Bending the little pins also works (they will tend to bend themselves after a little while of use anyway), but at the cost of making insertion a little harder as well. I found that to be the best compromise for me, but YMMV.
I bought a model Y in ‘22. I had some initial problems like a creaky back seat and the floor popping like a jam lid, but after a few service visits those were resolved and since it has been very reliable and even gained nice new features like matrix headlights which avoid oncoming vehicles. It’s a great car to drive.
However, when it received the holiday update with Apple Watch support, and I paired my watch, it started losing several % charge every day. I contacted service who told me to reset my password, which effectively disconnects all connected devices from your account. That solved it. Then I paired my watch again, same problem.
In the next update, Tesla fixed it. And in the next update, it automatically paired your watch without asking. Brave/risky of them, given the previous issues.
My biggest concern for this car now, other than getting abuse for owning a Tesla or the brakes rusting up [1], is Tesla releasing a software update that breaks something, possibly dangerously. With Musk’s recent behaviour I wouldn’t be surprised if talented engineers are leaving or considering it, perhaps excluding Musk’s favoured h1b employees…
The issue with these reliability tests is that they operate on old(er) models. At the end of 2023, the Model 3 was upgraded during a refresh. It roughly received 40% new parts, and is a substantially better value-for-money.
Clearly there are still some things to iron out, and I personally know folks with a few problems in the new model, but as a 2024 M3 owner with zero problems I hate the one-sided online communication surrounding this.
I'm not condoning Elon's behavior at all, but this vehicle is such an insane value for money especially with EV rebates and such. Purely saying Tesla is bad quality is such an easy trope, especially if you have never driven in one
- write well-defined and self-contained bash, python, powershell scripts to automate tasks
- give it an error (often from a build tool) and ask it to help fix it. Sometimes it figures it out, but if not then it gives me ideas, and sometimes this allows me to figure it out myself
- ask it how to achieve things at a high level (if I’m unfamiliar with a tool or problem domain). Sometimes this is to validate what I was already planning to do or find a better way to achieve the desired result (I tend to work solo on projects)
- text or code transformations
- writing regular expressions
- I use copilot to improve code writing speed. Sometimes it gets things wrong but overall I find it does speed things up, particularly for repetitive tasks (e.g switch statements with similar cases)
Housing stock is growing faster than population. There are other more complex issues behind our inflating housing market than just ‘not enough homes’, but nobody seems to want to talk about them:
https://positivemoney.org/2023/01/more-than-building-new-hou...
> "Home ownership has increasingly become the preserve of the wealthy, with billions pumped into property purchases by overseas investors, landlords and retail banks."
So the UK population is not the complete set of entities that want to buy housing stock, and measuring population alone is not sufficient to capture the entirety of the demand. This means we need to build even faster! Saturate these markets. Those folks are giving us money to build empty houses; use it! Once supply outstrips all demand, prices fall - that's how markets work. Let the invisible hand of the free market inform the foreign investors that housing bubbles are a bad bet. Certainly nothing else has worked.
That’s what we’ve been doing for a while now - why hasn’t it worked? I guess we could deregulate and approve more building, but then we end up with a load of empty boxes of substandard/dangerous quality, with inadequate local resources, and a few very rich property developers. Sounds a foolish pursuit in the face of a climate crisis.
Like in the US, democracy in the United Kingdom is faltering. Our first past the post electoral system means the Tories can retain power with a third of the (active) electorate voting for them. Labour believes first past the post serves them well, but it doesn’t, because they would have been leading a coalition government in the last several elections under Proportional Representation. Instead it requires Labour to be a very broad house, meaning Starmer struggles to take strong positions on anything because he doesn’t want to lose votes from different groups (mainly from the centre right based on his recent statements). In a proportional voting system each party can be more focussed on having a distinct set of policies and beliefs, which can be debated openly with other parties without fear of alienating a large proportion of their base. It is clear that this is the core problem in the UK, Brexit was a symptom of this issue because people felt their vote actually counted and they wanted to protest against the neoliberal establishment. Now that the implications are becoming clear, a majority want to return to the EU. If Labour win the next election their position will be very fragile, and I’m unsure they will get more than one term.
Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition. As a result, decisions that are undesirable by the majority are consistently made.
We are currently after an election but before forming a new government and as part of the coalition negotiations the upcoming government is trying to pass several laws to weaken Israel's democracy, including one that effectively strips the Supreme Court of its ability to override non-constitutional[1] laws and directives (and let's not mention the personal legislation).
I suspect then that the problem is not specifically in the voting system, and the voting system at best can be a contributing factor.
[1] - Technically Israel doesn't have a constitution and instead has "Basic Laws" that serve a similar function, let's not get into that :)
I subscribe to the idea that the most important aspect of democracy is to be able to kick out the incumbents (and less important is that every opinion gets direct representation). I think for all the challenges in the US, it does this quite well.
Re-election rates for incumbents in the US Congress are very high [0]. In the House, they haven't dropped below 80% for at least 60 years. The Senate is slightly less stable, but still way above 60% ever since Reagan was elected.
There are two components though. One is the ability to choose the party, the other is the pressure on a party to adjust so that it appeals to enough voters to elect it. If a party doesn't need to adjust to get some votes, as in proportional representation, then we (potentially) end up with coalitions that live or die based on narrow issues, which is what the original post I replied to alluded to. On the other hand, if you have two parties that fight over the votes, you come closer to having parties that optimize for broad appeal.
There are lots of problems with democracy (just fewer than the other potential systems as has famously been said). Imo a two party first past the post system can actually help regularize the will of the people by forcing parties to align with actually electable platforms and not dig in on single issues. Lots more to say about that, I just want to counter the usual rhetoric about how proportional representation or similar systems are somehow automatically better
Put simply, "when most of the thieving stopped, the thriving stopped."
Britain faltering is not "strange" and has little to do with political party, rather its ability to use violence to extract capital from productive outside entities and support its welfare state is nearing an end.
The Economist has a long history of avoiding the elephant in the room because the people running it are hopelessly biased.
This isn't quite right. U.S politics is much less party-centric than it is in many other countries. Basically, though you've got a vast majority of candidates for X or Y office who are either democrats or republicans, their platform tendencies can be quite diverse, even though they often go against the grain of their own party's nominal positions. It's somewhat subtle, but this detail of U.S party politics makes for a strong multi-party diversity of candidates even though there are formally only two parties that mean anything for votes.
This is how you can have, for example, a surprisingly moderate republican senator like Susan Collins, sharing the same party with someone like Trump. And then also in the same party, a Rand Paul type.
I put to you that it in fact does this terribly, because if the government shits itself midway through term there is no mechanism for removal or new elections, as there are in most other countries. Wait out the 4 year term (or two year cycle) and deal with the tribalism
The upside is that the regular cycle means elections are at predictable intervals. US mid-term elections already have low turnout. Snap elections after a vote of no confidence only would decrease turnout.
> I subscribe to the idea that the most important aspect of democracy is to be able to kick out the incumbents
In think you are wrong on both points. The most important aspect of democracy is that it produces a government that reflects the popular will; being able to throw out the incumbents—at which the US does exceptionally badly—has some instrumental value to that, but isn’t an independent goal. And the pervasive use of FPTP elections is a big part of why the US is bad both at tossing incumbents and at providing effectivelt representative government.
I agree. And I'll point out that in the US 200 years ago, the only federal office directly voted on was house of representatives (not the senate, not the president).
OK, but members of the House are "representatives"; members of the Senate are "senators". So if you're going to regard mushbino's statement as referring to only one side, it has to be referring to the House.
It would be a bit odd if the median term length were much longer, and if you look at an actuarial table you'll see why. I guess that's one advantage to electing the ancient: built-in term limits.
> Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition.
Now Benjamin Netanyahu is soon to be back in power. He's generally acknowledged to be a crook, but nobody else seems to be able to assemble a governing coalition. He's already been Prime Minister for 15 years.
Is there a minimum quorum a party has to reach before they can enter parliament?
In Germany they need to get at least 5% of the votes. This was introduced because many small parties had made the parliament of the Weimar Republik unstable.
When New Zealand went shopping for a new electoral system in the 1990s, we ended up with one based closely on the German model, including the 5% threshold. The Israeli parliament was frequently pointed to as an Awful Warning of what would happen if we din't have the threshold.
Until 1992, Israel had a threshold of only 1%. Since then it has been repeatedly increased, and is now 3.25%. The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe (CoE) recommends such thresholds be no more than 3%. [0] (Many member states defy this recommendation. Israel is considered non-European for the CoE's purposes, and therefore isn't a member state, but it is an observer. New Zealand is neither a member state nor an observer, but it does participate in some CoE conventions.)
The aforementioned thresholds are "formal" thresholds, but there are also "effective" thresholds, arising from district magnitude. In the absence of a single "at-large" (nationwide, in this context) district, districts need to be large to bring the effective threshold down even to 5%. (It depends on the seat-allocation method, but it could be about twenty representatives per district for a 5% effective threshold, and over thirty for a 3% effective threshold.)
Where the effective threshold is higher than the formal threshold, the latter has no effect. But where a parliament has districts with different numbers of representatives, districts can have different effective thresholds, so any formal threshold could have an effect in some districts and not in others. I believe this is the case in Czechia, Poland and Turkey (but I don't know whether the formal thresholds there apply nationally or at district level). On the other hand, the Netherlands has no formal threshold and a uniform effective threshold of only 0.67%. The effective threshold of Israel's Knesset would be less than 1%, but still greater than the Netherlands'.
