Economy 7 and storage heaters. Heat up bricks overnight using cheap rate electricity so they can keep your home warm during the day while you’re out working.
In fairness it probably works ok for homes insulated to a much higher standard than most British ones.
> The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.
Looking at population density if you draw a 50km radius in the Netherlands you get about 8m people. This covers lots of small cities etc. In the US you get maybe 5m in a contiguous city like Phoenix (which fills the circle) or the Bay Area. (LA is more dense and you might get 10m.)
Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing. S the effective density experienced is much higher.
> Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing.
Much more the opposite. European settlements were largely established before the train existed, emerging from outward rural growth rather than seeing an active urbanization movement. Trains have been woven into that after the fact to best support the rural-esq population shape.
Whereas America was built by the train. Established originally to support the same rural-esq shape idea, but, with little in the way of existing settlements, the train ended up enabling the people to purposefully congregate rather than simply expand outward, which allowed those congregations to be designed such that transportation was unnecessary; being the whole appeal of leaving friends and family behind to move into those settlements. The passenger train eventually started dying out at the height of the urbanization movement because there was no longer a mass benefit from it like the was, and continues to be, in Europe and other places that grew up in those earlier times.
This is never going to happen because the US Social Security system is almost entirely pay-as-you-go since current contributions fund the vast bulk of current payments. The social security fund is a bit of an accounting fiction since it is just one part of the government owing money to another part of the government.
Even if it were practical though, how would you deal with those left destitute because of poor timing (retiring just after a market crash) or who just made poor investment decisions?
> The reserve chute is the Canada Pension Plan. The CPP was originally intended to cover one-third of Canadians’ retirement income, but these days it’s more akin to what you might get from a part-time job: a sheet too small for most beds. The maximum CPP payout comes to about $18,000 per year; the average is just over $11,000.
Isn't the reserve chute the Old Age Security pension along with the Guaranteed Income Supplement?
Assuming a single person with no other income, they would add $11,378 to the maximum CPP payout of $18,092 for a total of $29,470 or $14,918 to the average CPP payout of $11,000 for at total of $25,918. (Unlike the CPP, OAS is clawed back if you have other income over a certain amount.)
Retiring at 70 would raise the maximum CPP to $25,690 and OAS to $12,272 for a total of $37,962.
Not a huge amount but substantially more. Renters also seem eligible for other help at these income levels which might amount to $5,000 per year in BC.
> Isn't the reserve chute the Old Age Security pension along with the Guaranteed Income Supplement?
CPP benefits are proportional to how much you pay in over your life. OAS is proportional to how long you've lived in Canada and thus 'contributed to society at large'; once your income is CAD >95k/indiviudal OAS starts getting clawed back (IMHO it should be clawed back much sooner).
On top of CPP and OAS it is your responsibility to have personal savings: RRSP/pension, TFSA, etc.
GIS is the 'poverty prevention' program, for people making less than 20-30k:
> once your income is CAD >95k/indiviudal OAS starts getting clawed back (IMHO it should be clawed back much sooner).
The downside of means testing pension payments is that it acts as a disincentive to discretionary pension saving.
The previous UK system (pre-2009) was an extreme example of this where those without additional pension savings got topped up with pension credit (GIS equivalent) that was clawed back at 100%. They ended up raising the state pension (OAS equivalent) to that level so those with a full contribution history are no longer eligible for pension credit (12,548 GBP = 23,416 CAD).
The OAS clawback rate is only 15% which seems more like a tax on pensioners - reasonable given they no longer make social security contributions though maybe the 50% GIS clawback would disincentivise workplace tax-deferred pension saving for those affected.
Someone making CA$ 90k will get the full OAS. If they have a spouse who makes $90k, they will also get the full amount. So a household with $180k income is getting a bunch of government money.
Why does a couple with $180k HHI need to get anything?
Broad based benefits tend to receive more public support. Just tax those with high incomes to get it back. Otherwise the bumpy effective marginal tax thresholds (which increase and the decrease again as income increases) end up incentivising gaming the system by shifting when income is realised.
Presumably the optimal strategy if you have retirement income within the range where you face a 15% clawback might be to withdraw extra income one year so that you can avoid the clawback the following year, since the higher marginal tax rate would be less than the clawback saved.
> Just tax those with high incomes to get it back.
it also has the direct benefit of drastically reducing the bureaucracy since you don't need all those eligibility checks and associated paperworks (and associated costs)
You absolutely need broadly based taxation for social democracy. But specifically for clawing back benefits from higher earners you can absolutely tax those same higher earners instead.
Dan has actually criticised a similar situation in the UK where child benefit is clawed back from higher earners.
> If I was a Tory Chancellor, I wouldn’t abolish inheritance tax. I’d fix the ridiculous marginal rates that mean there are hundreds of thousands of 30-somethings paying more than 70% tax on every additional £ they earn.
It’s reasonable to question the balance between how much taxation should be born by higher income pensioners (who likely own their home outright) vs working age people at the same level of income (who additionally pay social security tax). Maybe it would make more sense to roll social security into the tax system and raise pension payments so lower income pensioners don’t lose out.
