A slammed saddle used to mean it was as far down as seatpost/tube could go, so it didn’t get in theway of yr rad midair skillz. That saddle definitely does not look slammed in the usual pinkbike sense!

The Game is lovely to look at (sets, cars, costumes, buildings, props etc) but it’s no Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The last episode where they had playing cards as representatives of who might be the leak rather took the piss i thought (remembering a very similar scene but with Control’s chess pieces as the ‘suspects’ in the film).

I was thinking 1864 when i opened this thread, it really is great. Lord knows how historically accurate it is, but the first historical drama i have ever really got into. 2 episodes behind everyone else though so no spoilers please!
I really liked both series of inside no 9. New series had some great episodes and some average ones though.

*old-fashioned till kerching noise*
That’s a fair old ride even for a healthy/well person! All the best for tomorrow.

I dont know where you got any of that from? Sure as hell it’s not anything I said!

Ninfan, why else would you derail a thread about the morals and future of a (now former) minister lying to the public, just beforea general election in which he was returned with a slim majority, with paragraphs about the truth/untruth of what it was he was actually lying about? I am sure you have seen and challenged may instances of such whataboutery on here over the years.

Anyone would think you are just oppositional for oppositional’s sake. It is quite possible that right now you could be having just as much fun are arguing just the opposite on a lib dem chatroom somewhere.

Oh i recently had advice on here about looser fitting road tyres, consensus seemed to be that schwalbe are fractionally looser and conti usually tighter to get on.

My 66 yo dad wears a baseball cap on sunny days when he does the gardening or walks the dog. He still looks 66 in it but not particularly daft imo. Although his is the sort you would find in marksies or cotton traders, so not sure how a wide flat brimmed one with a shiny sticker on it would look on him!

Much earlier in the thread:

He leaked meno, lied about it then set up a £1.5m, tax payer funded, enquiry to find out it’s source.

Ninfan, the content and accuracy is one issue, perhaps we should have a thread about that too. Getting back to the title of the thread, he still lied more than once about being involved in the leak. In fact there were only 2 people involved and one was him, a minister to boot.

It almost sounds as though like you think that the content of the leak justified both leaking it, and lying to the public about his involvment in it just before a general election. I seem to remember you having opinions on the legitimacy of other famous leaks in discussions on here. Are there ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ones then?

He recognises that, as a Secretary of State, he was responsible for his own conduct and that of his Special Adviser. He could and should have stopped the sharing of the memo and accordingly accepts responsibility for what occurred
no-one else had any involvement in the leaking of the memo

Ninfan, whataboutery. He still stated several times before the election that he knew nothing of the leak, and gambled on the inquiry turning up no evidence against him (as is more often the case in leak enquiries iirc). Does the disputed accuracy of the memo change the significance of the above? -(coped from your cut’n’paste)

Depth of channel in middle makes the difference as well as tyre itself. C-G, if you are using tubes you could still consider the thickness of whatever rim tape you have on. Stans yellow (or similar) tape is thinner than cloth or plastic tape, and so will increase the depth of the channel in the middle (relative to thicker rim strip) and give you more wiggle room to get bead over the edge of the rim. However i am not sure what sort of pressure it copes with. I have used tubes and stans rim tape to 40 ish psi with no probs but not sure about cx or road tyre pressures. Stans website suggests it is suitable for use as lightweight rim tape with or without tubes, but to put 2 layers on for road tyres and tubes due to pressures invoved. Hopefully someone can advise from experience.

If the election was in a month’s time there, there is no way would he have his 800 majority (down from circa 2000 last time iirc). So yes if one of the advantages of fptp is that you vote for the individual candidate as well as the party, then he should stand again in a by-election and let his constituents decide based on this rather new and important information.

Venus at bigbury, is lovely unforgettable place and lush views, but no inside to it, picnic benches whatever the weather! . But if you are staying in/near Plymouth, have a look on the yogi cycling club website for a great list of routes (and links to gpx files) and indeed cake stops. If the gran fondo doesn’t do you in too much, i reccommend the slapton sands loop.

I hope that they are very proud.

