it remains to be seen what the overall vehicle C02/mile will actually be with all things considered, less than a Tesla 3, probably

[citation needed]

Stop making stuff up.

Interesting, but that range estimate is complete and utter rubbish.

I thought it was just weak. Only interesting bit was James May in the old library. I suspect the naffness of a lot of the scripted elements comes down to Amazon’s target audience in the US.

Makes you realise how good the Vietnam / Bolivia / Burma specials were, though.

But it’s also undeniable that there’s a lot who don’t yet are perversely incentivised by the tax rules to have them as company cars. What do we do about this?

Just insist that they have company sign writing on the sides and back taking up a minimum area.

I imagine it went along the lines of taxing trade users of crew cab vehicles more heavily will upset the 5 people who might vote Conservative

^^ this

Think about the typical thick-necked angry cyclist-hating possessive tax-avoiding aggressive ill-educated racist tailgating backwards Brexity person who is typically behind the wheel of one of these things and you’ve got your typical 2023 Tory target voter.

All the insects have just woken up in North Yorkshire. Pedalling through clouds of the things. Probably caused by the flooded roads courtesy of our esteemed farmers squashing mud into every single drain thanks to the eleventy million tonnes of machinery driven over the verges by a 14 year old on his phone.

They probably shouldn’t travel if they are too frail, repatriation costs for dead bodies are very expensive.

If I’m dead I won’t care what the costs are.

To be honest I imagine at that point in my life I’d just take my chances and self-insure if it was somewhere I really wanted to go and wouldn’t get the chance again. Pack an American Express card to cover a giant hospital bill and worry about it when you get home. And avoid the USA.

It’s great as long as you stop after season 3 maybe 5 at a push.

Nah, Tikka to Ride is one of the best episodes of TV ever made.

Amazon has been rubbish for quite a while now, the ad thing was the final straw. Netflix has also been getting worse. I’ve cancelled both and and subscribed to STW instead, saves me money and I get to chat shit to strangers on the internet.

Yep, especially once I discovered that you can have next day delivery to a locker for free. As a prime subscriber things had slipped to roughly 48-72 hours for a home delivery. When you realise that everything on Prime is priced to include delivery anyway (kinda like eBay + free postage) there’s no benefit.

Another recommendation for Ted (TV series) here. A few jokes fall flat but overall pretty good.

Anyone know which streaming service Space Cowboys is on? Need to prep for inevitable nuclear satellite doom.

PS: NASA / SpaceX, I have actually got a clear calendar for the next month or two if you need me to do something heroic. Already have required acting talent.

*glares at camera and mumbles*

Hi Flaperon, I’d be able to use the referral code for Octopus, please DM if it’s available ta!

Sent, thanks!

Watch this…

I know I’m in a minority here but Amazon warehouse work is decent pay for not having to think very hard. You’re on your feet a lot, and you’re monitored, but you have zero decision making, zero risk, and zero responsibility.

With overtime you’re earning the same as a paramedic or junior doctor with none of the challenges.

bit of a **** move, considering the entire reason there’s so much choice of great stuff is because (most) people are happy to pay, thus giving the streaming studios massive budgets!

Are you a streaming company?

I think they’ve shot themselves in the foot given that I know completely tech-unsavvy people using dodgy streaming sticks and it’s gathering momentum.

It’s not impossible to fix – the music industry learned from their mistakes.

Newandusedlaptops4u on eBay are good. Very happy with the cheap laptop I bought from them.

XPS 13 is in your budget:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/234629862742

I have a referral code which gets each of us £50 if you haven’t got one already.

do you do a lot of public charging?

About half of the charging I do is on a public charger. The rest is at 7.5p/kWh with Octopus.

The road tax is a relatively small element of my decision.

Road tax on a new Model 3 from next year: ~£650/yr.
Road tax on an old V60: £30/yr.

Tax increases on fuel have been held year-on-year for fear of upsetting Tory voters.

Had an email from Tusker last week suggesting that with only six months left on the lease I need to start hunting for a replacement. Decided not to go electric second time around and will just grab another used 5-year-old V60 (diesel or petrol) towards the end of the summer.

I love the experience of driving electric cars, like the get in and go, instant heat, refuelling at home at cheap rates, but there have been some changes in the last three years that I don’t like.

The first one, obviously, is the price increase. Even with the salary sacrifice tax dodge the higher BIK and £800/yr road tax knock much of the benefits away. That applies to any new EV, really. Need 300 mile range? Pay £50k+. Teslas are particularly expensive on the Tusker scheme, whether down to insurance or poor residual values, I don’t know.

The new Model 3 has the same crippled automation as the current one, and I’m not going to spend another £4,000 for an automatic lane change that doesn’t work much of the time and which can be removed whenever Tesla deliberately interpret UNECE rules incorrectly to make a point. Still no parking sensors.

Other main reason is public charging. It was 20p/kWh when I bought the car, but is now 50p/kWh at Tesla stations and between 80p-99p elsewhere. I know there’s an upfront cost to building new chargers, but there’s a balance to be struck and it feels like the equivalent of having to refuel at motorway service stations everywhere. Even slow chargers are astronomically expensive.

Landowners are taking advantage of the increased demand – not by building more chargers, but by applying onerous access and parking charges. The last two Tesla chargers I used had a minimum £5 fee just to get into the car park. Could you imagine paying a fiver to drive into your local Esso station?

