive part of the population.
3) Wealth taxes to achieve a similar goal to point 2 but shared across more people (but still biased to older generations). Abolishing NI and making part of income tax has a similar effect.
4) Continue to put all the tax burden on an ever shrinking working population as the economy gradually gets less productive and slowly decline into a shadow of our former self.
I predict that number 4 will be chosen.
No, we need more of a stand alone NI to pay for health and social care, contributory unemployment benefits and the state pension as NI was set up to do
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
English urban middle classes lefties, mostly Corbyites.
If polling is to be believed, urban, middle class lefty English people are actually more unionist than right-leaning working class, leavers.
Pre Brexit maybe not post Brexit. While in Scotland Remainers are more likely to back independence than Leavers, yet in 2014 it was working class Scots who voted Yes to independence and middle class Scots who voted No.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
English urban middle classes lefties, mostly Corbyites.
If polling is to be believed, urban, middle class lefty English people are actually more unionist than right-leaning working class, leavers.
Pre Brexit maybe not post Brexit. While in Scotland Remainers are more likely to back independence than Leavers, yet in 2014 it was working class Scots who voted Yes to independence and middle class Scots who voted No.
Chomsky though is basically a Corbynite
Racist somewhat? You mean "voters in Scotland".
Technically voters resident in Scotland
Quite so. Though nobody else would be a voter in Scotland ...
Apparently people living longer is a demographic and unaffordable disaster, so average life expectancy falling to its lowest level in a decade in the UK last year is therefore I suppose a great achievement?
Why isn't there a huge campaign to reduce energy/gas use?
Bin the Tesla. Get on your bike. Get that thermostat down and have shorter showers. Don't overfill the kettle.
Find a partner to keep your bed warm at night. *Boris states down camera* "Let's shag our way to victory".
More 20 mph limits. except for cyclists.
Especially for cyclists. In fact they should be kept to 4 mph and have someone with a red flag walk in front. They are so dangerous to ordinary human beings.
Why isn't there a huge campaign to reduce energy/gas use?
Bin the Tesla. Get on your bike. Get that thermostat down and have shorter showers. Don't overfill the kettle.
Find a partner to keep your bed warm at night. *Boris states down camera* "Let's shag our way to victory".
More 20 mph limits. except for cyclists.
Especially for cyclists. In fact they should be kept to 4 mph and have someone with a red flag walk in front. They are so dangerous to ordinary human beings.
Anyways. Am absolutely outraged the price cap doesn't apply to my gas. Even though I'm charged for what I use as an individual. Worse. We have no switching or fix option.
Why isn't there a huge campaign to reduce energy/gas use?
Bin the Tesla. Get on your bike. Get that thermostat down and have shorter showers. Don't overfill the kettle.
Find a partner to keep your bed warm at night. *Boris states down camera* "Let's shag our way to victory".
Because you don't need a campaign to tell folk not to waste energy when basically doubles in price. Not many people in the country right now are going to be feeling particularly profligate when it comes to energy. Literally every article about energy prices at the moment comes with the bog standard energy saving tips.
Indeed, I'd venture telling a significant proportion of folk struggling to pay their energy bills that shorter showers is the way forward is likely to get one clobbered.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
I see four obvious options:
1) Increase retirement age much quicker. A bit unfair on those under 67, but makes things more sustainable.
2) Increase the charges for health and social care, even if cashflow is deferred and paid from assets when they pass away. Thereby stopping the increasing tax burden from falling on the economically productive part of the population.
3) Wealth taxes to achieve a similar goal to point 2 but shared across more people (but still biased to older generations). Abolishing NI and making part of income tax has a similar effect.
4) Continue to put all the tax burden on an ever shrinking working population as the economy gradually gets less productive and slowly decline into a shadow of our former self.
I predict that number 4 will be chosen.
No, we need more of a stand alone NI to pay for health and social care, contributory unemployment benefits and the state pension as NI was set up to do
You retiring soon?
Depends whether he can age faster than State Retirement Age increases.
Why isn't there a huge campaign to reduce energy/gas use?
Bin the Tesla. Get on your bike. Get that thermostat down and have shorter showers. Don't overfill the kettle.
Find a partner to keep your bed warm at night. *Boris states down camera* "Let's shag our way to victory".