Sounds like the union negotiators held their nerve and reached some sort of better agreement.
Not sure how different this really is from business negotiations, where customer wants to pay the least possible, and provider/seller says ‘find someone else to do it for less (ie sack us for striking), or choose us for this price’ and they meet somewhere in the middle. I hope that ‘somewhere in the middle’ represents good vfm for the union members’ subscriptions. Morally i see this as no different to large corporations who lobby westminster or buy their way into charity meals with ministers in order to lobby for their interests direct with the legislators.

Really, having lived (and gone on strike :D ) in France, the panic about this one felt like a storm in a teacup.

our telly.

Its only a £200 thing from the co-op, but
-4.30pm on boxing day,
-mother in law staying, wife out at work till late
-actually turned out to be easy slean up of contacts on main power switch.
When m-i-l stopped fretting and settled back down to watch Only Fools and Horses i could have wept with joy. 8)

I can. A mate is a rollerderbyist, it looks well fun, but there are only so many things you can fit in your life, and boys roller derby down here would mean a lot of travelling compared to the many girls teams locally.

Pik n Mix – Member
Yes I can skate, spent too many years at Granby halls with my Bauer’s.

I believe it is like hoovers, my wife tells me that in Leicester you can call whatever (2×2) skates Bauers, regardless of the make. Also mandatory to have them poorly laced up with the plastic tongue thingy stuck out front. Wife and i used to go skating at zanzibar near the bus station when we were just starting out, Granby Halls was/were a pile of rubble by then. :(

[professional hat] I don’t do the neurodevelopmental/autism assessments in my team, but my basic understanding is that it involves some/all of this:
-meet kid. Interact with/play with kid. Take history from parent or child as well depending on age and communcation.
-discuss at length with SENDCO at school, and Ed. Psych if involved.
-looooong developmental history interview. Lots of questions about develomental milestones, speech, gestures, attachments & bonding with parents, sensory/tactile stuff, food, toiletimg, playing, interacting with other kids and adults.
-if kid is still quite small, some services do school observations where someone spends a few hours watching the whole class and playground.
-maybe proper psychological testing (google GARS and WISC. Wisc was actually quite fun when one of the psychology trainees had a practice run with me some years ago).
-iirc you can be diagnosed by a clinical psychologist if senior/experienced enough otherwise you might have a child psychiatrist locally who specialises. Some areas might have a child development centre that does all this rather than part of a formal child and adolescent mental health service.
It is a long process and not to be taken lightly. But a diagnosis can be useful and enable changes and support to be made in education, as well as helping parents ‘get’ their kids and to plan and enjoy much more rewarding and less ‘eggshells’ experiences with them. These days i would not see as diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder as a barrier to higher education or employment and i have known some truly awesome 16 and 17 year olds through work who have gone on to great things.

I am curious as to how your son might be a way through this process without anyone having spoken to you as dad and living with son too. Since you will i assume have parental responsibility (i cannot imagine a situation where a parent still living with the child has had this displaced by social care or family court, but also not certain there might not be some slight differences in family law in scotland that i don’t knw about) you could, (and i would say you should) be involved in this assessment as a valuable source of information (as i said, the developmental history interview with parents is big and very important), and you should be informed of any updates the team may have.

If ex-wife is obstructing this process (i am guessing that appointment letters were opened before you saw them, and the person doing the assessment perhaps has a different story about why you aren’t coming to the appointments), my advice as someone who does get this situation very ocasionally with the assessments/cases i do would be:
Phone up and gently enquire/offer to come in and discuss. Given the apparent rift between you and ex-wife, do not think it will be a good idea to go with them both next time though. Not knowing you, family etc i couldn’t say at this point if i would want to see you on your own or with your son minus mum. Your ex’s actions in this are one thing, and your son should not be a battleground, but the difference between the story of the family and the perspective of one parent on the child versus the other should not be underestimated. For all i know you might actually be a terribly hard person to live with and maybe your wife had understandable reasons for keeping this from you (neutral is my middle name, at work at least!) but that wouldn’t mean i woudn’t be interested in meeting and involving you too.

[unprofessional hat on now] but going all ‘fathers for justice’ on the service doing the assessment will not likely be helpful!

Great graph!

Of course some proper electoral reform (as opposed to AV) could sidestep all thses accuasions of gerrymandering etc.

