>> Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls.
>
>Pension funds inherently depend on increases in production. Population growth is one factor, but technological development can also increase production.
Interestingly, capital returns and population growth are (unquestionably?) on exponential curves. So, are production factors too slow to evolve along with the exponentials? Maybe they are, because of waste, lack of recycling, raw resources decline and environmental damage.
>> The other near-ponzi scheme is the real estate market. In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today.
>
>Hello from a Vancouverite! I broadly agree with this point, and I'm not sure how to work our way out of a housing bubble beyond popping it and dealing with the aftermath. Too many people are invested in the status quo, so any politician who tries to pop it will be crucified for destroying the savings of a large portion of the population.
You could argue that in the same time frame, world population has more than doubled, and because the cost of capital is a lot cheaper elsewhere than in Canada, pressure on attractive living space in peaceful and stable countries has increased exponentially. At this point, the "liberal" view on capital flows and capital control, the fuel of foreign direct investments of Western countries into overseas properties since WWII, came back to bite the originators of the idea in the ass.
Economic and biological growth curves look exponential right up until they don't. Both are limited by energy consumption, and nothing with limits can exceed the growth rate of its constraint.
Yeah, and if the study of populations has shown us anything, exponentials can also turn quickly into gaussians when a tipping point is passed. Not all of them end up as nice (if you are not afraid of the end of growth anyway) logistic curves.
Well, the view that history may be in fact (perhaps not objectively, but to any observer cultured enough to entertain himself with observing it) not a time line into the future but cyclical, with civilizations rising and falling, is not new [1].
Perhaps this time what's different is that due to our information age and accelerated rates of change, cultural history's process of change has been pushed from being viewed closer to evolution (the next step of the change being defined by "environment and chance", that is, stretched out over long periods of time and caused by factors not directly being under human influence) to being much closer to immediate, accountable, man-made history (the next step of the change being defined by "environment and choice", that is, actors making active choices causing outcomes) [2]. And so, because most humans, even humans of influence making the choices altering the life outcomes of populuations not over generations but even within single, half or quarter lifetimes, are terribly selfish and stupid and unwise, the outcomes of bad choices just never seem to stop coming.
I'm no expert, but topics like shifting balances between global powers which are interested in different kinds of change (from hegemonic US in a post-WWII word to a very multi-polar world order to xyz) causing metrics like HDI to even out between global population groups have been "hot" since when? the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s? So sure, things might keep falling apart for one population group but still improving for the other group(s).
Another interesting take on "falling apart narrative" interpretations of current history might be a take on how looming juggernauts like climate change, migration waves and so on play into it. This kind of change may be good for something, but surely not perceived stability in the factors that make up human societies.
That's really interesting. Is it normal in UK (thinking £) to get such an extremely short (introductory) loan and then refinance every few years? In Germany, most people take a 10y fixed rate at least to reduce such risk.
Yes, here 2 and 5 years is the norm. There's talk of longer terms becoming more popular but that's probably just talk due to the current climate of rising rates. I've spoken to a few brokers lately and not one even mentioned anything longer than 5.
It feels like there's a few signs now that the so-called "18-year property cycle" is due to be cut short this time around. I've only recently heard the idea so I'm not sure how it's real it is (outside of their circles that have a vested interested in the timeline it predicts). UK lenders seem to be now toughening lending rules rather than relaxing them as they were "supposed" to. Not sure it's a good time to invest or not!
7 and 10 years are quite widely available now, although they're still not particularly popular.
Not sure why brokers didn't mention them to you. Perhaps they like to show people low headline rates, or perhaps they see longer initial terms as bad for the broking business?
I think it's both of those reasons. Collecting commission on one 10-year mortgage, or five 2-year mortgages... I doubt they get 5x for the longer term, if anything.
I'd like to understand how people think about a longer-term fixed deals. How do you know where you'll be in more than 5 years? If you need to move don't you get hammered by the ERCs? Can you really rely on transferring products?
Habito One is an interesting product, that seems to be a lifetime fix (Which I have personally never seen before the UK but maybe it exists) with no ERC! Obviously the rate is less attractive but rates are still so low and I think you can offset as well.
You will get hammered by the ERCs, but with a few caveats:
1. Often if you move house they will let you transfer your mortgage (actually take out a similar product and avoid the refi costs).
2. If you win the lottery, or otherwise are in a situation to prepay your whole mortgage? Well you might care much less about the 5% early fees in that case.
3. You can prepay usually 10% a year, at their discretion, without any early fees. If you just become a fair bit richer than you expected, prepaying at this level will reduce the mortgage quite quickly.
