Posted by xrayarx 7 days ago
The Soviet Union had constant problems with insufficient food production. The successor countries didn't.
But as an example, one of the first actions taken after Brexit was to stop monitoring and treating sewage discharges into the English Channel.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62670623
- https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62626774
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9kz8ydjpno
Another major success for the privatisation of services such as the postal service, railways and electricity in the UK.
> Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year.
Seems like there's most of a solution here, just staring us in the face, no? Problem being of course, that the privatised water companies have little incentive or investment in order to tackle the problem.
Are we ready to admit that selling off critical national infrastructure was a stupid idea, yet?
It's the same story with power and gas, wherever they get turned over to the private sector, things get worse. Fundamentally I don't give the first shit about choosing an energy provider. I don't want to find a new deal every few years. I don't give a shit about choice, I just want someone to do it well and charge reasonably. Instead you get stuck in a market offering discounted signup rates and you have to switch every year, while the companies draw their earnings from the minority of people who forget or otherwise can't be bothered to switch.
I don't miss that from the UK. Here in communist Western Australia we maintained ownership of the water, power and gas infrastructure, where other parts of the country set up privatised energy marketplaces. When the UK and the rest of Australia were screaming about rocketing bills, we were protected from some of the fluctuations in international energy prices over the last few years and any profits got ploughed back into infrastructure or the state coffers rather than heading off to private hands. It's just better...
Unfortunately, the water system doesn't work that way. It has been parcelled off to various private companies, giving them a natural monopoly.
The price-discovery aspect of supply seems a bit broken as well - suppliers bid daily on their price to supply power, and the cheapest X units are selected (where X is the daily demand), then they all get paid out at the level of the most expensive provider in the selected mix. Seems to me that it leaves the consumer significantly overpaying, though it must be a nice little earner for those that can provide cheap power.
But you’re right that water is in a worse state due to the monopoly side of things.
It also incentivises avoiding cheap sources from dominating the market.
I can see that the model does incentivise both cheaper energy sources (more over-pay leads to greate investment possibilities) and pricing honestly. If the scheme chose the cheapest X units and paid them out at their bid rates, there would be incentive to bid as close as you can to what you predict the day's cutoff would be... but it does seem likely to not achieve the best overall price.
From that article:
> The UK’s electricity market operates using a system known as “marginal pricing”. This means that all of the power plants running in each half-hour period are paid the same price, set by the final generator that has to switch on to meet demand, which is known as the “marginal” unit.
> While this is unfamiliar to many people, marginal pricing is far from unique to the UK’s electricity market. It is used in most electricity markets in Europe and around the world, as well as being widely used in commodity markets in general.
The thing that's unique about the UK is that the marginal price is almost always (98% of the time) set by the price of gas. That means when the gas price increases, the wholesale price of electricity, and hence consumer bills, increase in direct response.
Of course the situation is also made worse by the fact that gas is used directly for heating and cooking in a high proportion of British homes.
I have no clue how UK's "privatized water companies" work though. I'm not going to be too surprised if UK's system somehow manages to combine all the disadvantages of private ownership with all the disadvantages of state ownership in a single system.
The free market approach seems to require allowing water companies to even build and maintain parallel infrastructure that can't be shared, if they consider it to be economical. That would require immense capital investment, meaning the barrier to entry would likely be very high. The "efficient" case, where joining an existing pipe infrastructure is cheap, due to competition, would entail having several parallel networks of pipes running between reservoirs and people's homes. This was viewed as profoundly wasteful, even by the Thatcher government that privatised water, and that's why it's forbidden by regional monopoly.
The companies seem to operate on a model of doing as little maintenance as they can get away with while taking on debt and paying out to shareholders and the C-suite whenever possible. This has been done in complicity with the regulatory body who wanted to keep bills as low as possible for as long as possible, so played along with the zero-investment model.
It is a clusterfuck.
It's incredibly expensive to have the population increase this fast.
Weird that they are to blame, even though water abstraction has been trending downwards for close to 30 year.
If you add millions of people over the last 25 years (say) then of course water will become much scarcer. And it's not like, say, food supply, which scales up and down relatively nicely with demand. Additional water provision is a massive capital investment each time to provide a load more provision in a big chunk.
Not if the profits from selling the water are reinvested into the network to increase the capacity to fit the need.
