A lithium rechargeable battery should work ok – it solved the problem with our Tado valve batteries reporting issues.

Buyer A and B are the same person.

It’s good to read in the article that Labour has pledged to ban second jobs should it win the next election.

Which then begs the rather obvious question – why are Labour’s current MPs still working in second jobs and why has Sir Keir happily taken tens of £thousands in second income and corporate hospitality since becoming party leader?

If the point is one of ethics, surely it’s worse to continue doing something you say you’ll stop in the future.

Akin to “yes I do continue to beat my wife regularly but after the next election we promise to pass a law to make it illegal”. A more authentic demonstration of personal ethics is to not do the thing you say is wrong.

Per Moore & Large, some bike companies have failed to factor in inventory finance costs until it is making a material difference to their liquidity / cashflow. Not saying this is the case with IslaBikes as there may be many other reasons. As a rule though, inventory turns matter – even for bike companies.

Hopefully the Islabikes discounting is nothing to worry about – I certainly hope that’s the case as my kids have had 3 or 4 Islabikes and love them.

Tried loads of different ones – Jabra Evolve 75 (not the evolve2 model) have been a reliable workhorse for 4 years now. They work brilliantly with Mac – I’ve found the usb chip makes quite a big difference on windows laptops though – maybe it’s just at HP thing but all Bluetooth headsets have been rubbish with 3 different HP laptops.

2 alternative solutions to an adjustable stem that might work:

1. A spare seatpost with a saddle mounted in a more forward position. Cost £15?

2. A (spendy) redshift dual position seatpost that moves the saddle 5cm closer to the bars. (£130 second hand on eBay)

Eero and the older puck style google Wi-Fi are both ok as long as the assignable IP works – the specs suggest that’s the case.

One thing worth mentioning if you consider eero or google Wi-Fi – the Ukcamelcamel price tracking tool is quite helpful for seeing the “real” price of items on Amazon. It will show you the cheapest price in the last year and the frequency of promotions.

“The thing is, defence spending itself isn’t automatically a bad idea- we’ve seen that in teh last few years I think. It’s just, it tends to be spent on vanity projects, ….but it doesn’t let you cosplay on an aircraft carrier”

The new QE class aircraft carriers were procured under the last Labour govt – albeit in full knowledge there wouldn’t be any planes to fly off them after they entered service.

If the carriers are a “vanity project” (look how much the world has changed in the last 13 months…) then the pursuit of vanity can only be lodged at the door of the then Labour government.

Dazh is spot on re: vague missions.

After literally years to develop its thinking on *how* it would implement the changes it’s clear there is very little substance behind it.

Take the example of the “zero carbon economy by 2030”.

The “mission” (is that a promise, an aspiration or a pledge?) relies on technologies that haven’t been invented yet, a concentrated investment likely to run into hundreds of £Bs in a 4 year period and literally no thinking on the inflationary effect that would have or how it would need to be controlled.

Then we have the “fastest growth” mission that means companies would need to grow faster than they have for many decades and literally no thinking on how that would happen.

Even with just 5 missions the top level thinking is vague and contradictory.

Labour might has well come up with a mission to give every household a pony – everyone in high rise flats would see through in exactly the same way.

Their biggest risk now is that Sunak increasingly looks to voters like a boring but safe pair of hands – happy to work in the background on the detail without making much of a fuss about it until it’s complete.

Those who worked with him at the Treasury when he was Chancellor recognised his ability to grasp the detail – it’s pretty clear that Rachel Reeves not only lacks that but can’t even think on the spot how to answer simple questions on whether alcohol tax is too high / too low.

Unless it changes sometime soon the offer to the electorate is Sunak and a team that can deliver change vs. a load of vague missions on the back of a much longer list of promises made by Keir Starmer nearly all of which he’s broken.

It makes a lot of sense to make it worthwhile for more experienced clinicians to work longer in the NHs.

One reason for that is that if we want to train a lot more doctors to reduce workload pressure we first need to secure additional
training capacity in med schools and for supervision etc when practicing.

Drac – that rather assumes the retirement age on self invested pensions doesn’t change again. It’s about to go up to 58 as it is.

What a great result.

Someone who quietly gives their time to a charity over many years is hounded out from that position by shouty internet people who ignore that she was required to read out what was said by her employer, in order to avoid a potential libel claim.

Location makes a big difference though.

