quite an interesting analysis of what Hamas’ aims are:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/understanding-what-hamas-wants/374656/

the Di2 version seems to have cannondale’s hollowgram cranks which retail for about £600 on their own…

Three have worked pretty hard to improve coverage and service in te last few years and it’s starting to pay off – they have heaps more 3G coverage than the older networks now and their customer service is pretty good too with less complaints to ofcom than any other network:

http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/news/telecoms-complaints-june-14/

http://www.broadbandgenie.co.uk/mobilebroadband/roadtrip

I moved to a sim only deal on Ee yesterday – moving my contract over took 10 minutes and the new SIM card was working with my old number a few minutes after that. The deal I got is not advertised but still available in store to customers moving from orange or t-mobile … £19 a month for unlimited texts and calls with 5gb of data. It’s the only cheaper plan where the data is double speed and so far the speed has been extremely good a 60-70 meg downloads on on the m4 today and no, I’m not driving!

He was probably there to learn from people who actually know what they are talking about

here’s quite an interesting perspective on religious intolerance from a British muslim who describes his experience. It’s quite interesting.

link linky

It always amuses me when people rant on about vodaphone [sic] not paying the “fair” amount of tax.

Most of the people most willing to offer their views on Vodafone’s tax arrangements have no idea how transfer pricing works, no understanding of how much revenue Vodafone generates overseas or any grasp of actually how challenging it is running operations in more than one country with the huge tax issues that arise as a result when that income gets repatriated – let alone what the original dispute between HMRC and Vodafone was about.

And the thing that amuses me most when people slate Vodafone – this year the company will pay a special £84B dividend equivalent to 1/3 of all income tax for the year – all of which will be going into the pockets of pension schemes and individual investors, and much of which will be spent on the high street in Britain.

help to buy, 600k upper limit, the policy was either

a) a sweetner for the kind of people that can afford over half a mill on a house, you still need to have a 15?% deposit to get it so thats a lot of money

Despite the rhetoric from Mssrs Balls and Co, the Help to Buy scheme has done very little to push prices up or help middle class families buy £600K homes.

The boring truth (that Ed and Ed know perfectly well unless they are even more badly informed than usual) is that the majority of people helped so far are on limited incomes.

The AVERAGE loan underwritten fell to £147,330 in April this year from a high of £158K in December last year – in the north west the size of the average mortgage is even lower at £121,303. It’s worth point out that the volumes are also quite low – with a total well short of 20,000 loans underwritten to date.

the BoE have other tools to control lending that can be used before a rise in interest rates – for example changing loan to value ratios, income to loan multiples, increasing the amount of reserves banks are required to hold and thus reducing the amount of money available to lending.

With inflation falling and wage growth pretty well controlled there’s no urgent need for an interest rate rise just to control increasing house prices – the “new” tools would do this as effectively without impacting on lending to businesses which will sustain the significant improvement in growth seen over the last year.

It’s worth noting that only one of the leading forecasters predicted a run of 5 years without an increase rate hike – even 18 months ago the majority were predicting significant hikes in 2014 and so far they’ve been wrong on that too.

I’m not sure such CEOs exist. You need to be pretty ruthless and selfish to get to the top….

Even many large charities are run by cut throat money grabbing individuals, whose sole aim is to earn more and don’t give a monkeys about the charitable cause.

Try the CEO of Next for starters – CEO gives his entire bonus to staff for the second year running

If the job is now worth £9 an hour for a new starter Bill should be asking for more than that to reflect a sustained period of continuous performance.

wtf?

I have to say that I was gutted when I saw this thread appear last night.

Perhaps it’s that my love for all things two wheels bloomed at a relatively early age but for me Steve Worland’s various bike tests and articles have been a constant thread in my adult life since his first contributions to Bicycle Action magazine, and subsequently alongside those from John Stevenson – which I guess puts the timeline in the mid to late eighties.

58 seems very young to pass on and is made all the more poignant by his planned wedding in April. I can’t begin to imagine the pain that his partner and daughter are experiencing right now but hope that in time they will be able to reflect on the huge amount of pleasure that Steve’s work brought bike nuts like me over the last 25 or so years.

