It's not particularly difficult either. Most people haven't declared bankruptcy, been involved in financial crime or other rare event that will make you ineligible for credit. Given the number of challenger banks out there if the high street banks turn you down you've got options and options for days. Hell, a lot of the challenger banks are skirting the rules on credit to get new customers, Starling for one offers a line of credit (overdraft facility, effectively the same thing) on almost every account, default is £500 and can't be reduced to less than £50.

I'm going to wait for Meme Civ IV.

The subsequent ones will be terribad.

Which is always going to be a bigger risk with small aircraft, in particular with helicopters because they're vulnerable to high winds and more single points of failure.

Commercial VTOL flights are also notoriously uneconomical, you only really use them when no other form of transport is suitable.

You'd be lucky if it were just spit... Joby is Scottish slang for shit.

Wha....

Our King hasn't even been able to do that since before 1649 (ironically, the last time we had a Chaz in charge).

A simple answer is, prices must not be changed during opening hours. This is basically how most countries regulate their petrol stations. A price is set at the start of the day and may not legally be altered until the following day (otherwise we'd have them changing the price depending on how many people are queuing up).

Any subscription is too much, I'll continue to play on platforms that don't charge you money for basic functionality.

This is just the only country in the world where this kind of thing happens refusing to admit why this kind of thing happens and trying to find any reason except the obvious to explain why this kind of thing happens.

The old excuse of "video games and rock and/or roll music" just ain't cutting it no more.

So they're back to trying to find any scape goat they can to avoid admitting the US has too many guns and an unhealthy love of violence.

Unfortunately in this case it's less about earning rights and more "give the rich overlords a steady supply of cannon fodder". The kids of CEOs will be exempt from service one can expect.

Third invasion's the charm.

Erm... just exactly which side is the BBC biased against?

The right will tell you the BBC has a leftist bias whist the left will tell you the BBC is biased towards the right.

They can't both be correct.

Disney doesn't want affluent consumers, people who have money typically have it because they aren't spendthrifts and understand the value of their dollar/euro/pound.

What Disney want are the kind of people who "don't even look at the price tag" and just put everything on credit. The kind of people who's pay barely even touches their bank account on it's way to service their ever increasing pile of debt so they'll need more debt to get through the month. That's the kind of mindless consumer Disney wants, perfect for consuming their mindless garbage.

This kind of consumer will never have a whole $40 in their pocket.

This.

I'm no linguist but I speak enough Spanish to know how limited machine translators still are. They're fine if you don't speak any of the language and need to find the bookshop or can help to order a meal, a succulent Chinese meal but they lack any understanding of idioms, slang, nuance, tone or context. This is before you get to local dialects, abbreviations or typos.

Yep, my point of reference is the Daily Mail Compoface scale.

When we see an increasing number of sad looking faces on the front of Tabloid papers with the headlines "Ryanair cancelled our flight to Magala and ruined my hen party" then we'll know we're in trouble.

Erm, Europe doesn't get much oil from Iran. Most of it is imported from Norway or the US amongst others. The only route it might (and I mean might as this could easily be going overland) is Iraq or Saudi Arabia (10% in total).

The problem is that this is fucking with the global market as the countries that do import a lot of Middle Eastern fuel, notably in Asia such as the Philippines, are scrabbling to get alternate fuel sources. So Europe will have no trouble sourcing jet fuel, the question is how expensive will it get.

Europe and the UK are handling this quite well, current fuel prices in the EU are between EUR 1.50 and 2.50 depending on nation as they all have different taxation structures, supply agreements, et al. Prior to Operation Epic Stupidity (end of FEB 2026), fuel in the UK was £1.50, at the peak it's £1.80, so 30 pence per litre (about US$0.40), Germany was EUR 1.80 and peaked at 2.25, in the US prices almost doubled in the same time.