Do you mean regarding electrics? Bulb or Octopus, can’t remember which said something akin to: for every 1X of energy we pay to the energy company 5X.
Even doubling, they’re probably still not running much of a profit. I’m still a believer that the government should have bailed out the energy firms, launched a bond to fund cheaper energy sources in the medium term and just added to the national debt to keep prices stable for the consumer now.
Was referring to the company I buy my pet food from actually!
It’s going up in price by about £2 per KG. A 10KG bag of dog food now costs £92.They were very forthcoming about why, and the markup, the other options that didn’t align with their values like cheaper, lower quality manufacturing and ingredients, shrinkflation, etc.
I’m actually glad they chose to increase prices instead of the alternative, because if/when price becomes an issue that I don’t think the quality is worth it, I can just go elsewhere.
The same thing is happening with grocery store products too, it’s just not as noticeable at individual level, and the changes are sneaky. I switched back to Andrex quilted recently for my toilet roll, whilst it’s still nice, it’s now 3 ply rather than 4ply. Most bottled water and soft drinks are up 10-20p per litre, that’s one I have noticed. The three cheese bloomer I like from Co op is 40g lighter and 20p more expensive. The other items I buy I’ve not noticed individually, and I should be tracking them, but I’m spending substantially more on my shopping this year, and I buy exactly the same things I always have.
The energy market volatility is rippling, and I fear the economy is in turmoil. Even with energy prices ballooning, they’re still not going to be turning a profit, though the big ones are certainly profiting more elsewhere, and people can’t afford their bills. It’s quite the tragic dilemma. Pretty much agree with you though. The energy market is the sort of thing that would actually benefit from nationalisation. We don’t need for profit companies running the show. Whoever we pay for the service, it’s the same supply.
That is quite an increase.
Shrinkage should be considered bad consumer practice. It’s as bad as bait and switching imo. (Which is unlawful under the consumer protection act).
Like, they’re very quick to advertise a “new, bigger size” but always very quiet when the price goes up and the size down.
Hard agree. We could even renationalise British Petroleum and turn it into The British Energy Company, with a focus on transitioning to low-carbon solutions like nuclear (Thorium is great) as well as renewables.
It’s blatant abuse of taxpayers not to invest in our futures now. My concern is that parliamentary terms are only 5 years long, so our democracy only incentivises politicians to generate short-term returns and to engage in reactionary politics, instead of doing right by the public’s purse.
Shrinkage is an accounting term for when stock goes missing without being accounted for - normally it’s a byword for theft but also covers incidents of misreporting stock levels and stock believed to be in inventory which never actually was.
Do you mean shrinkflation?
I’d go further and say what’s actually needed is an authority responsible for planning the provision of energy on a rolling 25-year basis, with responsibility for setting pricing and shifting to more sustainable forms of energy.
The fact that the vast majority of heating installations, including those in totallly new homes, are still entirely dependent on a finite natural resource which we are unable to produce or even store in the volumes we need to meet demand is a national disgrace. Leave alone the fact that 40% of our electricity is derived from that exact same finite resource.
The trouble is no government will think more than 1 election cycle ahead - which is why it needs to be an external independent body like the Bank of England is, with the power to set pricing and provide stimulus for shifts to where we need to be going, and to not do kneejerk maneovers to save face like “cutting the green crap” as David Cameron so delicately put it.
What’s the point of nationalising a ginormous corporation and then doing something almost entirely different from that massively profitable thing that gives the corporation its massive value? Surely better to just start afresh and leave all the morally bankrupt stuff to the private sector?
Yes, I mean the act of shrinking the size of your products by a small amount over time so consumers don’t notice it
Nationalise what was originally a national company and use it to usher in the green industrial and technological revolution.
Also, there’s a certain amount of pride to owning the companies that form the British namestake, imo
BP has a market capitalisation of ~£70bn.
That is a hell of a lot to pay to for goodwill relating to one of the most tarnished household brands ever, especially if you’re going to bin off essentially everything about the company that currently makes money.
Better to leave the past in the past.
70bn is a drop in the water or spending /shrug we have 2T in debt
Also, we gained money from the sale of it to begin with, didn’t we?