RIP and Happy Trails Steve.

He’s just pledged to put the top rate of tax up again. Because it’s been such as success in France and tax receipts didn’t go down last time Labour tried it. Oh, hangon….

I’ve done quite a bit of reading round and reflecting on this over the last few years and my own conclusion is that ritual slaughter can be unnecessarily cruel – particularly for larger animals e.g. in a study by the British Veterinary Association, 13% of cows that had their throats slit for halal slaughter fell to the ground and then stood up – the veins on the back of their necks mean it can take up to 3 minutes to dye in what can only be horrendous and barbaric conditions. The BVA have described ritual slaughter as intolerable cruelty – an analogy would be letting a relative experience major surgery with no anaesthetic.

Ritually slaughtered meat now accounts for up to 25% of all meat sold and most of it’s not labelled so consumers can’t even make an informed choice – this is nothing to do with religion but consumers should be allowed to choose whether to buy meat produced in a cruel way – even the likes of Waitrose with their squeaky clean ethical image have been busy selling halal meat on the quiet for a long time – ask the butcher behind the counter and he / she will reluctantly admit that all of the fresh lamb apart from “Duchy” branded lamb is in fact ritually slaughtered. It’s just wrong that for years the law has been developed to strengthen the protection given to animals and now 25% of animals are killed outside of the very well placed legislation and consumers can’t even make an active choice.

Then we have the many restaurants that use religiously slaughtered mean to cut costs and fail to put this on menus – I made a point of writing to Gourmet Burger Kitchen to complain (and have never been in there since) when I found out after the even that their chicken burgers were made from ritually slaughtered meat -as the consumer this failure to put something highly relevant about the source of the raw ingredients is something I see as deceptive and says a lot about the way a company is run.

There are two other angles to this worth considering over and above the cruelty aspect though – many people object to eating food blessed for religious slaughter and this applies to atheists and followers of other religions who are not allowed to eat food blessed in the name of another deity.

On the specific point of “halal” – the certification / logo on food is part of a wider system of payments and certifications that are not transparent and in some cases place additional controls on who may / may not be employed or own organisations that produce halal food. Again putting aside the religious aspect I personally refuse to give money to any company that enters into arrangements that ultimately place restrictions on who can be recruited into jobs on the ground of their religion or who can run the organisation / own it – it’s just wrong and seems a lot like the discriminatory behaviour that is quite rightly against the law in other areas.

The only downside to making a personal choice not to eat ritually slaughtered meat is that many popular choices are now off the menu – for me that includes:

– Costa coffee
– Whitbread and Fullers managed pubs
– Meat from Asda, Tesco and Sainsburys
– Pizza Hut / Domino’s Pizza
– Nandos
– Gourmet Burger Kitchen
– Subway
– KFC

The upside is that I now eat less junk food and meat so in theory should be healthier – if only I could ween myself off cakes!

I wonder if there’s an angle here with the auction house.

Now that the original poster has had confirmation that his property has been passed to the auction house, the said auction house are effectively selling on property to which they have no legal title.

If the original poster makes them aware of this in writing, there’s a good chance that due legal process can be followed to deal with the auctioneers knowingly selling on goods that they have no title to.

Virgin use EE for their network but cap the downloads at 3 meg.

They are losing the final salary pension in 2015 though – it’s part of a wider set of pay reforms. If there are loads of aggrieved public sector workers (“raped by the condems” – FFS!) who are willing to give up their own final salary pensions for a one off 11% pay rise I’m sure that the current or future Chancellor would only be too happy to make that a reality.

1. The MPs haven’t asked for it
2. The MPs have asked for it to be postponed but have no power to stop it as it’s exactly what the public said they wanted I.e. MPs pay set by an independent third party
3. The current government elected to take reduced salaries compared to the last government – from memory I think they took pay reductions of around 15%
4. Most MPs earn less than head teachers and doctors (50% less than the latter) but historically have earned similar amounts
5. Most members of the public think they are overpaid but are completely ignorant to the real work of MPs which isn’t in the shouty chamber but in endless select committees and local constituency surgeries several evenings a week.