Are you saying that its fine that billions of pounds of UK water profits money have gone into overseas investors pockets, because we shouldnt have let so many immigrants into the country and so there would still be enough water services for all if we hadn't?
I'm not saying it's fine, no.
Implying migration is 'unnatural'. Which it isn't, humans have migrated as long as they've existed, and without migration the population in the UK would be trending down, which is a very bad problem to deal with.
This is just silly. Natural population growth is a term. Being the connotation police is entirely unnecessary.
Population growth in the UK is roughly in line with other developed countries. The past few years have been a bit choppy due to global events like the pandemic, but the UK is not an outlier in its population growth.
Oh there will be plenty of new technology invented, but it will either be underinvested, or bought out and buried by competition.
Just like how the electricity companies buried Nikola Teslas perpetual motion machines. /s
All of this requires lot of electrical power, large pumps, cleaning, corrosion-resistant materials, etc. Desalination is generally the last resort when there are no other options.
It is much simpler, more efficient and less expensive to properly manage freshwater resources, maintain networks, eliminate losses and leaks, etc.
Great Britain is not an oil rig or a desert devoid of fresh water. It does not have cheap energy such as natural gas to produce electricity at low cost. Nor is it Israel, which has only the Jordan River and reuses every litre of water two to three times.
The UK has chosen to delegate the maintenance of its water and sanitation network to private operators who chronically underinvest in the maintenance, renewal and improvement of the network.
That's the bloody problem. Injecting a little fresh water from desalination into a leaky network by importing natural gas for the necessary energy is a monumental waste.
Desalination is at the bottom of the list of things to be addressed.
It would be _vastly_ cheaper and easier to build reservoirs.
you might as well just do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Contour_Canal and spend the rest of the money building homes.
And the market and technological developments (batteries) are actively working against this pricing anomaly - I can see the phenomena of negative pricing disappear completely in electricity markets in the next few years given the current explosion in grid battery deployment.
Uhhhh that seems pretty cheap and affordable?
> can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean. That's about as much as two people in the U.S. typically go through in a day at home.
What am I missing here? Even if you triple the cost, people will pay a $180 water bill before living in a water scarcity situation.
2. Tax base plateaus
3. Import refugees and give them free money to increase tax base
4. Run out of natural resources
5. ?
6. Profit
This particular issue is imho mostly related to a lack in investment in water infrastructure (reservoirs and pipes). I don't see how migrants factor into this equation (not to mention that the "free money" given to migrants is scarcely a drop in the bucket). Please spread your hatred elsewhere.
As of the 2021 Census, approximately 16% of the population in England and Wales were born outside the UK, which translates to about 10 million people. This figure represents a significant increase from previous years, indicating a growing presence of foreign-born individuals in the country.
Wikipedia
+1
Also, the "foreign born" statistic is pretty moot, seeing as UK was part of the EU until shortly before 2021 with free movement of labour. Most other European countries have higher levels of "foreign born" people living there, e.g. Austria, Germany and Sweden with around 20%[^1]. If you scroll further down, you see that ~half of these people are born within the EU.
So yeah, check your biases.
[^1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Btw, I am "foreign born" within the UK, doing my PhD here in computer science. Most of my colleagues aren't from within the UK either. This is not because of any "policy", there simply is not enough demand from UK students to fill these places. Good luck with your country once you convinced all of us to leave. Have fun drinking your water :)
Your main point was not "free movement of labor undermining sovereignty and eventually quality of living".
You started off by implying that the problems we see come from a "Import refugees and give them free money" policy.
I then pointed out that I don't think refugees receiving free money is the main problem, as there is comparatively little money going to refugees.
You then point out that 16% of the UK were foreign born, implying that they were refugees, that they get "free money", and that this is the reason why the UK has infrastructure problems now.
I simply pointed out that "foreign born" != "refugee".
If we entertain your goalpost-shifting and argue about free movement of labour as the root cause for lessened sovereignty and quality of living, I would like to ask you to how Chinese students coming to your country to study, or eastern European truckers trucking around your goods exactly undermine the sovereignty of your country. I am honestly curious.
I cannot figure out how this prevents your country from maintaining her own infrastructure.
Btw, I would invite you to reflect a bit on how you came to the extremely reductionist viewpoint that all foreign born people are refugees.
We have not run out of natural resources, the issue is we have not built appropriate infrastructure to harness it for a very long time.