£70bn is a phenomenal amount of money - that’s 3 nuclear power stations worth of investment, or hundreds of thousands of heat exchangers. It’s 70% of the budget for HS2! By your logic the government should do literally everything because it’s likely to be a tiny amount in terms of the overall debt. Those tiny amounts add up - there are limited opportunities ultimately.
The money we realised from BP and our North Sea oil money is all gone as you well know, hence the debt figure you quoted.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about nationalisation of monopolised services - I just don’t see the benefit of nationalising a company which happens to have the word ‘British’ in its (no longer used) full title.
We can knock out a power station for <1bn USD. Thorium Reactors.
HS2 100% should not cost as much as it does, but our law gives the mentally deranged the ability to dig tunnels on-site and we shut it for safety - adding millions to our costs. we should lock them up until HS2 is complete.
no, they should run services where competition isn’t required. fuel should be provided at cost and we should use our own reserves. they should also run OpenReach and force Virgin to hand over their cabling. Anything that is a fundamental requirement for the state to function and nearly universally used by people, should not have private enterprise siphoning money in profits.
It’s all gone because we won’t use it. We have more reserves.
See, now this I don’t agree with. The infrastructure involved here can vary wildly. Maybe it’s because OR was so monopolistic for so long, but there’s a lot of very good competition and competing backhaul providers that are driving us forward after being stagnant for many years.
I could perhaps see an argument for nationalising the backhaul specifically whilst letting others build services and last mile infrastructure on top. There’s good competition here, and unlike electricity, it’s not all the same. The hardware, the paths, node capacity, available bandwidth etc, can all vary wildly. I pay a (not so much anymore) small premium for a much better quality of service from a much smaller ISP. Something BT would never be able to match, nationalised or not. (Edit: it’s not that they wouldn’t be able, but there’s no incentive to, and even less so if it’s nationalised)
But I don’t trust the current government not to turn the whole thing into a surveillance tool. And even if I could, we may not be able to trust future ones, so I’d rather not see nationalisation here. These are the same politicians running propaganda against E2E encryption in our country whilst at the same time proclaiming how important a tool it is against Russia.
https://mobile.twitter.com/kkomaitis/status/1500783964251996162
A lot to unpack here.
You mention you pay, a smaller ISP than BT for a better service. They’re not all over the UK though. As I mentioned, WILDLY different services available to different parts of the country. It’s not fair.
It’s not possible lol, encryption prevents all of this
our politicans are braindead and the second they ban E2E encryption is the second we should overthrow HMG
They are!
Like a lot of ISPs, they run off the major back haul providers (BT, TalkTalk, etc). I’ve spoken about them widely on these forums on the past. Here are some of the reasons why they’re better than BT, despite essentially using the same infrastructure.
https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/why-choose-aaisp/
It’s not exhaustive. Once you exit the back haul network, there are a lot of other factors involved. Different hardware, peering agreements, among other things. It’s a vastly different level of service.
Encryption only obscures half the picture though; the content. The context, the meta data, is largely visible. This assumes their efforts to weaken or eradicate encryption fails too of course, and they’ve been trying for over a decade now! A lot of us are getting tired of fighting against it. Though their new campaign appears to have a lit a spark, and folks mobilised to form a good response. But they’ll try again, I’ve no doubt, and the views of the opposition aren’t any better either.
We know what exists in China and I think it’s fair to be concerned that the same sort of system could be implemented here too.
The roots of this run pretty deep in the Conservative party. I’ve been involved in every such discussion since 2010, and every campaign against every proposal. All her predecessors shared the same view, as, I suspect, will those who succeed her. It’s not about banning encryption at the end of it. It comes back to privacy, and power. It always does. Encryption for the powerful only.
And I get you, it’s a pretty silly narrative, because it’s just math, and you can’t ban math. Encryption will therefore always exist for those who want it. Namely the terrorists and pedophiles they claim they’re trying to protect us from.
My inner conspiracy theorist can’t help but wonder. When did charities suddenly gain so much influence on a topic they have little understanding of, or perhaps more pressingly, how? Because they’re the driving force behind these recent efforts. Even Apple cowed the very same charities behind our government’s #noplacetohide campaign.
