FirstTimeBonkers

The way to understand business-speak is to suppose the converse. ..."we need non-charismatic people with no leadership abilities who can discourage customer focus in a culture which pays no heed to performance"

Conflating peak oil and peak uranium is a mistake usually made by the anti-nuke brigade. Once the black stuff is burnt, it's gone. Most of the globe has been seismically picked over for it, and it's believed that there's no other Ghawar for the simple reason that Ghawar is big. Comparatively, only the very low-hanging fruit of uranium resources have been tapped in places like Oz where you literally only need to scratch the surface to find it. The two resources are in entirely different stages of their exploration and extraction cycles. You also ignore the effect of reprocessing and fast breeders, both of which can extend current resources by a factor of up to 10. This is all known technology; it hasn't been thoroughly exploited yet because there's so much uranium out there.

Exactly. So the way to solve this problem is by using normal business criteria - make it extremely unprofitable for the lender when the customer is unable to pay. When their bottom line is at stake, they will soon start exercising a little more caution as they operate the "free money" machine.

Surely a company with the name of Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation would have to be British.

Leading some commentators on to the conclusion that it's the current way of life that has to change, not the technology that powers it. That seems to work very well as a thought experiment until one realises that the extraordinary energy density of oil has made our kind of high density population with super-high-yield farming possible. These factory-farmed foods are simply the result of stuffing natural gas and oil into the soil via nitrate-based fertilisers. "Bio"-fuels anyone?

One characterisation of this threat I read was that it would take several men doing hard physical labour for one year to output the energy contained in one barrel of oil. 70$ for that barrel? Sounds like a bargain.

If you mean building regulation E (equates to a fairly reasonable standard of acoustic privacy) I think this became compulsory for works starting after April 2005, so plenty of recently completed stuff and even some stuff still in the pipeline is not compliant. Plenty of flats built in the last 40 years have only a partition wall seperating them, but it's not necessarily true that this is worse than older, "more solid" builds. A single course of bricks seperating one demise from another can let more noise through than acoustic plasterboard and resilient bars. The worst offenders (and the cheapest to build) are those which just have two sheets of standard plasterboard either side of a void seperating the flats. You can look forward to hearing the neighbours flush the loo and pry into the details of their most intimate conversations, a situation which reg E tries to end. The walls may be one thing, but after renting numerous types of flats in London over a number of years I've come to the conclusion that what happens above the ceiling is the most critical of all to ensuring a good night's sleep. The worst offenders are unsealed (and, in modern fashion, exposed) floorboards supported by the same joists hanging the plasterboard ceiling. However, even sealed concrete floors will happily conduct impact noise, and non-impact noise invariably finds a way down through service ducts. Effective solutions to this pernicious problem: 1) control the space above your bedroom (i.e. it's part of your flat) 2) ensure the space above is empty (i.e. top floor flat). 3) live on a very busy road 4) go deaf

Regarding the person on the other side of the desk, on the bus today I saw an ad the type of which used to be proffered to encourage people to retrain as IT "experts", but this time the miracle profession was that of MA. It "guaranteed" a salary of £50k after training (subject to "acceptance", but apparently "anyone can do it, no previous experience necessary"). The length of the training was 11 days. This is most reassuring for those of us who were starting to fear that the miracle economy is propped up only by cheap mortgage debt. We can now rest secure in the knowledge that it is also propped up by the £50k salaries of an army of newly trained MAs.

There's a whole row of them south of habitat on the east side of TCR but I think this is just because the buildling they're in is going to be redeveloped - probably into a whole load more shops.

That would be the moral highground rubbish that's mentioned in the original posting.

I do appreciate your point - you seem to be suggesting that since affordability is subjective (and understood by the EA and the buyer as such) then it is a fair bargaining tool. The EA criticism of buyers then becomes pots and kettles, but I think they are still entitled to claim that such buyers are not on the moral high ground I was simply saying the same-but-opposite: that since affordability is subjective (and understood by the EA and the buyer as such) I choose to leave it out of the discussions because the EA knows full well that once I have exhausted the credit limit of a lender I feel comfortable with, there is another less reputable one waiting in the wings prepared to lend me more, charge me a higher IR, and accept fewer proofs of income. In my opinion, it's none of EA's business how conservatively or aggressively I choose to run my finances, and if he thinks I should be stretching myself further so his buyer can trouser more of my hard-earned, he can think again.

Fair enough, but I think the point was that the buyers were claiming "that's all I can afford" when really it was just a case of "that's what I want to offer" and thus, in the EA's opinion, stepping off the moral high ground. I would have thought a refusal to comment about whether they could afford more a simple way out for the buyer.

All 1 of the 1 people I know who were in the process of letting their flats through that agent have withdrawn the instruction due to "incredulity and shock" at the practices shown in that programme. Not a particularly large sample, I'll grant you.