[0] "58. In well-established democracies, there should be no thresholds higher than 3% during the parliamentary elections. It should thus be possible to express a maximum number of opinions. Excluding numerous groups of people from the right to be represented is detrimental to a democratic system. In well-established democracies, a balance has to be found between fair representation of views in the community and effectiveness in parliament and government." http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fil...
> Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition. As a result, decisions that are undesirable by the majority are consistently made.
Could you explain this a bit more? Surely if they are proportionally elected and have the numbers to outvote the current government, then they're representing the majority views, not minority?
In the UK, our government gets elected by winning 40% of the vote and therefore almost every decision it takes is against the wishes of the majority of voters.
A simple majority may not be enough in certain cases.
Let's imagine a parliament with parties with these shares of seats (proportional to electoral votes): A = 50%, B = 33%, C = 15%, D = 2%. (Note: Not an actual Israeli parliament!)
Even for cases where a simple majority is sufficient, A would be able to overpower all other parties combined, had it one more representative. But with precisely 50% (or, funnier yet, something like 49.75%), it has to seek a coalition with at least one other party, even if every A representative is going to vote the same way (which is not a given). The smallest party, D, voting in an agreement with A, can turn tables with a guarantee; D's representatives will be courted by every other party, but by A's most of all.
For cases where a qualified majority, like 2/3, is required, a coalition is a must. A + C would narrowly miss it, and again D has an outsized influence. A + B would definitely make it, but usually A and B are opposed to each other. Thus the votes of C are worth more than their modest 15% of electorate represented.
OTOH B + C + D is enough to block any bill requiring a simple majority.
So C and D, which collectively represent 17% of electorate, will be able to command serious concessions from both A and B, which collectively represent 83%, but are usually opposed to each other.
(And no, something like A = 87% may be even worse.)
> Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition.
Unless there are no minor parties outside of government, isn’t that offset by the risk of what they currently get from being in government being lost while the rest of government continues by bringing in one or more currently-out-of-government minor parties in exchange for prioritizing some of their priorities?
(Anyhow, there’s been extensive comparative study across established democracies and a number of positive outcomes, including greater public satisfaction with government, track with greater effecrivd proportionality.
You are correct in theory, it is certainly a technical possibility to avoid such a problem. In practice, this isn't done and isn't possible since the major factions are too at odds with each other to create such a situation. In particular, everyone in the center-left knows that there's no point in trying to cooperate with Binyamin Netanyahu because he is guaranteed to betray them and not uphold his part of whatever bargain they make. Everyone in the right knows that they can't cooperate with anyone outside of Binyamin Netanyahu because they'll be accused of being evil terrorist supporting leftists and will lose many votes in the next election.
The point I was making is that it is actually this dynamic (and the fact that it is legitimized enough that it is able to continue) that is causing issues and that whatever is creating it is the real problem. Proportional representation may be the superior system, but it is not the cure for the problems democracies are facing and so the specific system in use should not be blamed as the root cause of these problems and it is then in my opinion a contributing factor at best.
> In particular, everyone in the center-left knows that there's no point in trying to cooperate with Binyamin Netanyahu because he is guaranteed to betray them and not uphold his part of whatever bargain they make. Everyone in the right knows that they can't cooperate with anyone outside of Binyamin Netanyahu because they'll be accused of being evil terrorist supporting leftists and will lose many votes in the next election.
So, by your description, due to the polarizing influence of a particular personality (a—and I get that Netanyahu’s political longevity makes this east to forget—transitory situation) you have, despite (but not because of proportional representation) the dynamics of a two-party system with potentially influential potential defectors from a majority, rather than the normal dynamics of multiparty coalition building.
Guess what, that’s a fairly common state of FPTP independent of personalities; the potential defectors just aren’t conveniently marked with a different party label than the solid partisans.
> Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition.
If small parties' power is such a problem, why don't the big parties form another grand coalition? Or form Scandinavian-style pre-election pacts with the small parties?
[Edited to acknowledge grand coalitions aren't a foreign concept in Israel]
Simple, because you aren't going to form a coalition with parties radically different than yours, you choose those that are mostly aligned with you. But now any party within the coalition, even a small one, can force the coalition to listen to them, because the alternative is to form a coalition with parties even more at odds.
That's the dilemma the big parties face. By choosing not to deal with each other, they empower small parties. Without actual majority support, they (rightly) have to compromise with somebody.
What are the radical differences between Likud and Yesh Atid?
(In fact, they did form a government coalition in 2013, which lasted about two years. And then there was the 2020, where the two biggest parties in that election, Likud and Blue and White (of which Yesh Atid was a major constituent), formed a government. So it happens. I'm not sure the current two biggest parties, Likud and Yesh Atid, have a radical difference in policy platform. (the most radical things the newly elected coalition government is putting on the agenda are not really from Likus). They certainly are not going to form a government together this time, but I don't think it's because they are radically different, exactly.).
You're making the common mistake that these parties are about their platforms, not their leaders. It's not so much a difference between Likud and Yesh Atid so much as a difference between Netanyahu and Lapid, with Netanyahu's struggles to avoid a corruption verdict and Lapid's insistence that elected politicians must not continue to serve after indictment.
Lapid and other center-opposition leaders have all indicated a willingness to negotiate with a Likud without Netanyahu at the helm.
To add to this (which I feel is also a partial answer to lambertsimnel's original question here), if we look at politics as an iterated prisoner's dillema, the center-left parties have chosen a "tit for tat" strategy whereas Binyamin Netanyahu has chosen an "always defect" strategy.
Of particular note, at the start of the corona crisis, there have already been several failed elections. At the time, Benny Ganz's party ran together with Yesh Atid (and Telem) in a combined list, but since Yesh Atid refused to cooperate with Binyamin Netanyahu (after their own bad expereinces), Benny Ganz chose to split up the combined party and join Binyamin Netanyahu in the coalition, citing the importance of having a stable government for these difficult times (of COVID).
The coalition agreement stipulated that Binyamin Netanyahu will be the Prime Minister for the first two years and Benny Ganz for the final two years (elections in Israel are theoretically every 4 years). However, after two years, Binyamin Netanyahu disbanded the government (by manufacturing a disagreement so that the coalition could not vote together). Benny Ganz then learned his lesson.
(There are of course more disagreements and issues and a lot more nuance then what I can present in a short comment on an online forum, but hopefully this is a useful example to understand the sort of issues we are having)
Going back to my original post, I'm trying to say that the fact that whatever factors have lead to this sort of rotten situation (and that we stay in that situation continually) are the real problem, and not specifically the voting system. Even if we accept that proportional representation is the best system ever, it is not on its own enough to prevent the sorts of problems you see lately in democracies around the world.
I was replying to the comment, "you aren't going to form a coalition with parties radically different than yours."
But yes, it seems politics world-wide, the US certainly included, is increasingly more about personality, affect and identity/community -- and sheer competition for power between different players -- than it is about policy platform, agreed. Sometimes between parties which are actually not that different from each other. I think we may be agreeing with each other.
I think the reason that a "national unity" coalition government in Israel seems so unlikely currently may not in fact be that the major parties "are radically different from each other". (The coalitions formed may be, because of the outsized influence of minority parties on the flanks necessary to build the coalition, which is the whole topic of this thread -- why don't the major parties form a coalition to avoid that? I suggest the reason they don't is not that they are radically different from each other, disagreeing with the comment I was replying to)
This is interesting. Does Israel have parliamentary supremacy? In NZ we have MMP which is proportional but Supreme Court rulings on law do no "override" action as parliament is still supreme. So it can't override laws perse.
If you have a constitution (I'm not sure what happened after you rejected Australia's, but you're still in there and it's not too late to join) then the Supreme Court can override laws which it deems unconstitutional.
I think the issue is that recent governing coalitions' majorities in the Knesset (over and above what they need to appoint a prime minister) is smaller than an individual small party. Consequently, an individual small party could unilaterally bring down the government (or threaten to).
No, he's complaining that minority parties can join with the opposition to form a majority and consequently bring down the government (this can happen when government forms a minority government or relies on minority parties to form a government).
if the minority parties work together with the opposition to form a majority representing a majority of the public surely that's a great example of real democracy in action, it may be a 'peril' to the governing party .... but at that point they represent a minority of the populous - this is not 'shocking' this is how a democratic country should behave
I live in New Zealand we have a proportional representative voting system (MPP), since we changed we've had coalitions and minority governments .... but we haven't had dysfunction or anarchy, largely I think because our parties know that if they go beyond the pale they wont get reelected
The problem is not that the minority parties can cooperate with the opposition to bring down the current government, that's indeed a good thing. The problem is that every coalition in recent years has been so narrow that any individual party in the coalition, no matter how small, is still large enough to bring down the coalition on their own.
And my point in general was not that proportional represntation is bad because it has this specific failure mode, but rather that our political climate has put us in the situation where the failure mode happens consistently, and so the real problem democracies are facing (in my opinion) are the factors that lead to this situation rather than specifically the voting system (which at best is a contributing factor).
