@43d7c4ea IIRC something like 10% of NHS clinical posts are vacant because nobody qualified wants the job. So that's the equivalent of a 1 day strike every week and a half for the last decade or more. 

 @59034767 Indeed. Check out Stack Exchange, https://stackexchange.com/ . It's a collection of sub sites that do this for different topics. The original one was Stack Overflow, which was for coding. It worked so well that its creators decided to expand to lots of other topics. 

 @43d7c4ea I'll look into this more over the weekend. 

 @43d7c4ea Houses aren't liquid assets, but if we put some of our savings into shares then we have exchanged our money for (a share of) property that isn't money. But we haven't lost that money, and we can easily get that money back by selling the shares. Shares aren't money, but they look a lot like money.

There is a parable about a rich man who visited an island and paid by writing cheques. The islanders never bothered to cash the cheques, but just treated them like bank notes.
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 @43d7c4ea 
I also disagree with the notion that a commodity-based money equates to a barter economy (if I understand the article correctly). An actual exchange of gold for food is indeed barter, but as soon as loans are made you have the creation of new money that isn't gold. The original "bank notes" were effectively IOUs issued by banks; hence the "promise to pay" language on them. But they promptly became money, exchanged just like the gold they supposedly represented.
/6 

 @43d7c4ea To make a profit you also need to lend at a rate higher than what you have to pay to borrow the money. Mortgages fixed for 5 years are a bet on future interest rates. If those mortgage rates are going down its a prediction that interest rates will fall, by people who are putting their money where their mouths are. 

 @a0b872c9 
I always assume that raw meat is contaminated and act accordingly; wash anything that touched it, avoid spreading contamination, etc. That goes double for chicken.