Prices of the electricity we use to charge

Ghost1951

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You can read it. Open the link in incognito, or private mode and you can read two articles. Close the browser and you can read another two by reopening another private browser window. A bit painful, but maybe worth it, as a counterbalance to the communist propaganda often posted here - not to mention the sleazy pictures posted here too.

If I have made more work for the moderator Helen, in my attempt to provide some balance to the 'Give me money you took from hard working and innovative people,' message blagged about the thread by others, I apologise to her for the trouble.
 
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Woosh

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Ghost1951

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Ghost1951

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About time too. The mid caps invest here, not Australian miners, Chinese EVs, American NASDAQ.
I think this is what is known as a non sequitur.

I have no idea what it means or how it relates to anything said above.
 

Ghost1951

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Surprising how easily Boeing has managed to slide out of accountability for the lethal quality issues it is responsible for. The aero manufacturing and travel industry worked hard to increase safety when it had a terrible accident record in the 1940s and 1950s and did that by taking every engineering and safety related issue seriously. Lately, Boeing has had a series of catastrophes and has hidden production safety flaws, and for the most part has been allowed to continue pretty much unpunished by the FAA.

I wouldn't get on one of their planes these days.


Live at time of posting. Flights over Eastern Atlantic, UK and near Europe @ 0920 Monday. About half of these are Boeing planes.

58643
 
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Ghost1951

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Has the UK been suckered into destroying its capacity to make virgin steel from iron ore by a foolish devotion to the green agenda?

I know of no way to make virgin steel without significant carbon emissions. If you do know how to make NEW steel from iron ore without adding a lot of carbon, please do tell how. I think it is a matter of chemistry and not idiology.

High quality and speciality steels needed by an advanced economy can not be made from recycled scrap steel. Steels needed by many of our industries will have to be imported from China and elsewhere.

This article asserts that the UK is the first advanced economy to abandon its ability to make steel from scrap.

.
 
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Woosh

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I think this is what is known as a non sequitur.

I have no idea
I think this is what is known as a non sequitur.

I have no idea what it means or how it relates to anything said above.
That was a reply to lenny. Last Friday, the FTSE250 jumped 1.5%
We have about £100bn in cash ISAs. This money isn't productive. It was suggested that Labour should change the rules on ISAs to force the momey be invested in a more productive market.
LSE is big, second only to the NSE. It manages a lot of assets but those are mainly in rest of the world. invested in big sectors like virtual currencies, mining, social networking, banking and electronics. It does not generate much new jobs for the UK. The mid caps where the market caps are less than £10bn are prominently uk base, such as housebuilding, supermarkets, renewables, generators, software engineering, aeronautics, boat building etc I am pretty sure Labour would look to stimulate those sectors that provide more employment here than just profits.
I invest mainly in medium caps.
 
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Woosh

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Has the UK been suckered into destroying its capacity to make virgin steel from iron ore by a foolish devotion to the green agenda?
No.
I know of no way to make virgin steel without significant carbon emissions. If you do know how to make NEW steel from iron ore without adding a lot of carbon, please do tell how. I think it is a matter of chemistry and not idiology.
you can always make steel with different chemistries but it's not the point. Tata is making a loss at Port Talbot so it has zero interest to continue to operate the blast furnaces. It is motivated to either modernise or close down. Our conservative governments did not like to subsidise industry just to protect jobs. Labour government may do things differently.
High quality and speciality steels needed by an advanced economy can not be made from recycled scrap steel. Steels needed by many of our industries will have to be imported from China and elsewhere.
not true. You can make things in different ways but making things competitively is much harder, usually requiring bigger investment. That's why I made the point about as a country, we need to invest our savings more in industries and less in properties.
 
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Ghost1951

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That was a reply to lenny. Last Friday, the FTSE250 jumped 1.5%
We have about £100bn in cash ISAs. This money isn't productive. It was suggested that Labour should change the rules on ISAs to force the momey be invested in a more productive market.
LSE is big, second only to the NSE. It manages a lot of assets but those are mainly in rest of the world. invested in big sectors like virtual currencies, mining, social networking, banking and electronics. It does not generate much new jobs for the UK. The mid caps where the market caps are less than £10bn are prominently uk base, such as housebuilding, supermarkets, renewables, generators, software engineering, aeronautics, boat building etc I am pretty sure Labour would look to stimulate those sectors that provide more employment here than just profits.
I invest mainly in medium caps.
Thank you for the clarification.
 