> our parties know that if they go beyond the pale they wont get reelected
Ours know that going beyond the pale won't cause them any problems, especially for the smaller parties ;)
Electoral systems are very difficult to change. The party with enough votes to lead the change isn't going to be interested, because it's the system that put them in that position.
Edit: So we're talking electoral systems, referenda have a big caveat. Usually you vote a goal, but you don't vote how it's going to be implemented. The brexit was sold as a measure against Brussels' regulation and taxes...
And also the adverts of sick babies who would not get the funding they needed if the money was spent on implementating proportional representation. A similar lie was used to sell Brexit.
> And also the adverts of sick babies who would not get the funding they needed if the money was spent on implementating proportional representation
Proportional representation and ranked choice voting are orthogonal concepts. A referendum for ranked choice voting doesn't necessarily implement proportional representation.
No, but it would likely be more proportional than the current system in the UK where the last time a single party won a majority of the popular vote was 1931 and yet parties usually have a majority in parliament. Proportionality is not a binary thing. You can have more or less proportional systems of government based on the selection / election mechanic chosen.
1. regulations around referendums (compared to general elections) are very poor and the "no to AV" campaign exploited this by running an extremely dishonest campaign [1]
2. turnout was < 50% of the electorate so one can somewhat facetiously imply from the result that the majority of the electorate don't care what the system is.
There was a referendum to change the voting system to Alternative Vote.
It's important to remember that the change on offer was itself deeply flawed. It was trying to apply a reasonable system for electing one person to elect a whole Parliament. However AV is not a form of proportional representation and would probably have resulted in an even less proportionate cohort of MPs at the following general election had the referendum result been the other way.
Some people were arguing at the time that it was a useful first step to establish popular support for the principle that FPTP had to go but others were arguing that AV was a poisoned chalice and voting for it implied that it was an acceptable alternative and would end the debate for a generation without really fixing the problem.
Worth remembering that the Tories only allowed the vote as part of the coalition deal, and then actively campaigned against it. The whole thing was a damp squib, and was designed to be
A lot of people who wanted PR saw the Alternative Vote referendum as a poison pill and voted against it. It's one of the reasons support for the Lib Dems subsequently crashed, as they were seen to have fundamentally sold out.
In any case, a referendum on whether to keep a fundamentally undemocratic electoral system is in itself undemocratic - there is no legitimate case for keeping an electoral system that effectively disenfranchises a substantial proportion of the electorate.
Democracy is remarkably robust and people fighting is not an indication that it is faltering. The UK has a long and proud history of tenuous balance between different groups that are all on the verge of doing violence to one another, the current era is remarkably peaceful and cooperative.
People are undercalling the effects of a multi-decade campaign against energy security in favour of environmentalist goals. The driver of the environment of cooperation post-WWII has been abundant cheap energy. That meant there was always a path forward where everyone was better off - which is no longer so obviously the case.
To be fair, it isn't just a policy problem. The UK is running out of fuel. But this article isn't going to the root cause of why people can't find an easy grow-the-pie solution to keep everyone working together.
The UK has the highest energy prices of any country in Europe and - not coincidentally - its energy companies make the highest profits.
The UK could have promoted renewables, and did for a while. But the current government - like you - is actively hostile to decentralised solutions that work, and prefers to promote corporate choke points over energy supply that have put the entire population at risk of fuel poverty.
It's been the same story across most of the privatised industries. The concept of the common good has been replaced with an oligarchic dystopia in which a few corrupt winners shake down everyone else.
The root cause is neoliberal dogma, which has been aggressively promoted to the population since the 1970s. It was sold as "freedom". But it's only ever been used to justify increasingly extreme economic apartheid and incredibly poor strategic planning.
The UK is not a poor country. It's not even an energy poor country. But it's on course to having the poorest working population in Europe.
That's not the fault of windmills and solar panels, and it's disingenuous to suggest it is.
Looking at the tabulated data [0], in 1965 the UK was roughly 200% the European average for per capita energy consumption. Now it is ~75% of the same. It has dropped in absolute terms too (dropped to ~75% of the 1965 figure). In fact, on a per-capita basis the UK is neck-and-neck with China. Nearly, actually it is slightly behind.
It looks a lot like an energy poor country.
> That's not the fault of windmills and solar panels, and it's disingenuous to suggest it is.
I'm not suggesting that. I assume it was decades of policy where people were asking "how do we kill off our cheapest source of energy", consistent with other western states. The UK - like everyone else - should have been focusing on how to secure cheap fossil fuels, how to bring down the cost of nuclear energy and loosening the regulatory state to accept that energy is needed despite NIMBYism. If the market says wind and solar are cheap then build those too, but only if they are cheap enough to make stand-alone economic sense.
Instead I suspect policy attempted to achieve an unachievable level of environmental non-interventionism and look like they are paying the price.
POSTSCRIPThttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_production... - mission success! Fossil fuels being phased out without a ready replacement. A country becoming energy poor in one graph. Of course there'll be some political tension with these sort of fundamentals.
> in 1965 the UK was roughly 200% the European average for per capita energy consumption. Now it is ~75% of the same. It has dropped in absolute terms too (dropped to ~75% of the 1965 figure)...
> It looks a lot like an energy poor country.
I'm not sure that follows. Couldn't you also say "it looks a lot like an energy efficient country"?
The Core i7 in my laptop uses a fraction of the energy of the Pentium III in a desktop a couple of decades ago, but I certainly don't want to go back to the P3 today.
Do you reckon you have reduced your energy substantially since the 2000s? With no lifestyle compromises? A 25% drop is a lot more than a Pentium.
They're poor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#History covers most of the actual argument (and evidence) on why energy efficiency doesn't work that way. In an energy-rich environment the efficiency gains would go in to charging phones and tablets, or running extra cores and graphics cards. Or using electric vehicles. Something. Consumption wouldn't be dropping.
Double or triple glazing, insulation, mandatory energy efficient building codes, fuel efficiency standards, energy efficient light bulbs.... 25% reduction is certainly plausible. I'm surprised it isn't more, but I guess some industries remain high consumers. The lifestyle compromise is more expensive buildings, which hurts at least in the short term.
Personally, yes -- I have significantly smaller gas and electric bills despite being in a larger house in a colder climate as a result of better construction and insulation and more energy-efficient appliances. I also moved to a city where I can walk or bike for daily tasks so I fill up my (more fuel-efficient) car's gas tank about a quarter as often.
I'm not claiming this is the case generally across the UK -- I'm in the US and don't know the situation there. Just that it doesn't automatically follow that "I'm using less energy" necessarily equates to "less energy is available for me to use".
Heh, ouch. Hopefully that is a lesson to me in phrase my questions more carefully.
However, I don't think that is quite enough to show that Jevons' paradox has been avoided - you'll find that with the savings from paying less for heating and your car you have a bit more money left over - what happened to it? Because it represents the energy that was freed up. It isn't enough to say "Well I spent less energy on heating and petrol so total energy consumption went down". Maybe you consumed the energy as a capital good, or maybe it just got shunted to someone else to use.
It is really difficult to convince an economy to use less energy without some sort of legal or physical barrier. We'll find that you haven't actually caused a reduction in energy overall once the dust settles - because you haven't done anything to reduce the amount of energy production so it isn't obvious why it would have dropped.
The problem with your argument is that the energy cost of, say, charging a phone, is multiple orders of magnitude less than heating a room, and that in turn is many orders of magnitude from producing steel through recycling, and so on.
Comparable objects (a steel section produced in an arc furnace vs a steel section smelted from ore) have radically different energy requirements. If you legislate away the worst offenders (uninsulated houses) the raw drop in energy consumption is such that even if everybody starts leaving their lights on all the time, usage will still drop.
Here is a chart [0] of the UK's coal production over the last century+. And here is their oil production [1] forming the nice bell-curve-like plot of a country burning through their reserves. I'm sorry to be the one breaking the news to you, but trends like that have nothing to do with energy efficiency and everything to do with exhausting reserves.
In my opinion, they could probably have resisted this outcome by some judicious investment in making nuclear cheaper rather than getting distracted by the climate change nonsense. Maybe not, who really knows? Regardless these charts are the realities they face. The theory says they're running out of cheap energy, the stats indicate their running out of cheap energy. The decline in political quality suggest they're running out. Grumpy Brits flailing with things like Brexit suggest they're feeling some serious pressure to make changes. And unless something changes fairly radically, the UK has in fact become energy poor since circa 2008.
It could be worse, they'll probably survive. But coincidentally (<narrator: it wasn't a coincidence>), their GDP/capita has run in to a brick wall [2] and the effects from that'll be politically rocky. Democracy can cope.
I think we're talking at cross purposes here. I read GP as saying that energy usage will always meet whatever capacity you can generate. I don't think that's true: if the economic return from energy usage doesn't cover the cost of producing the energy itself, then production will fall.
I also don't think the UK's role as a fossil fuel exporter/producer is relevant at all. The UK was essentially de-industrialized in the 80's for political reasons, and the energy usage is inefficient, also for political reasons. Many countries have never been fossil fuel exporters, and do not have the UK's sky high energy costs.
The biggest single cause of waste (and thus high prices) in the UK is uninsulated homes. This is caused by a lack of sensible building codes, which in turn is caused by a lack of sensible politics.
