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sloucher

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I still take issue with the idea that a rise of 3% is unprecedented. I speak as someone who purchased my first property right before the ERM crisis and saw my mortgage payment almost double.

Also, for a long time, 100% and even 105% mortgages were common. I remember that when property prices nose-dived, we had people on TV being interviewed and complaining that they were "now in negative equity" as though that were something that had been done to them. These people started in negative equity by taking out a loan for more than the value of the property at the time of purchase.

With all that said, you're 100% correct that higher rates are going to cause real pain now, just as it did then. I don't accept that it's going to cause unprecedented pain, because to do so is to dismiss the very real problems that many many people had back then.

PS. Your strongest "unprecedented" argument would have been that the percentage increase in rates is bigger than ever before. 5% is 250% of 2%, whereas 15% is "only" 200% of 7.5%. But then it's easy to grow hugely when starting from a very small baseline.

20×10% 4 years ago

Why would you want an image-manipulation feature in a text editor (unless you were a developer who thought that it'd be a fun thing to work on)? That sounds like bloat of the worst kind...

See also: FX rates that affect billions of transactions daily.

Where there's money to be made or lost on the value of anything that's determined subjectively, pressure will always be brought to bear to move the needle one way or the other.

I started playing an Wordle-like app to get around the one-per-day limitation (I know, sue me), and played probably dozens of rounds per day. I ended up with a simple strategy of always starting with the same 3 words: LAUGH, DIRTY, JOKES which cover all the vowels (and y) and put an S at the end where it's most likely to be found. Generally I can "waste" the first 3 guesses on those words and still find the solution.

Then one day, I typed LAUGH and got 5 greens on the first line! Had to happen eventually, but still...

My wife visited Torness (the plant in the article) for a meeting with one of the managers. She went through reception, got her badge, and was on her way up the stairs to the meeting room when the receptionist shouted at her. "Maam! MAAAM!... please hold the handrail".

They're nuts about safety - and a good thing too, speaking as someone who lives relatively close-by.

We absolutely do not have a shortage of gas (petrol, as we like to call it). It's just not in the right place because we have a lorry driver shortage - and the media has created a toilet-paper style panic that's caused everyone to try to buy as much as they can, all at the same time.

They could equally have said "we're running out of milk!" and we'd have a milk "shortage".

The fact that there's a whole site dedicated to tying your shoes properly tells you everything you need to know

Similarly: half of the top 10 most-voted questions on StackOverflow are about Git.

I very much agree. And the annoying thing for me is that I spend much of my (work) life sitting in front of a full-size keyboard, yet when I want to respond to a personal email on my phone it's actually quicker to type it on the PC keyboard, mail it to myself, and then copy-paste it into my personal email on my phone. It's horrific.

What I've longed for is a bluetooth dongle (or something) that I can just plug into the PC or piggyback on the keyboard's USB connector, and which will let me use the keyboard I already have to type on my phone.