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Saving For a Space Ship

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Posts posted by Saving For a Space Ship

  1. ‘Tame’ wide British roads and replace them with boulevards of homes, says thinktank 

    https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2023/sep/10/tame-wide-roads-and-replace-them-with-boulevards-of-homes-create-streets

     

    I always liked the idea of building over car parks , like ZEDPODS or perhaps have low height rds underneath them 

    https://www.zedpods.com/car-park-owners
     

    MORE PICS

    zed factory zed pod proposed for existing carparks

  2.  London rental scam of £13,000+

    Quote

    I thought that I should share my story of a current situation where my partner and his friend, just barely post-students, has been a victim of a very well thought out scam and lost over £13,000, 6 months worth of rent alongside 5 weeks of rent for deposit.

    To breakdown the situation, the flat listing was found on OpenRent, which is a very common property listing website in London. The scammers had posed as a fake landlord, had a fake agent, posed under a legitimate agency and got all the necessary documents that one might need.

    They used the name of the real owner of the place, which before signing we had even paid a small fee to check if he was the real owner. Turns out the real owner is in New York, and has someone else managing the property for him under booking.com. We even checked the company registration number too on the gov.uk website.

    They held 2 days of viewings at the flat and showed us around, which we later found out they booked it through booking.com and posed it as their own flat which was how they got the keys.

    We even asked detailed questions during the viewings that usually only the agent will know such as bills, moving in date, current tenants. The name of the bank account that payment was made to also had the agency name. On the day of moving, the “landlord” had agreed to meet us at a specific time and alas, nobody showed up.

    For us internationals in the UK who are looking for a job, it is common among us to be required to pay either a 6 months or 12 months upfront as we don’t have guarantors, mostly from not having any family members in the UK. They were so desperate relieved to have finally found a place for a decent price (£1850 p/m near Stratford) after months of searching that they fell into this scam.

    I’m sure the whole UK is aware of how difficult the housing situations are especially for internationals, so this was an extremely pathetic thought-out scam that took huge advantage of the vulnerable.

    At first it was suspicious that the process of signing the agreement getting references checked etc was so quick, just over a week, but my partner was so desperate to get a house that they were so grateful for how efficient the process was, that they didn’t even think it was a scam.

    Regarding this particular incident, there were multiple others who fell for the same thing and we have managed to get in contact with most, each losing a few thousands but none as much as this. One girl even brought all her belongings and boxes to the property only to find out there was no property to get.

    Bank reports have been done, but we have low hopes of getting our money back as banks don’t care much for this since they don’t take fault. We have also reported to the Action Fraud police but by the time this case comes into anyone’s hands, the scammers will be long gone with the money.

    We tried calling 999 but it is not their jurisdiction, 101 and they told us to report it online, and so we have no one to go to. We have a big sum of information to be used to track the scammers down but with no one to give. Unfortunately none of us know of private investigators. As of when the reports were done, the scammer’s phone was still ringing and through the person managing the airbnb, we have gotten the name and address.

    Another worry is also that we had provided our passports, BRPs, bank statements, etc as usual processes would require. Now possible identity fraud is another thing we have been stressed about, but concluded there’s nothing we can really do about that unless something happens. Correct me if otherwise.

    Now left with no place to stay and no money to even rent as 6 months of rent would still be required without a guarantor if either one of the tenants are unemployed, and quite frankly not knowing what to do, we’re left to be sitting here doing nothing but be miserable and wait for anyone to get back to us. Finding a place to stay was already killing us, and now we’re set back a whole £13000+, truly taking away hopes to go on.

    We are hoping and praying that the bank will do something, even a small sum of the money back to rent a small room to get by, or that someone will pick up this story, or for someone who has the expertise to pick up the case to investigate but after much research its pretty much an unspoken fact that the money is gone.