I want to say - I did consider that as a counterargument but it is too weak. Moving closer to where your daily tasks take place is a reasonable way to make a lifestyle more energy efficient. It isn't necessarily a step down (why should we want to spend time in cars anyway?). It is potentially scaleable too, there are lots of examples of cities where people get packed in very tightly.
The issue is more that, while fader has demonstrated that they use less energy for heating and transport, they haven't actually demonstrated that they use less energy - what happened to the energy not going to those highlighted examples?
The key observation behind Jevons' paradox is that there is no reason for the aggregate energy production to go down just because some way of using energy gets more efficient. Since the payoff for the same amount of energy is higher, there is no economic incentive to produce less. Quite the opposite. Nothing in this example sits in contradiction to that, so there isn't a need to try and poke holes in a reasonable example of someone making their personal life more energy efficient to make the basic argument work. Plus there is the obvious practical evidence that economies only use less energy when there is an energy shortage, it is nigh impossible to find counterexamples that end well. The UK polity isn't acting like they have abundant free energy to play with.
except it really hasn't. America was dominant after WW2 and has mostly been costing downhill since. in the past 2 decades inequality has increased, life expectancy is stagnant, obesity is up, cost of healthcare and education is up. public transit is worse than it was in the 1950s. it's pretty hard too find a metric on which the US is doing better on than Europe at this point
There are some grass roots efforts emerging to convince people of the importance of purely technocratic improvements that society needs. In this case, cheaper energy and faster transportation.
Proportional representation also has its problems. Look at the Netherlands, which has 17 different parties in parliament and led to it becoming increasingly difficult to form coalitions, see:
I'm confused when you wrote "becoming increasingly difficult to form coalitions". Mark Rutte has been PM since 2010. Wiki says: "On 2 August 2022, he became the longest-serving Prime Minister in Dutch history..." Without specific examples that demonstrate a trend, the term "increasingly difficult" is editorial-speak. Also, look at NL economy for last 30 years. Looks pretty good compared to any other highly developed country. That is very difficult to do without a high functioning govt.
You might not approve of where the “center” is in the US, but Democrats absolutely represent the center left and republicans represent the center right of the actual American electorate.
Yes, but since the US is a more right-wing country than the rest of the developed world (healthcare, death penalty, taxes...), that would mean the Democrats are "centrist" and Republicans "right." Characterizing based on relativity to the developed world seems much more fitting, since we're discussing it between people mostly from other developed countries and in a thread about Britain.
When it comes to abortion, it's more of a wash. By one measure, US is now more decentralized, less federal gov., thus more right wing. 13 US states have complete elective abortion bans at all times, thus much more right wing. Most other US states have somewhat more lenient abortion laws, roughly ~6 weeks longer in general, thus more left wing.
If that's your best and only example, it only substantiates my case.
You brought up Canada, Canada being more left than US just furthers my point that US is more to the right than over developed countries. As to comparing European countries to the US on immigration; % of immigrants in the country
Switzerland: 29%
Sweden: 20%
Germany: 19%
Austria: 19%
Ireland: 18%
Belgium: 17%
Norway: 16%
Spain 15%
*US: 15%
Netherlands: 14%
UK: 14%
France: 13%
Denmark: 12%
Italy: 11%
US doesn't seem like any sort of above-average on your chosen metric either...
Didn't the Tories run on making things worse 13 years ago (austerity)? Thanks to COVID, Brexit, and the war in Ukraine, they have succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
Actually no, they did not run on that. They ran on a platform of “sharing the proceeds of growth”, and then changed their mind after getting into office. I believe the outgoing minister left a (lighthearted?) note saying “I’m afraid there is no money left”, which was used as a partial justification.
This was Germany's case for Tunisia's democracy. Tunisia ended up implementing a Proportional Representation system and I believe it's a good and well balanced system. On Paper.
Well, democracy in Tunisia imploded and exploded. So, yeah, be careful of things that look good on paper.
Honest question: did Germany have any say in Tunisia's voting system? Wasn't Tunisia a French protectorate? Do you mean more recently than 1956?
In any case, Tunisia is not the only country with PR. It's used a lot of places, including Germany (well, MMP, but pretty similar). Like any system it has advantages and disadvantages, but democracy in the Nordics hasn't imploded nor exploded...
> did Germany have any say in Tunisia's voting system? Wasn't Tunisia a French protectorate?
It's different, I think. Germany offered help (along with the EU) and Tunisia(ans) don't know any better so they took up the offer. Plus it was free help and free money. I don't think Germany or the EU had any malicious intentions, I think they truly wanted to help.
But big surprise: Tunisia is not a Nordic country! Apparently, what works there doesn't work here at all.
> Like in the US, democracy in the United Kingdom is faltering.
This is unfortunately not unique. India too has seen the rise of the right, and its democracy threatened and at a perilous stage. Many other countries have seen the rise of the right too. However, I feel this is a political pattern that can be observed historically and generationally, where the political spectrum switch between extremes of left and right, with brief periods of centrism. This can be observed in the last century too. The hard question is how long will this political effect last before we see it wane. Another question is how much the internet contributed to this and if we can do anything about it without trampling our rights.
"democracy is under threat when people I don't like are democratically elected." Is it invisible to you how such statements are, themselves, bad for democracy?
We treat speech differently based on context. Yelling fire in the middle of the ocean with no one around is legally distinct from yelling fire in a crowded theater.
I would argue that without the intent or ability to act in a dangerous manner that this speech is legally distinct from the same statement with those qualifiers.
The realities of limited resources in our judicial system and common sense require us to make these distinctions.
The difference here, in my mind, is that Hillary Clinton was not able or intending to spur a grassroots coup that was dangerous to our Democracy based on her statements.
You really are not grasping how ubiquitously this concept is used. Biden has declared democratically elected people like Georgia Meloni and Victor Orban, and candidates like Marine le Pen to be dangers to democracy. It certainly isn't restricted to Trump. The fact that you jump to him shows how blind you are.
Democratically elected people can absolutely be a danger to democracy. I remember when Russia democratically elected Putin. In 5 years, all opposition TV channels were owned by the government and the oligarchs that chose subserviency over prison. In 10 years, elections were so blatantly fraudulent that voting became pointless.
I don't see it as a bad comparison. Putin wasn't eating babies when he was first elected, either; but his background gave ample reasons for concern, which some people did voice at the time, and which was fully realized eventually.
The problem is that in many Western systems the people who gain power aren't democratically elected.
In a real democracy the big challenge should be how to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. However most of us aren't even getting that far because the people who gain power often don't even have the support or even acceptance of the majority.
The grandparent is simplifying. The goal of a democracy is to respect the will of the majority while respecting the fundamental rights of the minority. If you're not doing the first step, respecting the will of the majority, then your democracy has already failed. A tyranny of the minority is strictly worse than a tyranny of the majority.
The whole point of democracy is that we don’t agree on what’s “the truth” and who is “right” and need a process for deciding what to do notwithstanding those disagreements.
We're talking about politics and democracy here. People will always have a diverse range of opinions on political issues where none of those opinions is objectively "right".
Hopefully one opinion that most would agree on is that in matters of fact any competent representative should pay attention to the knowledge and advice of experts.
> In a real democracy the big challenge should be how to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.
Protection of minorities has nothing to do with democracy, and is often anti-Democratic. In the west, minorities are increasingly being invoked by elites as pretexts for strengthening anti-Democratic institutions and overruling majorities.
Can you give an example? I'd suggest protections against "tyranny of the majority"/"mob rule" are a cornerstone feature of any successful democracy. The point is to ensure that it's not possible simply by force of numbers alone to elect governments who then enforce laws and implement policies that could significantly disadvantage any minority group.
The US Supreme Court is a good example. It sits as an elite Guardian Council that over the last century has overruled the public on numerous issues, ranging from contraception to abortion to same sex marriage to the death penalty. These rulings are not based on law but rather moral philosophy—specifically the libertarian moral philosophy of elites.
Protection of minorities is not a necessary feature of democracy. It’s a feature of a specific type of democracy. In the American system, it’s a feature that initially arose because elites sought to protect their property rights from the masses through constitutional checks on democracy.
Roe overturned abortion laws ostensibly to protect the minority of women who choose to have an abortion. In doing so, the justices replaced the moral philosophy of the public with their own moral philosophy.
Well if you really believe that then I assume you think they did the right thing by overturning Roe, so it seems like (in your eyes) it has a self-correcting mechanism in place. Except I gather that it's now the case that right-to-a-legal-abortion does actually have quite firm majority support from the polls that have been done?
At any rate, I don't see either case as an example of the Supreme Court protecting minority factions against tyranny of the majority.
Protection of minorities has nothing to do with democracy, and is often anti-Democratic.
Exactly. And that means protecting minorities from abuse - particularly abuse caused by short-term or ill-informed policy making by politicians - is the big challenge facing any political system based on representative democracy. But before you can get that far you first need to have your representatives democratically elected in the first place and most of us don't right now.
In the west, minorities are increasingly being invoked by elites as pretexts for strengthening anti-Democratic institutions and overruling majorities.
Careful. Relatively few policies implemented by Western governments actually have a clear, verifiable majority of the public in support of them. For that you essentially need either a referendum or a clear result electing representatives on an explicit platform of implementing that policy and where that policy is known to be the deciding factor in voters' choice of representative.
