Beelbeebub

As for big businesses I saw an interesting take. The"paper clip problem" is a familiar thought experiment in AI. From wikipedia The scenario describes an advanced artificial intelligence tasked with manufacturing paperclips. If such a machine were not programmed to value living beings, then given enough power over its environment, it would try to turn all matter in the universe, including living beings, into paperclips or machines that manufacture further paperclips. Obviously we are very far away from inventing an AI capable of the above. It"s just a parable about the dangers of creating entities hyper focused on a single goal - like the sorcerer's apprentice with the brooms and buckets of water. Someone recently pointed out to me that we already have created those entities. Large companies are entities who's sole focus in maximising profits and everything else is secondary. Without restraint they will (and have in the past) destroy environments, overthrow governments, foster conflict, start wars. All to produce more profits.

In different ways yes to a degree. Doesn't make it a good thing or inevitable. I used to be relatively relaxed about the existence of billionaires but now my views are veering away, I'm increacingly struggling to see any that are a net benefit to the world.

And the bad thing about that is it puts your old aged eggs in one basket. If your kids get sick, die, don't get a well paid job etc. You're stuffed.

It's an all too short set of step from there to those that do have the vote starting to think they shouldn't look after those that don't vote. If your criteria for voting is "Net contributor to treasury" then you basically confine the vote to the top earning 40% of households. That is not a good idea for a just and stable society.

Just did a some number crunching For income tax, the over 65's pay abiut £30bn a year. I imagine a similar total in Vat and other indirect taxes. So a total take of £60bn, maybe a touch more if we include death duties. Pensions alone are double that. My point is the over 65's are (as an age group) net negative on the national finances. This is not a criticism (babies are also net negatives in financial - and quality of sleep - terms) But the bulk of the tax take comes from thr middle aged (40-50) higher earners. We need to be careful about determining who is a scrounger and who isn't. As has been pointed out anyone can become disabled and contributions to society are subjective and not always obvious from a purely financial perspective. And finally, everyone should vote. Voting (and despite waht the Americans thing, not guns) is one of the last defenses against tyranny. Once you start to exclude people for various reasons (not paying enough tax for example) it becomes far easier for politicians to pick their voters. One area we are failing on is voter information and education. You can only make a choice based on the information you are supplied and if that information is skewed then your vote can be manipulated. In traditionally totalitarian societies this is done by government capture of media - state media. You only see stories about the glorious leader, the vile foreigners and the victory parade to celebrate the 4th year of the 3 day special military operation. In the west it now seems to be big business and billionaires who are shaping the media landscape and not to benefit of all. See the pushback against renewables - for example the often quoted "energy security" argument for stayijg on the energy source we have to import from unstable regimes.

I thi k we have to be a little careful about interpreting that graph. It says that a higher % of over 65 (just) pay income tax - *not* that the tax take from that segment is higher The basic state pension is a hair over 9k for those who became pensioners before 2016. That means any pensioner who earns more than about 3.5k from other sources will pay income tax. For those that retired after 2016 the basic is just under 12k, so they onky be to earn £500 or so to start paying taxes. This (and the triple lock) is probably why there was a distinct upward kink from 2018/19ish. So pretty much every pensioner who earns more than a few k from an old work place pension or maybe letting a room, or doing a day a week at the supermarket pays income tax. Whereas the under 65's are less likely to pay income tax because their income floor is zero. So more pensioners pay tax, thanks to the increaces in state pension over the last 15years or so. The really interesting figure would be total taxes collected from over 65's vs pensions (and if you want to be thorough - medical and social care costs for over 65's) I am not certain that is a positive nunber

Just for completeness here is a graph of oil & gas production (hence the hugher BoE numbers) production from an oil and gas consultancy that errs on the high side of things. As you can see it still shows a big drop even with discoveries and prospects included.

Sadly you are probably right that this argument will keep popping up. Still, feel free to quote that post back at them.

Yeah but they give you 15p all the time even when they could be buying it at 1p wholesale. It also aids predictability. I know that I will get paid 15p for every kwh I export and it will cost me 13.4p for every E7 kwh I import . Given losses the two prices are essentially the same and I can effectively use the grid as an extension of my battery. It makes planning easy. I don't have to worry about onky partially filling my battery to maximise self use. Or what the weather will be. If if fill up 10kwh (£1.50) and the excess solar was 4wkh (60p) it cost the same (90p) as if I fill up 6kwh (90p) and exported nothing.

