It’s probably not the point, but the Xbox series x gpu is meant to be very similar performance to the 6700 XT (just a lot cheaper as Microsoft subsidise the Xbox), so don’t expect much of an upgrade.

Decent TVs have a tendency to get more expensive over black friday (certainly cashback/combo deals disappear). I was looking at Samsung OLEDs and the best deals stopped in early November. I assume they will stay high until after the christmas/the world cup.

I wouldn’t belittle the danger of air quality; far more likely to be killed by that than covid even if we hadn’t had lockdowns.

That said, whilst CAZ help with this, they are more a way for left wing councils to extract some cash from those too poor to afford new cars (and therefore probably too uncultured to vote labour) whilst their middle class voters get to enjoy less congested roads whilst feeling smug about their clean new cars and low CO2 (but air quality destroying) log burners.

Have the mt500 waterproofs from 2020. I really like them as they are very lightweight compared to most proper waterproof trousers (and even the mt500 spray trousers) so they aren’t too warm pedalling up steep hills unless it’s above about 10C. The water repellant coating isn’t great however, even when new they never really beaded and they don’t take nikwax well. Despite this they still seem to keep me dry.

If you were getting 0.5% when inflation was at 2% then you were losing 1.5% in real terms (I.e the cash in could buy 1.5% less stuff even if the number was bigger). With inflation at 10%, an interest rate of 4% means you are losing 6% in real terms.

No gearbox in a typical thermal plant. Turbines designed to spin at the right speed to get 50 Hz out of the generators.

Fine for riding with, but the mesh just pins your shirt against you back so it still gets sweaty. You can’t avoid a sweaty back with a backpack; either don’t bring the stuff, put up with the sweaty back or carry it in another way (e.g. panniers or saddlebag).

The cost of posturing about climate change making western companies reluctant to invest in new fossil production?

How do you do it with two cables? Does the external battery act as a junction box? I have always assumed it would need 1 cable from hub to junction box, then one from there to the battery and another to the shifter.

It surprises me that no one does fake di2 cables. The markup must be huge.

I have an 11 and it if fine (if you don’t mind it dribbling oil occasionally), except it is impossible to get the low and high gears perfectly indexed at once. It doesn’t feel too draggy, but the roller clutches mean it will never give a particularly snappy engagement.

The big appeal for me is the ability to shift when stationary, which is great for commuting.  For normal road or mtb a derailleur is cheaper and better.

Di2 is appealing as it shifts perfectly (llandegla had them on hire bikes years ago). However the cost of the  battery, cables etc are high even if you get a bargain hub.

Just watch out if you are tall and heavy. I have last year’s, and whilst generally a good bike I can’t get the sag below 30% even at max pressure on the shock. I am 83kg and 6’2” on an XL, so not crazy huge!

The bottom bracket is very low, which combined with the long wheelbase makes it super stable on the downs also means it’s not a great choice if you want to do technical climbs without spend the whole time trying to time your pedalling to clear obstacles.

I would second the calls to get some coaching first. My other half had learned bike position by rote rather than feel, so moving to a modern bike ended up with her weight way too far back and a sketchy experience. Second to that hire bikes on trips away; buying a bike she had a great time on when she hired it on holiday should help mentally frame it as a good bike; the current one may just have to much mental association with cycling badly even if it isn’t a bad bike.

I have an x-t30 and the af is disappointing. I expected a big jump coming from an old d40, but it’s not much better.

I mainly take photos of cycling and in af-c it loves to jump off the subject onto the background even with a small zone selected (will find the one point in the box that sneaks under an armpit etc.)

When looking for alternatives the canon m mount options might be promising for you. A lot of the lenses are very small (if slow). The af somewhere between fuji and Sony.

I can’t comment on the specific SC models, but long vs medium travel probably depends on riding style.

I have a 160mm bike and a 100mm fs xc bike. I don’t think there is anything I couldn’t slowly get down on the XC bike that the 160 would enable, but I would be much faster in rough stuff. Recently I did jacobs ladder down from kinder scout on the 100mm bike as the other was out of action. It was fine, but I had to pick my way down as it gets sketch with speed. I find ploughing down there on the long travel bike more fun. However, my other half likes to slowly pick lines even on her long travel bike didn’t find a shorter bike much worse. For her the shorter bike makes sense as the ups are faster and boring bridleways are more engaging.

