Previous £25,000 maximum no longer enough to fund some home improvements, says building society
Nationwide building society has doubled the maximum personal loan it will offer borrowers to £50,000, citing the continued increase in building costs as the reason for the change.
The society previously offered up to £25,000 for qualifying customers but said this was no longer enough to fund some home improvement projects.
People who receive the new state pension can get thousands a year more than those on the old basic scheme
Sheila receives the basic state pension and says it is a struggle to make ends meet. “We’re supposed to survive on pocket money,” says the widow, aged 81. “I don’t go out because I can’t afford it. I used to go for a coffee to treat myself but not any more. It’s too expensive. If I buy clothes it is at the charity shop.
“The way we have to live is not nice at all. There’s masses of people in the same position. It makes you isolated because if you can’t go out and have a little spend it is not living is it?”
Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Following Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund providing significant funding for GNOME, Rust Coreutils, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and numerous other free software projects, the FFmpeg multimedia library is the latest beneficiary to this funding from the Germany government. The Sovereign Tech Fund notes that the FFmpeg project is receiving 157,580 euros for 2024 and 2025.
An announcement on the FFmpeg.org project site notes: "The FFmpeg community is excited to announce that Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has become its first governmental sponsor. Their support will help sustain the [maintenance] of the FFmpeg project, a critical open-source software multimedia component essential to bringing audio and video to billions around the world everyday."
Visa is rolling out new technology that will allow the payments giant to share more information about customers' preferences [non-paywalled source] based on their shopping history with retailers as it seeks to remain a top player in the competitive e-commerce space. From a report: The data will be shared via the payments giant's proprietary "tokens," which provide an added layer of security between a consumer's bank information and a merchant. Shopping inclinations and other information based on past transactions -- such as preferred categories, like movies or golf -- will be shared via token with retailers with the consent of consumers.
"It's almost entirely blind to almost all consumers," Visa Chief Executive Officer Ryan McInerney said in an interview of the company's token technology. "They just know their payments work better." The sharing of shopping data via token is one of a handful of innovations Visa unveiled at a conference in San Francisco, where it's based. Visa, one of the largest e-commerce technology companies in the world, is finding itself increasingly fending off competitors seeking larger slices of the fees merchants must pay to carry out consumer transactions.
Europeans have more time, and Americans more money. It is a cop-out to say which you prefer is a matter of taste. There are three fairly objective measures of a good society: how long people live, how happy they are and whether they can afford the things they need. A society must also be sustainable, as measured by its carbon emissions, collective debt and level of innovation. So which side does it better? [Financial Times; ungated]
Everything is more expensive these days, but the rising cost of electricity is especially irritating because it’s so fundamental to modern life. When energy costs spike it can feel like just existing has become too expensive, and when you have to pause to calculate the cost of basic necessities, life can feel kind of exhausting.
The kitchen is a prime suspect when it comes to your rising electricity bill; it costs between $391 and $1,777 annually to run your kitchen, depending on where you live—and about 75% of appliance energy use happens when they’re turned off, so you can try to reduce your electricity usage by unplugging them when they’re not in use. But if you want to reduce that bill even further, you can take the extra step and get rid of some of the most common electric appliances altogether, replacing them with hand-powered alternatives (or, in some cases, foot-powered).
Your own hands
Dishwashers are much better than hand-washing dishes in just about every way, especially if you choose one with a solid energy rating—but if you’re looking to save money on your utilities, hand-washing your dishes in cold water will save you about $45 a year. Is that a lot? Not by itself—but if it’s part of an overall hand-powered plan it can add up.
Hand-cranked washing machine
Washing machines and dryers have become so prevalent we forget that you can easily wash and dry your clothes without any electricity or natural gas at all. Hand-cranked or foot-powered washing machines combined with air-drying your laundry on a drying rack or a clothesline can save you about $115 annually and will do just as good of a job of keeping your clothes clean.
By unplugging your at-home coffee making, you can save yourself about $14 annually. A fancy manual espresso maker like this one from Rok makes excellent espresso shots with zero electricity, and a simple pour-over coffee maker will brew plenty of java with zero electricity (though you’ll have to heat up the water somehow, admittedly). Combine them with a hand-powered coffee grinder and you can remove the electric tax from your morning cuppa altogether.
A foot-cranked blender
You’re not going to hand-crank a blender, no—but you can foot-crank a blender. A Fender Blender is designed to attach to a stationary bicycle, using your leg power to blend whatever you need blended. It actually works much better than you might imagine, as you can see here—and you get a little exercise to justify whatever treat you’re mixing up for yourself.
The cost to run a blender depends on how often you use it (and your local cost for electricity, of course), but if you use your blender once a day for a year you could save about $15 by going with the hand-powered version.
A good old whisk
Using a mixer every day will cost you about $12 annually, and using an electric egg beater daily offers a similar cost savings, so substituting a hand-powered whisk and mixer can save you about $24 a year.
Using a food processor only costs you about $2 a year unless you’re running your processor constantly. Still, that’s $2 you don’t have to spend if you use a hand-powered food chopper/processor instead.
Total savings
On average, you’d save about $215 every year by using these hand-powered tools instead of their electric versions—although that number might grow if the price of electricity keeps going up. Plus, of course, having a hand-powered kitchen and laundry means power outages, blackouts, and societal collapse won’t slow you down—throw in a hand-cranked generator and radio and you’ll ride out the apocalypse in style.
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