For everything else in a representative democracy we elect our representatives usually based on some very narrow set of priorities and yet those representatives are entrusted with deciding on any government policy that requires a decision throughout their term of office. There is a very long tail of minor issues that can still profoundly affect the lives of many people yet where the representatives making the decisions certainly were not elected based on their position on those particular issues. Even on major issues situations will inevitably change during the term of office of elected representatives and their response to any emergency was almost certainly not something voters had an opportunity to consider before making their choice at the last election.
Representative democracy has obvious practical advantages over requiring direct democracy for every little decision any government ever makes but it also implies limitations on the democratic mandate granted to representatives and by extension on the legitimacy of any actions those representatives take on behalf of their electorate. Strong checks and balances are essential to keep representative democracy democratic. One common safeguard is to have constitutional rules about the most important policies where the powers of any current representatives to act in those areas are limited without going back to their electorate for a specific decision to change the foundational rules. Another is having a power of recall so that if the voters who elected a representative are unhappy with their actions then they can require a fresh election that might choose a different representative instead. Crucially both of those safeguards ultimately depend on an explicit decision by the entire electorate, which can and should be more powerful in a democracy than any decision by elected representatives.
Looking from outside, it honestly doesn't seem that's what's going on. Here in the Netherlands we have proportional representation, and while our democratic system does show signs of decay, it still feels way more healthier than the British one. Here we have 20 parties to choose from, which always leads to coalitions and compromises. Having to keep deciding between only two would feel incredibly constrained to me.
And I say this as someone who keeps voting, unsuccessfully, against our incumbent PM.
What you’re seeing in India is democracy in action. Modi has the highest approval rating of any major world leader, nearly 80%: https://morningconsult.com/global-leader-approval. What you’re seeing is the majority of Indians overthrowing the minority of British-educated secular liberals that have ruled India since independence.
This is an excellent analysis of what’s happening in India: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial... (“The last of the post-partition generations are passing on, to be replaced by an indigenous leadership class more parochial and rooted in the subcontinent. The modern Indian culture war is a reflection of the decline of a once-secure, outward-looking cosmopolitan Western elite in the face of a rising Hindu nationalist movement, one that is relatively insular and inward looking. India is maturing, becoming culturally more self-confident, and shedding its post-colonial skin.”).
> What you’re seeing in India is democracy in action. Modi has the highest approval rating of any major world leader ...
If you think democracy is only about winning elections, then Hitler was a great democrat too.
> India is maturing, becoming culturally more self-confident, and shedding its post-colonial skin.
You mean the current indian leaders prefer to live in the past, fantasising about its glorious history while preferring to blame all its misgivings on "foreigners" to repress their feelings of insecurity with an equally dysfunctional sense of superiority complex?
How would Starmer needing to accommodate for instance, the Lib Dems on every position, be an improvement on this? Take the issue of housing policy for instance. Britain urgently needs more houses, but the Lib Dems turn up at every local election and by-election on a NIMBY platform.
The same for building new energy infrastructure- the Lib Dems famously blocked the building of new nuclear plants ‘because they wouldn’t be online until 2021/22’. The evidence of the Coalitions we’ve had is that they overall lead to pretty terrible decision making, and indecisive government on the whole.
I feel your point on nuclear only paints half the picture. During their time in the coalition the Lib Dems did push for an expansion of wind power, with the subsequent ban on on-shore wind coming after their demise in the 2015 election. Also, the number of solar installations dived after the Lib Dems were dispatched with and the subsidies were removed.
In terms of "terrible decision making, and indecisive government" I believe this is a better description of all that has come to pass after the coalition with only a single party in power.
I understand your point.
'First past the post' may not be ideal for your country. For other countries, it is appreciated despite its inconveniences. Example: Québec. We inherited 'first past the post' from England. The results are obvious: small parties with significant numbers of voters in many ridings don't end up in parliament. But Québec is a rural province with only one city worthy of the name, Montréal, almost half the population of the province. That city has a demography very different to the rest of the province. In a proportional system, the will of the big city would simply sweep away the rural regions that don't have the same weight. People have learnt to accept 'first past the post' and any change would upset the balance that exists today.
I don't know if you've fully considered the alternatives here. Alternatives like Approval or even RCV (which admittedly has its own issues) don't at all weaken the rural vote here. Approval means all those rural parties can be voted for instead of having to be consolidated and also increases the chance that some city folk will vote for them. RCV allows rural people to vote for the longshot candidate they ACTUALLY want while making sure their vote isn't thrown away when their candidate does lose
This "balance" you're speaking of only benefits the duopoly that's developed BECAUSE of the FPTP system.
Organizations are like organisms. Organisms don't only have to replicate their DNA to be successful—they also need to replicate their environments (e.g. buffalo and elephants protected grasslands from being overrun by woodlands, pine forests making wildfires more common, etc). In this case these parties both have disproportionate power because of FPTP and are both interested in maintaining this "balance"
I appreciate your suggestions but would really need to see some simulations to digest the potential effects. Not that my opinion counts for much but it's always good to suggest alternatives when one criticizes.
That said, the duopoly isn't always so bad historically. Many cases of individual candidates who broke party lines or walked the fine line. It depends to a great degree on party discipline or the lack thereof.
you're probably asking for historical examples. Tbh I lack the knowledge of the specific politics of Montréal to think of the best comparisons, but if you want a more abstract toy to play around with the large variety of different voting systems available, I've made a toy just for that:
Maybe I will, but I've had this update pending (see preview here[0]) that adds some major algorithms that any self-respecting voting theory nerd would expect to see. I started my first software job right as I was wrapping that up though and never fully got through with it. Maybe this winter break I'll have time tho... I'd like to have that update out before sharing it more loudly
The problem with what you describe is that it doesn't merely prevent large areas from dominating the smaller; it actually allows the smaller areas to gang up and impose policies on the majority. Tyranny of the majority sucks, but tyranny of the minority is even worse.
In the case of my small example: I am the rural vote so I don't see our collective force as tyranny of course. As long as basic rights are respected. Ours is a case of a region with specific identity and interests not shared by the single metropole so a purely proportional result is not ideal from our perspective. But I understand your point.
If the goal is to prevent the metropolitan area from unilaterally imposing itself on the rest of the province, all you really need for that is some kind of veto power. For example, a bicameral legislature in which one chamber is elected through some proportional system and actually writes laws, and the other one that represents all the various interest groups (under whatever representation formulas people find agreeable) and approves them.
> But Québec is a rural province with only one city worthy of the name, Montréal, almost half the population of the province. That city has a demography very different to the rest of the province. In a proportional system, the will of the big city would simply sweep away the rural regions that don't have the same weight. People have learnt to accept 'first past the post' and any change would upset the balance that exists today.
That's a very long-winded way of saying "some people's votes are weighted more than others", which is an inherently undemocratic principle.
“Democracy” isn’t a unidimensional system. It’s a balance of many competing concerns. In particular, a key variable is not merely who wins the majority, but who votes. It wouldn’t placate Ukranians to say that if they became part of Russia, their vote would count just as much as a Russian’s. Simply winning 50%+1 isn’t sufficient. People must be willing to be bound into a body politic with other people to begin with.
Different voting mechanisms, along with federal systems, are a way of balancing those competing concerns. They allow you to form a larger body politic that would not necessarily be willing to be bound together in a simple “majority rules” system.
> "some people's votes are weighted more than others", which is an inherently undemocratic principle.
Has there ever been, in the history of human civilization, any self-styled democracy that did not weigh the votes of some people more the votes of others? Whether by sex, gender, race, wealth, education, criminal status, party membership, age, or status as an elected official, I'm pretty sure every single democratic state has continuously subscribed to some non-uniform distribution of vote weights.
With modern technology, it maybe possible to create a truly direct and equal system where newborns have the ability to ratify trade deals, but this might not be desirable.
2015 was a disaster we never recovered from. Millions of voters voted for real change, and got ignored. But then the party who DID actually win the election pandered to those voters to try and win them over. We ended up with Brexit and a whole host of other related problems with populism, etc.
Isn't a parliamentary system effectively proportional representation? It's just prime minister that's first past the post, but from a proportional vote in parliament?
Labour is not going to save Britain. They are just going to redistribute money that is more and more and more "not there" anymore. The EU is not going to save Britain, they are having a crisis too. Nothing will save Britain, it is doomed for the next couple hundred years or so.
> Isn't a parliamentary system effectively proportional representation?
Not necessarily. Imagine a country with four parties. In each constituency, they respectively get 40%, 30%, 20%, and 10% of the vote. Under FPTP, parliament is made up of all reps from the 40% party, shutting out other voters. Under PR, depending on variety you'd get results closer to the distribution of the votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
Imagine there were 100 constituencies, and in every one party A secured 51% of the vote and party B got 49%. Under our current system, party A would have all 100 seats, and party B would have no representation at all; whereas under PR, A and B would (simpisticly speaking)split seats 51-49.
Worse, imagine that in 51 constituencies A gets 51% of the vote, and in 49 it gets 0% of the vote. This gives A a majority in parliament even though voters as a whole prefer B nearly 3-to-1.
Because they do resemble the actual outcomes. The 2 major parties in the UK regularly get majorities in Parliament on far less than 50% of the vote. In the USA gerrymandering has been brought to a fine art. How can this not contribute to discontent, when the majority of people get a government they didn't vote for?