£60k in the North East gives a very good lifestyle – it’s noticeable that “premium” car brands are very well represented.

£60k in London can make for a pretty rubbish lifestyle – throw in kids etc and you’re looking at a substantial commute or living in a shoebox in a former industrial area.

It’s shill not “shrill”.

And he doesn’t have a “multi-million” contract with the Tory party either.

“ What I don’t understand is why it is ok for Tories to moonlight as paid shills and have shows on GB News”

How is that different to David Lammy who is a presenter on LBC? Or the many Labour MPs who are guest presenters on LBC or have paid podcasts on the Global (radio station that owns LBC) platform?

Actually – there is one difference. David Lammy spoke at length about why MPs shouldn’t be allowed to have second jobs.

Not that his personal values stop him trousering £20-30k a year from his own second jobs mind – or claiming parliamentary expenses for a second home close to parliament when his main home was less than 7 miles away.

Whenever Yvette Cooper talks about the “right thing to do” it’s hard to forget her house flipping at the tax-payers expense. Her moral compass appears to be fluid and paper thin at the best of times:

https://www.binlabour.com/2018/10/pigs-at-trough-yvette-cooper.html?m=1

https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/cabinet-husband-and-wife-cash-in-on-two-homes-loophole-6686858.html

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/cabinet-couple-ed-balls-and-yvette-394045.amp

The whole thing could just be a way of proving he’s not an employee / in the control of the BBC for the purposes of the £5m IR35 tax dispute with HMRC.

The timing is too much of a coincidence – the first tier tax tribunal hearing took place last week.

The quick fix which won’t happen is to align it with the MPs’ own pension scheme which allows them to accrue a pension pot of around £2m (value of benefits) without penalty.

Most of the public sector schemes are also under valued in that the cost of buying the same benefits in a private scheme e.g. index linking, is massively more than the stated “value”.

“The current BBC chairman has donated nearly half a million quid to the Tories. ”

by contrast:

Greg Dyke donated £50K+ to Labour, was a paid up Labour party member and had already sought election in a Labour seat when he was appointed to run the BBC.

James Purcell was a Labour Minister for Media and subsequently joined the BBC on a c£325K contract.

Not sure prices will fall but there may be some divergence on regional prices.

With many cities implementing ULEZ schemes – the London extension will impact 200,000+ cars in London and several times that for drivers crossing the border of the new zone, there will be more demand (higher prices) for petrol cars and less demand (lower prices) for diesel cars in these areas.

Outside of London / other cities this could mean a new diesel car will be a good bet so long as it’s used out of the current / proposed ULEZ schemes.

Update: Rachel Reeves has today admitted that Starmer’s discussions with Gray took place “over several months”. He also met with her son.

Which means that legal eagle Sir K; having called for more honesty, accountability and openness in politics and endlessly criticising everyone else was doing the opposite when he was interviewed yesterday.

It also means that he reportedly facilitated a senior civil servant breaching the CS Code – something that as a lawyer he would have understood all too well.

And for Gray herself – it’s been reported that she resigned with immediate effect last Thursday in order to avoid being sacked for a clear breach of the Civil Service code – having personally adjudicated on similar transgressions.

I think Sir K is dancing on a pinhead for a couple of possible reasons:

1. He’s repeatedly stressed he had no contact with Sue Gray “during” her inquiry. Which naturally begs the question – what contact did he or members of his team have with her before, during and after?

2. He has declined to share his own messages with Sue Gray whilst regularly calling for messages between ministers to be revealed. Why?

3. The Civil Service Code of Conduct specifically prohibits all contact between civil servants and members of HM’s Opposition unless the contact is specifically authorised * in advance * by the relevant Dept Minister. He has obfuscated whether Sue Gray requested or received that permission before discussing the CoS role with him.

Either way, the apparent obfuscation is noticeable – not just his own but also refusing to address whether Sue Gray herself stuck to the Civil Service rules that we would have been well aware of. And as others have said – it’s just another own goal from someone who trades on his “laser” like attention to detail and integrity.

And then there’s the curious matter of Rupa Huq, who was quietly re-admitted to Labour last week even though Starmer himself said her recent comments on Kwasi Kwarteng were in his view “racist” and has repeatedly pledged to drive out racism from his party.

He’s not even in power (yet) but seems to making exactly the same errors of judgement he criticises in others.

