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People Are Okay With Wind & Solar Installations In Their Neighborhoods, Studies Say
  • As I understand it, the efficiency of a wind turbine increases with blade size, so multiple smaller personal wind turbines are less efficient than fewer, larger turbines that serve a neighbourhood, as well as costing much more and using more overall resources.

  • Jacob Rees-Mogg says HS2 money should be used to scrap inheritance tax
  • It’s an entirely intentional deception. People get the fear that they’ll not be able to pass on their 3-bed semi-detached*, a dinner table set and the last dregs of a private pension to their kids, so they vote so that rich people don’t have to redistribute wealth.

    • Usual caveat for London 🙄
  • ‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’: Yanis Varoufakis on extremism, Starmer, and the tyranny of big tech
  • Capitalism has a definition. He’s saying that the markers that define Capitalism (as opposed to Mercentilism, Feudalism, etc.) are no longer there.

    Specifically he’s saying that you can now no longer be on the top rung by privately owning the means of production, which is probably the biggest hallmark of Capitalism.

  • Coogan and Vorderman back Liberal Democrats' electoral reform pledge
  • AV+ was not a PR method and only offered minor benefits above FPTP. It would still lead to a concentration of power between the two main parties, but it would increase the overall number of seats gained by a centrist party.

    AV+ suited the Tories (and Labour) only slightly less well than FPTP, but Lib Dems would have been a much bigger spare leg if it had gone through. For the Tories, it was a win-win result.

    In other words, the LDs allowed themselves to make another compromise, being tempted with another minor power grab, and in doing so allowed themselves to be outplayed again, and didn’t even gain us the minor democratic benefits AV+ had to offer.

    As for AV+ being a short leap to PR, I have doubts, even though I voted in favour of it. PR would be less beneficial than AV+ to the three main parties now, so why would the LDs try to push it through? Also the referendum would have been used as a weapon - “the people voted so we can’t change it” - just as has been done for election reform, the Scottish Referendum and Brexit since.

  • Nigel Farage fury as regulator finds 'no evidence' of bank account closures due to political views
  • The costs are high. Finance regulations force the banks to investigate high-profile clients for any conflicts of interest or reasons where a bank may be facilitating something illegal or sanctioned. It is literally illegal for the bank not to perform these checks. They can’t just put on blinkers and claim ignorance.

    It would be at least negligent to shareholders, and possibly outright illegal, not to act on that information if there were significant risk.

  • 'Solar leafs' outshine panels in UK breakthrough - Energy Live News
  • It doesn’t make sense to think of it in terms of how much of the Sun’s energy it uses because solar energy is essentially free and unlimited, it comes from an outside system, we don’t need to mine it or carry it or anything and we can’t ‘waste’ it in the same way we can other fuels. All it tells us is the maximum theoretical limit.

    10% more energy from solar means a rooftop array could generate an extra 300-500W which is a genuinely useful amount of energy.

  • Earned income taxed twice as heavily as capital gains for some in UK, study finds
  • Absolutely, a change to CGT may affect the risk-return profile of individual investments and might make some unpalatable. But it wouldn’t slow or stop investing altogether. One thing that has a bigger effect would be how much spare money people have to invest, how much they earn above their costs of living.

    People have a financial incentive to invest their money somewhere (stock market, bonds, businesses, property, interest-bearing bank account) because if they don’t, their money devalues. Economically speaking it doesn’t matter so much where, so long as money cycles around the country and doesn’t sit doing nothing - or leave (which is another issue with global investments). A change in CGT would have to be hugely disruptive to change that incentive.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TE
    teamonkey @lemm.ee
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