Oddbean new post about login | logout Good point. What's going on there? Is Britain doomed?
Don't forget Russian oligarchs!
There were like 100 yids like that in the UK. Doesn't explain 9K
Very high taxation (incl inheritance tax), very high costs (esp housing), very high unskilled/ refugee immigration, very little productive industry outside of intl finance and incredibly low wage growth.
The "Saudi Arabia of coal" moved up the value chain into steel, ship-building and organised violence, and then closed down the mines. Oops.
The US is the Saudi Arabia of coal and gas.
Guyana is now the Saudi Arabia of oil.
Gotta move from Britain to South America, amigo
We may want to hold off just a little while. This might be like moving to oil rich Kuwait in the late 1980's. https://www.cato.org/blog/will-nicolas-maduro-invade-guyana
Britain by itself was a majority of world coal production by 1640, and remained that way for two and a half centuries. China now has the crown.
Cause there's no more decent grade coal there. They claim to have 40% of Europe's wind though. It oscillates between 10 and 25 TW though, and no way to store efficiently yet.
Truth, but they were still mining the bad stuff into my lifetime. The shutdown was politics. Wind will be interesting. Used to know an engineer who worked maintainence on offshore turbines. Awful job, but the pay was apparently epic. (It all went to his ex tho.) Lots of power, but only where you don't need it and when you don't need it. Grid scale storage isn't going to be worthwhile without new physics and new chem, but development of markets for responsive demand has promise.
Shutdown was cause it was cheaper to get coal shipped, or to use gas like all civilized world. Storage chemistry exists. Either ammonia or formic acid. Japan funded ammonia for ships, but adoption is very low so far. We're probably 50 years and 2 major wars away from it catching on. I think it will scale eventually unlike batteries. EU is big on fuel cells now.
Would be fine if they had a large share of those industries as well. From wiki (admittedly a poor source) not in the top 20 ship exporters, and 24th in steel production with a 3rd of the share they had in 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ship_exports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production
If you own a house, those don't matter much? High tax is if you work (income). No need to work if you're a millionaire. Can masturbate all day, gov can't tax semen.
Owning a 1br flat in London probably makes you a millionaire at this point. Doubt you can retire off that, but you can sell and move somewhere with lower housing and other costs of living. In fact, a large portion of these sales may be people retiring to another country where they can better utilise that capital/ protect their childrens inheritance.
Well, that's still not applicable for younger folks. For them, very few places accept poor migrants. And they can't copy millionaires. That's why the world is so lame these days. Gotta kill boomer kikes.