Exactly. The one year old CFL outside now takes 5 minutes to come on when its cold, and sheds a sort of grimy orange light around.
Ive got not a few CFL's, but frankly, the light output is not what is claimed, the lifetime is not what is claimed, they wont dim, and they don't fit half the fittings either.
And the energy they save is utterly minuscule in the overall power we use.
Now if the government said that all new houses had to have heatpumps, I would probably applaud..there is a technology that could knock 50% off the carbon footprint of every domestic heating system, and is actually almost cost effective versus gas, and certainly cost effective versus oil. Apart from initial installation costs.
Yes, Ive been trying to find details if what the regs will actually say, Ive seen these anecdotes:-
"The new light bulb scheme will initially apply to bulbs of 75 watts and higher and the phasing out of the traditional bulbs will come into effect beginning March 1, 2009."
If its only 75 watts up I dont have any!
"The bulbs are also too big for some old-fashioned fittings"
"some old fashioned" - last time i tried i had a number of modern ones they would not fit, others where they look stupid. But I think they got smaller lately.
A bit of research is telling me my small 240v lamps are halogen mains versions of the 12v halogens I understand are not banned, although I havent seen this in black and white yet.
I'd give everyone a citizens income, just enough to almost make a limited lifestyle possible, abolish all income and capital taxes, and then tax the *consumption* of goods - especially those not subsistence type goods - sky high to make the money back.
Oh and minimum wages goes as well. That is catered for by the citizens pension. which underwrites low wages completely.
So, instead of the current taxes on capital, on ownership, on savings and on actual productive work, you switch to taxes on spending, especially on spending on luxury items. Of course being all based on VAT,. foreigners could buy cheap to take home.
Then instead of paying people not to work, you have a situation where any work you do is untaxed. Thus making UK labor very competitive with the far east etc.
You move the financial goalposts completely away from a society where the harder you work and the more you save, the more tax you pay, to a society where the harder you work, and the more you save, the more you get to keep. Only when you *spend* it, do you actually pay taxes.
If e.g. carbon taxes on fossil fuels were sky high, alternative energy would become far more cost effective.
Its the only way we will ever repay the debts that Comrade Gordon is taking out on our behalf, as he robs our savings and taxes us for making them.
We've got nothing left EXCEPT our labour force. It has to be put to productive use, rather than an army of petty bureaucrats making work for themselves, and stopping anyone getting any kind of genuine economic activity going.
labour is all about not working. Time for a change.
One day socialists will realise that the best way to help the working man - if there is such a thing left, is by not taxing his labour out to china, but by encouraging anybody who can do anything productive, to do it. At whatever hours and wages they can manage.
And eco warriors will realise that if you want to reduce the consumption of something that is socially bad news, you just have to tax it till people use something else.
We burn oil because its cheap, and because there is no point in not spending money, since saving it means you get it removed by the government, cos they can't save anything: they haven't a clue how to. The winners have been those who borrowed massively: and the government is now borrowing even more to make sure they don't fail to vote laber next time.
Its completely unsustainable, and it has already ruined the country. You just don't know it yet.
As someone succinctly pointed out
wealth==owning something someone else wants.
No one wants anything that Britain has.
All we have left, is a workforce employed by the government to keep them off the dole, doing makework by and large.
They have to do something useful. Something exportable.
I don't think there would be much in it. The efficiencies are all good when you are only looking for a 30-40C temp rise, and that suits either means of delivery.
with electricity generation at around 40% efficiency, or so overall, a heatpump with a a 4:1 step up factor is 160% 'efficient' overall.
Compared with the best condensing boilers at around 90%.
The real problem is that very very few domestic heating systems work with water in the 30-40c rage.
So there is a huge cost in upgrading to ones that do.
AND a typical heat pump installation is £5-£15k which is a lot more than boilers are, and finally, you need 3 phase to get much over a 15Kw output.
so for new builds and offices its a possibility, but retrofitting is a big expense right now.
OK, labour bashing aside, this is a free for all devil take the hindmost economy sweetened by everybody having a state income that allows them to survive. Would that citizens wage include the ability to buy accommodation? It would be quite a high level if it did. Generally moving to consumption tax seems a good thing, except choosing what is a luxury is fraught with problems and nearly wrecked our yacht industry among others when it was tried.