Less of a point now that all of the south west peninsula is blue apart from Exeter, but my local super-safe-seated MP got pissy about boundary reforms because it looked like in his case he would actually have had to do some work to get returned as MP, with some very labour areas being brought into his patch -a legitimate worry for him on 2010 figures, he had his intern check certainly did his homework on that, but not borne out by the swing to conservative since 2010. Naturally he insisted it was because his constituency was geographically big enough already and would be unworkable as a funny shaped and craply-roaded patch. The size of his patch would still have been significantly smaller than most of the other rural constituencies nearby.

It was interesting to see him (a tory whip with his eye on the deputy speaker’s position at the time) break cover and speak out on it even if it was only really in the local press and local beeb. I look forward to emailing him about the lack of protest from him should similar gegraphically challenging but politically safe boundary changes come his way this time. :D

I personally think that those peddling them aren’t a million miles away from big tobacco in the way they market and sell them.

in the absence of a single “hollow laugh” smiley: :D :lol: :? :|

A friend in the nicotine replacement industry (pharma end) advised me some years ago that philip morris, b.a.t. Et al are all investing in e-cigs and viewing vaping products as simply a new product line with far far fewer restrictions on packaging, duty and so on. Mechanics of marketing and keeping customers using the product (and their product) will be just the same. This was a couple of years ago now, i wonder who owns what nowadays?

Also the lack of pharmaceutical trials/ testing and transparency around ingredients on some of them as compared to ‘proper’ nrt is worrying. Remember these are products designed to keep you vaping not help you quit altogether. Methinks that nrt (for quitting purposes) needs to become cheaper and more freely available with the financial incentive of ‘you won’t need to spend anything on this in a few months’ rather than ‘its still really expensive but at least you aren’t smoking.’

@Julian whilst you deride the concept of profit margin in the NHS the vast majority of the medicines you’ll be given will have been researched, developed, produced and sold with that in mind.

Sorry to return to this s late, been seeing nhs patients all day. Unbelievably none of the ones i saw today are on any form of medication whatsoever. I think i am seeing two this week that are! At a ‘retail’ cost of a total of about £50 a month for both of them. One is on a particularly expensive drug that is unusual in my field, would usually be a few quid a month per patient in meds if they are prescribed any at all.
Of course jambalaya, plenty more are on, errr, plenty more than that, and plenty stand absolutely zero chance of recovery or even survival without medicine, yet I wonder if you know what proportion if the annual nhs budget is actually spent on medication? of course you know what single cost is by far the largest component of healthcare…

jambalaya – Member
…NHS, other health systems exist in different countries and they work quite well including many who have large sections which are in the private sector…

Absolutely right. Half the story though. My understanding is that we live in straightened economic times where austerity and managed public spending is paramount. Where it is possible to reliably compare overall cost (whoever pays/however it is funded) versus treatment outcomes, internationally the nhs is one of if not the best value for money services.

Why would you want to risk eroding that value for money by retaining ‘free at point of use’ principle but forcing profit margins into the equation? it is hard enough to put on a service that balances the books for less money than and same outcomes as the old nhs provider, without then having to make a profit on it too. The profit also leaves the country in the case of many of the big boys lining up to run public services.

The justification for the health and social care act on economic/ vfm grounds is incredibly weak and smells of idealogy not pragmatism or thinking beyond the next 2 administrations.

Better funded than it would have been.

Of course. It will need to be for companies to deliver on what they are commissioned to do and still make a realistic profit. Why would you bollix and obfuscate your way through multiple rereadings and amendments to the health and social care act without making really sure (and making potential private providers of services confident) that it would be properly funded? That would be like spending your dinner party budget on fancy invitations, placecards and napkins, and then not having enough money for a decent pudding ( ;) )and coffee at the end.

This does not necessarily mean that increases in funding mean increases in throughput, quality and treatment outcomes though. These companies need to make a profit to exist, after all. What it does mean is that taxpayers money is being spent in a way which allows much more of it to leave the country through the various companies who are commissioned to do the work. (See railways thread and sncf’s investment in uk rail franchises).

Oh and +1 to the bits about social care. Even in children’s health where they have parents and families, it is frightening how much even today the poor resourcing of social care adds to the cost of nhs care (most particularly inpatient £1200 a night sort of stuff). Better funding can easily and quckly be swallowed up in delayed discharges or additional ‘borderline’ admissions which could have actually cost social care far less (if they had it, poor feckers) to avoid than it subsequently costs nhs england to deal with instead.