Or alternatively start fracking, build more nuclear/tidal power stations.
Fracking is lacking exploitable sources in the UK.
Add: build more offshore wind turbines... quick, relatively cheap, proven.
Some PB genius explained in detail last week that we are at max capacity on that. Something about surveying the seabed.
Good mate does exactly that. He's a geologist. Paid an absolute fortune for a few weeks at a time. I'd pick his brains on it, but he's just left for six weeks off the coast of Belgium. Living the dream!
Why isn't there a huge campaign to reduce energy/gas use?
Bin the Tesla. Get on your bike. Get that thermostat down and have shorter showers. Don't overfill the kettle.
Find a partner to keep your bed warm at night. *Boris states down camera* "Let's shag our way to victory".
Because you don't need a campaign to tell folk not to waste energy when basically doubles in price. Not many people in the country right now are going to be feeling particularly profligate when it comes to energy. Literally every article about energy prices at the moment comes with the bog standard energy saving tips.
Indeed, I'd venture telling a significant proportion of folk struggling to pay their energy bills that shorter showers is the way forward is likely to get one clobbered.
Fair. The Comms are extremely tricky - we need the PB demographic to cut down on energy use, to bring the price down for those who are really suffering.
Why isn't there a huge campaign to reduce energy/gas use?
Bin the Tesla. Get on your bike. Get that thermostat down and have shorter showers. Don't overfill the kettle.
Find a partner to keep your bed warm at night. *Boris states down camera* "Let's shag our way to victory".
Or alternatively start fracking, build more nuclear/tidal power stations.
Fracking is lacking exploitable sources in the UK.
Add: build more offshore wind turbines... quick, relatively cheap, proven.
Some PB genius explained in detail last week that we are at max capacity on that. Something about surveying the seabed.
Good mate does exactly that. He's a geologist. Paid an absolute fortune for a few weeks at a time. I'd pick his brains on it, but he's just left for six weeks off the coast of Belgium. Living the dream!
I have a similar mate. Lays cables. At full capacity all the time
Why isn't there a huge campaign to reduce energy/gas use?
Bin the Tesla. Get on your bike. Get that thermostat down and have shorter showers. Don't overfill the kettle.
Find a partner to keep your bed warm at night. *Boris states down camera* "Let's shag our way to victory".
Because you don't need a campaign to tell folk not to waste energy when basically doubles in price. Not many people in the country right now are going to be feeling particularly profligate when it comes to energy. Literally every article about energy prices at the moment comes with the bog standard energy saving tips.
Indeed, I'd venture telling a significant proportion of folk struggling to pay their energy bills that shorter showers is the way forward is likely to get one clobbered.
Fair. The Comms are extremely tricky - we need the PB demographic to cut down on energy use, to bring the price down for those who are really suffering.
I think a campaign would be important and appropriate if/when there are genuine supply risks and serious blackout potential. I think on cost grounds it's not going to make a lot of headway.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
That will almost certainly have been me!
Here's the funny bit.
The noose will have completely loosened because of Putin's invasion.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
I see four obvious options:
1) Increase retirement age much quicker. A bit unfair on those under 67, but makes things more sustainable.
2) Increase the charges for health and social care, even if cashflow is deferred and paid from assets when they pass away. Thereby stopping the increasing tax burden from falling on the economically productive part of the population.
3) Wealth taxes to achieve a similar goal to point 2 but shared across more people (but still biased to older generations). Abolishing NI and making part of income tax has a similar effect.
4) Continue to put all the tax burden on an ever shrinking working population as the economy gradually gets less productive and slowly decline into a shadow of our former self.
I predict that number 4 will be chosen.
No, we need more of a stand alone NI to pay for health and social care, contributory unemployment benefits and the state pension as NI was set up to do
As a retiree I applaud your suggestion, but don't you think it a bit harsh on the younger working population. Don't you think us more well off pensioners should contribute more particularly for health and social care?
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Covid might have actually delayed the invasion though. If not for that, maybe it would have happened in 2020?
The epitaph for this dismal government will be that as the country collapsed into fuel poverty and chaos, the thing they tried hardest on was bringing back Imperial units.
The epitaph for this dismal government will be that as the country collapsed into fuel poverty and chaos, the thing they tried hardest on was bringing back Imperial units.
