I dont know that justifies lending your labour to a very nasty enterprise

I see a lot of people arguing good people should not be on X I don't know why those arguments don't also apply to working at the Telegraph

is moving a city really easier than building a lot of desalination plants asap? there are Gulf countries with a lot of expertise here, the ability to use solar power is improving. Tehran has 15m people, Saudi Arabia has 35m and desal provides 1/2 its water.

I guess it also does not solve the UK problem that wind generation is geographically distant from consumption, which unless transmission if fixed might we we want grid scale storage nearer the site of generation?

of course it remains to be seen if this business will flourish or go bust, but the reduction in upfront costs they are offering, compared to buying a (smaller) powerwall, according to that article, looks like a big deal. But maybe it needs Texas sunshine

could a similar initiative see the cops respond more effectively to "my phone/laptop has been stolen and find my device shows it's in this house"?

I have bad news about cognitive performance in your 50s 😧

Geneva convention on sport and recreation for prisoners of war:

ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treat...

yes I suppose you need to offset whatever return premium private actors demand. Whole point of PFI was that under traditional public procurement, private contractors have an incentive to cut all the corners they can get away with, PFI was supposed to change their incentives.

there are also complicated questions about whether the government ought to act as if it's risk neutral or whether it ought to build a risk premium into its calculations

I wonder the extent to which "sympathetic to Palestinians" is "Islamo" in these guys minds

but looking at investments as one-off cases isn't the whole picture, you also need to think about how much you can get done overall under different choices, and that gets very complicated if you think that PFI causes some public capabilities to atrophy and others to strengthen

if you wanted to construct a more sustainable case with the private sector getting what it regards as a worthwhile deal (earning some risk premium) my guess is you'd probably need to also include some productivity improvement under the private route to still come out as preferable to public finance

the general point is that if higher nominal financing costs reflect genuine risk taking, and those risks would be born by the public under the alternative choice, then the public might still be getting good value, and "government debt is cheaper" is misleading.

here is an example of what I presume was a incompetent public sector being outperformed by private (and saving lives) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I don't know - there is an argument that the less competent the government gets, it gets worse at both doing things itself and at designing and overseeing contracts with the private sector (who will certainly take you for a ride, if it can)

this podcast transcript with one of the authors of that might be of interest:

blogs.worldbank.org/en/ppps/when...