iso1631

You provide no evidence of the number of cars or the kilometres driven

23.5 million light-duty vehicles

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241021/dq241...

If each one were to drive 25,000 km (way higher than the NJC assume on https://www.njc-cnm.gc.ca/s3/d896/en, way higher than the insurance complanies say is the average - https://affiliatedinsurance.ca/blogs/how-average-mileage-per...)

It would require electricity to provide for 587500 million km of driving each year, that's about 118,000 million kWh, or 118 TWh.

Your statement

> 10kwh x 100 x 24 = 24,000kwh Solar panels

Is tricky to understand what you are on abbout as it's not clear what on earth you mean by this as solar panels aren't measured in kWh. kWh per year perhaps.

You are talking about delivering power to a specific location, not generating power. This is an argument from a decade ago, reality has proven that isn't a problem.

For what its worth, I drive over 30,000 km a year and very rarely use a public charger.

I've done the math. The average car in Canada does 11,000 miles a year. A Tesla isn't great efficiency, it uses about 3.5 miles per kWh. Throw in inefficiency of charging and you're talking about 3MWh per car per year, and with about 25 million vehicles that means about 75TWh a year

Travers Solar in Alberta generates about 2.5TWh a year from under 14 sqkm.

Build 30 of them and that's 400 sqkm.

A 20sqkm by 20sqkm solar plant would power every car and light van in Canada forever (setting aside seasonality).

Factor in lower generation in December, you'd need 10 times that amount of solar, about 70km by 70km, 5000 square km.

That's less than 1 quarter of 1 percent of the land in Alberta alone.

(Of course you wouldn't put it in one location, it would be spread out across the country)

Funnily enough 5000 square km is about the total land use of Canada's oil land use (surface use)

You'd have a lot of excess power in the summer -- you'd be generating 650TWh of excess power a year

> > Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV

> Have you done any calculations as to whether this would actually work?

Yes. All cars and vans in the UK drive a total of 320 billion miles a year. My own electric car tells me this would require 80 billion kWh. 1kWp produces 1000 kWh a year, so you need 80 million kWp or 80 TWh a year.

My house will easily provide 8kWp, meaning you'd need 10 million houses. There's 30 million homes, and that's before you factor in non-domestic buildings.

A single shooting estate in the uk could produce 20TWh a year with solar alone. Throw in wind and that would petty much double.

Yes, you're right. No doubt Theresa May, who was criticised massively for US style deportation policies, is the far left. There are people online who thing Nigel Farage is "far left".

OP thinks that a "far left" government are against groups like "Hope Not Hate"

Not sure if these people really exist, but if they do its a sad indictment of the damage the internet does

Yes those terrible far left people such as Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

No wonder famous right wing groups like "Hope Not Hate" are on this list as "enemies of the loony left"

You're as deluded as the fringe saying that Starmer and Burnham are on the extreme right wing

Tricky to work out citational claims in the rhetoric, but

> France also has, officially, nearly 60% of its GDP that is public spending

That's fair

> [working in public sector is] the only way they can envision having a stable job.

That is the same globally. Except in countries where the public sector doesn't mean a stable job. Young people today are all about the hussle, gig work etc. People who just want to work to live have problems across the western world.

> France's public spendings have always been out of control

It seems to be quite stable over the last 10 years, other countries aren't.

> Education levels are down the drain

There's no data to support that

Heres some data:

https://www.imf.org/en/-/media/files/publications/fiscal-mon...

France spends 57.5% of GDP, way higher than Germany, UK etc

But its been stable for a decade (2016 = 57.4%)

Germany has grown from 44.7% to 51.4% in the same time

As for educational achievement, France scores about the same as Germany on PISA, it does better in maths than the USA but worse in reading.

Adult literacy overall is slightly below USA, looking at level 1 or below it's the same, but high proficency is slightly below OECD averages

Everything I've read about US banks over the last 25 years are they are a decade behind even the legacy euro banks.

I saw a massive advert this week in Singapore for UPI, "pay like you do in India". Systems like Alipay are accepted very widely too.

American companies at the behest of American leadership which has turned is back on free trade and has weaponised trade against its allies.