Indeed. The currently favoured measure of poverty is relative, rather than absolute. As such, it's self perpetuating. As the population as a whole becomes more affluent, so the relative poverty level increases and a certain proportion remain trapped "in poverty". I bet most of them have a mobile phone and Sky (neither of which I choose to have) and smoke or drink a lot more than I do.
Generally moving to consumption tax seems a good thing it strikes me on reflection that you cannot *just* have a VAT type tax, the affluent would accumulate more and more investments, which would attract zero tax on its income, after a couple of generations a very large slice of wealth would probably reside with a few people.
which is actually a way to get money that can do something out of the governments hands.
Into private peoples hands.
History shows that people with wealth do one of three things.
- pursue a spendthrift life of idleness, which recycles their capital into somewhere else. Think 'footballers wives'
- use the capital to exercise political power, which is probably no worse than Comrade Brown being bolstered by Big Business. You can shoot a person, but you can't shoot an offshore registered oil company.
- use it to do stuff that a government never ever would.
You will find the 19th century littered with inventions and discoveries made by 'gentlemen of independent means'
Not a single one by a government.
Read 'Slide Rule' for what happens when governments try to sponsor R&D..
Look at today, what has this government actually invested in? almost nothing. I can maybe think of Railtrack. ALL the money has gone to create jobs that arguably didn't need creating, and make labour for actual productive work unavailable.
You probably bitch about the way companies pay their top executives a load of cash, and their shareholders a fat dividend, and overcharge everyone else.
Now consider GB Ltd. The executive are the ministers and cabinet ministers, who award themselves fat salaries, The shareholders are their marginal voters who get cash in hand to persuade them to keep on voting Labour.
Anyone who is in e,.g. a Tory safe seat, or indeed a labour safe seat, isn't needed to keep them in power: they will get shagged and buggered.
Frankly I'd rather have Bill Gates, than GB ltd screwing the workers into the ground and stealing their savings, to keep a bunch of idle layabouts in takeway pizzas in the marginal seats.
What THIS government calls investment is spending money on consumables. People, not infrastructure. People who spend it on food drink fuel and housing. Slightly more than they probably need to. Nothing of lasting value has been created: much of complete waste has been created.
I suppose my argument is that people who show they can save and invest, and produce, are the people who are the best custodians of wealth. People who have never managed to handle what money they have, have got themselves into debt and are now borrowing even more do not deserve to manage wealth, especially other peoples.
By leveling out capital, taking it from those that would or have already accumulated it, you do extremely bad things to a society. Firstly you utterly destroy the incentive to actually create businesses. Or even work at all. Secondly especially in the case of illiquid assets, like fine art or stately homes, you end up with them all being in government hands or going abroad. You most certanly prevent them from being constructed.
Finally, you remove the whole the middle class, and all its entrepreneurial ability, and replace it with Party apparatchiks. If the only means to change your world is to join the Party and weasel your way to the top, back stabbing as you go, thats the sort of society you end up with, and history shows its almost always a stagnant one, and a miserable one.
I have always felt that the justification for having the rich, and the monarchy, is to show people how, in a few generations, when they have similar levels of wealth and affluence, they ought to be living. Whether thats a life of Woosterihs idlenss (which harms no one really) or a life dedicated to the pursuit of some interest, hobby or scientific research(which again harms no body, and may actually come up with something remarkable) or whether its a life devoted to teh manipulation of wealth as a means of control its all better than what we have now.
Today, if the government wont fund it, who will? there are no people in your scenario, to appeal to. Just the nameless bureaucrats, whose track record on investment is utterly appalling.
By reducing everybody to a level, there are no leaders. There is no initiative, there is nothing anyone can do to change anything. One might as well get rat arsed on alcopops, take a load of smack, and TWOC a Fiesta, and go for a ride.
Guess what so many do?
This system allows them no other alternative, than working in a dull office for dull little managers, for wages barely above the dole.
1984? just about.
Private wealth is the best thing tat ever happens to a nation, if you like freedom, liberty and choice. The oly triuble with a private income is not enough people have one.
