Beelbeebub

I do my best and will bring facts and figures to the party when needed, for all the good it will do.

My other crazy position is that parliamentary votes should be secret ballots..... Hear me out..... We have secret ballots for elections for a reason. It makes buying someone's vote much harder. I could give you money and favours to vote for me, but you coukd vote for someone else and tell me you voted for me. I woikd have to trust you (the person selling their vote) to be honest! Now with bills and votes in parliament things are so complex that the average person has no easy way to know exactly what a bill does and whether a vote for or against it is the right thing in the long run. When you throw in parliamentary procedure it gets worse. Someone might vote against the "don't lower the kitten into a blender Act" because they want it to go back for amendments, or prefer the "don't put the kitten near a blender Act" instead rather than actually wanting to lower the kitten into a blender (though there are some MPs who would 100% want to blend a kitten) This provides fertile attack ground later on when opponents can shout "MP. X voted against saving the kitten!" with no context. Then you have whips who basically blackmail MPs to voting for thr party line even when the MPs don't want to. All of this would go away if you had secret ballots. MPs could vote according to what they thought right. Whips would be powerless to strong arm MPs - the MP could swear blind they voted for the party line. Business lobbies and shady types coukd bug cash in brown envelopes to MPs to vote one way, the MP could trouser the cash and vote the way they were going to anyway. So everyone, whips, constituents, lobby groups etc would have to just trust that the person they empowered with their vote. Which is sort of what we should be doing anyway. There is no point in giving the person our vote then looking over their shoulder at which way they voted when we aren't privy to all the circumstances that made them vote that way. I'm not totally mad. There would be a sealed record of how each MP voted (as there is with election votes). And those records would be made public (along with any public statement on which way they voted so we could judge their truthfullness) at the end of each following parliament or after an MP resigns. Effectively the MPs legacy is the thing that holds them in check long term. In the short term it's whether or not they can convince their constituents of they hold their interests at heart. I am aware that there are charlatans out there who seem able to convince turkeys to vote for Christmas or that they are men of the people despite being clearly of and for the entrenched establishment. But they seem to get voted for anyway.

One thing that would be good would be extending the "not lying in parliament" bit to all public statements by MPs. Anything that isn't obviously a private setting eg dinner with friends etc. So any press releases, comments at public events, conferences etc must not be lies and if found to be must be retracted and corrected at the earliest opportunity. Searchable web page on parliament website with all the corrections. House of commons library is given job as the arbiter of factual truth.

OK, Again on the energy security argument. The fossil fuel areas that the UK has access to are mature, that is to say they have past peak production. It costs about 3x to get a barrel of oil equiv (boe) out of the ground in the north Sea as it does in the Middle East. This ratio has been getting worse as the oil and gas fields produce less per well than they used to. Our refineries don't accept our oil, so we have to ship our crude abroad to be refined and import other countries crude for us to refine. Nitw how almost all our crude is exported and almost all our Refinery input is imported For gas the production situation is similar but there isn't the refinery issue. So for energy security we have a choice. A) we could increace our extraction which will result in much costlier oil and gas. This means we need to accept that burden on our economy or we need to subsidise the extraction. We then need to refit all our refineries to take this much more expensive feedstock and turn it into petrol, diesel etc. All of this woikd result in much higher prices for us in the UK and a huge drag on our economy. B) we could do the "green" thing - reduce demand for the things (oil and gas) we struggle to produce ourselves. So electrifying transport as much as possible, electrifying heating and industrial processes as much as possible. Also reducing demand by things like insulation, public transport etc. And replace the imported energy with energy produced in the UK like wind and solar (and nuclear etc). The only people who would benefit from A) are - foreign countries rich in oil and gas who would like to make money off us and have control over us ("do what we say or lights out") - oil and gas companies who would be able to make huge profits from the subsidies required to produce enough UK oil and gas. As it happens Reform have significant links to both those groups. It's rather convenient that their energy policy would be beneficial to a certain country who have been paying a close colleague/person he barely knew of the reform leader Right now, today the levelised cost per mwh of a new CCGT plant is higher than on and offshore wind and PV. If we ignore the carbon costs (dark blue) the CCGT is somewhere around £55, whilst the others are all below £44. Note the CCGT fuel costs assume world market prices and not the higher prices if we were to use only domestic gas. Crucially, the forward projections have the CCGT going up for projects built 2030,2035 etc, whilst the other ones are falling. To conclude : From a energy security perspective attempting to boost domestic extraction and refining would result in much higher energy costs for UK homes and businesses and/or huge taxpayer subsidies for the energy firms. Reducing our reliance on fossil fuels would reduce both our dependance on foreign supplies and our energy costs.

At these low battery storage prices I wonder how long before someone like octopus will install a battery system at your house for free, you pay an elevated standing charge but get upto 15kwh a day "included" then a higher unit price afterwards. The battery charges up under control of energy firm at various times when the wholesale price is really low. Say the kit (battery plus 10kw inverter) costs energy Co £5k installed and is 15kwh usable. We assume the kit will last 10 years. So. Energy Co. Need £500 a year capital, let's say £730 or about £2 a day. The usual price for 15kwh at 25p plus 50p.standing charge is £4.25 If the energy. Co offered £3.75 a day, they would have 1.75 to buy 15kwh of energy, abiut 11.5p a unit average over the year. I reckon thry could do that. They can already seem to afford to give EV owners 8p a unit.

I think the spec is for one "cornex" module The price is includes 16 of them so 16kwh. Crazy low price. Less than 3p a kwh over 6k cycles

Controversial opinion but I think the UK has always been and continues to be "well run". The doesn't mean it is perfect or that almighty cockups and scandals don't happen for too often. But we have centuries of a fairly professional civil service at many levels from local to national. What has changed (or maybe it hasn't) is that politicans seem less serious now. Once they would have sat down and had a 1h interview where they didn't doge questions and the difficulties of a given situation were explained. Now it's all on message soundbites and answering the question you wanted to be asked not the one you were asked. Remember, bashing the present and looking back to the past as a golden age has always been done.

I. Listened to an interview the other day with the outgoing CEO of national grid. I'm pretty sure he said they had a massive ramp up of projects to get the grid better suited to the new reality. Something like the typical number of major projects per 5 year period being one or two and itvs now 17 at a cost of £60bn He did say it would double the cost of the network to consumers (I can see the daily mail headline now!) He then clarified that the current cost is something like £25 year (so doubling to £50 a year) but they expected the work would lower the overall costs to consumers by £40.

I cannot think of a better way to allow a corrupt government to remain with a veneer of democracy. They simply have to depress the turnout (limited polling opening times, voter ID, disinformation etc) and voila! they are voted for overwhelmingly. Voter apathy and hopelessness is easy to manufacture. See: The counter to this is - "if voting were so useless, why would the rich and powerful spend so much to make you think it was?"

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