Soleron said:
MakeAmazing said:
I dont agree with selling power/water, but actually most of these monopolies were totally inefficient. Thats governement for you... the bigger the system the more money/red tape thats required. So making them private companies and making competition cuts costs and improves systems on the whole.
How? There is no competition for consumers in water, buses, or rail. For power, gas and telecoms, you can technically choose a supplier, but the physical pipe is the same and providers are clearly operating a cartel because prices go up in lockstep and do not fall when the wholesale price of gas/electricity/bandwidth falls. On the telecoms side, Britain is dense enough for 100Mbit fibre to be basically everywhere but the hills of Scotland, yet I am stuck with a <1Mbit connection on the top tier.
Something like mobile phones can be competitive because four independent physical networks operate and consumers have free choice which holds prices down.
I agree government monopolies are inefficient, but just putting the word private on them doesn't change that. There has to be meaningful competition between independent providers. Privatisation also makes the companies completely unaccountable - Thames Water is losing millions of gallons of water in leaks and they don't care; whereas a Government organisation could be made to change via political/media pressure.
The Coal mines, well lets be honest they are totally a waste of money. We can buy coal and get it shipped from Australia than digging up our own coal. When something is that inefficient there is no point keeping it going. Open coal mines are the most efficient, but we dont have the room over here to do that. Personally i would rather us waste that money we would spend on getting coal out of the ground on solar panels on every house.
Solar panels? In Britain? lololol. No, what we need is lots of new nuclear as a stopgap to clean nuclear fusion. Nuclear is now safe, in addition to being reliable and scalable unlike renewables.
Selling council houses actually helped house hold income and gave people more spending money - so it helped the economy, the *BIG* problem was that no one (conservatives or labour after) had considered building any more. So a bubble was created. The actual idea of people owning their own houses was fine, it was the rest of it that was the problem. In fact no goverment since the 80's has still fixed the housing issue... were still not building them in anywhere near high enough numbers.
Yep. We need to buld lots of houses and ignore planning regulations. They won't do it because house prices will fall...
|
|
I dont know why you think Solar panels are bad... there is a perception they still are... but thats like 15 years ago. Think about the tech in your mobile/computer 15 years ago and today, totally different things. Add to the face that electrical devices/bulbs are now much more efficent, we can reduce the energy we use quite easily.
Problems with solar panels in the old days was no many people were making them, and they were costly... they are really getting very efficient now, and because they are making so much of them, the price is dropping (as with all tech). Solar panels work in pretty bad light, and even if they were just for heating or power (either one is good), if we use less general power things improve. I am using gas for heating in my house, and the price just keeps going up and up.. so at some point i will get rid of it for Solar heating.. much more efficient. With gas having to be pumped in from abroad most of the time, you can guess that in the next 10-15 years the price is just going to go up and up. It's that kind of reliance we need to reduce. Solar panels wouldnt mean we dont use other energy sources but it reduces the overall need to bring in fuel/power from abroad and build lots of power stations.
And privatisation, of course there has to be some monopoly... but I have 78mb broadband now when 15 years ago I had a 48k modem. That's progress. The problem has always been a lack of direction from governement and who was going to pay for upgrading the network. Unfortunately the Gov didnt want to add £1 onto peoples bills to pay to upgrade the network, it took time and money from the monopoly to invest in it.