To be fair, a lot of us will be wearing half a dozen layers this winter.
Just listening to Brendan o’Neill’s latest podcast with Alex Epstein.
“Why fossil fuels are the future”
It’s almost entirely bollocks and makes Brendan look completely stupid when he agrees with pretty much everything Alex says.
In amongst the bullshit, there are a couple of important points I agree with;
1) Ditching fossil fuels is likely to be shit for poor people. Nobody is being honest about this.
2) It seems likely there are some things that simply aren’t going to be able to be replaced, economically, with renewables - eg: flying & shipping. Tech/business/politicians/eco-warriors also aren’t being completely honest with people about this.
Alex did come up with one interesting stat: 3bn people on the planet use less energy than your average US refrigerator uses. I’d love to know if that was true. Anyone know?
Btw, can we change pb/vanilla to allow taglines? Mine would be:
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Chomsky is interesting. I read a lot of his books on politics when at university, and thought for years about what was wrong with them. The first problem is that the issues that he identifies with the United States government are just as bad if not worse in other countries, like China, but he gives foreign governments a complete free pass, just saying that the problems with the Chinese government are a matter for chinese civil society, avoiding the question completely. He seems to find an explanation for everything in the inherent evil of the United States and is resistant to contemplating any alternative explanations, which is quite annoying. The second problem is that he has some strange ideas about power in human relationships which are based in anarchism and just seem to me to be quite naive. If the United States ceased to be the dominant world power, we would just get a different dominant world power, probably worse. It would not be the case that peace would break out, and everyone would disarm their nuclear weapons and give up their territorial claims and not bother fighting over natural resources etc. What would probably happen is war. But he seems to just have a different view of human nature, a bit like Corbyn in that respect. Its no surprise really that he is loved by the left, and he is pro Russia - it is in line with his worldview, he blames the United states and its allies for everything that is going badly so is sympathetic to any other country as he views them as victims.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Just listening to Brendan o’Neill’s latest podcast with Alex Epstein.
“Why fossil fuels are the future”
It’s almost entirely bollocks and makes Brendan look completely stupid when he agrees with pretty much everything Alex says.
In amongst the bullshit, there are a couple of important points I agree with;
1) Ditching fossil fuels is likely to be shit for poor people. Nobody is being honest about this.
2) It seems likely there are some things that simply aren’t going to be able to be replaced, economically, with renewables - eg: flying & shipping. Tech/business/politicians/eco-warriors also aren’t being completely honest with people about this.
Alex did come up with one interesting stat: 3pm people on the planet use less energy than your average US refrigerator uses. I’d love to know if that was true. Anyone know?
Fossil fuels are the present, not the future. What utter bollocks.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Did you see he's flaring off vast quantities of gas near St. Petersburg?
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
He has a lot of obsessive fan boys in academic circles who literally believe he is right about everything. I met quite a few of them when I was doing my PhD.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Did you see he's flaring off vast quantities of gas near St. Petersburg?
He doesn't have a lot of choice: his oil production generates a lot of gas, and he has nowhere to store it.
Just listening to Brendan o’Neill’s latest podcast with Alex Epstein.
“Why fossil fuels are the future”
It’s almost entirely bollocks and makes Brendan look completely stupid when he agrees with pretty much everything Alex says.
In amongst the bullshit, there are a couple of important points I agree with;
1) Ditching fossil fuels is likely to be shit for poor people. Nobody is being honest about this.
2) It seems likely there are some things that simply aren’t going to be able to be replaced, economically, with renewables - eg: flying & shipping. Tech/business/politicians/eco-warriors also aren’t being completely honest with people about this.
Alex did come up with one interesting stat: 3pm people on the planet use less energy than your average US refrigerator uses. I’d love to know if that was true. Anyone know?
I'm not sure why ditching fossil fuels will be bad for poor people. We're past the point where renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, so once the transition is complete it will be better for everyone.
I think we're doing the easier things first, and then as technology develops we'll be able to do the difficult things later.
The stat is the sort of thing that is likely to be changing very rapidly over the last couple of decades, so I could easily believe it was recently true, though it might not still be.
