andrewducker | Interesting Links for 21-05-2025

1. Avenge yourself on the icebergs that sunk you in Titanic Re-Christened: Maiden Vengeance: (tags:stupidity games titanic review )
2. UK Suspends Trade Talks With Israel Over 'Abominable' Situation In Gaza: (tags:uk israel gaza )
3. What happened to American manufacturing is not unusual - here's what experts says helps: (tags:manufacturing economics )
4. Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books: (tags:newspapers ai OhForFucksSake )
5. How many carers does it take to afford a flat? The answer is Labour's big problem: (tags:economics labour care precariousness migration )
6. The Hive - a glorious piece of art in Kew Gargens: (tags:bees art gardens viaKenny )
7. Flying dinosaur fossil with intact feathers reveals how first birds took flight: (tags:birds dinosaurs flight fossils paleontology )
8. The Default-Parent Problem (I am delighted that both school and nursery have now mostly learnt to call me first): (tags:parenting sexism society )
9. Israeli MP Yair Golan hits out at own country for 'killing babies as a hobby': (tags:Israel genocide )
10. The mayfly's lifecycle: a fascinating, fleeting story: (tags:life insects )

If the Labour Party can get a million homes built before the next election they will win a landslide. If not, not.

If they do, then yes. Build houses, bring electricity prices down, everyone will be happier.

The question is, can they find the right levers to encourage housebuilding, will housebuilding companies move quickly, are there the resources available in the country to build them in time.

(I'm more convinced that they can get electricity prices down.)

I'm actually a bit less convinced that they *can* get electricity prices down. I think electricity prices are likely to fall over this Parliament but I don't think that will much to do with what the British government does or doesn't do. I think it will be more driven by global supply and pricing of solar PV, the impact of that on gas prices and the probability that the war in Ukraine will have stabilised by 2028.

British government action consenting energy infrastrucure will help but most UK energy infrastructure that the UK government supported today will not be generating in 2028.

We are a global price taker on energy for the most part.

Housing more domestic in nature. The government could borrow a few dozen billion pounds and build council houses. If it wanted to.

Oh, they could do that. And if I were running the country then "Pay companies directly to build houses" would be exactly what I'd be doing. Rather than repeatedly tweaking rules in the hope that I could find a combination of them that would cause them to do it themselves (not that we shouldn't be doing that too). But that's not what Labour seem to be interested in doing, alas.

On the electricity front, I think that the UK can do regulatory things to drive electricity prices down. Zonal pricing, for instance, which looks like it will probably happen. But having checked, things like the massive solar farm around Drax won't be online until 2029. The ones approved instantly in 2024, like Sunnica, might be online before 2028, but mostly they're going to take more than 4 years from approval to being online. I wonder if there are things that could be done to speed that up.

I wonder if there are things that could be done to speed that up.

Would paying the Chinese to build a solar panel factory here work ?
How long does it take to build a factory ?

But I fear the problem is lead-time for grid connections.
What skills do you need to build those, and are we training enough people to do that ?

I am not sure that building a factory here would actually speed things up in the short term. And it might make things a lot more expensive.

But I don't know - I hope people that do are investigating!

Theoretically the government could reorganise our electricity pricing system, which is said to be the reason our electricity is much more expensive than that in Europe. I don't know how easy it would be to change the billing systems at every level to actually implement a new pricing scheme.

4) So if the imaginary list was in a promotional insert produced by a syndicate, and not done by the paper's staff, then the paper's staff cuts aren't really relevant to the problem (as inserts of this sort long predate recent staff cuts).

8) Two related, though less serious, problems: 1, the "can only store one phone number in the system" problem manifests for me as figuring out which phone number to have businesses phone me at (as I prefer to use my landline at home); 2, which person in a party does the server give the bill to? Here it's default male, often even if the woman has signaled desire for receipt.

Interesting Links for 21-05-2025

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