I have those sensors, they are pretty good for the price. The app can be a bit janky at times but they outperform way more expensive ones and don't come with a ton of bloat and cloud services.

Right, let's put this to bed once and for all. First, the UK produces less than 1% of world oil/gas. That isn't enough to affect the world price. Even if we were to double our production, adding 1% to the world supply isn't going to change the prices. Secondly, and this is the most important bit - our oil & gas fields are nearly exhausted. A quite from the latest consultation on the UK pop and gas industry "The UK’s offshore oil and gas industry launched sixty years ago, when the first licence to explore for oil and gas in the North Sea was issued to British Petroleum (BP). This long history of oil and gas production in the UK means our offshore basin is mature – much more so than other areas of the world. The most accessible oil and gas has already been extracted. Production is naturally declining and has done so for the last 25 years. Our North Sea no longer has the reserves available to meet domestic energy demand." (emphasis mine) Here is graph of the Uk's projected production if we carry on as now (green). Note that it is falling quickly and will have dropped to less than a quarter of today's production (which is only 50%of our consumption as it is) in less than 2 decades. Now look at the yellow and red bits. That represents our production if we drill everything we know about (orange) and everything we are likely to find (red). So even if we go drill crazy we will only change our oil production from 150,000 barrels a day to 200,000 barrels a day down from 700,000 barrels a day now. Like it or not, we are import dependent and it's only going to get worse over time.

I wonder, now we have rent tribunals, if the rent tribunals were to fix a fair rent ignoring the energy performance, then subtract the difference between the EPC running cost and the potential epc running cost if the property made C.

100% it's the scammers and subsidy harvesters. The core idea of encouraging insulation etc by making it cheaper is sound. It is hard to think how to do this without attracting the cowboys - see the recently unearthed external insulation debacle. My problem, as a LL, is how to upgrade old properties (mostly victorian) whilst navigating planning, conservation areas and finance. For example switching to double glazed windows makes a big difference to tenants. But it's expensive about £1k a window (they are big) and one building alone has 125 windows. Now this isn't an issue, we could just start plugging away at it, but if we swap out all the windows in a property for £5-10k (we've down a few) we get 2-3 points on the EPC, barely moves the needle. We've insulated all the roofs to at leat 200mm, most are 300+. But the majority of EPC inspectors won't actually look through the loft hatch - they just put it down as "as built" ie totally unisulated. Obviously wall insulation. That leaves walls and floors. Which are all solid so expensive and with downsides. My latest plan is to try and fit solar as that seems to have alot of points attached to it. I can get 10+ points for £10k of slap and batteries vs 3 points for £10k of windows.

Landlords already have to upgrade at their own expense unless the tenant (not LL) is eligible for certain subsidies. And those subsidies are crap - I think mainly there for subsidy harvesters. We organised one for a tenant. They came back with a package of measures including insulating the loft as it had no insulation. It def had at least 200mm of insulation, 300mm in places as it was up insulated when the roof was redone a few years ago. They also would onky do internal insulation but not pay for any redecoration, just leave the plasterboard finish. They also would only do the whole lot, not just the loft insulation. We had the same thing with windows. I the end we just paid for it ourselves. It would be great to increace the EPC ratings but the %of "poor" rental properties (less than c) is nearly identical to that of the owner occupied sector. Basically it reflects our poor overall housing stock.

There was one YTer who sat in on the latest Octopus "webinar" and apparently the question was put to the octopus CEO. The answer was it [getting rid of the 15p export] wasn't something they were looking at or had plans to look at. Of course he could be lying or they might start looking at it tomorrow. But there isn't much we can do about it. The 15p rate seems to be too good to be true and it will probably have to go - or at least go if you have an extra cheap rate well below the 15p eg EV tariff. To be fair, banning the ev tariff lot isn't a terrible thing. There were people exploiting it a bit (one YT guy has a couple of tesla batteries to exploit the rate difference). The best thing is not to build your financial case on high export rates but on self consumption. Treat the high export as a nice bonus.