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Ditto Gary fucking Lineker
One of the worst evolutions of Social Media is rich twats with huge following pontificating on shit they know nothing about, generally from a Woke perspective
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Ditto Gary fucking Lineker
One of the worst evolutions of Social Media is rich twats with huge following pontificating on shit they know nothing about, generally from a Woke perspective
Chomsky was pontificating on shit long before social media.
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Chomsky is interesting. I read a lot of his books on politics when at university, and thought for years about what was wrong with them. The first problem is that the issues that he identifies with the United States government are just as bad if not worse in other countries, like China, but he gives foreign governments a complete free pass, just saying that the problems with the Chinese government are a matter for chinese civil society, avoiding the question completely. He seems to find an explanation for everything in the inherent evil of the United States and is resistant to contemplating any alternative explanations, which is quite annoying. The second problem is that he has some strange ideas about power in human relationships which are based in anarchism and just seem to me to be quite naive. If the United States ceased to be the dominant world power, we would just get a different dominant world power, probably worse. It would not be the case that peace would break out, and everyone would disarm their nuclear weapons and give up their territorial claims and not bother fighting over natural resources etc. What would probably happen is war. But he seems to just have a different view of human nature, a bit like Corbyn in that respect. Its no surprise really that he is loved by the left, and he is pro Russia - it is in line with his worldview, he blames the United states and its allies for everything that is going badly so is sympathetic to any other country as he views them as victims.
Yeah. He utterly revolutionised linguistics, and was then the intellectual on the spot, the early adopter of the (largely correct) idea that the USA might not be exactly the absolute good guys in Vietnam. At a time when that was a hugely niche viewpoint. He's been riding that particular prescient political insight for 50 years. And applying it liberally to every situation.
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Ditto Gary fucking Lineker
One of the worst evolutions of Social Media is rich twats with huge following pontificating on shit they know nothing about, generally from a Woke perspective
I had to explain to someone how the energy cap works to a maths grad at work today. Didn't have a clue (knew where the Danube was, mind).
Who came up with that silly term? Miliband?
What really pisses me off is that it's always quoted as a dumbed down 'average household' cost, the cost per kWh for electricity and for gas. The 'average' cost is meaningless.
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Ditto Gary fucking Lineker
One of the worst evolutions of Social Media is rich twats with huge following pontificating on shit they know nothing about, generally from a Woke perspective
Irony died.
Tbf he did cite "rich twats with huge following pontificating on shit they know nothing about" rather than "rich twats with fuck-all following pontificating on shit they know nothing about"
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him.
Chomsky needs to exist to get weird Unionist amoebas like staylorish worked up. I can’t speak for PB weird Unionist amoebas.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
I see four obvious options:
1) Increase retirement age much quicker. A bit unfair on those under 67, but makes things more sustainable.
2) Increase the charges for health and social care, even if cashflow is deferred and paid from assets when they pass away. Thereby stopping the increasing tax burden from falling on the economically productive part of the population.
3) Wealth taxes to achieve a similar goal to point 2 but shared across more people (but still biased to older generations). Abolishing NI and making part of income tax has a similar effect.
4) Continue to put all the tax burden on an ever shrinking working population as the economy gradually gets less productive and slowly decline into a shadow of our former self.
I predict that number 4 will be chosen.
No, we need more of a stand alone NI to pay for health and social care, contributory unemployment benefits and the state pension as NI was set up to do
As a retiree I applaud your suggestion, but don't you think it a bit harsh on the younger working population. Don't you think us more well off pensioners should contribute more particularly for health and social care?
There may be a case for expanding NI to pensioners, at least in terms of state pension and health and social care contributions. Though as the state retirement age is rising to 67 more will pay into it for longer anyway
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him.
Chomsky needs to exist to get weird Unionist amoebas like staylorish worked up. I can’t speak for PB weird Unionist amoebas.
Don't suppose they are getting muddled with this chap?
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Did you see he's flaring off vast quantities of gas near St. Petersburg?
He doesn't have a lot of choice: his oil production generates a lot of gas, and he has nowhere to store it.
He could do what they've started doing in the US - mining bitcoin with the energy generated from the flare off.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
I see four obvious options:
1) Increase retirement age much quicker. A bit unfair on those under 67, but makes things more sustainable.