“Better funding to nhs” is a poor measure, great for the cover of the Mail, obviously welcomed by those in the nhs but quite simple to see how much more complicated it is than this.

Oooooh, st4, mmmmmmmm……. :)

You need a 25.4mm stem/handlebar, 9 speeds on the back (although it looks like you already have: enjoy the cheap chains and powerlinks!!) and of course inner tubes.

I am going to take out a contract* on the next person that posts an election thread.

So, this ‘contract’….
Is it out to tender yet?
My inexpert multinational service company with absolutlely no links to the conservative party or donations given whatsoever can put in a bid so low we cannot afford to fulfil it properly (it’s starving out the competition that counts not delivery of the contract, do keep up) and then the taxpayer can bail us out when we fail to deliver the ‘contract’ that the relevant secretary of state still has a responsibility to provide.
Feel free to dig this post out in four years time when we are bitching about child protection social service ‘Mc-Teams’, your nan’s bolloxed up hip operation or the crappy new Serco/G4S/virgin probation ‘service’ that is not monitoring your dodgy new neighbour properly.

So, the ‘right wing parties’ (Conservatives, UKIP and DUP) would have almost exactly the same majority/dominance that they have achieved through FPTP?

Irrespective of the difference in overall percentages due to protest/get them out voting habits under fptp copared to how poeple think and vote under pr, the cons/dup/ukip coalition would certainly be governing dIfferently from a single conservative majority. No doubt cameron will be dressing up/pulling an ‘AV’ on the europe referendum (surely he will never let the public decide on a simple in/out without some smoke and mirrors) which he would not dare do if he relied on a large number of ukip mp’s to prop his coalition up. Scotland’s response to whatever the outcome of the referendum would also surely be different under a scotland with a mix of parties via pr than it will be with their 56 snp mp’s.

Tpt cruiser, i have long maintained that Farage is actually working under deep cover for the lizard people as a vote-splitter and a way to make the most right wing tory government for ages look a bit more centre-ist and less unappealing.

I think one issue is, everyone who hates the tories does so with such a vicious passion it just spouts out their mouth (or keyboard) like frothing gibberish, so no-one who is ‘marginal’ understands them and just writes them off as loonies. Er-go, they vote conservative as they have a clearer message (from their trained pet-monkey media apparently?)

Alternatively, the conservatives are just really good at apealing to poorly-educated people as well. Although a quick tootle through our local ge and council results suggests thatlocally ukip sem to have had a few of the really slow voters off the conservatives.

Awhiles+1
Also,
1) fob off your coalition ‘partner’ with a totally half-assed and doomed-to-fail electoral reform referendum, thus keeping fptp for another generation. No sense these meddlesome little parties with their pissy 6% vote shares actually having any seats off the big boys.
2) pass some legislation capping and monitoring what non-political organisations are able to do in the name of ‘lobbying’ for issues they represent eg charities, churches, volonteer organisations. You don’t want them messing things up for the nasty parties now do you?
3) Then sneak in a change allowing your party to spend much more than the opposition could possibly afford on campaigning.
4) circumvent any laws about money spent on political campaigning by getting your donors and chums in the press (some of whom may not even live in the uk or be uk nationals, bien sur) to spend as much as they see fit on doing your campaigning for you as “news”

Yay democracy!

I did read somewhere on facebook that if we had 100% turnout, its estimated that the election results in terms of seats won per party would be near enough the same. I always imagined the little and/or protest parties would do better and many marginals would swing away from conservative, but apparently not.

. I imagine my Tory supporting Scottish State School Art Teacher may have had a different experience.

Eeek. As i recall my dad (state school teacher) was considered a bit of an outsider with his sdp window sticker, but that is a whole different level of staffroom tension!

Actually my staffroom is chiefly split between labour and greens, with the labour voters mostly in marginals apologising for voting the conservative incumbents out and not the most left-leaning party in. The stereotype of sandal-wearing handwringers agonising over their betrayal of their socialist roots is a not entirely inaccurate description of the last time we discussed this together. :D Easy for me as i live in a 14000-majority-safe constituency so i might as well vote for ‘hopes not fears’ (mandela) and so no need for apologising about tactical voting/compromise.

mefty – Member
two christmas-voting turkeys
Maybe they vote on the basis of the wellbeing of society rather just their own selfish agenda.

