What makes it worse is that governments are doing this somewhat unintentionally.
The US CAFE standards that effectively push large turbocharged vehicles were never intended to do so, the UK salary sacrifice rules were never intended to push PHEV range rovers, and the European emissions rules were never intended to be so harsh on Toyota hybrids.
Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.
It’s similar to how the British empire hated subsistence farming, and always wanted colonial subjects to be economically interacting with either trading companies or the state apparatus.
> Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.
All well and good, provided the homeowner opts out of the system. Part of the problem comes when the grid connection is not severed. Using it as a backup option (at the same time as other people, for when the weather is bad) or demanding the grid takes their excess production are counter-productive to the system as a whole.
It’s better to give welfare / benefits directly to help poor people in that situation, rather than fix prices to make energy appear artificially scarce during daylight and abundant at night.
Typically: yes. The clock starts ticking the moment you or anybody within your organization becomes aware of the breach. Three days is plenty. It even gives you time to consult your lawyers if you are not sure if a breach is reportable or not, but you could always do a provisional which gives you a way to back out later.
In the UK the airline and telecom privatisations were largely successful (BA, Rolls Royce, BT, etc). BP did okay too.
For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground.
MG might be the exception, but it’s a bit of a weird situation in that it went from being owned by a loss making British state owned enterprise (Leyland) to being owned by a loss making Chinese state owned enterprise (SAIC). Still makes popular, cheap and not very reliable cars though.
The key is competition. BP compete on the global oil market. BA compete freely with other air companies. RR with other turbine manufacturers (not many of those globally!).
The semi-successful ones are the "shell company" ones: telecoms, power, and railways. The user gets a choice of who to get customer service on, which feels nicer than a government bureaucracy, but the infrastructure is a natural monopoly so the actual hardware delivering the service is mostly the same.
Electricity markets work pretty well as a market and has miraculously managed a lot of carbon transition, but is now horrendously expensive (like trains) in a way that's becoming politically important. The public are going to demand that something be done. AI power use is not helping here.
The less successful ones are the actual big capital asset ownership ones: RailTrack PLC, OpenReach, water companies, the nuclear industry.
For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground.
I know that there are some nuances to this, but this makes sense right? If you think you can compete on say London-Amsterdam, your airline can in principle decide to compete there (yes, they need slots, etc.).
If you want to compete with rail between Amsterdam and Berlin, you are either going to pay an insane amount for extra infrastructure (too expensive) or you have to let companies bid on exploiting a line. But you can never have two companies competing at exactly the same times.
But let's all take a moment to acknowledge that it would be awesome if they had them. Can you imagine the shenanigans you could get up to designing a nationwide 40,000-foot-high rollercoaster system?
BT was only successful if you take a very narrow view of success. They dragged their heels on rolling out ADSL to maximise short-term profits from ISDN which has had a hugely negative effect on the country.
Government spent decades figuring out how to regulate it and even today OpenReach is far than ideal.
These entities are not really the same kind of thing. BA and RR were successful private companies that ran into difficulty for one reason or another and took on the UKG as an investor of last resort. BT was an offshoot of the Post Office, a service that is run by the government even in the USA. BP was government controlled for...geopolitical reasons.
There are some nuances to it. British Airways (not the original British Airways Ltd [0], who merged to form BOAC) was established to manage several existing airlines that had already been nationalised (BOAC, BEA) and two regional carriers (Cambrian Airways and Northeast Airlines).
Of course BOAC and BEA had been made my consolidations of many smaller airlines which gets messy quickly when tracing the lineage. Even Cambrian and Northeast had formed British Air Services prior to this which was 70% owned by BEA.
So it is technically true that is was started as a state owned airline, but one made from companies that were originally created as private with a mixed history of state ownership.
Starting an application ecosystem is not trivial. Banks aren't going to rush to write a new app for an OS with such a small market presence. Banks also like and guide security features they rely on in phone apps.
Yeah it would still be difficult. But I could imagine that if steam offered to give a few million to cover development costs and gave projections of 20k new customers, they might be able to convince one of the not very profitable children's fintech banks to develop for the platform.
> One common rhetorical tactic, commonly used by their political allies, is to use their (perceived) enemies' most powerful words and ideas against them, to disarm and counter-attack. 'Woke' was a term on the left; racism became descrimination against white people, diversity becomes affirmative action for conservatives, banning and mocking and even embracing discussions of Nazis, etc.
Heresy is at truth taken too far, or a virtue emphasised to the detriment of others - paraphrasing Chesterton whom Tolkien almost certainly read given their similar locations/religions. It's a theme you see with Sauron's love of order in particular.
I think a lot of the Maga people pretty much take this view of DEI or Nazi hate. That diversity was originally good when it was about helping minorities but not when hurting whites, however tricky those are to separate in zero sum environments.
If the British government can pressure international payment processors or service providers to cut off a website, they can pressure those websites to do stuff.
This happened when the Dems were in power. Its part of the reason why they aren't in power anymore. Letting un-elected bank employees make these sorts of decisions isn't in anyone's best interest. The banks did not enjoy this situation at all and probably won't play ball next time they are asked. Banks hate to lose money and that's exactly what happened in this situation. First they had to turn down business, then they had to pay to defend themselves in a lawsuit.
Financial trouble at OpenAI - even minor stuff where they slow purchases by 25% - could have a big impact on global prices.
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