It would have been a pretty compelling campaign when compared to the ones that have come before, if not for things like this:
Inevitably, smart people have fought back – with one buying up an unclaimed domain name similar to the official No Place To Hide site and pointing those at informative material explaining the benefits of E2EE. Thus noplacetohide.uk goes to ex-Facebook chap Alec Muffett’s blog post titled “There are more and better ways to help kids, without destroying the future of internet privacy”.
We’re way beyond the scope of energy prices at this point though! Is there a discussion on end to end encryption where we could continue this sort of discourse?
Just to add my support for AAISP. I’ve been with them since I moved from dial-up to ADSL back in 1999. My home network is all IPv6 and ‘real’ internet-routable IPv4 addresses. None of this NAT nonsense 
They give me a real internet connection - complete, unfettered access to the whole of the internet. They let me decide what I can and cannot (or don’t want to) see on the internet.
I wouldn’t go with anybody else.
Well, that’s true; it’s hard to obscure the metadata because without access to it, the system can’t really route it. But I guess we could do this by using obfuscation services like VPNs and proxies; these are pretty easy for the average consumer to setup (on platforms like DO) or to rent from a good provider (like Proton or Mullvad).
What’s yet worse is the Pirate Party UK has been disbanded now so there’s not really a single privacy advocate party here.
I am in theory able to run for a seat on behalf of the Tory’s :') do you think they’d take my whip away if I voted against weakening encryption laws?
This is what I don’t get with their argument - we can actually build some rudimentary protection measures onto devices without compromising privacy. For example, iOS/Android is 100% able to be trained to identify naked images of children and this could be made available through an API to match against (on-device.) this could then automatically notify a parent through the parental controls and family sharing arrangements.
We can’t really do much more than systems like this without a lot more at stake.
As for terrorism, they’ll just go to WhatsApp, to Threema, to iMessage, all of these things that can’t do this lol
Unfortunately people are not as understanding of reality as you or I are, they like to believe there’s a fix for this without being able to comprehend (or they don’t care) about the consequences of these actions.
Personally, I believe Britain needs to foster privacy, innovation etc to flourish as we once did. This includes embracing technology that could potentially give us more privacy (like crypto etc).
Lmao, I should read these things before I write a response. You are right that we’re totally out of scope now haha. There very well was on FTT but I don’t think there’s a discussion on FTF about this: just @ me if you’d like to make one there (or don’t, I’m sure I’d find it anyways).
BBC News - Energy websites crash in meter readings rush
Should I be panicking? 
Glad I’m on smart meters, don’t have to worry about what’s in that article.
Currently with British Gas on a new homebuyers tariff that they put me on in June last year, so that deal will be coming to an end in two months time. It won’t be even worth looking at moving to another supplier, I’ll just go on to their standard OFGEM capped tariff.
I also pay by monthly variable direct debit, so I’m only ever paying for the actual energy I use each month. I’ve done this since November 2019 when I first went on to smart meters at my previous home, and now of course in my new home which had smart meters installed at build. I find this payment method far better than the previous quarterly or six monthly billing cycles of old. This way, I never build up credit in the summer months when I’m using far less energy. That might fit ok for some, but then I’ve heard of too many stories of folks who end up with horrendous hikes in their monthly direct debits, or who build up a huge credit and then complain like billy’o when their energy company goes bust and it takes months to get their credit back.
So, two months left of reasonably cheap energy, and then I guess it will be doing everything we can to reduce our energy use. Electricity will be the main issue as the heating will be off anyway. I’m really thankful it’s only me and the Wife and the cat in a very well insulated and energy efficient new home. I have absoluely no idea how four/five or six person families are going to cope.
The main choice you’ll have will be whether to take the fix BG offer you or not, most likely.
Pre-Ukraine conflict they were worth looking at, as they were slightly beneath what the October cap was forecast to be (at that point, obviously way lower than that now).
Lord alone knows what’s going to happen in October though, frankly. If the price goes much higher than where it is now I’d hope there will be some sort of further state intervention.