Foreign Perspectives

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In times gone by, getting inflation down was always considered to be a “good thing” and it still is but the problem is that the underlying reasons for inflation these days are quite different from those a few years ago.

Nowadays, inflation is largely driven by the oil price either directly through increasing the cost of your own petrol or indirectly through increasing transport costs generally. More to the point though is that it isn’t driven by the banks handing out money as they used to as anyone who has tried to get credit lately will tell you.

Yet, the Bank of England persist in using interest rates as their seemingly only means of driving down inflation. It isn’t working and it won’t work because it’s not bank lending that’s keeping inflation up (as is clear by the “credit crunch” that we’re all experiencing): it’s the oil price. Even if they took interest rates to 50%, inflation would still remain high.

What those high rates are doing though is killing the economy; they’re certainly not killing the inflation.

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Shopping for white goods in the high street always seems such a soul destroying exercise, doesn’t it?

Not only is the shopping part unrewarding but then you’ve to put up with the salesman trying to sell you the extended warranty that never really makes sense on electrical or electronic goods.

Buying online avoids all that and offers a much wider range than any high street store could realistically stock. The downside is that something like the Miele KF5650SD obviously is going to cost a fair bit in terms of delivery charges so that although the list price online might be lower than the price in a shop, the price you end up paying isn’t all that different most of the time (there are exceptions to this of course). On the other hand you’re definitely going to avoid the high pressure sales techniques for the extended warranty and save a lot of trudging round shops too.

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After much tinkering around with other peoples’ Wordpress templates, I figured that it was time that I wrote my own one.

That sounds like it would be a major undertaking but in reality it’s not nearly as difficult nor timeconsuming as you’d think basically because a lot of the groundwork has already been done so it’s effectively tinkering around but on a slightly larger scale.

Anyway, I’ve been plugging away with that off and on for the last month or two over at SevaTeem and it looks like it’s getting close to the time when I’ll be able to release it on an unsuspecting public. As a bit of preparation for that day, I’ve started to roll it out on some of my little family of blogs with the one over at Our Inns probably being the closest representation to the final product although as it’s going to offer loads of options it could well look quite different and Personally Chosen is also using it.

What’s needed next is the addition of some options to avoid people needing to dive in and edit the code itself.

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