It’s a great business model – annoy people to the extent they will pay you not to see adverts, then require the user to be logged in at all times to benefit from “ad free” and thus allow you to further enhance your data collection / user profiling activities / turning the user into a product.

An absolutely awesome gilet:

https://www.certini.co.uk/clothing/jackets/castelli-perfetto-ros-mens-vest–orange__65921?currency=GBP&chosenAttribute=CS195040345&gclid=Cj0KCQiA9YugBhCZARIsAACXxeKDAoo9INyIILCwgg1PAYR3HElcarCxhSvE_Qxu1YHCJaUmOJ5pxgoaAn7xEALw_wcB

Long time intermittent lower back pain sufferer here.

Two things have helped me a ** lot **

1. The Hog. See below. Some gentle hip / back exercises when I start to get the early warning twinges.

2. A standing desk. I stand all day for work now and rotate my hips / do knee lifts etc etc on calls to keep my core muscles moving.

If the original poster can get a prescription off their GP, the pain relief products “French” style work very well for acute lower back pain.

https://amzn.eu/d/5syixcQ

Poll tax would raise more money and be fairer.

We’ve a couple of HMOs on our street -each with 8-12 working adults per house (some rooms are shared by couples) collectively paying the same as me / my partner.

You joined on the basis of a fully remote working basis and subsequently “established” that from an employment law perspective through the ongoing working arrangements.

Should the employer try and force you to change the agreed working practices without a clear basis for doing so there’s a pretty good basis for a constructive dismissal claim down the line.

I’d try to highlight the agreements made at the time of hiring any relevant contractual evidence and try and resolve it amicably – but also be prepared to fire a warning shot across the bows of HR at an appropriate point.

If it’s an American owned / led company this kind of stuff is often complicated by the fact HR people in the States are often pretty ignorant about employment laws in other countries – even small efforts to highlight relevant local legal constraints result in the employee being deemed “awkward”.

Good luck!

I agree with Rone above – but Starmer has boxed himself in with some really stupid “missions” e.g.

Mission: Decarbonise electricity supply by 2030 and cut bills

What does this mean in practice?
– Huge (hundreds of £Bs) investment and deployment of long term (weeks not days capacity) grid level electricity storage infrastructure using technologies that are still being piloted / are not ready for scale deployment.
– The need to develop and commercialise the tech and create a viable market for it i.e. balance of supply and demand to ensure competition
– (lots – thousands) of planning applications all of which could take up to 2 years if they go to planning inspectorate appeals
– thousands of sub projects to be designed, procured and delivered in 60 months or less.
– tens of thousands of jobs to be created and trained in the tech that doesn’t exist yet.

Chances of this happening – zero.

The tech doesn’t exist – in its current form it’s v expensive and will require £00’s of Billions against a pledge that consumers will pay less. So who is paying?

The poll bounce that Rone suggests will happen largely because the public will see through the missions for what they are – vague aspirations with no substance behind them.

Fruit and Veg wholesalers in Ireland are facing similar issues.

Bad weather causing a shortage of fruit and veg

Do all of the ones above remember the last setting i.e. if the colour is set to blue and the light is turned off, is the colour blue when they are turned on again?

Philips Hue lights do that but the “memory” of the last setting is a bit hit and miss.

Depending which network / type of data connection you have there may be solutions to boost your speeds.

In short:
– use an external antenna
– mount as high as possible
– use a high-gain solution e.g. mounting the antenna in the middle of an old satellite dish and directing it towards the phone mast

The forums on ISPReview are pretty handy.

There’s also a starlink thread as well – one of the issues is that its quite expensive for electricity costs.

Also – £55 a month is loads.

Unlimited data can be had on EE and Voda for £25 a month or less (see scancom / lebara) or less on 3.

Three is currently £9 a month on one of the scancom pre-pay data deals.

“I’m not a big earner but live well within my means. So from my (apathetic) position I take joy in watching the country burn to ashes so I can gloat over those that wanted national suicide. I want people to suffer. I want people to regret. I want people to learn that next time they are given a choice, to learn what the effects of either direction will lead to instead of doing what the oligarch has told them to do.”

Pretty much the whole of Europe (exc. switzerland) are facing the same issues – in many cases CPI inflation at country level is more than double UK inflation. It has little / nothing to do with oligarchs, “national suicide” or the other causes you suggest.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/225698/monthly-inflation-rate-in-eu-countries/

Currently chugging along on a 3 unlimited data sim from scancom – £300 for 3 years up front with no contract – so less than £10 a month.