2) Increase the charges for health and social care, even if cashflow is deferred and paid from assets when they pass away. Thereby stopping the increasing tax burden from falling on the economically productive part of the population.
3) Wealth taxes to achieve a similar goal to point 2 but shared across more people (but still biased to older generations). Abolishing NI and making part of income tax has a similar effect.
4) Continue to put all the tax burden on an ever shrinking working population as the economy gradually gets less productive and slowly decline into a shadow of our former self.
I predict that number 4 will be chosen.
No, we need more of a stand alone NI to pay for health and social care, contributory unemployment benefits and the state pension as NI was set up to do
As a retiree I applaud your suggestion, but don't you think it a bit harsh on the younger working population. Don't you think us more well off pensioners should contribute more particularly for health and social care?
There may be a case for expanding NI to pensioners, at least in terms of state pension and health and social care contributions. Though as the state retirement age is rising to 67 more will pay into it for longer anyway
You're just interested in entrenching inter-generational inequality in any way you can. Your entire political philosophy rests on this.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Did you see he's flaring off vast quantities of gas near St. Petersburg?
He doesn't have a lot of choice: his oil production generates a lot of gas, and he has nowhere to store it.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
I see four obvious options:
1) Increase retirement age much quicker. A bit unfair on those under 67, but makes things more sustainable.
2) Increase the charges for health and social care, even if cashflow is deferred and paid from assets when they pass away. Thereby stopping the increasing tax burden from falling on the economically productive part of the population.
3) Wealth taxes to achieve a similar goal to point 2 but shared across more people (but still biased to older generations). Abolishing NI and making part of income tax has a similar effect.
4) Continue to put all the tax burden on an ever shrinking working population as the economy gradually gets less productive and slowly decline into a shadow of our former self.
I predict that number 4 will be chosen.
No, we need more of a stand alone NI to pay for health and social care, contributory unemployment benefits and the state pension as NI was set up to do
As a retiree I applaud your suggestion, but don't you think it a bit harsh on the younger working population. Don't you think us more well off pensioners should contribute more particularly for health and social care?
There may be a case for expanding NI to pensioners, at least in terms of state pension and health and social care contributions. Though as the state retirement age is rising to 67 more will pay into it for longer anyway
NI isn't a hypothecated tax, so your assignment to pension etc is meaningless.
Gmty also ought to abolish the savings, rentals, and dividends allowances for income tax and tax all income fairly.
Also: just because the SRA goes up, doesn't mean someone pays NI. Only employees pay NI at full rate. People who don';t work but have a private pension don't. Self-employed pay a far lower rate. Spot which groups are better represented in the Tory Party.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Did you see he's flaring off vast quantities of gas near St. Petersburg?
He doesn't have a lot of choice: his oil production generates a lot of gas, and he has nowhere to store it.
Can't they close the tap?
AIUI it just boils off the oil - like carbon dioxide from beer.
Michael Shellenberger argues, in his "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All", that fossil fuels may make sense for very poor people in third world nations. For example, a woman in central Africa may be better off buying a little kerosene for a stove, rather than spending two or three hours each day gathering wood for cooking. In areas that are not always as safe as one would like.
(I wouldn't be surprised if she created less carbon dioxide with the stove than with the wood, too.)
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Did you see he's flaring off vast quantities of gas near St. Petersburg?
He doesn't have a lot of choice: his oil production generates a lot of gas, and he has nowhere to store it.
Can't they close the tap?
AIUI it just boils off the oil - like carbon dioxide from beer.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Did you see he's flaring off vast quantities of gas near St. Petersburg?
He doesn't have a lot of choice: his oil production generates a lot of gas, and he has nowhere to store it.
Can't they close the tap?
AIUI it just boils off the oil - like carbon dioxide from beer.
Do we know it is oil, not gas in the pipe?
All hydrocarbons - the lighter ones just come off when pressure is released, hence gas, the others don't, they remain as oil, I'd think. Quite a bit of gas was flared off in the North Sea for years because someone wouldn't build a pipeline to collect it - maybe HMG ca. 1980?
I had to explain to someone how the energy cap works to a maths grad at work today. Didn't have a clue (knew where the Danube was, mind).
Who came up with that silly term? Miliband?
What really pisses me off is that it's always quoted as a dumbed down 'average household' cost, the cost per kWh for electricity and for gas. The 'average' cost is meaningless.