    London is truly a shit show. Please, if anyone knows of anyone who could help, get in touch. We are in desperate need of help…

     

  3. Bit of a concern for all those new leased car renters ..

    If You’ve Got a New Car, It’s a Data Privacy Nightmare

    https://gizmodo.com/mozilla-new-cars-data-privacy-report-1850805416

    Quote

    Bad news: your car is a spy. If your vehicle was made in the last few years, you’re probably driving around in a data-harvesting machine that may collect personal information as sensitive as your race, weight, and sexual activity.

    Volkswagen’s cars reportedly know if you’re fastening your seatbelt and how hard you hit the brakes.

     

    That’s according to new findings from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project. The nonprofit found that every major car brand fails to adhere to the most basic privacy and security standards in new internet-connected models, and all 25 of the brands Mozilla examined flunked the organization’s test.

    Mozilla found brands including BMW, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, and Subaru collect data about drivers including race, facial expressions, weight, health information, and where you drive.

    Some of the cars tested collected data you wouldn’t expect your car to know about, including details about sexual activity, race, and immigration status, according to Mozilla.

    “Many people think of their car as a private space — somewhere to call your doctor, have a personal conversation with your kid on the way to school, cry your eyes out over a break-up, or drive places you might not want the world to know about,” said Jen Caltrider, program direction of the *Privacy Not Included project, in a press release.

    “But that perception no longer matches reality. All new cars today are privacy nightmares on wheels that collect huge amounts of personal information.”

    Modern cars use a variety of data harvesting tools including microphones, cameras, and the phones drivers connect to their cars. Manufacturers also collect data through their apps and websites, and can then sell or share that data with third parties.

     

    The worst offender was Nissan, Mozilla said. The carmaker’s privacy policy suggests the manufacturer collects information including sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic data, though there’s no details about how exactly that data is gathered.

    Nissan reserves the right to share and sell “preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes” to data brokers, law enforcement, and other third parties.

    Other brands didn’t fare much better. Volkswagen, for example, collects your driving behaviors such as your seatbelt and braking habits and pairs that with details such as age and gender for targeted advertising.

    Kia’s privacy policy reserves the right to monitor your “sex life,” and Mercedes-Benz ships cars with TikTok pre-installed on the infotainment system, an app that has its own thicket of privacy problems......

     

  4. Not sure this got a mention from a week ago ..

    At least 26 English councils ‘at risk of bankruptcy in next two years’

     Research from body representing 47 authorities says many could follow Slough, Croydon, Thurrock and Woking into collapse

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/28/at-least-26-english-councils-at-risk-of-bankruptcy-in-next-two-years

  5. 23 minutes ago, Si1 said:

     

     

    sorry to hear that, I suspected it .

    Any chance that as the economy gets worse & the Gov / tax payer becomes more skint, they will give police / HMRC / Enviro Agency more funds , as it will raise more cash for the state ? Has this happened before in previous slumps ?   

     

    would a public petition to change the law to make the landlords more liable  be possible ?  

  6. 21 hours ago, Frankie Teardrop said:

    I look forward to estate agents being replaced by turkish barbers as so many clearly need a haircut.

    I look forward to the property market getting a haircut , but no more barbers / nail bars / vape bars / delis with 'cash only ' signs in the window that may be part of the money laundering operations epidemic that the police may be ignoring 

  7. prop it all up again ...BREAKING: @hsbcuk to offer a 40 year mortgage - so it will last as long as a new undergraduate’s student loan debt! Welcome to 2023!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/mortgages/hsbc-launches-40-year-mortgage-first-time/

    https://twitter.com/paullewismoney/status/1696844891962171767

     

    On R4 the other day, some VI was rebranding the bank of mum & dad as 'the bank of family '  

    ‘Bank of family’ to help a record number of UK house buys this year https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/aug/28/bank-of-family-to-help-a-record-number-of-uk-house-buys-this-year

     

  8. South East council ( Hastings ) on brink of bankruptcy over ‘massive’ rise in homelessness costs 

    https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/home/home/south-east-council-on-brink-of-bankruptcy-over-massive-rise-in-homelessness-costs-82901

    Quote
    NEWS29.08.23BY ELLA JESSEL

    An East Sussex council pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by its spiralling temporary accommodation bill has set out plans to reduce spending and tackle its financial instability.