saneagle

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That was a reply to lenny. Last Friday, the FTSE250 jumped 1.5%
We have about £100bn in cash ISAs. This money isn't productive. It was suggested that Labour should change the rules on ISAs to force the momey be invested in a more productive market.
LSE is big, second only to the NSE. It manages a lot of assets but those are mainly in rest of the world. invested in big sectors like virtual currencies, mining, social networking, banking and electronics. It does not generate much new jobs for the UK. The mid caps where the market caps are less than £10bn are prominently uk base, such as housebuilding, supermarkets, renewables, generators, software engineering, aeronautics, boat building etc I am pretty sure Labour would look to stimulate those sectors that provide more employment here than just profits.
I invest mainly in medium caps.
The problem is not where they invest, it's how much they take out of the fund for themselves. I ran two ISAs at the same time over about 8 years. One was in the RBS managed fund. It lost about £500 in that time. The other was in a self-managed equities ISA, which tripled in value even though i had no experience, skills or knowledge about equities. They both invested in mainly FTSE100 companies.

Lesson learned: Never let "experts" manage your money. They have the expertise to manage it from your account to theirs.
 
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Ghost1951

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No.

you can always make steel with different chemistries but it's not the point. Tata is making a loss at Port Talbot so it has zero interest to continue to operate the blast furnaces. It is motivated to either modernise or close down. Our conservative governments did not like to subsidise industry just to protect jobs. Labour government may do things differently.

not true. You can make things in different ways but making things competitively is much harder, usually requiring bigger investment. That's why I made the point about as a country, we need to invest our savings more in industries and less in properties.
I agree with the last point. We do need to invest more in industry. A HUGE amount more. And government should lead that process.

I have never seen any technical discussion which says you can make high quality, steel for technical applications from scrap. Scrap steel is contaminated by a variety of metallic and other matter which when melted in an arc furnace makes it useless for many kinds of steel that a developed industry needs. If you just want to make tin cans, buckets, and rebar for concrete reinforcement, scrap is fine.

Iron ore is of a variety of sorts, but it is all highly reacted with oxygen. It is essentially one form of rust or another. To make iron and steel, the oxygen has to be extracted by heating with carbon from coal in a blast furnace. This reconstitutes the iron in into the form we all use and also produces a lot of co2. The UK started this process and developed it in the Industrial Revolution. We were not the only ones though.

If the UK abandons entirely its ability to smelt iron ore and make virgin steel, we will be the only major country to have done so and we will be entirely at the mercy of long supply chains. I can't see our strategic rivals ever doing that. Russia? China? I think they know that their power depends on the ability to make every kind of steel on their own turf.

In any case, abandoning our virgin steel making capacity won't reduce co2 globally will it? We will just have to buy high quality steel from our rivals who will probably make even dirtier steel than we would have, and we can concentrate on patting ourselves on the back and making steel for steel for tin cans and other crap. I expect in the coming days to hear Ed Miliband championing this plan, like i heard various Conservative know-nothings doing it before.
 
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Ghost1951

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Woosh said:
That's why I made the point about as a country, we need to invest our savings more in industries and less in properties.
Yes, I agree with that.

A few days ago I applauded Starmer's drive to build millions of houses. It seems that already they are talking about cutting the power of local government planners to stop development. It isn't just a block on housing; it also afflicts green power development in terms of grid infrastructure. There are big wind farm developments in Scotland and probably elsewhere that are moth balled because there is no transmission line capacity to carry the power to where it is needed. There is a huge bottleneck in Northumberland for one case. Wind farm operators are paid to leave their turbines with the brakes on.

I would want to see a massive house building strategy that is NOT controlled by the house builders. They want only to build expensive homes at maximum profit. The country NEEDS a lot of decent cheap housing and a lot of it should be for rental and not susceptible to the right to buy. That act needs to be repealed. It simply takes publicly funded housing and sends it into the private sector.
 
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danielrlee

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Gary Stevenson, also known as Gary the Economist, is a British economist and former interest rate trader who gained recognition for predicting the 2008 financial crisis. He is known for his analysis of wealth inequality and advocates for policies to address economic disparities.

If you haven't come across this individual, I recommend you check him out.

 

lenny

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May 3, 2023
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"Industry body RenewableUK’s chief executive Dan McGrail said: “Lifting the onshore wind ban in England was long overdue and we’re delighted that Labour has made this one of its first priorities in office.

He said public support for onshore wind was “sky-high”, with 78% in favour of the technology in official polling."

 

lenny

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Peter.Bridge

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I have never seen any technical discussion which says you can make high quality, steel for technical applications from scrap.
From your link

However, electric arc furnaces are currently estimated to be able to produce about 90% of the grades of steel a blast furnace can. Scientists are working on ways to improve the quality of recycled steel, and the addition of an iron source, such as direct reduced iron, should allow the UK to produce the highest qualities of steel for demanding applications. As such, there are questions over whether steel needs to be produced from scratch in the first place.
 
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