We get the same wank when it comes to the output of a power station. "Enough to power 140,000 homes" or "Enough to power a town the size of Cheltenham". Just tell us the MW ffs! And this isn't just crap reporting - it is what you get in the press release and on the Web site of the project developer.
Now I have released that tirade, I think I will go to bed.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Did you see he's flaring off vast quantities of gas near St. Petersburg?
He doesn't have a lot of choice: his oil production generates a lot of gas, and he has nowhere to store it.
Can't they close the tap?
AIUI it just boils off the oil - like carbon dioxide from beer.
Do we know it is oil, not gas in the pipe?
All hydrocarbons - the lighter ones just come off when pressure is released, hence gas, the others don't, they remain as oil, I'd think. Quite a bit of gas was flared off in the North Sea for years because someone wouldn't build a pipeline to collect it - maybe HMG ca. 1980?
The flaring at Mossmorran is just incredible sometimes. Coming back from a long day in the hills in the dead of night, and it seems like the whole sky is on fire.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Did you see he's flaring off vast quantities of gas near St. Petersburg?
He doesn't have a lot of choice: his oil production generates a lot of gas, and he has nowhere to store it.
Can't they close the tap?
AIUI it just boils off the oil - like carbon dioxide from beer.
Pretty regular occurrence on the Grangemouth skyline I believe.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
I see four obvious options:
1) Increase retirement age much quicker. A bit unfair on those under 67, but makes things more sustainable.
2) Increase the charges for health and social care, even if cashflow is deferred and paid from assets when they pass away. Thereby stopping the increasing tax burden from falling on the economically productive part of the population.
3) Wealth taxes to achieve a similar goal to point 2 but shared across more people (but still biased to older generations). Abolishing NI and making part of income tax has a similar effect.
4) Continue to put all the tax burden on an ever shrinking working population as the economy gradually gets less productive and slowly decline into a shadow of our former self.
I predict that number 4 will be chosen.
No, we need more of a stand alone NI to pay for health and social care, contributory unemployment benefits and the state pension as NI was set up to do
As a retiree I applaud your suggestion, but don't you think it a bit harsh on the younger working population. Don't you think us more well off pensioners should contribute more particularly for health and social care?
There may be a case for expanding NI to pensioners, at least in terms of state pension and health and social care contributions. Though as the state retirement age is rising to 67 more will pay into it for longer anyway
NI isn't a hypothecated tax, so your assignment to pension etc is meaningless.
Gmty also ought to abolish the savings, rentals, and dividends allowances for income tax and tax all income fairly.
Also: just because the SRA goes up, doesn't mean someone pays NI. Only employees pay NI at full rate. People who don';t work but have a private pension don't. Self-employed pay a far lower rate. Spot which groups are better represented in the Tory Party.
NI was actually set up by Lloyd George with the intention of being hypothecated and should return to those principles, including for the state pension.
If you are able to retire early on a private pension you have already contributed a large amount to on top of your NI contributions then you are in a different circumstance to someone working until 67 reliant on the state pension after and making full NI contributions until SRA. Though increasing enrolment in workplace pensions should reduce reliance on the state pension alone in future decades
Michael Shellenberger argues, in his "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All", that fossil fuels may make sense for very poor people in third world nations. For example, a woman in central Africa may be better off buying a little kerosene for a stove, rather than spending two or three hours each day gathering wood for cooking. In areas that are not always as safe as one would like.
(I wouldn't be surprised if she created less carbon dioxide with the stove than with the wood, too.)
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Ditto Gary fucking Lineker
One of the worst evolutions of Social Media is rich twats with huge following pontificating on shit they know nothing about, generally from a Woke perspective
No kidding.
We used to have some wanker novelist talking all kinds of shit on here.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Ditto Gary fucking Lineker
One of the worst evolutions of Social Media is rich twats with huge following pontificating on shit they know nothing about, generally from a Woke perspective
No kidding.
We used to have some wanker novelist talking all kinds of shit on here.
What, like comparing Noam Chomsky with Gary Lineker? That's a bizarre first. I don't imagine they've heard of one another.