It’s not like they’d be content with a deadlocked parliament where the ‘government’ they voted for can’t enact any policies. It’s good that there’s two dominant parties, both fairly central, who continually moderate their policies to keep high levels of support, and after an election, one of them gets to actually govern.
OP is using the term loosely, but the issue is with FPTP a candidate can win with one vote over 1/n percent of the vote. So if there are 10 candidates the winner need only 10% of the vote plus 1 vote to win.
And so the big parties have a disproportionate advantage. That's why there's no push from either of them to change the system and why it ends up essentially being a scam for the big parties.
Sadly, while many of our governments readily adopted the concept of representative democracy, they retained other oppressive aspects of the ancient systems which they replaced. The old monarchies claimed a right to rule their subject peoples in perpetuity, deriving their power directly from God. Our modern governments claim the same thing! Instead of that divine right flowing directly from God to the state, it flows from God, through your forbears who created the government, to the state. Isn't that slick? They derive their legitimacy from man's divine right to choose his own government, while simultaneously denying that YOU have such a right! It's the 'ole divine right to rule with extra steps.
So while you can choose who controls your government via democratic means, you'll have a helluva time choosing a new government, since the old government will waive the crusty old document that your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather signed and say that you are committing treason.
See the Catalan independence movement[0], or the official position of the UK government on the most recent Scottish independence referendum[1].
Not saying it's worked out perfectly, but the US Declaration of Independence must count among those crusty old documents, and its preamble explicitly declares that throwing off such a government is the right and duty of the governed (admittedly preceded with some couching from "Prudence, indeed...").
True, true! I didn't mean to imply anything negative about old, crusty documents in general! Especially the ones, like The Declaration, that serve to clarify and bolster our common understanding of our natural human rights.
Also, look how narrow the margins are on that scale bar. Most of those regions would need to be further subdivided, and the whole of the UK would end up like Baarle-Nassau: Baarle-Nassau
https://maps.app.goo.gl/aRn73rm1cz2fHznt7?g_st=ic
The British Empire certainly did have a lot of experience of that, but it wasn't exactly good for the people on the ground where that had been done. One of those partition lines led to a 30-year low-intensity civil war that only ended in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
> If Labour win the next election their position will be very fragile, and I’m unsure they will get more than one term.
This is my expectation, the Conservatives will have been able to "clean house" and remove a significant number of MPs who now have too much baggage. I expect a Labour government to struggle through the end of a recession, and have significant infighting.
The conservatives will capitalise on that and could take back control.
I just really hope Labour push through significant electoral reform in their first term.
I believe this is a common trend through the west. Here in Canada the current Federal Liberals won the last two election with about 30% of the vote which when you take into account how many people even vote amounts to something like ~5 million people in a country close to 40 million. The kind of overarching policies and rhetoric coming out of government is widely disproportionate to that level of mandate.
Yup. In France Macron hold total power with less than 30% of voters and less than 30% of good opinion in polls. His "pension reform" has everyone against it, the unions, all political parties but his own, even the employers association, but it will be enforced anyway. Democracy is dead, and it even began to smell.
Curious to see what HN's opinion on mandatory voting is. We have that in Australia and the sense is that it tends to dull the extreme fringes of the party platforms since they need to broadly appeal to the mainstream.
It is hard to disentangle the temperament of the populace from the voting system.
The UK and all former settler colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) all have very stable politics and that generally appeal to the median voter. None of them really have any extreme political incidents in living memory that I can think of. (maybe a few extreme incidents by their own standards but on a global standard they are still tame)
I thought it was implied but I meant former settler colonies of the UK specifically.
The USA could be included and does have overall remarkably stable politics compared to most of the world. I didn't include it due to the length of time it has been separate from the UK, however there was substantial emigration from the British Isles to the USA in the 19th century with the settling of the West (more British went to the USA in the 19th century than Canada/Australia/NZ/South Africa combined and served as a 2nd large wave of Anglofying influence on the nation). I would lump it in with the other nations I mention as having overall extreme stable politics and high adherence to political norms that can be broadly characterised as the "Anglo model of politics".
South Africa is a bit of a unique case. Due to the Apartheid system it never had any of the sort of political stability that characterises the politics of the other nations mentioned.
The political culture of Spain/Portugal is massively different from the UK (especially at the time of the colonisation of the Americas) and the model of politics in the nations of South America is very different as a result.
I'm always going to be against adding more force and coercion. People are way too quick to reach for that as a solution to every purported problem.
I also think many of the people who are forced to vote will do so with the least effort possible and will keep voting for the same party they (and probably their parents) have always voted for without thinking too much about it or doing any research.
Agree with this, the experience of workplace Covid mandates has left a permanent distaste in my mouth that will likely never leave.
I think the Greek way of choosing elected officials - randomly - within some reasonable sampling criteria, i.e. no criminal record, sound mind, at least >=X age would be better at this point. Professional roles such as city attorney can have corresponding pools of possible candidates.
It's like when you have an actively bad betting strategy, it would actually improve your performance to bet randomly.
Proportional voting doesn't have to mean tyranny. Make the very first option on the ballot "I don't approve of any of the candidates here", and if it wins another election is held and nobody from the prior ballot is allowed to be listed.
Mandatory voting in a proportional representation electoral system feels like the best way to me. You can't force people to vote when their vote can end up worthless like with first past the post.
Neither, it's essentially a type of ranked voting that is often referred to as "two party preferred" on the assumption that for any seat, it will go to one party or the other, and it's likely to be one with the highest first+second preference count (not exactly how it works, but you can find the details online easily enough. A fairly typical scenario is that the ALP might have something like 40% of the 1st preference votes and the Liberals 45%, but the 2nd preference votes overwhelmingly favour the ALP and they take the win). There hasn't been any serious discussion over the need to revisit mandatory voting (personally I don't think it should be over a certain age - there's an argument those over 75, who are making up an increasingly larger percentage of the population, have undue influence on selection of a government whose job should be to put forward policies etc. that determine the long-term future of our country, which is of far more relevance to those who'll be alive to see it. I imagine once I'm past 75 I wouldn't be so concerned with voting in every election on that basis. But I'll admit it's not something I feel particularly strongly about.)
It's simply ranked choice voting (aka IRV) for the house. "Two-party preferred" is a system used by polls and news to try to convey how they think the runoff voting will play out, by picking the two candidates most likely to come first and second and showing their expected final tally.
We need better representation, and for instance designate Senators from random draw from the voters pool to make it a proposition force.
Also we need to dismantle most of the constitutional changes of the past 30 years, which created several layers of pretend democratic assemblies (city, metropolis, department, region) that nobody understands nor care about, and are only useful to feed a large crowd of professional politicians.
And most important, we must dismantle the rampant control of these by the state through the nationalisation of taxes. Almost all local taxation which used to be defined and voted by the city councils, departmental assemblies etc have been taken over by the state, which nominally redistributes the money but keeps control of it, effectively killing all local democratic processes and politics.
> Instead it requires Labour to be a very broad house
This is a severe disconnection from reality, the Labour party is totally ideologically possessed. 52% of the population voted for Brexit and not a single Labour MP supports it. Not a single Labour MP would ever dream of criticising the NHS system. Not a single Labour MP said a bad word about BLM.
The Conservative party are so broad they have everything except actual conservatives.
Electorate has moved on since Brexit has actually happened, even if the number who would vote differently given what they know today is much smaller than you might expect given how few think it was done well.
Especially Corbyn, though of course he couldn't "support it" outright because that would mean agreeing with Tories (and he couldn't oppose it outright without angering a lot of Labour members)
Corbyn is a lifelong Eurosceptic who voted against every expansion of EU power that came before him in his entire ~30 year career as an MP pre-2016. He only "opposed" Brexit in 2016 because he had to.
There are several problems with fission (probably fusion too) as I understand it:
1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable.
2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait.
3. Decommissioning is expensive and a long way in the future. Is that cost built into the cost per MW? How can we be sure the money will be protected, and will be enough to cover it?
4. Spent fuel. The project you mentioned isn’t complete yet, but even then it’s a huge liability to leave for future generations to manage indefinitely.
Meanwhile, renewables don’t have these problems and are available immediately. We should be building huge factories to produce wind and solar en masse.
> 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable.
You can't directly compare cost per generating capacity, because nuclear, gas, coal etc. are available according to schedule, while most renewables aren't. Adding storage around renewables to make them schedulable raises costs.
Nuclear in the UK has a capacity factor of around 60%. Availability is in the 70-80% range.
Yeah it's (usually) planned, but it's a decently long time in which you need those gas plants.
Why not just build solar instead and fuel those same gas plants with hydrogen or methane you plucked from the air with your $20-30/MWh unscheduled electricity?
Plus, you can get solar and storage as an off the shelf item today as a retail customer for less per watt than recent reactors in UK/France or even USA. 8kW nameplate solar and 16kWh storage capacity is about $10k which matches 1kW of net from eg UK projects of around 2.5GW net for 26 billion pounds fairly closely.
Yeah if you live far north or have a long cloudy month in winter you'll be relying on that gas plant, but so does the nuclear reactor. Plus you'll be dumping 10-20kWh/day into the grid on the good days. Provides a decent incentive to figure out how to store it, and even if you're only getting 5c/kWh for it, it'll pay for replacement in 7-10 years or so when prices have dropped another 50-80% without sacrificing your kilowatt.
