Any question answered...

sleeping bag advice

I'm looking for a sleeping bag for my girlfriend for Patagonia and I'm a bit lost on where to start... mainly on the temperature thing. Most things seem to say 30° F (which I guess is 0° C) will be fine.

Is that equivalent to a 3 season bag and as she feels the cold, is a 4 season a safer bet?

Next does anyone have any suggestions for a suitable synthetic * bag that's relatively small and doesn't cost the earth / as close to £50 as possible?

Cheers

*I'm working on the assumption that as there's a good chance of rain synthetic makes more sense, but is the whole wet + down thing exaggerated?

27.2 thomson dropper post. Has anywhere got them in stock, ideally for less than the retail £350?

Get a silk liner.

Look at decathlon IMO range of bags that are cheap and handy.

Yep, she's got a silk liner. Just wondering if even then a 4s makes more sense. I guess it's just very subjective.

Don't bags have a comfort and extreme rating?

Anyone have a derailleur hanger alignment tool I could borrow tonight?

I do.

Can anyone explain why a crash in the housing market would be a bad thing? Assume houses were suddenly 10x cheaper to buy.

You're not a proper enough cyclist to have such advanced tools.

Huge swathes of people would be left owing more money than their property was worth, many would default.

Apart from that, it's not a bad thing. However, for that to happen supply would have to outstrip demand so either there would be a mass of new housing stock being built or the wider economic situation is so bad that no-one dares move house.

Does anyone know of a photo booth for ID photos near Seven Sisters or Tottenham Hale stations?

Asda?

At the end of the day though, they'd still have a house to live in (which they agreed to buy at x price), so I've never quite understood the issue. Unless you've bought to let...

Edit: added to that, they're already paying back more than it's worth because of the interest.
/primary school knowledge of economics

Can anyone explain why a crash in the housing market would be a bad thing? Assume houses were suddenly 10x cheaper to buy.

It won't happend, so don't worry about it.

It's fine if you are able to stay in the same house until it's worth more again, if you need to sell then you lose a tonne of money.

Huge swathes of people would be left owing more money than their property was worth, many would default.

Wouldn't that depend on what proportion of people were looking to refinance their debt?

Your average / modal home owner isn't going to be doing this very often, so provided they are still able to service their existing debt obligations, nothing should really change. For them, loan to value is pretty much a once only problem.

(Assuming interest rates don't go up at the same time...)

Buy-to-let might be a different matter, as the value of the property is an on-going factor of the leveraged finance model. If the value of your rental property drops, the bank may offer less favourable finance, which combined with falling rental incomes (that correlate to falling property prices, even if lagged) don't paint a pretty picture.

IIRC, that's how it's been in the past few house price "corrections", but I guess other models might be different.

It's fine if you are able to stay in the same house until it's worth more again, if you need to sell then you lose a tonne of money.

Depends why you're selling. If you're selling to buy a bigger house then a crash is a win as you now need to put in less extra cash to upgrade to the mansion you want. If you're trading down ("we're old, we don't need this big house, we'll trade down to a flat and live off the profits") then a crash is bad, because you get less money out.

Indeed.

going with the original premise of a 10X drop in house price. Assuming I bought a £250k house with 10% deposit, I have monthly mortgage payments of £1,450 and will repay £434k over the mortgage life.

Assuming the house is now worth £25,000, post theoretical crash, it is irritational to keep paying the mortage - I could default and with the money saved by not making mortgage payments be able to buy an equivalent property debt free in two years time.

We can say with reasonable certainty that is what will happen because we saw it happen in Merica post 2008 default, just google Jingle Mail.

So impact #1 banking disaster

Also I suspect it would be pretty ruinous for the building industry and allied trades...

I would love a crash, the property developing cunts who will soon make me redundant will have a worthless building/project and owe a shit load to Chinese investors(basically chinese mafia types).

Pretty much anyone who has anything to do with policies in the UK owns multiple homes. Self preservation will pursue. The x10 crash isn't going to happen, especially on this densely populated little island.

If houses were 10x cheaper to buy then it would be uneconomical to build them. So all developers and house-building companies would go out of business overnight. Cue massive redundancies in the construction industry, a massive increase in unemployment, a reduction in GDP and tax income and a huge increase in social security payments. Cue knock-on effects on the rest of the economy, and you'd be looking at a recession of biblical proportions.

I misread as 10% cheaper.

And by misread, I mean "didn't read at all".

That's want they want you to believe.

Well, job done as far as they're concerned then. Of course, the real issue would be the underlying reason why houses suddenly became worth only 10% of their current prices. The only reason this could happen is if you suddenly had a massive surplus of houses - i.e. a sudden increase in supply or a sudden decrease in demand. Given that a vast number of houses aren't suddenly going to spring out of the ground overnight, the only way this could happen therefore is a sudden and huge depopulation of the UK. Which would probably have far more significant consequences than lower house prices, whatever the Daily Mail might think.

I see your point but considering the difference in price between:
http://www.barratthomes.co.uk/new-homes/cleveland/H249201-Meadow-Rise/
and
http://www.barratthomes.co.uk/new-homes/middlesex/H442601-Edgware-Green/

It doesn't seem to me that the cost of materials and labour is really the main driver of final price.

The point @fidbod makes sounds like it fucks the banks over but perhaps 10x cheaper is too extreme to make a realistic comparison. I also don't know the penalties for defaulting and where the cost benefit of doing it overcomes and potential problems.