    Hastings currently has 1,000 people living in temporary accommodation (picture: Alamy)
     
    An East Sussex council pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by its spiralling temporary accommodation bill has set out plans to reduce spending and tackle its financial instability #UKhousing

    The seaside town of Hastings currently has 1,000 people living in temporary accommodation, costing the local council £5.6m per year, compared to £730,000 in 2019.

    A recent report by the Local Government Association (LGA) warned that this increased spend was putting Hastings Borough Council at risk of bankruptcy.

    The body’s finance peer review team said it was “very concerned” over the council’s finances and that in 2021-22 it had incurred a “significant overspend” on homelessness of £174,000. As demand grows further, this has grown to a forecast overspend of £2.03m for 2022-23.

    The council’s revenue budget position must be addressed as a “matter of urgency”, the LGA said, or its finance officer will be left with little choice but to issue a Section 114 notice effectively declaring the authority bankrupt.

    In a recent response, Hastings Borough Council has accepted all of the LGA’s 13 recommendations and promised to urgently reduce spending, review all its spending budgets and prioritise financial stability.

    Achieving this will require further difficult decisions, the council said, and it is likely that more services will need to be scaled back or paused until the council is on a strong financial footing again.

    Earlier this month, the council approved plans to sell off four assets to raise up to £3m, potentially using the money to transform its housing and temporary accommodation services.

    A financial monitoring report going before the council’s cabinet next week (4 September) explains that additional staff were recruited in July with the purpose of reducing the number of people in temporary accommodation and it was seeing the first “tentative signs” of a reduction.

    However the council is still forecasting an overspend of £697,790 due to an increase in provider costs.

    Hastings, which is one of the poorest towns in the South of England, does not have its own housing stock – meaning it has been forced to use expensive nightly accommodation from the private sector.

    To address this, the council has approved plans to spend £11m acquiring properties to house people experiencing homelessness, and is also building its own hotel, which will be leased to Premier Inn. 

    Next week’s cabinet will also be asked to approve a plan to increase the capital programme budget for the 80-bed hotel in the town centre to £13.6m after the tender price exceeded the original estimate.

     

    However, the LGA report raised concerns about the hotel project, and said there had been “limited scrutiny” over the council’s initial decision to enter into a contract for the scheme. It warned that the new hotel could lead to losses in the short term, while buying up homes could add pressure to the capital financing budget.

    “Whilst purchasing property will create capacity, this will not be enough to combat the housing overspend. A more holistic approach is needed with the focus on addressing costs and the overspend, by managing demand and preventing homelessness,” the report said.

    The LGA also said that the council had been “slow to respond” to opportunities for collaboration, and that the East Sussex Procurement Hub could help it to achieve better value for money for temporary accommodation.

    Using this hub could also replace more expensive options such as spot purchase of accommodation, the report said.

    Writing in the Hastings Observer earlier this month, council leader Paul Barnett said that the town’s problems were part of the national housing crisis and that changes in the housing market meant more and more homeless residents were being placed outside the town.

    Mr Barnett accused the government of “dragging its feet” by refusing to increase the Local Housing Allowance and failing to introduce rent controls or end Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions. 

    “They have even removed housing targets from local authorities, so fewer than ever affordable homes are being built nationally,” he said.

    Inside Housing’s new Build Social campaign is calling on all political parties to commit to meeting targets for social rented homes in their manifestos for 2024

    The council was approached for comment.