That is the admitted cost of Hinkley C and lower bound on the cost of Sizewell (it will go up, they always do). Sizewell is a rolls royce smr. Matching end user retail cost of solar. Right now. By the time sizewell comes online it'll be a fraction. It's also calculated with a 12.5% capacity factor which is winter in the UK. Add in overnight costs and it's extremely one sided.
You could add as much net capacity as the UK has in nuclear in just above the space used for parking cars.
You could add twice to four times that again just on detached house rooftops.
Even as a commercial installation with no other purpose, a 4km square is hardly an insurmountable barrier.
The initial capital budget of sizewell and hinkley alone could provide 30-80GW of nameplate solar or a rooftop system on every building in the country.
If there are trillions in the pot, by all means go ham with fission, but when low carbon sources are fighting for the scraps left over after subsidizing fossil fuels we have to do the thing that is effective first.
There are always trillions in the pot, because the UK is a sovereign country with its own currency. Money is never the issue.
Therefore it's only overnight costs that matter in a build (and hitting the deadline). The real issue is one of manpower and stuff. We don't make solar panels in the UK. We will make SMRs. Therefore we're not reliant on Chinese manufacture, or the whims of export markets to fund them. A problem we're currently having with gas and oil.
To have security of energy supply over time you have to be as decoupled from world markets as possible. We don't want to be in the situation where we're relying on China for replacement advanced manufactures to keep the lights on.
Solar has no reliable capacity in winter in the UK unfortunately. You wouldn't want to rely on solar with several weeks of grey miserable UK winter weather even with storage. The same with wind, which is still suffering from a degradation in capacity due to the as yet unexplained overall reduction in wind speeds - which may itself be a result of climate change.
Commenting about fiat currency is a pointless distraction when the purpose of using it is as a proxy for labour and materials. 'Trillions in the pot' is just a proxy for a certain amount of access to raw materials, trading ability and labour power, all of which are finite and don't really increase if you sink your country into hyperinflation.
> Therefore it's only overnight costs that matter in a build (and hitting the deadline). The real issue is one of manpower and stuff. We don't make solar panels in the UK. We will make SMRs. Therefore we're not reliant on Chinese manufacture, or the whims of export markets to fund them. A problem we're currently having with gas and oil.
> To have security of energy supply over time you have to be as decoupled from world markets as possible. We don't want to be in the situation where we're relying on China for replacement advanced manufactures to keep the lights on.
Spending an amount on computers and steel and exotic alloys and uranium ore and then also spending 10x as much on labour is no better than spending that first amount on foreign solar panels. Far better to overpay for solar panels by developing a local industry, or overpay for solar thermal systems (which are still vastly cheaper than fission).
> Solar has no reliable capacity in winter in the UK unfortunately. You wouldn't want to rely on solar with several weeks of grey miserable UK winter weather even with storage. The same with wind, which is still suffering from a degradation in capacity due to the as yet unexplained overall reduction in wind speeds - which may itself be a result of climate change.
Renewable-derived hydrogen is already at cost-parity with fossil-fuel-methane derived hydrogen in some markets. Renewable-derived methane isn't much further off and is one of many ways of solving the storage issue. When a gas plant (which you need anyway) and the renewables to provide enough net power in winter and a massive overprovision during summer cost a fraction of nuclear there's no point.
Plus your argument about energy security completely precludes nuclear as an option for over 50% of the world as they're not allowed to make their own fuel. There are also about as many countries with a credible manufacturing base for solar panels than countries with viable uranium reserves, and there is more than one chemistry that you can make solar cells with.
Finally being entirely beholden to one of four or five corporations worldwide is no better than being entirely beholden to one of four or five countries with the cheapest solar.
Given the scale of investment we are talking about, it's also plausible that EU based manufacturing of solar panels could emerge given the right incentives.
This is oft repeated, but once the cost of renewables is low enough it would have (usually un-modelled) second order effects on end users which may make this less important.
Some industries literally can't turn off production without damaging plant, but if some can then where energy cost is ~30% of fossil/nuclear than it might make sense to over-provision industrial capacity and only run it when the sun is shining.
Scheduling also raises costs though. Costs don’t go down much for nuclear power plants if you let them run at reduced output. Nuclear also isn’t as reliable as it seems as it can be seen in France.
Renewables even have the advantage that they produce electricity mostly when it’s needed. Photovoltaics during the day and wind during winter when heating is most needed.
macron removed investment and focus on nuclear in his last mandate before realising that being woke made france broke (luckily not like germany broke - you know like in a way that when there is no sun or wind they need to call Putin to send some energy) now he reverted his thinking because money and energy is more important than beliefs when you needs them. just like usa or germany reactivated coal and biden is selling fracked gas to europe at gold price.
> macron removed investment and focus on nuclear in his last mandate before realising that being woke made france broke
None of those problems OP described have anything to do with that overblown statement. Investment may have been removed for FUTURE projects but not for current operation which is highly subsidised by the French taxpayer guaranteeing the fixed price the Government decides on.
Also Germany reactivated those dirty plants also to help France out. The whole European grid is helping the nuclear nation out and will continue to do so until France diversifies its power generation infrastructure.
the investments included maintenance of existing infrastructure. france has more than half its reactor being off right now. guess what? invest more 5 years before and we wouldnt be there today. so yes. it is not overblown it is factual
Show me some useful source which says that there have been investments missed 5 years ago and which is why that lead to the current problem. French is ok too.
I’m a firm believer in distributed generation and storage, i.e. solar on the roof and battery on premises. This has the added benefits of reducing load on the grid and increasing resiliency. It should be required for all new buildings in regulations.
In fact, solar on roof often loads the local grid in unhelpful ways (they were designed for asymmetric loads).
I'm in favour of renewables, but done in the way that actually makes most economic and environmental sense. In the Uk we threw money at rich people with £15k to install 4kwh solar rigs on their houses. That money would have been much better spent subsidising large industrial installations.
You can however price this in, and I doubt it accounts for 110$/MW. Furthermore, nuclear energy specifically only runs according to schedule. Reducing or raising output is expensive and slow.
For simplicity, lets use the cost of for every $ that a KG of green hydrogen costs, this mean that the cost per MW will be 30x of that. So if green hydrogen cost $1/KG you the cost in term of MW will be $30.
The current cost of green hydrogen is somewhere between $2 -> $12. That is the production cost. The market price for green hydrogen sits around $4-$20, since there are multiple industries that demands hydrogen.
For 110 to break even the hydrogen need to cost $3.5/kg, and in order to really displace natural gas, it is estimated that it need to reach $1/kg.
Now I noticed that those $150/MW is not a range, so I took a look. Projected nuclear LCOE costs for plants built 2020-2025 places nuclear around $27/MW to $147/MW depending on financing and country (source: OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s (NEA's) calculation). Russia has the lowest cost and Slovakia or Japan (depending on financing method) has the highest.
So in summery, it can definitively cost more than $110/MW to produce viable green storage solution, especially in northern countries where low duration lithium batteries is not a working solution for long winter periods with low wind production and the sun is only up for a max few hours per day. Nuclear can also be much cheaper depending on where it is built and how it is financed.
EDF has published a paper stating they can scale 80% down and then up again, every day, within 30min.
In practice, they have done something like 20% within an hour. It was early 2019, there was such a crazy wind that they had to reduce nuclear production also (after already reducing coal, gas etc. to the min).
I think what they really can do is somewhere in between.
Cost factor isn't as relevant as you think, as this is an apple's to oranges comparison.
Renewables are too unreliable to act as baseline generation for a country.
In the UK last year for example we had very little wind, so we had to ramp up our gas power output to make up for our shortages in renewables. We burned through much of our gas reserves before the Ukraine war started, because of Renewable power unreliability.
Fission is the replacement for that baseline role that hydrocarbons currently fill, not the unpredictable-but-clean role that renewables fill.
The ideal future has both, with renewables producing as much power as possible and fission running on low capacity and ready to ramp up when renewables fall short.
Just repeating the baseline myth does not make it true. Nuclear does not compete with gas it competes with coal and renewables. It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers.
Moreover nuclear is not the beacon of reliability, Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly). Guess who was picking up the shortfall... German renewables and gas.
Finally, cost is absolutely the main measure: if the cost of nuclear is 3x wind/solar (and the cost of solar is falling exponentially) and you want to replace fossil fuels as quickly as possible the obvious way is to build renewables, you can overbuild 300% at the same cost. At that point you're close to being able to run your grid if you are sufficiently geographically distributed (even without batteries). Moreover in 10 years when your nuclear plant is finished building the price differential is like >5x due to the cost decreases.
> So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers.
One thing I don't understand here is the problem with overproduction. If we actually have excess electricity (as in not needed as electricity later) can't we dynamically use that for active carbon capturing? The efficiency of that process isn't even that important then as the main goal is to remove carbon from the atmosphere with carbon free energy.
Having carbon free overproduction sounds like a good thing to me. It's the occasional underproduction that's hard to handle.
Calling it a myth doesn’t make it a myth. Power companies have been saying exactly this for years: they need PLANNABLE power generation. Building 3x solar or wind plants means 3x volatility.