Most people would want a lot more than £65k for a job that takes then away from friends and family every week.

That’s only 25p a mile though

this is going from bad to worse…. it’s like Grand Designs but without Kevin or the TV cameras

So further to my original question we’ve now got a problem of mice nibbling at polypipe heating pipes that have been installed underneath a a sealed (solid oak) and tiled floor. We can hear them crunching away under the floor but due to the lack of any access points can’t do anything to get to them – the air bricks already have mesh over them.

At the time the build took place I tried to insist on the ground floor heating pipes being installed in the walls just in case there was ever a leak i.e. it’s easier to fix a leak in wall void than wrecking thousands of pounds worth of flooring by tearing it up. I basically got overruled by the architect who refused to instruct the builders / plumbers to follow my request despite having previously agreed to it and previously committed to making sure they followed it – he basically forgot and by the time I came home and said “but the pipework is all in the wrong place” it was too late and I got told that even if I insisted it be re-done they would refuse to do it and he would refuse to make them do it.

Is there anything in Building Regs that says heating / water pipes must be installed in somewhere that’s potentially accessible in the event of a leak and how to / how not to install pipework under what will ultimately be a solid floor?

happened sooner than I thought – EE are turning on their 300Mbps 4G service today

Root Metrics UK[/url] is always worth a look – they’ve done very detailed coverage assessments on all the operators in quite a few cities now – based on calling, texting and data performance inside and outside buildings.

There’s a pretty consistent pattern now though which is EE and Three trading places for best network overall – the former now has the UK’s biggest network measured by population and geographic coverage – when Three start to rollout 4G voice next July on 800 Mhz their indoor coverage will be way better than vodafone and o2’s existing 2G coverage. EE have announced the planned rollout of 300Mb broadband on 4G which should make things even more interesting in 2014.

Good point Geoffj

I used an app called kWh on iphone to track gas usage and based over several months of data it’s consistently (to my surprise) a lot cheaper leaving hot water set to permanently on vs. timed – the volume of gas used has gone down (when the heating is turned off) by 3/4.

One other thing that also made a significant difference was turning the hot water temp down from 70 to just under 60 degrees.

Thanks everyone. The person who did the plans is not qualified as an architect but the service / contract is with a RIBA registered firm – I think the root cause is that the qualified person didn’t do the plans or check them. It only became during the build how little input (none) the architect had had in anything leading up to that point – it’s only a small firm so despite checking references and speaking to previous clients this issue was not anticipated.

Another question for architect types – if this is a screw up, what’s the fairest way of resolving it?

The temporary average speed ones definitely work and the fixed variable ones that are now popping up are also left turned “on” even when the gantry signs are off – there’s an article about this on the Beeb website.

70% of households have never switched suppliers – even the simple thing of switching is apparently too much effort.

06.53 alarm / snooze button
07.02 2nd alarm – get up
07.08 finish shower / shave in the shower
07.10 finish brushing teeth
07.15 finish getting dressed
07.18 finish small bowl of cereal
07.19 leave the house

Ratherbe – it can’t be self funding as it is a defined benefit scheme i.e. The “risk” is taken by tax payers and not members. Additionally the self funding claim was only ever even partly true when there were significant year on year increases in the NHS workforce i.e. More people working and paying in than people retiring or already retired. As has been widely reported that “tipping point” will be reached by the end of this decade and will lead to a rapid year on year shortfall in scheme finance – which the treasury / the public will have to top up.

Kimbers – it’s not surprising it’s cheaper now as the government isn’t having to raise the £billion cost of the franchise through ticket proves that Alistair Darling and Co. Levied on the last franchise holder; National Express – whilst simultaneously criticising the cos of the service. Labour were spectacularly effective at imposing stealth taxes safe in the knowledge the public would blame higher costs on the provider and not the politicians – it’s the same with petrol where tax is now about 55% of the cost.

IGM is right – privatisation of utilities has actually been pretty successful – we have energy at a lower cost than much of Europe (more so when you look at the real cost with VAT and green energy subsidy costs removed) but we also have good infrastructure and reliability of supply as well which quite a lot of Europe still doesn’t.