     

  9. china grenfell

    What's going on? Fires broke out in Tianjin, Beijing, and Shanghai, as well as earthquakes... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuCMcSsye7w

    China’s shadow-banking industry threatens its financial system

    Weak economic growth means the country is particularly vulnerable to contagion

    https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/08/28/chinas-shadow-banking-industry-threatens-its-financial-system

    Quote
    Aug 28th 2023 | SHANGHAI

    Shares in xinhua trust, a Chinese shadow lender, are selling for rock-bottom prices. The outfit went bankrupt in May, becoming the first Chinese trust to fall in more than two decades. Since then chunks of the firm have been put up for sale on Taobao, an online e-commerce platform, at a 30% discount.

    Its company cars were recently added to the auction, which has been mandated by a court. A bargain-hunter could snap up Xinhua trademarks for just 12,000 yuan ($1,650).

    The shadow lender’s demise was an early warning: the same forces that brought it down are now ripping through China’s 21trn yuan trust industry.

    The country’s economic growth has been weaker than expected, and property developers are caught in an unprecedented wave of defaults and restructurings. China’s trusts, which channel funds from investors to infrastructure, property and other opportunities, are exposed to both developments.

    Although Xinhua’s bankruptcy has been relatively straightforward, a bigger blow-up may be on the way at Zhongrong, one of the country’s largest trusts, which missed payments to clients in mid-August. Panicked investors fear more firms will be ensnared, and that collapses will lead to further economic problems.

    During China’s years of strong economic growth, trusts and their investors flourished, with investment products often offering annual returns of 10% or more.

    Property developers and local governments were willing to pay lofty interest rates, transactions faced less regulatory scrutiny than bank lending and trusts benefited from the widespread perception that investors’ cash was safeguarded by the state in a fashion similar to bank deposits.

    That perception is now long gone—and as more developers default, it is likely that more shadow banks will be unable to pay out.

    Zhongrong, which managed about 630bn yuan in trust products at the end of last year, shows how pain has spread from the property industry to the financial system.

    When Sunac, China’s fifth-largest developer, defaulted last year, local governments began freezing company funds in order to ensure projects were finished.

    One of the locations where funds were frozen was Wuhan, a city in central China, and the money included investments linked to Zhongrong. Across the industry, about 7% of trust products were invested directly in the property sector at the end of March. Indirect investments via securities push that exposure to as much 30%, reckon analysts at anz, a bank.

    The risk of contagion is especially high because lending by trusts is ubiquitous and opaque, and because investment in them produces tangled financial ties.

    Zhongrong’s investors include several listed companies, for instance. Such companies often invest in trusts in order to eke out higher returns.

    Trusts have meanwhile invested about 4.6trn yuan in equities, bonds and other funds. They have also lent to local-government projects, and now cities and provinces across China are struggling to repay debts, which are estimated to have hit 57trn yuan at the end of 2022.

    There is another avenue through which trouble may spread. Zhongrong is controlled by a much larger investment manager, called Zhongzhi, which has about 1trn yuan in assets under management across a vast array of divisions.

    Zhongzhi has also been thrown into a liquidity crisis and has reportedly been unable to pay out the 230bn yuan it owes to some 150,000 wealthy investors. Across the country, similar investment-management firms have millions of customers.

    Since news of Zhongzhi’s troubles broke, phones have been ringing off the hook as worried clients, many of whom are regular white-collar workers, seek to confirm their savings are safe, reports an executive at another one of these companies.

    Such links between trusts, local governments and developers, and the possibility of larger financial firms getting in trouble, have spooked investors. Indeed, Zhongrong’s troubles have contributed to the poor performance of the Chinese stockmarket: the csi 300, a benchmark index, is down by more than 6% this month. Interventions by officials, which included a cut to stamp duty on August 27th, have had little impact.

    Policymakers are painfully aware of the problems faced by trusts. After all, they helped bring many of them into being through attempts to reduce risk. Since 2017 China’s shadow banks have been under intense regulatory scrutiny as part of an attempt to transfer opaque off-balance-sheet lending to banks.