You’d think the Tesla network brings an advantage, but now they’re opening more and more sites to all EVs, you hit the problem where the car navigates you there thinking that there’s an empty space, but in reality there are just 4 non-Teslas taking up 8 spaces. You’ve also wasted £4 in electricity pre-heating the battery in a pointless exercise.

And, fundamentally, I don’t want to buy another Tesla because of Elon Musk.

So I know this sounds depressing from someone who was an EV evangelist a few years ago, but it’s clear that neither the incumbents or Labour have any intention of pushing the green agenda over the next few years so I might as well take advantage of the bribes they’re giving to ICE owners.

Edit: just to clarify a couple of EV myths. Over the last 30 months I’ve never come close to running out of electricity or worried about finding a charger en-route. I’ve had to wait for a space a couple of times, and occasionally the charge rate has been irritatingly slow at only 50kW.

The battery degradation doesn’t seem to be a thing – it was showing a range of 333 miles when I bought it and now has 321. I’ve been charging it to 95-100% every time against the guidance and it doesn’t seem to care.

Motors / microwaves / fluorescent tubes / etc etc can all interfere with WiFi. You could try splitting the network into its 2.4 and 5 GHz sub bands.

That’s what they’re supposed to do?

Yeah, but if the oozing bloody fluid makes it to the edge, they fall off early and you wake up with your wound epoxied to the duvet cover. There is something distinctly creepy about hydrocolloid plasters when they work though.

Well, thanks to the advice on here I think I’ve got it fixed. There’s now a hydrocolloid patch with a Tegaderm dressing over the top for waterproofing, and the whole lot is fixed in place with the Hypafix sticky tape. First night in a week that it hasn’t leaked and gone stinky, and I even managed to make it down the stairs without hopping from step to step. 🙂

If there’s a double white line (UK) or white line Europe I slow down a little but keep going until there’s a safe place to overtake then pull right over and back right off.

Hopefully the proliferation of dash-cams will put an end to tailgating before too long. I’ve submitted two videos to the police recently and was told that both had resulted in fixed penalty notices for driving without due care and attention. Once was for an HGV sitting inches off the bumper while flashing his lights in a 50 limit in roadworks, and another was a car tailgating on an A-road with me already doing 60.

It takes about 15 minutes to make a submission via their portal but it’s worth it in the long run if it gets dangerous drivers to either think about their driving or off the road completely.

Hydrocolloid dressings! They’re amazing!

Have tried, but they can’t cope with my knee flexing, and fill up with sticky goo before falling off. 😕

The graze lower down is healing nicely under a hydrocolloid dressing though, going through the stage where you get a different creepy pattern on the gel pad every day.

Ductape and if that doesn’t do it, zip ties.

Would one of those giant jubilee clips work?

Mate, politicians don’t get anywhere by arguing things rationally. They get votes by manipulating sentiment.

Ain’t it the truth. I just wish there was a “Green-lite” party. Same overall progressive policies but without the PETA style anti-nuclear hysteria.

Having said that, Labour’s announcement yesterday that they’ll restore lifetime limits on pensions while adding a special exemption for doctors and teachers is hardly endearing me to them. It’s nice to know that there’s an official, formalised pecking order of “usefulness to society” and that those deemed pointless are taxed more heavily.

Bucketing down in Leeds but not settling. 😭

Don’t forget to take inflation into account. For your £43,000/yr “comfortable” figure you’d actually need an income of ~£92,000 if you retire in 30 years in order to enjoy the same spending power.

There’s a reason your MP’s final salary pension scheme is index-linked.

Personally I think this would be a pain in the neck and would cost more than you’d save.

It’s excellent, and whenever I go there it makes me realise just how rubbish it is in the rest of the UK.

Think how much better it would be if private cars / minicabs / black cabs were banned from the very heart of London.

Plastering. Having seen the devastation I can wreak with Polyfilla, I can’t imagine the skill needed to cover a wall or ceiling perfectly.

Lack of signage for me was lacking …I’m all for a drop in the speed limit to save lives/injury but needs to be straightforward …info on gov Wales isn’t fully clear either

Seems pretty obvious to me. If it looks like it *was* a 30 limit you drive at 20 until you see a sign saying otherwise.

Never. I keep an expired one on me for occasional ID reasons without needing to worry about losing the current version.

Fairly obvious that a meal composed of fresh fibrous veg and protein is going to be best for you. But if you’re in a situation where the choice is between something spectacularly unhealthy (airline food / work canteen / supermarket sandwich / Greggs etc) then Huel is likely to be the superior choice.

It’s a bit generic and boring if you have it every day, but it’s not intrinsically bad for you in comparison to a lot of stuff.

Wellcome collection can have some interesting stuff on. Close to Kings cross as well.

Came here to suggest this. They also sponsor the medical history section at the Science Museum, which is fascinating and usually deserted as people go for the glamorous exhibits in the main building.

You have to do intervals to get a decent anerobic training effect score. Don’t know if this reflects reality when it comes to improving fitness.

Realistically would you expect a single FTP test to have much of a training impact? I wouldn’t, so I guess Garmin is probably not far off. They use Firstbeat algorithms and you may find more information on the Firstbeat site, not Garmin’s.

Yeah, I tape button cells and 9V batteries, and they live in a metal biscuit in the garage. I have genuinely wondered about it but also keep forgetting to drop them off at the recycling centre.

I believe secondary glazing is much more effective for sound insulation than completely new windows. Cheaper, too.

Got the answer: came from my GP’s records.