I would suggest demo days. Even if you can’t get SC bikes it will still give a feel for different types of bikes (with the exception of the odd lemon most bikes of a similar type will feel pretty similar).

It’s not that they use more fuel and ad blue outside tests, they cheated by detecting tests and using more fuel and ad blue to reduce nox. This was good for the individual consumer as they were able to buy a car that had a better combination of upfront cost and real world fuel economy/ad blue consumption. Of course that came at a cost of nox emissions that shouldn’t have been legal.

To me, it feels more like the compensation should be to the government to reflect the impact on the whole population rather than individual owners.

European regulations have nox limits. Part of Euro 5, Euro 6 etc.  No sliding scale like with CO2 tax bands, just a maximum limit for a given type of vehicle.

The sensible thing to do would be, presumably… spaff it all on coke and hookers while it’s still worth something?

That’s another big reason rates need to rise even when the trigger is supply driven; when everyone starts spending instead of saving it shifts from a supply driven shock to persistent demand driven inflation.

Whilst a lot of inflation is being driven by increased prices of imported goods and commodities rather than cheap borrowing, increasing interest rates should have an indirect benefit; increasing interest rates increases the value of the pound meaning we can buy these more cheaply.

Of course other countries with stronger economies are raising mates more quickly so overall the pound is still devaluing, just not as quickly as it could.

A recession seems inevitable given the global shortage of oil and china’s zero covid strategy restricting supply of manufactured goods. Frothing about tories is odd, not much any uk party could do about that.

I struggled with it for a while. It went away after I rested it properly (no walking beyond around the house/bike racks at work to desk) for a couple of weeks before easing back into it in superboost style trainers with lots of heel cushioning.

Thanks, I noticed the Trek team still use the Procaliber on a few courses on the WC XCO calendar so did wonder if a hardtail was maybe a better option for most UK events.

They wouldn’t be able to sell procalibers to rich middle aged men to race their local XC series on if they didn’t! If you wanted a race hardtail and trek only used their full-sussers you might go for the BMC two stroke that you had seen on red bull tv!

Got a remedy 8 in 2020.  Great bike that I think neets your criteria. I has demoed a furl ex and something similar from moonraker. Both felt a little dead compared with my previous bike (a 2017ish norco sight).

I also demoes a nukeproof reactor 275 which was great, perhaps a bit more playful than the remedy which, in the version I have, has very plush suspension that encourages sticking on the ground and ploughing. There weren’t any available when I came to buy though (and trek do paint better!).

Read all the paperwork and try to understand it.

I know it is what you pay the solicitors for, but they will spend more time getting worked up about irrelevant details like fensa certificates than the big picture: we went with a well regarded solicitor for  a new build who didn’t point out that the contract obliged us to pay the company in charge of maintaining the green spaces whatever they demanded (with no requirement for it to be reasonable or based on costs they incurred). Apparently they didn’t bother reading that but until asked to confirm my interpretation… You would hope this was a one off, but the entire estate sold with the same crazy term in the contract so it can’t be common for lawyer to point this kind of thing out!

Hopefully an older house won’t have such issues, but it would still be worth reading through to make sure there aren’t any legal gremlins lurking.

If you are keen for something fairly challenging then the edale skyline trail run route is a great long walk. It should be fairly easy to find on Google.

Picked some up from Scotby. As discussed they are very narrow at the front so I had to size up. This means there is a big gap from the end of my toe to the end of the shoe.

Despite the narrow shoe, the ankle cuff is very loose and won’t synch down enough to not be baggy around my ankle. So they appear to be designed for people with long thin clown feet but fat ankles! I am normally a 12 in addidas, but needed a 13.5. The proportions may differ at smaller sizes.

They were reasonably waterproof in the showers today, but I have put my foot in a puddle to see if the drains do let water in! I suspect in pouring rain gaiters may be needed to stop water getting in through the baggy cuff.

Given the reputation for corruption, is it not likely that the rulers of el Salvador have bought a load of bitcoin and are hoping this announcement will inflate their investments? (So they can cash out and buy stuff in usd)

If you want it for the emissions improvement then it is probably worth getting one compliant with Euro 6b (manufactured after late 2018 I think). Some euro 6 ones had it but only used it in the situations needed to get through the emissions test. Euro 6b introduced a real world element to the test so it has to use the system a bit more often (although it’s still not perfect – ours doesn’t seem to use any when towing). It means topping up between services (which our old euro6 VW didn’t need) but I prefer to stick some in every few months and spit out less NOx.