    The official attack was ramped up in 2020 when the state introduced sharp restrictions on leverage at property developers. As a result of such moves, the issuance of shadow-banking products in the first half of this year was at its weakest in a decade, according to Capital Economics, a research firm. The crackdown has sapped liquidity and confidence from the property market, pushing both developers and trust firms towards default.

    In the short term, much of the pain will be borne by wealthy investors, as the threshold for putting money into a trust product is usually more than 300,000 yuan. Most cannot even demand their initial investments back, since products usually have terms that prevent investors from withdrawing, sometimes for up to two years.

    This may prevent a fully fledged financial crisis caused by a run on shadow lenders, and will give the government time to reckon with the mess.

    Bloomberg, a news service, has reported that China’s banking regulator has already set up a task force to examine the problems at Zhongzhi. Yet, given the vast, shadowy connections such firms have across the economy, government inspectors might not like what they find. 

     

  10. The Wire - Omar and Renaldo rob Old Face Andre.

    ..."and my change y'all'

    Stores coming like these

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYM16-zh3Hs

    I read this article about Walmart leaving low income areas,a few month ago, which includes an article on the US side of shop lifting 

    Why Walmart is closing half its stores in Chicago https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/12/business/walmart-chicago-stores-closing/index.html

    Stores say shoplifting is a national crisis. The numbers don’t back it up https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifting-shrink-walgreens/index.html

  11. Shoplifting is out of control. Forget the police – stores need to up their game

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/27/shoplifting-out-of-control-forget-police-stores-need-to-up-their-game

    Quote

    Within corner-shops and supermarkets and department stores, a new mood of lawlessness circulates. Owners of small shops have long complained that they are being treated as larders; now the owners of large ones have joined them.

    Co-op despairs that shoplifting is “out of control”; along with antisocial behaviour incidents, the crime has increased by a third in the first half of this year. Meanwhile, John Lewis has taken to offering free coffees to passing officers. “Just having a police car parked outside can make people think twice about shoplifting from our branches,” the head of security for the John Lewis Partnership has said, with more than a hint of desperation. Earlier this month, there was the “TikTok looting” of Oxford Street, where teens ran amok around stores after a thread urging people to “rob JD Sports” went viral. The trend has a longer sweep: in the past six years, shop thefts in Britain have more than doubled....

     

  12. To circumvent local government's restriction on sharp price drop, Chinese real estates developers literally handed out gold ingots to home buyers

     

    Why China’s economy won’t be fixed

    An increasingly autocratic government is making bad decisions

    https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/08/24/why-chinas-economy-wont-be-fixed

    Quote

    Whatever has gone wrong? After China rejoined the world economy in 1978, it became the most spectacular growth story in history. Farm reform, industrialisation and rising incomes lifted nearly 800m people out of extreme poverty.

    Having produced just a tenth as much as America in 1980, China’s economy is now about three-quarters the size. Yet instead of roaring back after the government abandoned its “zero-covid” policy at the end of 2022, it is lurching from one ditch to the next.

     
    Listen to this story.  Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

     

    The economy grew at an annualised rate of just 3.2% in the second quarter, a disappointment that looks even worse given that, by one prominent estimate, America’s may be growing at almost 6%. House prices have fallen and property developers, who tend to sell houses before they are built, have hit the wall, scaring off buyers.

    Consumer spending, business investment and exports have all fallen short. And whereas much of the world battles inflation that is too high, China is suffering from the opposite problem: consumer prices fell in the year to July. Some analysts warn that China may enter a deflationary trap like Japan’s in the 1990s .

    Yet in some ways Japanification is too mild a diagnosis of China’s ills. A chronic shortfall in growth would be worse in China because its people are poorer.

    Japan’s living standards were about 60% of America’s by 1990; China’s today are less than 20%. And, unlike Japan, China is also suffering from something more profound than weak demand and heavy debt.