Michael Shellenberger argues, in his "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All", that fossil fuels may make sense for very poor people in third world nations. For example, a woman in central Africa may be better off buying a little kerosene for a stove, rather than spending two or three hours each day gathering wood for cooking. In areas that are not always as safe as one would like.
(I wouldn't be surprised if she created less carbon dioxide with the stove than with the wood, too.)
Why can’t she have solar electricity ?
A true let them eat cakeism. Who is going to give her solar panels? Why is it so hard for rich whiteys to understand poor blackery?
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
Michael Shellenberger argues, in his "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All", that fossil fuels may make sense for very poor people in third world nations. For example, a woman in central Africa may be better off buying a little kerosene for a stove, rather than spending two or three hours each day gathering wood for cooking. In areas that are not always as safe as one would like.
(I wouldn't be surprised if she created less carbon dioxide with the stove than with the wood, too.)
Why can’t she have solar electricity ?
A true let them eat cakeism. Who is going to give her solar panels? Why is it so hard for rich whiteys to understand poor blackery?
Bollocks. Renewables are going to be a very large part of the electrification of Africa. Quite the opposite of cakeism.
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Ditto Gary fucking Lineker
One of the worst evolutions of Social Media is rich twats with huge following pontificating on shit they know nothing about, generally from a Woke perspective
No kidding.
We used to have some wanker novelist talking all kinds of shit on here.
What, like comparing Noam Chomsky with Gary Lineker? That's a bizarre first. I don't imagine they've heard of one another.
Michael Shellenberger argues, in his "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All", that fossil fuels may make sense for very poor people in third world nations. For example, a woman in central Africa may be better off buying a little kerosene for a stove, rather than spending two or three hours each day gathering wood for cooking. In areas that are not always as safe as one would like.
(I wouldn't be surprised if she created less carbon dioxide with the stove than with the wood, too.)
Why can’t she have solar electricity ?
A true let them eat cakeism. Who is going to give her solar panels? Why is it so hard for rich whiteys to understand poor blackery?
Bollocks. Renewables are going to be a very large part of the electrification of Africa. Quite the opposite of cakeism.
Yes.
You haven't been to poor Central Africa. I have. You are the one asking why they can't have cake. I know the answer.
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Ditto Gary fucking Lineker
One of the worst evolutions of Social Media is rich twats with huge following pontificating on shit they know nothing about, generally from a Woke perspective
No kidding.
We used to have some wanker novelist talking all kinds of shit on here.
What, like comparing Noam Chomsky with Gary Lineker? That's a bizarre first. I don't imagine they've heard of one another.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
I mean it's all true though isn't it? Just the Russian noose hasn't loosened enough yet.
Could explain the timing of the whole operation.
It does: Putin realized that the longer he waited, the less leverage he had. And he got a bit lucky too: Covid resulted in several large LNG projects getting mothballed.
Did you see he's flaring off vast quantities of gas near St. Petersburg?
He doesn't have a lot of choice: his oil production generates a lot of gas, and he has nowhere to store it.
Can't they close the tap?
Not really, no. A lot of the gas is a byproduct of oil production. And Russia can't stop producing oil, as that is their main export earnings.
Michael Shellenberger argues, in his "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All", that fossil fuels may make sense for very poor people in third world nations. For example, a woman in central Africa may be better off buying a little kerosene for a stove, rather than spending two or three hours each day gathering wood for cooking. In areas that are not always as safe as one would like.
(I wouldn't be surprised if she created less carbon dioxide with the stove than with the wood, too.)
Why can’t she have solar electricity ?
A true let them eat cakeism. Who is going to give her solar panels? Why is it so hard for rich whiteys to understand poor blackery?
Bollocks. Renewables are going to be a very large part of the electrification of Africa. Quite the opposite of cakeism.
Comments
https://bathnewseum.com/2016/11/30/did-you-bathe-with-a-friend/
Hey, I'm a glass half full kind of person.
Add: build more offshore wind turbines... quick, relatively cheap, proven.
Even though I'm charged for what I use as an individual. Worse. We have no switching or fix option.
Indeed, I'd venture telling a significant proportion of folk struggling to pay their energy bills that shorter showers is the way forward is likely to get one clobbered.
I'd pick his brains on it, but he's just left for six weeks off the coast of Belgium.
Living the dream!
Here's the funny bit.
The noose will have completely loosened because of Putin's invasion.