Smooth. Of course that is just what lefties the overwhelming majority of people working in state and third/charity sectors with the underprivileged and marginalised say about people with comfortable lives who will never need help and vote conservative, of course.

I am sure my naval commander riding buddy considers a green vote to be bad for national security, and he has a great deal of professional experience to base this on. He might even consider it his duty as an officer to remind me of this. Frequently. And were I in the forces I might therefore also be a christmas-voting turkey. On the same basis the conservatives i work with have a tough time justifying their politics and dicussing this with their colleagues in the face of the evidence of a widening povery gap and the mess that the health and social care act is making that they as professionals see in their day-to-day practice.

Mefty is your vote secret? And is your workplace a barrier to talking about it, or is ut easier because your politics match your colleagues an peers?

i wish everyone would/could -the more we do the more likely the missing 30-odd percent of non-voters will actually go out and vote.
According to the two christmas-voting turkeys amongst my colleagues, it is hard admitting to being a conservative In childrens mental health services though. As i imagine it would be if you are in the forces and vote green or have some similar politics/work ethics dissonance.

I would love to see another ‘cost’ expressed as “party donations for last 12 months divided by votes cast for the party”. Also/otherwise is there a way of measuring the cost of campaigning? I know that the gagging law transparency of lobbying act capped what charities, comapnies, churches and so on were allowed to spend on lobbying in the last year before an election, but not whether it meaures or monitors what parties actually standing for election could spend. It would be interesting to see if there is a ‘cost per vote’ you could meaningfully measure.

I had sh52 cleats on communter bike shoes a few years ago, they fitted what i had at the time (515’s) but I never bounced around much off road on them. IIRC they were supposed to have more/wider release angle than sh51 and certainly in real life the back part of the cleat is a good deal wider but still fitted fine in the pedals i had then.

There was a thread on here ages ago where the consensus seemed to be that some, particularly 27.2mm thomson posts were on the smaller side of what was still ‘acceptable’ tolerances, whereas some tubes were slightly on the larger side of that acceptable tolerance. I remember brant being involved in this discussion but i am not sure if this applied to on-ones. Also that somehow thomson posts being milled rather than forged/drawn makes a difference to them wearing a tiny bit more with repeated dirty-biked dropping/raising.
Fwiw i had a 2005 usa-made yeti that had such a good fit with the 27.2 raceface seatpost that when you pushed it in (there was no ‘dropping’ it!) you could hear air being forced out the headset!
Oh and salsa seatclamps rule!

Slightly off topic, but the bike in the picture at the top has a set screw/tensioner of sorts drilled and tapped into the dropout between chain and seat stays. 8O. Had a quick google and it doesn’t seem standard, but I also found another one with a less pretty version of the same thing. I would imagine this mod/bodge is harder to do with smaller frames/tighter rear triangles.
Also whatever chain tug or magic ratio you find does not cure How bikes with slot drops with seatstay brake mounts want to spit the wheel out backwards under heavy brake loads – you might still have the chain properly tensioned, but the wheel pointing to the left at the bottom of the hill (why the slotty inbred has the mount on the chainstay instead -there used to be a much better explanation for this than mine on the o-o website). So whatever you do with chaintugs, a really good grip on the nds dropout is needed for this bike too – bolt up hope hub with nice new sharp grip washers is ideal.

Riksbar, i was just remembering the very same, and yes they did. I think Q had one too, but theirs was a sort of riddle you could solve, write in and get some extra geek points for.

JY, perhaps the username refers to the amount of time the Conservative Battle Bus wifi lets you have online each evening.

Cue lots of angry swearing at VW and ‘who the f specs a 7mm allen bolt’ rants.

The only time i ever used my 7mm allen key bit was to change the discs on a p-reg fiesta. Curse these foreigners, sneaking into Dagenham and meddling with our proper british fasteners. ;)

I wouldn’t worry. Owned/known a steel frame (kona) and a very racey alloy one which both went on for years with far larger dents than that in the top tube.

Imho it suggests more that May is keeping her profile up and her face in the papers for a stab at leader of the opposition in a few weeks.

new slx and ebay the old ones.
Yes they are fixable but new slx are just superb too. Perfornamce versus pound they are a great way to spend money on a bike IME.