    Many of its challenges stem from broader failures of its economic policymaking—which are getting worse as President Xi Jinping centralises power.

    A decade or so ago China’s technocrats were seen almost as savants. First they presided over an economic marvel.

    Then China was the only big economy to respond to the global financial crisis of 2007-09 with sufficient stimulatory force—some commentators went as far as to say that China had saved the world economy.

    In the 2010s, every time the economy wobbled, officials defied predictions of calamity by cheapening credit, building infrastructure or stimulating the property market.

    During each episode, however, public and private debts mounted. So did doubts about the sustainability of the housing boom and whether new infrastructure was really needed.

    Today policymakers are in a bind. Wisely, they do not want more white elephants or to reflate the property bubble.

    Nor can they do enough of the more desirable kinds of stimulus, such as pension spending and handouts to poor households to boost consumption, because Mr Xi has disavowed “welfarism” and the government seeks an official deficit of only 3% of gdp.

    As a result, the response to the slowdown has been lacklustre. Policymakers are not even willing to cut interest rates much. On August 21st they disappointed investors with an underwhelming cut of 0.1 percentage points in the one-year lending rate.

    This feeble response to tumbling growth and inflation is the latest in a series of policy errors. China’s foreign-policy swagger and its mercantilist industrial policy have aggravated an economic conflict with America.

    At home it has failed to deal adequately with incentives to speculate on housing and a system in which developers have such huge obligations that they are systemically important.

    Starting in 2020 regulators tanked markets by cracking down on successful consumer-technology firms that were deemed too unruly and monopolistic. During the pandemic, officials bought time with lockdowns but failed to use it to vaccinate enough people for a controlled exit, and then were overwhelmed by the highly contagious Omicron variant.

    Why does the government keep making mistakes? One reason is that short-term growth is no longer the priority of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp).

    The signs are that Mr Xi believes China must prepare for sustained economic and, potentially, military conflict with America. Today, therefore, he emphasises China’s pursuit of national greatness, security and resilience.

    He is willing to make material sacrifices to achieve those goals, and to the extent he wants growth, it must be “high quality”.

    Yet even by Mr Xi’s criteria, the ccp’s decisions are flawed. The collapse of the zero-covid policy undermined Mr Xi’s prestige.

    The attack on tech firms has scared off entrepreneurs. Should China fall into persistent deflation because the authorities refuse to boost consumption, debts will rise in real value and weigh more heavily on the economy.

    Above all, unless the ccp continues to raise living standards, it will weaken its grip on power and limit its ability to match America.

    Mounting policy failures therefore look less like a new, self-sacrificing focus on national security, than plain bad decision-making.

    They have coincided with Mr Xi’s centralisation of power and his replacement of technocrats with loyalists in top jobs. China used to tolerate debate about its economy, but today it cajoles analysts into fake optimism. Recently it has stopped publishing unflattering data on youth unemployment and consumer confidence.

    The top ranks of government still contain plenty of talent, but it is naive to expect a bureaucracy to produce rational analysis or inventive ideas when the message from the top is that loyalty matters above all.

    Instead, decisions are increasingly governed by an ideology that fuses a left-wing suspicion of rich entrepreneurs with a right-wing reluctance to hand money to the idle poor.

    The fact that China’s problems start at the top means they will persist. They may even worsen, as clumsy policymakers confront the economy’s mounting challenges. The population is ageing rapidly.

    America is increasingly hostile, and is trying to choke the parts of China’s economy, like chipmaking, that it sees as strategically significant. The more China catches up with America, the harder the gap will be to close further, because centralised economies are better at emulation than at innovation.

    Liberals’ predictions about China have often betrayed wishful thinking. In the 2000s Western leaders mistakenly believed that trade, markets and growth would boost democracy and individual liberty.

    But China is now testing the reverse relationship: whether more autocracy damages the economy. The evidence is mounting that it does—and that after four decades of fast growth China is entering a period of disappointment. 

     

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