We also haven’t had to provide capital for investment (so tax savings for everyone) and the level of profit at 2 to 4% suggests the market / supply chain is reasonably efficient.

Labour are very good at trotting out the “privatisation of utilities has been a disaster” line and a lot of people are quite happy to repeat it but the facts just don’t support this – energy in much of Europe isn’t cheaper.

But you can take it into the apple store as ultimately the “seller” will ask Apple as the manufacturer to sort it out anyway. Or at least that worked for my 18 month old MacBook when I visited the apple store (originally purchased from Dixons duty free) …

Wysiwyg – it doesn’t matter whether it was bought in the apple store or not – the 2 year manufacturer warranty still stands.

Print off this article then go back to the apple store and ask if they would like to be fined again for breaking EU law for the second time…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16339651

“I hate tory Britain. They’ve sold off all our industry so we now have a minuscule manufacturing sector and we pay a fortune for utilities and travel. “

That’s what Ed and NuLab want you to believe and propagate at every opportunity – some rather rather inconvenient facts include:

1. In some manufacturing sectors we now make and export more than we did in the 1970’s e.g. automotive, life sciences

UK car manufacturing achieves all-time record exports in 2012

2. manufacturing employment has risen over the last 3 years as UKTI’s efforts to extend UK supply chains around successful industry sectors kicks in

3. we earn more from designing the intellectual property in some sectors than we would ever earn from the actual fabrication e.g. ARM Plc who last year received license fees on 8.7 Billion microprocessors

4. Utilities in the UK are middle of the range for price compared to the rest of Europe. When you strip out the CO2 escalator / sustainable energy premium added on top of prices by Milliband when he was in power / Chris Huhne 2 years ago, our actual energy costs are amongst the cheapest in Europe.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/household-bills/10332863/QandA-What-does-energy-freeze-mean-for-consumers.html

As for the “selling everything off” the rest of Europe has been doing this with the notable exception of France. Postal services in Germany and Netherlands were privatised years ago, First Group already and National Express are just about to take over train franchises in Germany and what was “British Gas” is now making Billions for the UK as “BG Group” who are developing LNG infrastructure in Brazil, Oman, Australia, Egypt, USA to name but a few places. Oh, and National Grid are pretty busy in the USA these days.

The UK is actually doing pretty well – let’s not talk down a country and industries that are consistently punching above their weight on the world stage.

It’s ironic that millipede has come out with this “policy” in the same week that a U.N. Report gave the uk an AAA rating for energy based on three main criteria, one of which was pricing.

Ed has overlooked that retail energy in the UK is actually cheaper than most of Europe as well as the need for around £110b of infrastructure investment over the next 20 years which I would guess the government will now have to subsidise owing to the flight of investors this attention grabbing but poorly thought out election pledge will almost certainly result in. “Ed” doesn’t appear to understand that a profit of several hundred million is pretty poor in an industry that has massive working capital to be serviced – and in his populist rhetoric conveniently overlooked that at least one of the big six made a loss on retail energy last year.

Of course, the new policy is in some respects helpful because it shows is that Ed is pretty clueless – this shouldn’t come as a great surprise to anyone though because as far as I can tell he’s never had a “job” outside politics.

How Do UK Retail Energy Prices Compare to Rest of Europe?

Has anyone tried the liberon anti slip decking treatment – is it any good?

At least fire fighters don’t need to look for a new career in their later years – most somehow manage to do two careers for their whole working lives as painters, gardeners, builders etc. the income from which typically isn’t declared. None of the FFs I know do self assessment to declare the additional income.

Next time the security services don’t catch 9 people intent on blowing up transatlantic planes we can all give thanks for the likes of the Guardian and Julian Assange exposing the inner workings of how intelligence is gathered and putting the lives of those that work in an admittedly grey area at risk.

Personally I couldn’t care less if my emails are read and Skype calls are intercepted – the small likelihood of someone looking at my web browsing history of the niner and stw websites or reading order emails from merlin cycles seems like a fair deal if it means that those who would do my friends and family harm are identified and dealt with.