Not only that, it’s popular to get “tracker” mortgages. It’s the Bank of England base rate plus a fixed rate. So it’s never actually fixed. My “Lifetime Tracker” is BOE+1.29% for 25 years. So it’s varied from 1.39% to 2.04% total charge in the last 10 years. If you bought a lifetime tracker today it would be BOE+2.7%. 20 years ago they were as good as BOE+0.25%
Snap makes sense, because it deals with desktop application confinement. Any Firefox process launched as $user is able to use all the RAM, read and write all the files, access all the networks and basically do everything as that user. You don't want that, it's stupid and so Windows 95.
There are alternative solutions: QubesOS uses VMs as the isolation layer, desktop application confinement using firejail with its good selection of profiles tweaked to my liking, systemd-run confinement configured through the vast resource control options made configurable through systemd. There is no reason ~ or even / shouldn't appear completely empty to Firefox the process except for the resources you pass to it (open file, grant download permissions...) or which it needs to run (of course, those would be immutable as far as possible). SELinux and AppArmor are child's play; you don't have a lot of problems of those tools if there are no objects a process could acceess in its namespace to begin with.
macOS I believe is already there in terms of desktop app confinement. Windows is not but at least it has the controlled folder access layer available after they gave up on making store apps meaningfully secure as its own app category (too many escapes/config tweaks possible now). Desktop Linux though has not had squat in that field in the mass market for 2 decades. Basically, you guys run all applications unconfined. Snap is a way to work on changing that.
Not saying though that the current implementation is exceptionally good. It's too slow, and they should have reused systemd or whatever for a thin, tweakable resource control and container layer, not invent a container format from scratch.
What's impressive to me here is not the capacity but the price for the capacity. At allegedly 777 CHF per year this is a steal so far removed from my reality it's obscene.
If you make the assumption that they are using 100G switches or line cards with 32 ports, those ports can be broken out to 128x 25G ports. That comes out to ~$100,000 USD in revenue per 1U per year. Not too shabby.
And Init7 is solid quality (and probably the perfect ISP for people who like to have fun with their network), but not exactly cheap for Zurich. You can get like 10Gb/s for half the price with other ISPs.
Does it also tell you of its own volition if the tax office owes you money instead on a return without you having to declare anything? For example, if the tax office knows where you work as an employee and where you live, and the tax code has provisions that stipulate that an employee gains a tax advantage of 0.xx€ per kilometre commuting distance between his home and his place of work, does it factor that in or doesn't it? Because that would actually be _nice_.
In the U.K. if you’ve overpaid in a given year (usually only a few pounds) you get the option to either roll it over to the next year, or a direct bank transfer to the account you give.
I’ve had payments pretty much instant (maybe next day) of repayments that are 4 figures, and ones that are just a few pennies.
Yes, if you pay too much in tax and their calculations reveal that, then, yes, you get money back on your bank account.
They don’t calculate commute deductibles for you, but mortgages, pension is something which is calculated for you based upon reports from the respective institutes.
Rather than this being a special quality of Apple, I think the marketing strategy of a lot of other B2C brands has now involved """leaks""" to enthusiast circles for a long time, probably since """evangelists""" and """influencers""" became subjects of pop consumer culture --- so I think that Apple leaking not less but the others just leaking intentionally more info ahead of release to fuel the hype is an important factor at play here.
I don't wish to comment on the "and quality" part in your question though.
> However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed and toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to work long days, the chance of success is very low. At every stage the probability of getting that next job is very low.
A "research precariat" is what keeps German universities going as well. This is an international issue; even the OECD seems to have studies on the subject. Would be interesting to see a cross-country comparison of who really has the "best" universities --- or university systems, as this kind of issue does not tend to be specific to one institution.
This is pretty accurate as an observation I believe. "My" middle manager does a lot more and acts more like a PO/PM combination fixing things in a horizontally integrated manner, whereas most typical PO/PM roles do their PM/POeing in a vertically integrated manner, on a product/product team basis. He's very good at that and therefore far from feeling irrelevant. Instead, he's drowning in useful work.
Interestingly, capital returns and population growth are (unquestionably?) on exponential curves. So, are production factors too slow to evolve along with the exponentials? Maybe they are, because of waste, lack of recycling, raw resources decline and environmental damage.
>> The other near-ponzi scheme is the real estate market. In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today. > >Hello from a Vancouverite! I broadly agree with this point, and I'm not sure how to work our way out of a housing bubble beyond popping it and dealing with the aftermath. Too many people are invested in the status quo, so any politician who tries to pop it will be crucified for destroying the savings of a large portion of the population.
You could argue that in the same time frame, world population has more than doubled, and because the cost of capital is a lot cheaper elsewhere than in Canada, pressure on attractive living space in peaceful and stable countries has increased exponentially. At this point, the "liberal" view on capital flows and capital control, the fuel of foreign direct investments of Western countries into overseas properties since WWII, came back to bite the originators of the idea in the ass.