Most People Are Not Prepared for the Extent of the Energy Crisis
bitcoinmagazine.com
bitcoinmagazine.com
> Callum's mum may try to avoid shuttering her doors by raising her prices by more than 5x but that will result in $13 chocolate crossiants and $20 iced lattes.
What kind of flawed reasoning is this? The net prices will only have to go up 5x if the price is the product originally was 100% covering the cost of electricity. In practice, it'll probably need to go up something <2x to maintain the same profit margins, with other costs (e.g. wages, property) trickling up at a slower pace (years) as the overall economy adjusts. Which is material, no doubt, but let's not lose ourselves to hysteria here.
Source: I live here. :(
People talk about Germany being dependent on gas but for heating I think they're about 50% gas while in the UK it's more like 80% and the UK is far behind in insulating homes to be cheaper to heat.
Combine with a government that doesn't actually want to help (which may explain why the houses are so expensive to heat in the first place) and it'll hit much harder.
Combine with a political system designed to let a minority keep control plus Brexit and things could get bad.
Note, I don't think the problem is unsolvable, I just think a lot of the people responsible for solving it will be looking for ways to make themselves money from the chaos.
Now everyone is acting surprised that the place is getting worse, the government are incompetent and nothing can be done about it.
I am sorry for people who didn't vote for this (including myself), but I have to admit we are a minority and we should really just emigrate...
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/general-election-2019-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...
This is the problem the UK has: we choose to fail and then complain we're failing.
Same trick used in the Scottish and Brexit referendums. Worked out for them with the first two, blew up in their faces on the third go.
Why improve our shitty system when the improvement isn't the exact thing you personally want?
Because "true PR" wasn't on offer, people voted no and we have basically no democracy at all.
Because there was no cheap, easy, clean, 100% supported energy supply on offer we end up reliant on Russian gas.
Because Corbyn was not the messiah, better elect Boris.
We're about to do it again with Kier.
This is the british disease: people would rather have something terrible and moan, than something better but not perfect.
That would have been harder if they'd given a better option, so they didn't.
People should have voted yes, it was the smart best thing to do, but they didn't. Some of them are just idiots, but most were just bamboozled into thinking they would get more money for the NHS by people who hate the NHS.
I don't understand this narrative. Germany will have its gas supply from Russia literally turned off for the next three days!
>but for heating I think they're about 50% gas while in the UK it's more like 80%
I saw that Guardian article too! A further 25% of Germans heat their homes with oil, and another 14% use district heating (which will be fossil-fuel powered).
Germany imports 98% of its oil, 95% of its gas, and a large amount of its coal, with a total of 63% of all energy being imported.
On the upside, the premature end of this age of exceptionally unreasonably cheap energy will hopefully teach us all a thing or two about what sustainability really looks like.
If a Norwegian company can make more selling to someone other than the UK, then they will. And those profits go to the Norwegian government, which isn't the case in Britain.
There are some limits due to transport but countries with more links to suppliers and storage can ride it out better even before getting into political responses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggar_thy_neighbour
Working together obviously makes it easier for everyone. But we have whole political parties built on ignoring that principle and blaming foreigners for everything.
What does help, is everyone using less natural gas.
edit: some green Tory ideas that accept that reality:
https://www.cen.uk.com/press/2022/8/16/green-tories-propose-...
Funny how much international politics looks like a "game theory failure", right? If only we could get along!
I'm mostly looking at this from the perspective of the "begger" - hence me originally pointing out that, in the current narrative of countries that are doing badly with energy geopolitics, Germany is in much bigger trouble than the UK. You can be the nicest country in the world, but you can't really predict or change what others will do.
For that matter, why should other EU countries bail out (in the form of energy exports) another country that has become absurdly reliant on energy imports from a hostile neighbour?
>What does help, is everyone using less natural gas.
Humans have burned stuff to heat their homes since the dawn of humanity - it's hard to see what could possibly replace that, unless we go nuclear. Heat-pumps require quite specific circumstances to function efficiently.
