Green Building Bible, Fourth Edition |
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These two books are the perfect starting place to help you get to grips with one of the most vitally important aspects of our society - our homes and living environment. PLEASE NOTE: A download link for Volume 1 will be sent to you by email and Volume 2 will be sent to you by post as a book. |
Vanilla 1.0.3 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
Posted By: djh Yes I'm referring to my newbuild, but specifically to the cost of building to PH rather than building regs, (not the whole thing!) which I think is relevant.Personally i think that marginal extra you paid would fade into utter insignificance compared to the cost of retrofit.
Posted By: fostertomCorrect, so two things are happening - real wages will rise, after 45yrs of stasis or declineIn construction, there haven't been 45 years of stasis or decline. There have been periodic upswings in wages as the labour market tightens - like now - and downswings as the market contracted and thousands lost their jobs. And construction tends to suffer from the swings more than most sectors, as a lot of it is 'discretionary' spending. That's likely to continue to be the case.
Posted By: fostertomautomation, robotisation, mechanisation, call it what you will, will resume.It needs to, as it barely moved on from the invention of the JCB - productivity in construction has been more-or-less flat since at least 1970.
Posted By: fostertomJohnson's already changed the story to a high-wage economyI'll believe that when it turns from a story into a sustainable reality.
Posted By: fostertomdjh prefers retrofit to be paid for via elect bills, incl payments back to the needy, rather than via his taxes.
Posted By: gravelldPersonally i think that marginal extra you paid would fade into utter insignificance compared to the cost of retrofit.
Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of pounds is not the sort of cost most people can afford to fix a house that 99% of homeowners otherwise would view as perfectly fine.
Posted By: Mike1Sustainable high wage economies arise from high productivity, not labour shortagesTrue, but it sure helps to kickstart that if labour becomes scarce, as now. Not just the shortage, but bid-up wages, both get employers and investors thinking of robots once more, instead of being flooded with too-cheap-to-resist human robot-substitutes worldwide, as successive countries added their workforce into the world economy. Productivity has stagnated because labour's been so cheap, no incentive to invest so's to use less of it.
Posted By: fostertomProductivity has stagnated because labour's been so cheap, no incentive to invest so's to use less of it.Lack of investment has certainly been a problem, but it's far from certain that cheap wages have been the main cause. I seem to recall that much of the productivity rise that has taken place in the UK has been attributed to new direct foreign investment, while existing UK businesses have tended not to invest.
Posted By: fostertomIn the case of a MagicMoneyTree-financed programme of housing retrofit, that would need to be paced very carefully, financing first the training of a body of trainers, then the training of a workforce, with finance to actually carry out retrofits only as skills and materials become available.
Anything but the present history of, indeed, handing out cash, after expensive bureacratic qualification, in the absence of training and supply chain, enriching the financial intermediaries and massively inflating the cost of the work
Posted By: fostertomJohnson's already changed the story to a high-wage economy, from previously seeing UK's niche as Europe's low-wage low-regulation offshore facility. At the large-buildings end, the building industry is already headed that way, from being almost as intractably un-automatable as Care work. At the small/domestic retrofit end, we'll see a lot more of things like Energiesprong. A committed major retrofit programme will look like anything but an extrapolation of todays small-building world.