u/RAbabbler

Likely to renew 365 Family subscription in the next couple of months. Noticed that the price for UK vendors for the 12-month renewal code has jumped to at least £100 in most cases.

When searching for deals on Google UK was presented with an India based outfit called Live Tech offering a family renewal for the equivalent of £50.34 for the Indian version. It requires an india IP address on renewal which is doable.

Question - has anyone bought similar and did it work for you?

Thanks for any thoughts or advice.

Rab

Gary has been making this point. Now it's being repeated.

Interesting opinion article by Susan Dalgety in the Evening News but there are a bunch of quite complex issues all bunched up into one stream of consciousness.

First off, hotels and apart-hotels are going gangbusters on various brownfield sites throughout Edinburgh. So too are student digs (PBSA). Much of that money is coming from offshored investment vehicles and not owned/developed by local businesses. This is because city planning is deciding what does and does not get built. Hotels are getting built. Student Housing is getting built. Affordable housing is not.

None of this has a lot to do with the, now licensed since 2022, self-catering sector (tagged short term lets in legislation). Back in the day much of the media spouted the claims, as if they were fact, that there were 12 or even 14 thousand properties given over to 'Airbnb' etc., in the capital. Once licensing came into effect we got the real numbers. It was a tiny fraction of these inflated claims.

We now know very accurately that city housing is made up of about 1% full time self catering operators (some of whom may use the Airbnb platform but there are many others) . The data is updated monthly by the Council. There is simply no way that self catering is anywhere big enough to be an influencing factor in the unaffordability of housing in Edinburgh.

What it does come from is decisions not to rebuild a healthy Council housing sector, quite probably because there is not enough money in the system or Councils lack the ability to borrow to build at the scale that is actually needed to make a meaningful impact. If they did this would take the pressure out of the bottom of the market and have an effect across the whole of housing.

So we are faced with a systemic issue that goes back multiple generations and various political perspectives but which none have been able or willing to address to the level really needed to address it.

And that leads to the wee self-catering sector which has usefully provided the perfect scapegoat for years of shoulder-shrugging and hand-sitting by our political masters. Easier to point the finger and blame a sector for your endemic failings rather than address the systemic issues you know are the cause, but you actually think you have no power to do anything about.

Even hotels and PBSA can't be held to blame if the city council green-lights every application put before them for a brownfield redevelopment. It'd just be nice if those businesses were indigenous and the money generated likely to stay in the local economy. It won't.

Meantime local small businesses that do employ local people and do keep the cash they generate in the local economy, are taking the heat for decades of political failure from all shades of political thought. Self-catering's become the convenient scapegoat, always on call whenever a difficult problem needs explained away without too much mental effort.

It's not black and white and it is complicated.

Johnny Harris does a deep dive on why so few have so much control in the USA. Well worth a watch. Pretty much the same playbook in the UK and rest of the world.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S25FfbFw4M