Ah-so

I had the right job at the right time. No handshake required. The work done here on the implications of the reduction in interest rate tax relief on leveraged landlords was very useful and by far the most informed public source.

I don't tick any of those (perhaps I'm a weirdo or a nutcase, hard to tell). But one thing I can tell you is that this site has been indirectly influential on some things that have directly impacted the BTL market. I can't say exactly why, but I have been lucky enough to be able to push some influence, using knowledge I'd gained here.

This isn't just a one-off, but symptomatic of the financialisation of everyday life that we have seen over recent decades. Leasehold properties are a very good example. Not a good system, but it kind of worked, with nominal ground rents and appropriate service charges. And then the money men got involved, writing trick clauses into the ground rents (and presumably packaging and selling the income streams). And with service companies, they realised that they could charge whatever they wanted and would have the power to repossess the property if the money wasn't paid. They have more power to extract money than HMRC.

It's a blurred line. It starts off with trolling, but then people start believing it, so it's hard to tell.

A very common and knowingly disingenuous argument is that Republicans freed the slaves and that Democrats resisted. While superficially correct, the parties have swapped their positions since then, which is why the KKK supports the Republican Party. Those who make this argument know this, which demonstrates that dishonesty is a fundamental strategy for Trump's supporters.

Surely this "mood" and the social media circles you follow on social media are likely to be something or an echo chamber. By reading your post, I too can refer to the mood on social media about their being a hung parliament. Doesn't for a second make it true. The Tories are unpopular and as a result will lose to Labour. I still have a bet on for a hung parliament, with Labour the biggest party, but my reasoning being the SNP take Scotland, taken out several years ago. I don't think it will win - Labour to get a majority even with the SNP sweeping Scotland.

I'm keen not to get tangled up in your discussion, but medicine is highly prestigious job, especially among British people of Indian heritage, where medicine and engineering are seen as the top careers. I don't think people get into it solely for the money, but as much for cultural aspects. There are plenty of jobs that pay more than being a doctor in the UK.

I was a governor at a London primary school for many years until recently. It is made up of multiple ethnicities and with a high percentage of immigrant families. The worst group for English was 'white British boys'. The worst group for maths was 'Asian girls'.

It is a combination of several factors, one of which is financial conditions. But the point I was making was that any deaths among the working age population have been replaced many times over by net immigration.

Yes, it is concerning to have any increase in deaths and I certainly didn't claim otherwise, but I am disputing the statistical significance over life expectancy of an entire population. And an approximate 0.005% increase in mortality doesn't. Of course, COVID-19 remains a killer, and really starts to pick up among the over 50s but affects all age groups, including those in their 40s. So these numbers will reflect the increased numbers still dying of that. But we do know that the pandemic slowed a lot of things down, such as hospital check-ups and the like which resulted in cancer cases being missed. Other causes may also be increases in death by misadventure among the young. But this is all irrelevant to your original point, given that the increase in deaths (even excluding the "sudden and unexplained" for which we have no data) statistically makes no impact on life expectancy. What did make a big difference to life expectancy during the pandemic, shaving off the best part of a year, was COVID-19. I'm actually surprised that there wasn't a bigger impact on house prices.

You haven't provided numbers that fall into "sudden and unexpected" but rather "excess deaths". How many of those deaths were not sudden and expected? Although the data doesn't break out 18 year olds, I can understand that you were working from memory. But if we take the 25-64 age group, we are looking at 4800 over the entire period. If we annualise that to 20,000, it works out to 0.005% of the underlying age group. For comparison, about 5,000 younger people dying on an annualised basis is dwarfed by say the 60,000 British troops who died on the first day of the battle of the Somme. That was "huge". Net immigration to the UK last year was 800,000, and most of whom I suspect fall into the 18-65 age group. A small increase in numbers dying in this age group (3/4 of whom are aged over 50), isn't going to make any difference to the overall picture.

Not necessarily for those still on 5-year fixes secured at lower rates. They may have excellent yields until they mature.

But if the numbers are low to start with, especially in the case of "sudden and unexpected", a 20% increase will be practically and perhaps even statistically meaningless, especially if we are using this as an input into declining life expectancy. But there's no point in speculating. Locke will no doubt be able to provide us with the numbers who died "sudden and unexpected" deaths in his age group in 2019 and the numbers in 2022. And perhaps he even has some analysis on the resulting impact the average age of death.

What are the statistics on "huge numbers"? I have a low bar for "huge" so would accept 2% of the underlying population of 18-65 year olds dying as being "huge". Let's just say that there are 40m in this age group, so do we have 800,000 18-65 year olds dying of "sudden and unexpected" deaths now? If not, what is the percentage of the population you would consider to be "huge"?

Have you considered getting a job at the Daily Mail or GB News? This is exactly the hysterical hyperbole that they demand to satisfy their persecution fetish.