And the whole point of "begger thy neighbour" is that it hurts you. So saying "I still really want to punish my neighbour because this is his fault" is literally punishing yourself. It doesn't make sense.
As I said, not a technical problem, a political problem.
>And the whole point of "begger thy neighbour" is that it hurts you
Not necessarily, and not necessarily across differing timeframes. Using the scenario at hand - Germany is reliant on a hostile regime to keep its lights and heating on. Why is it necessarily in some other country's own self-interest to send some of its own energy supply based purely on international economics, and not the needs of its own citizens?
A blind application of this "principle" would mean that less wealthy countries would be obliged to help out a wealthy neighbour in a time of distress, and just hope that the wealthy neighbour will be nice to them when they can. It assumes best intentions all around, which is nice but unrealistic.
If actual Conservatives can't convince you this is in your best interest then I have no chance.
But this is a good example of why the UK is and probably will continue to be hit hardest by this. The EU will be working together, and UK businesses will be selling out to them for profit, and the only politically acceptable solutions will be economic self-harm, leaving the UK with the worst possible outcome.
You mean this idea that "beggar thy neighbour" is not in someone's self interest? You haven't explained why that is necessarily true. The (very short) wikipedia article you linked also does not talk about "punishing other countries", and in fact is specifically focussed on reducing imports. In the context of our original discussion, we were talking about how Germany is now being screwed by the country it has signed up to gas deals with. How does that fit with your "be nice to everyone" idea?
Why?
Examining a relatively similar historical record of exporting scarce resources that are in high domestic demand, are you telling me the Irish potato famine was the best that could have happened?
Instead, very similar to what the UK is doing with gas, they sell the gas to the EU and keep the profits in private hands and let the poor people starve/freeze.
The key missing element is a government that cares about your life if you are poor and can't be bought off by fossil fuel interests.
I'm not really sure the Irish Potato Famine is relevant, given Ireland barely had it's own currency at the time (British pounds were in widespread use, and the value of the Irish pound was fixed to the British one).
I honestly can't really tell...
The referenced tweet for those wondering: https://twitter.com/coldhealing/status/1541826643681058817
Energy Blindness[1] is a huge problem right now, people have no idea how much energy is used in all the goods and services common in their lives.
And I do think governments have a direct role they can play here, but, maybe also, something that they don't do much of is messaging. I wonder if there's a place to reach out to people running businesses like these and provide some sort of free business counselling, advice or guidance. Maybe some of these business owners would benefit from being reminded about their situations. Many won't, as they have emotional investments in their businesses and probably won't want to hear bad news, but maybe some can be helped? My impression of Americans is that many of them truly believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires and also believe that rewards and stability come through the liberal application of enough hard work and years of unrewarded effort. Sometimes that is true, but there are scores who don't achieve what they're after with these methods, particularly because failure is basically invisible (!). Generally I think that it may be time to look at retiring these memes.
But with that said, it’s not something to celebrate, people’s lives are hugely affected when they lose employment.
By this definition a small company on the edge of solvency wouldn't be a zombie because it isn't even dead yet and it's glass like fragility is unlike that of a zombie.
A zombie company is either a declining company that is so large it abuses its monopoly position or other advantages to outlive all the fragile glass companies (think intel killing transmeta) or it is a company that has superior access to investors and external funding and manages to revive over and over again.
Unfortunately that isn't what zombie company means in colloquial language, in colloquial language it just means "I don't like this company, I will pretend to know something about it that I don't, shut it down" and generally this is used to not shut down hard to kill companies but small businesses that aren't abusing their customers and don't want to completely dominate the economy but rather just want to earn a little bit more than employees do.
What type of animalistic caveman shit are we about to see unleashed on the world?
Insanely naive libertarian point of view with an axe to grind. Honestly kind of embarrassing, reads like it was written by a teenager. And implying the 2020s are a disappointment compared to the roaring ‘20s is really telling.