UVB-76

> My view is that agglomeration really is valuable, that the high cost of housing and office space in London reflects their high value.

To an extent, but the current London property bubble is fuelled by the treatment of London property as a store of wealth for the world's super-rich.

A land value tax would help, as would a more progressive council tax regime.

It's madness that council tax in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea tops out at £2k pa.

In an office situation, especially when doing rounds, it makes sense to have tea over coffee.

Unless you have a nice coffee machine, you're left to deal with a French press (too much effort, difficult for large rounds), or (gasp) instant coffee.

When out and about, if your drink is being made by a professional, it makes sense to have coffee over tea. Less faffing about removing tea bags, etc.

The "get yours" mentality is flawed because all you end up doing is imprisoning large sections of the population for poverty-driven crime, and you end up paying for their imprisonment.

What do prisoners get while in prison? Basic necessities, like food, shelter, warmth.

A kind of basic income, if you will.

This only applies to our global economy if every country were to implement UBI, and with similar amounts.

Purchasing power will still be increased through imports.

Never heard of Getaround, but ZipCar is a very different business model.

This is about people subleasing their own vehicles, not a traditional car hire service.

ZipCar is like a hotel, and this proposed service is like Airbnb.

What's the crux of this concern?

If it's environmental, we can assume cars in the future will be all-electric, powered by nuclear or renewable energy sources.

If it's congestion, firstly we should see a dramatic reduction in the number of accidents. Automated vehicles will make far more efficient use of limited road capacity, and with no need for parked cars to litter urban streets, we will have greater capacity.

More importantly, we can just regulate against congestion. Cap the number of cars in an area at any one time, if you want, or implement dynamic pricing. That will go a long way to eliminating unnecessary journeys during peak times.

Granted, but a human guard nevertheless presents a problem for robbers.

Do you take the guard hostage? Do you kill them? Will they themselves be armed? Will they put up a fight, training or no training? If you try aggressively to bring their vehicle to a halt, will they concede immediately (as an autonomous vehicle likely would), or will they try ramming your vehicle?

A human guard is an unknown quantity, and any crimes you commit against their person are in a different league to the theft of the cargo.

Trucks routinely carry cargo worth many thousand times the value of the average household's possessions.

Even if we remove all the facilities for a driver, i likely you would still need a human guard.

Although thinking about it, the guard could travel in a separate vehicle, and could be responsible for overseeing an entire convoy of trucks at one time.

This is one of many reasons we will still need humans present, if only in a guard capacity.

Such an unbelievable number of ways in which this could go wrong.

Renters could mess up a vehicle in any number of ways, from making a mess with food and drink, to damaging parts of the interior, to getting in accidents and causing serious damage. Are owners expected to do a full damage assessment pre/post every rental? Nobody will accept any liability otherwise.

That's overlooking any "drive it like you stole it" issues which can ruin the mechanicals.

Think of all the nefarious activity a renter could get up to. Road rage incidents, motoring offences. Drug dealing or trafficking. Congratulations, your car is now on a watchlist.

Imagine the disputes over how much gas is left in the vehicle. Let alone what type of gas a renter puts in there.

There's no way any ordinary insurance policy would cover this kind of scheme. Your premiums can, and should, skyrocket.

Then contemplate the practicalities of all this. A renter will have to pick the vehicle up from a location, then presumably return it to the exact same location. If that requires payment for parking, who pays?

Don't get me wrong; I can't wait for the future where nobody owns a vehicle and we all travel in autonomous electrical vehicles that are efficiently utilized, monitored and cleaned automatically as needed. But this halfway house is a nightmare.

> The other issue is it's harder to capitalize on the reputation of online personas in the real world, if you care about that sort of thing.

That's the trade-off, and it's why I don't sympathize too much with people who go online to get publicity, then complain about the negative attention that comes along with it.

As I understand it, this only has to be done when accessing your Apple ID from a new device.

I hope the next Mac line-up includes Touch ID

I think I had this happen to me as well.

Wasn't an issue until I wanted to change my Apple ID password, for which the security questions are required.

Phoned Apple Support, and they took me through a dazzling array of security steps, involving my Mac, iPhone, payment methods, and the Apple ID website, before they allowed me to create new questions.

Surely it's referring to the temporary pass code which is generated and presented to the relevant user on your Mac?

Aren't pranks called "social experiments" these days?

None of the overheads I'm thinking about lend themselves to economies of scale.

I'm talking about things like:

* Admin costs (contracting, etc.)

* New tenant costs (marketing, agency fees, reference checks, credit checks, inventory, etc.)

* Landlords' insurance

* Extra safety checks (e.g. annual gas safety checks)

* Cost of downtime between tenants

* Cost of rectifying wear and tear (cannot recover from tenants)

There's also a difference in terms of maintenance. If I'm an owner-occupier and something breaks, I can live with it for a while, shop around, get a few quotes, and get it fixed at my leisure.

As a landlord, if something goes wrong with one of my properties I have an obligation to repair it as soon as reasonably possible.

Then every now and then you get a tenant who completely trashes a property, causing damage far in excess of any deposit, and which you're unlikely to ever recover.

People are only going to have trouble selling when the bubble bursts.

Until then, there is always a greater fool.

There are very few investments that have outperformed the average UK property over the last few decades.

Let alone investments that you can live in.

I find the inverse to be strange, i.e. the notion that the rental value of a property should be less than the cost of a mortgage.

Not least because landlords incur overheads over and above those an owner-occupier does.

There is a large 'buy-to-let' industry in the UK, whereby millions have taken out mortgages to buy properties for the sole purpose of renting them out.

The rental income pays the mortgage, and usually provides some profit on top, all while the value of the property itself continues to appreciate.

Homeownership has been glorified because, over the past few decades at least, it's been an unbeatable investment.

There is no need to pay off a mortgage before retirement. You can sell up (likely for a huge profit) and use the proceeds to buy a smaller property, rent, or retire to somewhere with significantly lower living costs.

Perhaps this explains why Apple have been so slow to get their Skylake MacBooks to market.

I was disappointed other OEMs had beaten them to it, but it looks like they just dumped hardware on the market without suitable software. Apple obviously take responsibility for both.

It depends how you look at things.

You can look at it as mere circulation of money. And let's be clear, this is circulation of money, not redistribution of wealth (as they are merely exchanging one asset for another at market rate)

Alternatively, you could see it as this individual making a decision about what humanity should do with scarce resources.

Should we direct them towards helping those in need, or to manufacturing luxury automobiles?

With great wealth comes great responsibility.

It can be more nuanced than that. Some of these "rich kids" are brought up in an environment, or culture, where they simply don't expect ostenentatious displays of wealth (even by those who have apparently not earned the wealth themselves) to be met with these responses.

In any case, I think it's important to emphasize the individual has a choice.

No one is forcing these people to flaunt their wealth.

Perhaps, if an individual doesn't want to be a victim of resentment and stereotyping, they shouldn't drive a $150,000 car?

Especially at an age where it's extremely unlikely for that individual to have accrued the necessary wealth themselves.

For what it's worth, being featured in these documents is not in and of itself evidence of any wrongdoing.

There are entirely lawful and legitimate reasons for making use of offshore company structures.

The Chinese middle class are all about status. The iPhone is a status symbol.

Far too many websites rely on JavaScript now for this to be a real workaround.