Removing reliance on American tooling is an essential security matter, it's going to take some time to unpick 80 years of interdependence though.

Or just someone with a $5 wrench

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6eq84eygz0qo

Singapore's population is 6 million, about 1.7 million are aged between 16 and 40.

That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.

Wine in France has absolutely plumetted, and has been for at least 60 years

https://statbase.org/data/fra-alcohol-consumption-by-beverag...

Non-wine consumption on the other hand has remained steady (beer up, spirits down, about the same amount)

Given France's wine consumption was far higher (8.5 in 2000, 5.5 today) than say Germany (steady at about 3 since 2000)

https://statbase.org/data/deu-alcohol-consumption-by-beverag...

I wouldn't read too much too much into that as a global trend

You started your data in 2020 and ignored the previous 20 years

You're looking at covid. Look at the 25 year period from .90 in 2000 up to 9.3 by 2008, then flat until covid, then a bump during covid times before lowering at 9.5

Sure you can say it's reduced from a peak which happened to coincide with an unprecedented pandemic. Wake me when it's back to the 9.3 norm of the 2010s let alone the 9 it was around 2000.

Now it's quite possible that fewer people are drinking at all, but of those who are drinking, they are drinking more.

Or it's quite possible that annecdotes about who you see in the gym and on instagram are just annecdotes

(for what it's worth I have seen data showing under 30s are drinking less in 2025 than under 30s drank in 2005, or 1985, etc, which would imply over 30s are drinking more to make up for it, but I don't have it to hand and it may not have been US specific)

Yet

https://statbase.org/data/usa-alcohol-consumption-per-capita...

Suggests it increasing

You're assuming that the loan repayments of interest plus capital are the same as the land tax. That wouldn't be the case.

Currently the purchase price of the property includes a good deal of future land rent, you just pay the current owner.

If you spend $50k on some land and pay 5% a year you're paying $2500 a year in rent, but you're paying that to the existing owner.

Under an LVT you'd be paying $2500 in rent, but the land itself would cost basically nothing.

Whether it's a loan, or the opportunity cost from not putting the capital elsewhere, doesn't matter.

Land speculators profit from land values increasing, and they do nothing other than gamble. They don't increase the value of their own land, that's what their neighbours do. LVT removes that speculation, and indeed risk. If the area goes downhill (say in Detroit), your taxes lower

The downside of this is if you have taxes funding the government, you end up in a death spiral. That's what the UK has with council tax (which is very regressive, a 10m house in one area can pay less than a 100k flat in another, and even in the same area would only pay about 3 times the price), and I believe it's the case in the US.

That's why I'd rather see a citizens dividend than just cutting taxes.

I'm in Singapore at the moment and it's 200 USD a night for my current hotel, which is near the office - not down town - and not particularly expensive. There are some cheaper ones which aren't on our corporate booking system.

Last week in Beijing it only cost 150 USD at a fairly central Crown Plaza, which I felt was very cheap compared to how much it normally costs in London, and London is a bargain compared to anything I/work pays for in the US (which is mainly in DC and NY)

The flights dwarf the cost of the hotels though, indeed the flights cost more than the cost of me for the two week trip (Work paid a premium to avoid Russian airspace though)

There's very little labour cost in your price, not sure where automation would change the cost much.

Isofix, click, it goes green. Some have an additional strap which goes over the top and clips on. I'm not sure how you can get it wrong unless you either don't check it's green.

If you charge $2500 and next door charges $2400, the first person to arrive rents for $2400, the second person has no choice but to pay your $2500

In that area, kids with computers that booted straight to basic like the spectrum, bbc micro, c64 etc fell into two camps -- those who were interested, and those whose parents were interested. I suspect the former were more numerous, as to have a parent interested enough to spend a fortune on a computer without the pester power of the kid feels quite niche.

The vast majority of kids never touched computers, other than maybe running logo at school to move a turtle around.

Most kids who were only interested in a game had a NES or Sega console.

Of the former group, the awe began when you wrote in the example program from the manual or magazine, made it do something, and then changed it. Even something as simple as changing from 3 lives to 99.

The bulk of the cost is the machines, not the power.