Most of the city buses in my UK home town are now battery electric double deckers. These carry up to 85-90 people (with 25 standing), weigh 11 tonnes, and is 10.5m long.
A typical jaguar Waymo usually carries up to 4 people (usually just one), weighs 2.1 tonnes and is 5.2m long.
So the double decker bus should be more environmentally efficient with maybe 5 passengers making independent journeys, though operational costs for paying a driver probably make the Waymo more financially efficient in that situation.
I suspect robotaxis will become very important in suburban areas with distributed jobs where buses don’t work well. In busy cities there simply isn’t the roadspace to replace buses with robotaxis (or any other form of car) for commuting.
The real question is what's the optimal size for a bus if you don't have to pay a human to drive it? Once the technology is proven, there's no reason you can't put the Waymo or other self-driving technology in a bus. A bus designed for a dozen people instead of 30, and a fleet of them that did point to point rides instead of a fixed route, just all booked via the app so you share rides with other people. I dare say that would be the best of both worlds.
> The real question is what's the optimal size for a bus if you don't have to pay a human to drive it?
It will depend on the area. Where I am in San Francisco we have articulated buses designed for 100+ people running every few minutes above BART. (We probably need more BART stations.) There’s simply not enough road space for smaller buses (let alone cars) to carry commuter traffic downtown.
(I’ve never worked downtown though so always drove to work in desolate Silicon Valley office parks.)
Even in my smaller UK home city (250k people) you need double decker 70+ capacity buses running every 15 minutes on two routes from city centre to university to handle demand because the jobs are not so distributed.
This is the right way to think about it. Larger buses make sense when there are a lot of people going to and from the same places at the same time, but I think that is much more rare in my city after remote work became widespread.
> A typical jaguar Waymo usually carries up to 4 people (usually just one), weighs 2.1 tonnes and is 5.2m long.
A more reasonable taxi for single riders is going to weigh around 1.5 tons (e.g. the prototype Tesla Robocab).
You also incorrectly assume that the efficiency depends linearly on weight. It doesn't, it depends more on aerodynamics, speed, and the number of stops. London buses (11 tons) average around 2.2 kWh/mi, Tesla Model 3 is at 0.21 kWh/mi while weighing 1.8 tons.
As someone from Britain with Scottish ancestry I don’t really tan at all. The melanin in my skin clumps in freckles, severely limiting its effectiveness at blocking UV. I can spend time outside in a t-shirt during the long summer evenings in Britain/Scandinavia but will burn during the midday sun. Living in California now the sun is stronger for longer so I just cover up.
San Francisco is at a southern European latitude. It’s a lot worse in the tropics.
Is there a difference between a 120V bulb and a 130V bulb?
I thought we basically had 110-130V North American voltage and 220-240V Euro and others voltage as the actual voltage you get from the grid varies within a range.
Yes, but that isn't a thing that is actually manufactured, due to the lightbulb cartel. And if it was manufactured, they'd label it as 120V, long-lasting, because no country uses 130V power.
You can't just will arbitrary part specifications into existence. You can't declare that you need a 67.53 ohm resistor and then search for that. They only make certain values.
In California consumer electricity is high because of distribution costs stemming form wildfire risks from distribution in rural areas and sprawl into the wildland-urban interface where many people live as urban areas have historically blocked development. Wholesale generation costs are some of the lowest in the country.
These costs of distortion vary very little based on how much you as an individual consume but they are awkwardly bundled into per-unit charges. As a renter in an urban area I certainly don't think I should pay those costs while those with home solar don't! At current prices I really don't think we should be subsidising home solar at all since it is so much more expensive than utility scale solar.
While a small part of that cost comes from tariffs on solar panels, they're so cheap it doesn't make much difference. The bigger part of the cost differential with Australia seems to be much higher permitting and sales costs.
Yes, because utilities get a fixed rate of profit from grid expenses; but generation costs of electricity are not tied to their profits.
Instead, highly distributed generation, and in particular distributed storage, drastically reduce grid costs. If a house is providing electricity for itself, and feeding back ok to the grid to also power the neighbor, it skips a ton of transmission infrastructure and costs.
And since all grid components must be sized for the peak usage, rather than average usage, and since storage shaves off peaks, distributed battery storage greatly reduces the need for more grid capacity.
(Side note, even though grid costs are $~0.30/kWh and generation is ~$0.10 in California, that $0.10/kWh is still a large fraction higher than in most of the US)
Interestingly, with the new free power periods in Australia, it is now better economically to not install solar panels and instead spend the cost saving on a larger battery. Solar has become so popular in my region that periods where the grid pays more than 0 for power when the sun is shining are a statistical anomaly. My solar panels will now never pay for themselves, pissing away their power to the grid for free, but my battery will pay for itself sooner.
One of my employers had that incentive but only for one year. I assume they wanted to demonstrate that as a population we were low risk but after testing us once there was no reason to do so again.
In fairness it probably works ok for homes insulated to a much higher standard than most British ones.
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