> Building 3x renewables in widely distributed places radically reduces volatility.
Is that actually true? Serious question. That sounds like a claim that seems so obvious, but won't hold up to the degree you might think in reality. Just one scenario I'm thinking of are giant storms that have clouds spanning multiple countries. And in that storm scenario even wind power shuts down to prevent damage.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2015.12.318 has tried to analyze this for the EU. I'm not convinced that daily data provides the necessary granularity though, but more detailed data for the mentioned time span probably doesn't exist. I would try to find some more articles and check if there is a consensus.
Is storage really transportable ? Like how much energy in any form could you realistically transport for any meaningful distance without using too much of the energy that you are transporting ? Since you made the claim I'd like you to paint any kind of realistic scenario.
Hydrocarbons, especially medium-chain liquid hydrocarbons, can easily and safely be transported 10_000 kilometres and further.
Doing exactly that is presently about a quarter of total global international trade by value.
Their advantages of high energy density, safety, and undemanding environmental and handling requirements (distribution can be performed in temperatures from -40 to +40 celsius by almost untrained teenagers), and effectively unlimited storage duration and volume, far outweigh the energy inefficiency of producing them from atmospheric carbon. Especially once PV gets cheap enough.
Edit: I notice I didn't answer your question. For liquid hydrocarbons, I believe the answer is in the single digit percents, perhaps five percent. For LNG, the energy cost is much higher, perhaps as much as a third of the total energy value.
TFA is entirely about synthesizing transportable hydrocarbon energy storage.
But making methane is inferior to making ammonia, because extracting the diffuse carbon you need from air takes up energy. It does not displace any more CO2 emission, because somebody will burn it and dump the CO2 back into the atmosphere again.
So, the only reason to make hydrocarbons is for things like your chainsaw or A320 that are not worth replacing immediately.
High voltage DC lines are quite practical over 1000 kilometers and more - Germany already operates an 1.4GW line to Norway, using the Norwegian grid as a storage for electricity.
There will be a very great deal of ammonia synthesis, worldwide, just because ammonia is so useful for so many things, ultimately billions of tons annually. Ammonia is very transportable.
Even liquified hydrogen is about as transportable as LNG, which is shipped all over.
It reduces volatility, it doesn't eliminate it. There will still be days when the sun and wind aren't out in a large enough fraction of places that there will be a shortage. It is less likely, but it will still happen. Factories can't just shut down, people can't just choose not to charge their cars or boil their kettles if there's a shortage.
When generation flags and local storage looks likely to be depleted, utilities will order a shipment of ammonia from any of numerous solar farms in the tropics.
Most of the time a utility will prefer cheaper local generation, local storage, or transmission-line power before spending on shipped-in synthetic fuel.
You’re not listening. They are literally calling for plannable power. I don’t think they’re stupid people either. You cover the base consumption using plannable sources, then use gas/hydro turbines for short term variation. The problem now is that when the wind/solar vary, you can only compensate so much with stored hydro before you empty the reservoir. Then electricity becomes expensive because you burn gas etc, or buy from elsewhere - which is EXACTLY what has happened.
When solar is 1/8th the price of current fission projects for the same net capacity and falling by double digit percentage per year you have a hell of a lot of money left over for moving the energy around.
Fission is around $10/watt with a mostly-plannable capacity factor of 60-80%. Fission is a cakewalk compared to fusion.
Solar is around $0.5/watt with a capacity factor of around 25% and falling rapidly.
The operating and capital costs of a gas plant are around the same with a plannable capacity factor in the high 90s.
So by spending $6 on solar, and $2 on a gas plant. You have $7/watt left over to figure out how to turn free electricity into hydrogen or methane at 50% efficiency and store it for a year.
We already have electrolyzers that work for $0.5 to $1.5 watt at around 50% efficiency.
Hydrogen storage is hard, but that left over $5 per 4kWh/yr should take care of it. If it doesn't, sabatier rractors are getting cheaper too.
The only thing we have to do for people to start using them is stop the coal and gas subsidies.
This is also just one of many options. Salt cavern CAES is similarly viable
So then according to your analysis there is no problem with solar/wind, and the power companies are basically lying when they say they need plannable power.
Meanwhile people are resorting to paying with their savings to pay the 10-fold increase in their power bills.
> It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources.
I'd just like to point out that the US Navy has an excellent track record running nuclear reactors that ramp up to full and down to zero rapidly, in submarines.
The US Navy does not have quite the same financial constraints as commercial land-based power, but constraints still exist.
I fully agree that solar PV and wind, especially PV, are much more atttractive to investors because you can be earning cashflow from your first MW of capacity while you're installing the second (which takes weeks (or days!) instead of years), and you can iterate and scale this all the way to 10 TW or more of capacity, as the demand requires.
> Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly).
It's important to use the real deal-breaking flaws when pointing these things out. The relevant figure is availability because capacity also includes energy that could be produced but was not due to having nowhere to put it.
Availability is 70-80% in France and UK and 80-90% in the US.
But due to the long timeline of refuelling cycles you still need a full baseload backup. So nuclear needs long term storage or other uncorrelated backup more than renewables if anything.
The upside is it's easy to have two uncorrelated nuclear plants, so overprovisioning by 30% is sufficient.
That makes something that is already more expensive than solar with the same overprovisioned net capacity factor, and a green hydrogen plant with capacity sufficient to cover, and full gas backup infrastructure even more expensive though. Probably not enough to cover the costs of hydrogen storage yet or someone would be doing it (ignoring massive nuclear subsidies), but prices of batteries, solar panels, and electrolyzers are dropping rapidly. Hydrogen storage or green methane production only needs to become marginally cheaper to make it start happening even sans subsidies.
> Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait.
This is a fallacy in two ways:
1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale.
2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both.
> > Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait.
> This is a fallacy in two ways:
> 1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale.
More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...). The opportunity for reducing cost through economies of scales is low. Economies of scales work for things build in factories, much less so for construction projects. That is true in general, not just for power plants.
> 2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both.
Why? It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost, because we can replace fossil fuels much faster building up renewables.
> It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost
That's under the assumption the available money, hardware and labor of ramping up solar and building nuclear plants directly competes with each other. That's a pretty strong assumption and I highly doubt there is a strong enough link between any of those three for your argument to have significant impact.
E.g. We should be able to drive rapid solar expansion with government money and subsidies while incentivcing big energy carriers to build nuclear plants.
That's a non-answer to my comment. Limited funding and a available money is the same thing. The point is the funding isn't so limited that we couldn't do both as we run in other bottlenecks.
Combined cycle gas plants are cheap because 2/3rds of the power output is from the combustion turbine, which needs no heat exchangers. The steam bottoming part needs two: the boiler running off the exhaust from the combustion turbine, and the condenser to transfer heat to the environment.
> Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling).
Do you count in all the subsidies the renewables get from governments, including the production of the solar panels/wind mills, land ownership, utilities and all kinds of tax cuts and preferential treatment? In my country billionaires own massive solar farms and make tons of money at the expense of everyone else.
Generally speaking the costs in those comparisons are usually without subsidies. However some subsidies are difficult to disentangle from the costs. For instance it’s difficult for nuclear power plants to get insurance, so often states take that responsibility.
> 2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait
You've been saying that for last 20 years. It's pathetic by this point.
Best time to start doing things (anything) was 30 years ago. Second best time is now
> Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable.
Doesn't make it cheaper, only hides the cost. Subsidies are many times perversive. Prices are communicating something. When Gov messes with it, people and organizations tend to make bad decisions for themselves, society, environment or everything.
The UK government system is more nuanced than that. The operator bids for a strike price and communicate something with the bid they offer. That price is then locked in. We will never pay less than that, but we will never pay more either. In successive rounds the strike price is lower. They are setting the price up front to give stability. And that makes sense when most of the cost is upfront. Otherwise renewable prices would just track oil prices.
Unfortunately, this is very wrong! Why does it have to be a sudden sound? The effect the article describes is the same as eg thunder, except an aircraft is continuously moving and emitting sound. The aircraft in the article is not heading directly towards the observer. It simply takes time for the sound produced at a given moment to reach the observer, but the light from the aircraft travels much faster, which is why the lag is observed. It is not ‘sound attenuation’ or ‘hearing threshold’.
> "Why does it have to be a sudden sound? The effect the article describes is the same as eg thunder"
Well yeah, that's a sudden sound. My point precisely.
So why don't you hear from your observation point the airplane (or all airplanes for that matter) as it takes off, which is when it makes its first noise? And by all means, account for a few ms of light movement if that makes you happy.
> Well yeah, that's a sudden sound. My point precisely.
But you are saying that isn’t like an aircraft - why?
> So why don't you hear from your observation point the airplane (or all airplanes for that matter) as it takes off, which is when it makes its first noise? And by all means, account for a few ms of light movement if that makes you happy.
That is attenuation! The aircraft is far enough away that all the energy from the sound is absorbed by the air and objects between observer and aircraft. Attenuation does not affect the speed the sound travels. But when the aircraft is closer to you, the attenuation is lower so you can hear the sound.
Because an aircraft does not make a sudden noise? At least where I'm from aircraft don't sound like discrete booms. I'm not sure I understand your question.
> But when the aircraft is closer to you, the attenuation is lower so you can hear the sound.
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