alva

Wonder how they will classify 'cousins' given its unfortunate prevalence in the UK

Fun idea for a book.

Excellent, thank you. This had be causing me headaches!

Passport equivalents go back to 1350BC

Just what i needed to read today, thanks.

MS?

I do not think successive UK governments have had enough of a long term strategy to do this consciously (though I would love to find out it was a deliberate), but I think the Battersea / Nine Elms development is a fantastic way to exploit the surging demand into Western real estate.

Tens of thousands of flats have been built almost entirely funded by foreign investment. If/once the market collapses on whatever time frame, London now has significantly increased housing stock almost entirely on the back of foreign money (whilst providing income for local builders and suppliers). Already foreign owners are taking huge losses on their investment and I expect this to drop even further. If price drop to a reasonable level for your average Londoner, this will be a great win.

On a side note, that entire development is an architectural disgrace and as you note, for the time being a ghost town, parking dodgy money from abroad.

I used to work in a small hotel as a student. Most of my job was taking guests' luggage up 4 flights of extremely narrow stairs of the historic building. The only guest who ever tipped me (not common in my country) was Anthony Bourdain, who was very generous.

> Buying bananas has no relevance to climate

Can you explain why? All the bananas in my UK supermarket are flown from Africa.

> minimise use of cars and planes

X = 1 is not exponential growth