Clare Grogan
@claregrogan2
TODAY! It’s my Happy Release Day https://altimage.lnk.to/mascarastreakz
@AlteredImages5
❤️❤️❤️
https://twitter.com/claregrogan2/status/1563074533879205888
It's an ill-wind and all that.
(Sorry.)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/27/rare-precious-smells-like-whale-hunting-for-ambergris-in-new-zealand
“Why fossil fuels are the future”
It’s almost entirely bollocks and makes Brendan look completely stupid when he agrees with pretty much everything Alex says.
In amongst the bullshit, there are a couple of important points I agree with;
1) Ditching fossil fuels is likely to be shit for poor people. Nobody is being honest about this.
2) It seems likely there are some things that simply aren’t going to be able to be replaced, economically, with renewables - eg: flying & shipping. Tech/business/politicians/eco-warriors also aren’t being completely honest with people about this.
Alex did come up with one interesting stat: 3bn people on the planet use less energy than your average US refrigerator uses. I’d love to know if that was true. Anyone know?
Btw, can we change pb/vanilla to allow taglines? Mine would be:
“I listen to podcasts, so you don’t have to.”
The second problem is that he has some strange ideas about power in human relationships which are based in anarchism and just seem to me to be quite naive. If the United States ceased to be the dominant world power, we would just get a different dominant world power, probably worse. It would not be the case that peace would break out, and everyone would disarm their nuclear weapons and give up their territorial claims and not bother fighting over natural resources etc. What would probably happen is war. But he seems to just have a different view of human nature, a bit like Corbyn in that respect.
Its no surprise really that he is loved by the left, and he is pro Russia - it is in line with his worldview, he blames the United states and its allies for everything that is going badly so is sympathetic to any other country as he views them as victims.
I think we're doing the easier things first, and then as technology develops we'll be able to do the difficult things later.
The stat is the sort of thing that is likely to be changing very rapidly over the last couple of decades, so I could easily believe it was recently true, though it might not still be.
One of the worst evolutions of Social Media is rich twats with huge following pontificating on shit they know nothing about, generally from a Woke perspective
He's been riding that particular prescient political insight for 50 years.
And applying it liberally to every situation.
Biden makes Liz Cheney his veep running mate and runs on a Save the US Republic/Constitution ticket.
Have you been smoking Spice?
To quote @rcs1000 there is more chance of me being the VP pick than Liz C
Everton have signed a striker. Maupay from Brighton.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jul/24/project-nim-chimpsky-chimpanzee-language
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/exxon-mobil-gas-bitcoin
Very good point, although I'm not gay, trans, black or a woman so a few boxes left unticked
Gmty also ought to abolish the savings, rentals, and dividends allowances for income tax and tax all income fairly.
Also: just because the SRA goes up, doesn't mean someone pays NI. Only employees pay NI at full rate. People who don';t work but have a private pension don't. Self-employed pay a far lower rate. Spot which groups are better represented in the Tory Party.
(I wouldn't be surprised if she created less carbon dioxide with the stove than with the wood, too.)
He’s a very stupid very old guy.
Or maybe he just really likes fascists, if they have the right label.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/26/wise-and-kind-labour-peer-giles-radice-dies-at-85
Now I have released that tirade, I think I will go to bed.
Truss administration is lame duck from day one if she does not act with something more than NI tax cut.
If you are able to retire early on a private pension you have already contributed a large amount to on top of your NI contributions then you are in a different circumstance to someone working until 67 reliant on the state pension after and making full NI contributions until SRA. Though increasing enrolment in workplace pensions should reduce reliance on the state pension alone in future decades
We used to have some wanker novelist talking all kinds of shit on here.
Does she?
Surely she must.
Mustn't she?
Not least in the field of linguistics.
Renewables are going to be a very large part of the electrification of Africa. Quite the opposite of cakeism.
You haven't been to poor Central Africa. I have. You are the one asking why they can't have cake. I know the answer.
Mary Harrington is undoubtedly one of the best writers around atm IMO but not sure what to make of this article.
"The rise of castration anxiety
Technology is emasculating society"
https://unherd.com/2022/08/the-rise-of-castration-anxiety/
https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/january-2021/push-renewables-how-africa-building-different-energy-pathway