1,779 karma · joined February 24, 2014
35 years later you would have an annual return (inflation adjusted) of 6% (6.5 times as much as you put in).
And this is somebody who invested in the absolute peak of the market in 1929, and then saw the worst crash in history, followed by the worst war in history.
May or may not have an impact?! 97% of climate scientists believe that the earth's climate has warmed as a result of human activities and continuing emissions will increase the likelihood and severity of global effects
Sure, we need mitigation efforts, but we also need to prevent things getting much much worse.
I'd say the upsides outweigh the downsides.
Amnesty International has specifically criticized NSO specifically regarding UAE activist Ahmed Mansoor. He is currently serving 10 years in jail. UN human rights experts considered his arrest and imprisonment "a direct attack on the legitimate work of human rights defenders". He was monitored by the UAE using NSO technologies.
Amnesty International have also complained that they have been targeted with NSO Group technology - specifically Pegasus. They're currently launching a legal case in Israel to restrict their export license.
A separate case claims that NSO Group used Pegasus to help the Saudis spy on Khashoggi, who was brutally murdered in the Saudi embassy.
I don't think we need to argue about the bad guys in this case.
Sources: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/09/nso-spyware-h...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/05/israel-amnest...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/02/world/middleeast/saudi-kh...
I'm just saying that if he's as smart as people claim, if the whole bumbling idiot is a calculated act, then there's not much to benefit from idiotically reciting that poem, it's not like there's some vast constituency in the British public who love The Road to Mandalay. It's an obscure reference, most British people have never heard of the poem... He seemed genuinely surprised that he shouldn't recite the poem.
I think the bumbling idiot thing is genuine. That doesn't also exclude him from being a nasty vindictive racist colonialist.
If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem. But he is a 'well-trained idiot' - he's had an English classical education, so he knows Kipling, but he doesn't understand what it actually _means_ ('oh yeah, I totally was going to shag a girl when we were fighting in Burma') or how it would come across to someone who wasn't also from a classically trained English background.
So I think he is a clueless bumbling idiot. He, and Jacobs Rees-Moggs, are the British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time.
The story is available here - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/30/boris-johns...
Plastic cups cost about a penny to manufacture (at least I can buy 1000 for £10). Many people will certainly pay 10p for recycled cups, and possibly more.
This underscores the view I was promoting - that interest rates play a large part in the difficulties besetting new buyers.
The amount people can afford to pay doesn't change, but the cost of the house does change.
Assume a 30 year mortgage. If the interest rate is 2%, and I spend 1.5k a month on my mortgage, I can afford a mortgage of 406,000 and own the home at the end. However, if interest rates are 10%, even if I'm still earning 1.5k a month, I can only afford a mortgage of 171000 in order to pay it off by the end. You can double check my figures using this calculator - https://www.bankrate.com/uk/mortgages/mortgage-repayment-cal...
Given that deposits are usually at a minimum 10% of the house price, it's very hard for first-time buyers to gather that amount of money - while people who have purchased before can sell their existing home.
The issue the paper describes is that interest rates have gone down, so house prices have gone up, _and at the same time_ it's harder to get your first mortgage (i.e. you need a larger deposit) - which most new buyers cannot afford.
Our current environment of low interest rates means that borrowing is cheap - which has pushed up prices, as now people can now afford larger mortgages. This has come at the same time as a withdrawal of mortgage finance from first-time-buyers, so effectively people who have bought before can buy another house, while those who haven't can't get on 'the housing ladder'. This is according to economist Ian Mulheirn, and is very much based on the UK (although similar arguments might apply elsewhere). Supply is part of the problem, but according to him, the smallest part.
https://housingevidence.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/201...
I don't disagree with the substance of your point, but London is far from a watertight argument.
Apparently when an escalator is broken the space between steps is uneven, and the escalator is metal and sharp, causing safety issues (although I've written other theories below in further comments).