I’m in a 5g area so the typical speeds are 500-700Mbps download and 100-170Mbps uploads

In the last year the service has been rock solid – no loss of service and literally a handball of slow network warnings on Ms Teams that lasted a few seconds each time.

By contrast our previous contract was with Virgin – constant outages of 12-24 hours, slow regional network issues and a whopper of 5 weeks without service before I really lost my proverbial with their endless lies.

The energy windfall tax is also now resulting in O&G companies winding back further capital investment in the UK.

Good riddance. We need to stop using fossil fuels asap, and the oil and gas companies are not going to help with that.

That’s pretty simplistic.

What you are actually advocating is the loss of tens of thousands of high paying / skilled engineering jobs and £billions of employment taxes.

What follows is the loss of UK corporation tax receipts that will be in the region of £25b (from shell and bp) this year alone.

Longer term the Uk will have less engineers so the effect will ripple out to universities and other industries.

None of this will alter the amount of oil and gas we use – it will just increase supply risk, carbon emissions (more shipping) and increase the cost of energy to consumers.

The £bs in tax will of course need to be replaced – based on £30-50B loss in tax a year that’s £1k more tax for every household – every year.

Shell’s retail energy business in the Uk has lost so much money (around £1/4b over two years) they are looking at selling it or shutting it down.

The energy windfall tax is also now resulting in O&G companies winding back further capital investment in the UK.

If it’s ceiling mould there’s a good chance the issue is ventilation or lack of it.

The tenants may be reducing their use or central heating (understandable) or failing to open the windows enough to get moisture levels down e.g. after cooking or showers etc.

As a first step, clean / kill the mould with white vinegar or similar and then ensure the room is aired regularly.

Slight tangent – does anyone know if it’s possible to just staple superfoil on top of ceiling joists? So leaving existing rock wool type insulation between the joists and then putting superfoil over the top?

As long as it’s a foil with a breathable membrane would it work?

We had a new Vaillant fitted and it failed within 2 months – Vaillant fixed it under guarantee (heat exchanger and a circuit board were borked) but it took nearly a week to get them out and that was in September before the peak of boiler breakdowns.

A family member had a Worcester Bosch fitted by a platinum installer and had no end of problems with it. WB warranty service was absolutely atrocious – endless calls to get them to acknowledge the fault, delays of up to 2 weeks to even come out, then they haven’t got the parts, then they fit 2nd hand parts, then it fails again etc etc. They may well come with a 10 year guarantee but aren’t set up to make good on that.

Aside from anything else it means that SRAM are wasting around 60% of the capacity for ocean and road freight (assuming they aren’t using air freight). That adds significant cost to the consumer but also means they are contributing to ocean / road freight pollution.

Apple’s done some great work to reduce the size of packaging – if they can manage that for metal / glass products it’s reasonable to assume SRAM can do the same for metal / carbon / plastic objects.

“This government has absolutely no idea on how to grow an entrepreneurial economy. There doesn’t seem to be anything there to benefit a SME owner or sole trader unless i have missed something.”

There’s quite a lot in there for SME owners and there are quite a few changes that will immediately impact what people do / spend next year.

– The cancellation of the corporation tax increase is quite a big deal. It reduces tax paid before profits are in turn paid out as dividends. In most cases SME owners may be more willing to invest in their businesses because they can get more out as net income. I can’t see it in the announcement but I’m assuming that the change to top level income tax will be mirrored in dividends – with the result SME owners may draw down more earnings and in turn spend it in the wider economy.

– The cancellation of the NI uplift will save employers money – giving them more headroom to invest in their businesses or trade through the very difficult period that’s still to come.

– The removal of the high rate income rate threshold will see a shift from saving into pensions to very highly paid employees taking more of their income as salary – and paying tax on it along the way. That increased wage packet will in turn be spent and sustain other jobs in the economy. Most of the increased spend will find its way back to the government through corporation tax on increased sales and VAT.

– The changes to stamp duty will likely help to sustain property sales, which in turn sustain jobs in the construction, property maintenance, building supplies, architectural services etc etc etc. sectors.

– The Regional Enterprise zones could have a transformational effect on local economies. Ref the huge shift that’s occurred in other countries where this has already happened – which in some cases have see huge areas transformed from low wage / high unemployment to high wage / full unemployment.