My plan is to give it to them. Not a lot, but allow them to create even bigger ones, because utltimately I do not believe that people are evil nasty bastards that need to be ruled by a paternalistic government. They are evil nasty bastards because that is the only way a paternalistic government allows them to get ahead.
I recall a remark..I was living in Blesize park, and remarked how, compared to Camden, teh ople in Hapmstead were so much nicer..my rathe socialist frined remarked 'well they can afford to be'
I took it as an accurate remark, but it meant the opposite to me. it means that giving people affluence, or rather not removing it from them if they worked hard to get it, would produce a nicer society.
When you can see a better life over there-> it is a good incentive to work hard and get out of the shitheap over here
Yes, and such a definition makes the figures entirely meaningless. To state that a minority of the population can't afford what the rest of us can is only stating the obvious. Its the sort of nonsense I'd expect to hear on the BBC news.
Indeed - why would we be so pathetic and clueless that we would need the govt to control it for us
There I will disagree. Cheap and available credit is a huge boon to the national economy, its a critical resource businesses need to get up and running.
The problem is rather some people being irresponsible with these tools. Teach kids basic financial accountability in school - first explain the basic maths of borrowing, then let them borrow money. They pay interest on it, and let them experience the consequences if they fail to repay. Everyone else will be watching, and will come to understand the price of it.
market, by decree.
less of it they use.
This preseves liberty better. Even better is to get the govt out of the equation entirely. People are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what type of lightbulbs they want, and what their priorities are in life.
The whole problem comes down to treating people like bumbling idiots instead of teaching them how to live and how to be financially responsible.
What a fine illustration of how wrong govt is to muck about with all this stuff. There is nothing antisocial about energy use at all - in fact increased energy use results in longer life expectancy, it reduces mortality. Just think about it at a basic level - some of the extra energy use will be wasted, some will be used for useful things, some for life saving things.
In reality its the ecobollox that is antisocial. Government should keep its nose out partly because it is so incapable of getting it right. Govt parties are desperate for power, and choose to appease political pressure groups like greens. The implementation of lightbulb bans is simply to appease the ecobollox movement - it has nothing to do with achieving any real useful result. I dont think anyone with subject knowledge seriously believes that switching to cfls is going to make the slightest difference to future weather systems.
On an individual level the bulb choice is down to things that people seem to care about - on a national level its a complete non-issue. And any government justification for the govt controlling what type of bulb we use is spurious, and disingenuous.
If you care about the long term weather forecast, this is barking up the wrong tree. If you care about personal financial efficiency - as we should - then advise, but dont be so presumptious/arrogant/foolish as to ban. If you care only about grabbing power, then sure, implement whatever nonsensical laws any pressure group wants.
yes - taxation is far better. But even better is to get out of the way and stop wasting our money on this political gameplay.
Such gameplay only reveals the reality that there is such poor public support for the present parties that they have to resort to these gimmicks to get votes.
And the reason? Primarily because we currently teach them to be irresponsible fools. THAT is the problem, its not that people are incapable idiots. And the solution? Education reform.
People would live and work in very dim lighting. Tasks would take longer due to reduced visibility, household accidents would increase considerably, and the whole exercise would do no-one any favours. Accidents are very resource inefficient. Some of us have experienced living like that, and while its livable its not a good thing.
There is a theme behind all this. If unchecked, power holding groups slowly drift further from the plot, until as some point they cease to be able to function competitively or effectively, and another power group takes over. I only know one cure for this - a climate in which good decisions result in survival and bad ones result in failure and consequent hardship. The minute you remove that effect, things go gradually downhill from then on.
There are examples of this in many areas of life in society today. Foolish political meddling, mucking up the basic worldwide rules of what works and what doesnt, has become extremely popular in the UK today, with a huge mass of unconstructive and anti-efficient laws being passed by the present government.
Any idea why poorer people tend to smoke/drink more than you do? Most people have mobile phones, and I think people like Sky because of sport.
No, the definition has meaning - relative poverty is usually used to estimate those deprived of *societal norms*.
It's meaningless to you, perhaps, because you don't know what such things might be (google Abel-Smith, Townsend). I doubt Fein Multimasters are a variable ;-)
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