Cost of living crisis/kWh Measuring Contest

Good article:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/18/cost-of-living-crisis-big-business-economy-prices-wages

Well, yeah, but the point is that they arent treated as such. To benefit consumers, companies flog workers to death which is one of the reasons we are in this mess.

Your company reduces your hours to protect the cost of THEIR widget, it affects their workers ability to buy other widgets. Its a shitty capitalist death spiral.

Yeah this is exactly what pissed me off about the article, might as well have been from the mirror.

In fairness it's not actually a Guardian article just an opinion piece published on their website. 

Yeah anything in "comment is free" isn't going through an editorial desk in the same way so it'll only have light touch editing for liable and stuff and not be attempting to match the Guardian style guides.

Though most the time Monbiot can also get in the sea for being a sanctimonious fuckwit. He's got a massive blind spot for other people not being middle class.

Define middle class!!!

The Guardian has long been basically Left Wing Fox News, going into Helen Lovejoy histrionics about pretty much everything. They might as well just add a new byline of “WE ARE ALL GOING TO SUFFER AND DIE”

I don't really give a shit either way about the Guardian (or any other newspaper, frankly), but it's worth noting again that the piece concerned is in the Opinion section and is not part of an editorial stance.

Somewhere between "fat cats are using the current situation to engage in merciless price gouging" and "small businesses are struggling to survive in the current conditions" (both of which are undoubtedly true) is probably a reasonable middle ground. Course, the reasons why the price of fuel, groceries etc are rising makes little difference to the family living on the poverty line.

That image is terrible.
Tiny amount of chips AND mushy peas.
FFS.

I meant more that they basically stoke fear as a means to keep engagement, rather than actively mislabeling their stuff. Though they also have a shortcut to that in their “analysis” pieces that tend to be fairly awful clickbaity stuff where the title is a question that usually just has “no” as the answer.

Their Covid coverage for instance has been absolutely awful. Some of their reporting has been so divorced from reality I wondered if it had some sort of deal with The Onion.

No he didn't mention money at all was my problem. It was very "why don't students pick to do the finer things", without mentioning money. When the obvious reason they get jobs at banks or do courses they think will get em money is because they don't come from money. This didn't seem to have occurred to him. It's just a case of check your privilege mate.

Sort of like whenever they (journalists generally) have someone going on about people eating ready meals and not buying all nice organic food at the farmer's market to live healthily. Doesn't occur to them other people's life don't work that way.

With student debt you just have to think of it as a graduate tax. The vast majority will never pay it back and it doesn't seem worth it for people to try to clear the debt. Anything anyone overpays on student debt seems to be wasted money.

As for the article I posted earlier, on reflection it may seem hyperbolic in places, but the sentiment is right, especially as it focuses on certain sectors rather than business as a whole.

It mentions specifically, property investment which I think we can all agree that property prices and rents are out of control, outstripping many peoples ability to actually pay for a home or being trapped in the rentier economy.

It mentions the petrochemical companies, which seem to have just applied a percentage calculation to profit on rising oil and gas prices. So they are raking it in. Not only passing on costs to consumers, but also increasing their profit margin as a percentage. The CEO of BP (or was it Shell?) boasting that their company was basically a cash printing machine is particularly callous considering bill rises for people.

The article was certainly not a 'fuck business' article, rather targeting a certain type of business that seems content with making ever more profit out a crisis.

The simple fact is, to help with the situation, the treasury could cap their tax take on certain products (petrol for example, the treasury could say we are taking this percentage of tax or an upper limit, at the moment, the treasury are raking it in thanks to increasing prices).

Companies as well, at least those providing vital services, such as water, energy etc, could limit the profits they make. Rather than passing on the rises to consumers, limit their profits to a certain level, rather than taking the same profit margin percentage. Just as a recognition that eventually, this is going to hit the entire economy hard and send into recession.

Anyway, there are certainly no simple solutions and I doubt a three word slogan assault is going to solve it.

This happened too:

www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/30/shell-and-bp-paid-zero-tax-on-north-sea-gas-and-oil-for-three-years

In short, BP and Shell have paid no tax on operations in the north sea, been the recipient of tax reliefs and paid shareholders £44bn in dividends over the last three years.

Still, we are serious about the biggest existential crisis facing the planet right?

Just had a look at available energy tariffs to see if it's worth a last-minute switch.

40 fucking pence for a unit of electricity?! I thought the 25p that I got in Jan was bad, but this is going to get seriously ugly!

We haven't even had the April cap increase yet.