I have always assumed the renewable suppliers are pointless as renewable generators are paid a guaranteed price for any energy that they can generate based on government capacity auctions before they are built. So even if you built a wind farm ages ago when it was really expensive you are still guaranteed the £100/MWhr or whatever it was you signed up to even if the market price is way below that?

The current regulations explicitly permit leaving home to visit businesses that are allowed to remain open. As coffee shops are allowed to remain open it would be difficult to argue that you weren’t allowed to consume what you bought there before it got told.

Picnics aren’t explicitly permitted by the regs so, Tatton park’s inconsistent stance isn’t inconsistent with rule rules.

Of course very little is explicitly prohibited by the regulations; you just need a reasonable excuse to leave home and a non exhaustive list of reasons is given. Whether picnics are currently allowed by the rules can only be determined by the courts taking the current vague regulation in the context of common law and other legislation.

Demoed the 2020 slash at the start of the year. Nice bike, very capable and stable, but just felt a bit lifeless compared to the remedy. If you want to plough through rock gardens at speed the slash would be great. I prefer a bike that feels like it wants to be popped off every little lip and thrown round switchbacks, and the remedy is great for that for the sacrifice of a hair of speed through the rough stuff.

The OP may have just been venting frustration but he raises a reasonable point.  If in January you everyone was asked if they would give up social contact with family and friends, security of employment, easy access to non emergency medical care, holidays and the rest of it for a few months extra life expectancy* how many people would have thought it would be worth it? It feels like, out of fear for doing badly by others, we have taken a course that is worse for everyone.

Of course it is scary, I have elderly parents who have chosen to take a trip round Spain despite the uptick in infections there. I might lose them, but I recognise that it would be selfish to guilt them into sheltering at home to humour my anxiety. They probably only have a few years left when they are strong enough to enjoy themselves so if they try and hide corona out there is a fair chance they will never be able to have such an experience again. If they go on holiday there is a >95% chance that they have a great time and come back healthy enough for me to continue to enjoy their company.

The risks of getting long term effects are also scary, but are relatively uncommon given the number of people who have been infected. It seems not hugely different to the CFS associated with Lyme, but we still all go mountain biking.

* The chance of dying if infected goes up with age, but so does the number of years you can expect to live without coronavirus. The young have little risk because the chance of adverse effects is so low, and a 90 year old has little to lose because they don’t have much chance of living out the pandemic even if they don’t catch it.

There was a good article in the BMJ a few days ago that talks about the serious limitations with antibody testing at the moment. Its not surprising that current antibody tests come back negative for a lot of people who have had it, and a negative test doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have any immunity.

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3364

I understand that there are also concerns with PCR testing (what the NHS test centers are using to say if you are currently infected) producing false positives in people who have traces of virus that has already been dealt with by their immune system.

I think its hard to underestimate how much the young are being sacrificed to save the old. It’s easy for most of us middle aged middle class folks on here to criticise, but the education and job prospects of the young are being decimated to keep a much smaller number of generally very old, very ill people alive another year or so. Education and income (entering the labour market in a recession is something that a cohort never fully recovers from in terms of income) have impacts on life expectancy, with those less educated and those with lower incomes expected to live shorter lives.  So it is true that live are at stake, they are at stake for the young as well as the old. They deaths just won’t happen for another few decades so it it easy to pretend that they don’t exist.

In that context, I find it very hard to criticise the young for wanting to let off some steam. It just seems a shame that only those willing to engage in illegal activity are able to.

We looked at the MPV version but on a long test drive found the front seats, particularly the passenger seat which lacks height adjust, uncomfortable. The seats are quite soft so felt great initially but lacked support after an hour or so; I would recommend a good length test drive before committing.

If you get along with the seats they seem like a great option. We are leaning towards the caddy, but that is more expensive and, other than the seats, not as nice as the PSA vans.

I would also suggest looking at the MPV version. I don’t know the price difference for the berlingo van vs MPV, but for vw there is practically no price difference by the time you have a decent spec on the van. Which for something that is cheaper to insure, take on ferries and on toll roads starts to shouldnt take long to recoup. Only issue on the berlingo MPV is folding the back seats stops you getting the front ones back that far.