If you have a machine which is worthless after 3 years, then if you only run it for 12 hours a day rather than 24 then it costs twice as much per hour in deprecation.

If your machine costs $1000 to buy and $1 a day for 24 hours to run with a lifetime of 1000 days, then the total cost is $2000 to generate 24,000 hours of output, or 8 cents an hour.

If you run it for 12 hours your cost drops to $1500 to generate 12,000 hours of output, or 12 cents an hour.

You could of course just add batteries to your solar. A 5GW power plant in the south of the US, add 10GW or 20GW of solar, add 60GWh of battery storage, in summer export excess to grid (when there's a lot of demand for AC), in winter you could import a small amount from grid, or run smaller amounts of energy.

The capital cost is way below the cost of the equipment you're powering, and land is less than a rounding error. If you don't have the grid then just don't export the excess power, or use it to give free EV charging to locals

The US is pretty unique in that mortgages are typically fixed for the length of the loan, which means the monthly outgoing is guaranteed to go down in real terms due to inflation

Renting means that your rent will typically stay the same in real terms, so increase each month, and indeed you might find your landlord decides to sell and suddenly you're homeless.

Most people in the UK, despite lifetime fixed interest mortgages being very rare, buy for stability, and to ensure they don't have to pay rent in later life. They might do an equity release as they are retired to give them more money, but that's certainly not the norm.

Now the buying of additional properties from the mid 90s was very profitable, house prices would increase far more than rental income, and you could leverage that, and some people (spurred by daytime tv shows) decided to buy a house, spend 100k doing it up, and selling for 150k more than they bought it, making a 50k profit. Had they not done it up they'ld likely have made more money, as the profit was caused by increasing house prices.

Certainly in the UK that was still a small part of the market.

The biggest leap was the move from the mid 90s to the mid 00s of house price:wage ratio from about 4-5:1 to around 7-8:1 as mortgage companies would lend more -- typically 4 times two incomes (in the 80s and 90s mortgage companies wouldn't lend that much).

Since then house prices have broadly remained locked to wages at a radio of 7:1. Its dropped to about 6.5 and gone up to about 8 over the last 20 years.

wtf are you on about?

There's certainly been some small attacks in the EU+ caused by Russia, and many more attributed to Russia, and of course Ukraine, which is not in the EU and never has been, is bombing Russian cities in retaliation for the massive invasion and continued occupation Russia launched some years ago.

Which comprises

1) Cost of land per year (which won't change as you'd be paying $10k a year tax rather than $10k a year in interest on the loan taken to buy the land)

2) Cost of building per year (which won't change)

They will charge the maximum amount possible, no matter what their costs.

Whether the landowner rents it to someone who will improve it to generate income, or they improve it themselves, doesn't matter.

All property owners can increase rental prices now anyway. They can only increase them to the maximum someone will pay for it. That's why average rental prices tends to track average income. If you have 5 homes and 6 people, each able to pay 2100, 2200... 2600, then the worst home will rent for 2200, and the one who can only afford 2100 will live in a box.

In a fully functioning spherical chicken market, once balancing in

If I buy land for $100k today, I can assume I'm going to make say $6k a year from renting it to someone and $2k a year from it increasing in value, giving me a 8% roi

If I instead had to pay just $4k a year in LVT, the price would reduce to $50k to keep that 8% roi. I'll still be making money for doing nothing.

Now if that LVT was returned to the population at large, it's quite possible the population has more money to spend on land, so I could increase the rental price from $6k a year, but then the LVT would increase, because the idea is it reduces unimproved land value to zero -- nobody should make money from occupying land, they should make money through improving it.

In reality though any LVT implemented would be full of loopholes which would introduce absurd incentives. Just like taxing income, and worse taxing earned income more than non-earned income.

All countries restrict speech their government (which is the will of the people in a democracy) finds does more harm than good.

America protects the speech of the rich and powerful but allows stoking division and outright propaganda. It hides a lot behind "it's not technically illegal but you'll lose your job if you say the wrong thing", or "you'll get arrested but if you're rich enough to afford a lawyer you might get charges dismissed"

Perhaps solve those problems before criticising other countries for fighting back in the war.