Rudeboy – having grown up in NI through the troubles and lost friends without there being a conviction or public enquiry I’d like to see all sides of the conflict held to the same degree of scrutiny.

But, the world has moved on. Suspected former terrorists on both sides holding political office trying to make the place work.

Unless an enquiry has a prospect of bringing criminal charges then I can’t see what it solves. A public enquiry will not do that.

speed directly contributed to roughly 436/1620 deaths on our roads; and 2744/18043 serious accidents.

I think you’re doubling up the impact there. The 5% accidents / 14% of fatalities is included within the 12% of accidents / 24% of fatalities. Which means 7% of accidents and 10% of fatalities are speed related but within the speed limit.

It sounds like the fixation with speed limit policing is a distraction from addressing the other 86% of fatalities.

(Mechanics also don’t bear personal liability if they mess up their job…)

Accountants and Lawyers have generally got that sorted with the move to LLPs these days.

It seems to me that everyone charges what they can no matter the job, be they lawyers, accountants, mechanics, plumbers. And all of those (and others) are likely to provide services that someone at some point is going to be left with no choice but to pay for.

Your posts have fallen short of defending the costs and have merely explained them

Explanations may help understand where the numbers come from and then anyone can make up their own mind. I left that work a while ago so I’ve no axe to grind either way.

If you look at hourly rates, you need to remember employment cost on top of salary, deduct holidays & sickness from productivity, add training costs and time, the office running costs including non chargeable staff etc and the inevitable element of non chargeable time. It is expensive.

The margin applied to that for partner earnings is where it is questionable. £400+/hr for a partner is Big 4 territory and Google will tell you what those Partners earn. Given how hard it is to qualify as an IP, those that do will want to be rewarded.

Whether they need to be so highly qualified, and hence expensive, is an entirely separate question.

Not all directors of bust businesses are irresponsible. Some are. Some aren’t. Some are bust because of being shafted by other companies and are victims themselves. Some are serial offenders.

Most businesses have standard rates / margins they want to work on. They drop if no-one pays them and IPs are no different. Don’t want to pay £420, then find the guys who will do it for less. They do exist, but you’re not going to find people doing such work for pennies.

never had journey in the uk canceled because i couldnt get there cause of snow .

Blair Atholl snow gates can be quite persuasive.

They don’t pay that to the staff! I think when I was on £28k I was in theory charged out at £120 / hr. There is plenty of non chargeable time plus office to run etc and few jobs get 100% recovery of fees at headline rates.

IP makes fee proposal.
Creditors vote
If no creditors turn up to the meetings, IP does what they want.

Roughly.

You’re looking at rates for professional services – lawyers, accountants etc. Takes a lot to qualify as an IP and unless one of them starts low balling fees or creditors fix lower rates, they’ll charge what they can.

Guide to setting fees

Here’s a short explanation for Liquidation fees. If no creditor bothers engaging with the process the IP will generally have voting proxies with which to manage the process they way they want.

As I said before, their remuneration is set by creditors. Creditor apathy around the appointment does not aid sensible fee structures.

Berm Bandit, you’re really not encouraging anyone to help you understand with an attitude like that, but here goes anyway.

If a business goes under with, say, 5 years left on a lease, that 5 years rent goes in the liabilities box. The business might have had perfectly valid expectations of making money to cover that rent during those 5 years.
Major customer goes bust.
Major supplier ceases supply.
Production problem causes huge cash headache.

Loads of reasons and if Directors are trying to weather such a storm to recover the business or pull the plug when one happens that doesn’t mean they were wrong to keep going up to that point.

Partner £250 -£275 per hour
Manager £140 per hour
Administrator £60 -£95 per hour
Assistant and support staff £65 per hour

I used to do this work in the early-mid 90s and those fees were what was charged then!

Any Director will be trying to keep a business going and will value assets on the basis of it being a going concern. IPs generally have to deal with assets at distressed sale valuations which are inevitably lower. Whatever event triggered the insolvency doesn’t necessariy mean the directors were wrong to keep going before that event.

Plenty of jobs IPs do see them only recover partial or no fees. Used to do plenty of fixed fee work. Fee basis is agreed at the start of the appointment, so challenge it then or live with someone else having agreed the basis.

The stop / start I can live with as it doesn’t kick in often.

The electronic handbrake on the other hand. Such a non solution to a non problem I’ll not be buying another car with one.

Interesting to see what happens next then:

Princes Street to open to all traffic

oldbloke » In BenCoopers pic the lane ahead is closed with big barriers across it
And of course, those barriers are going to be there when the project finishes.

Druidh >> See the cones down the left side of the photo? See them???

Absolutely no excuse for current accidents on that section, but are you suggesting that’s not going to be a source of trouble in future?

The rest of the street does have similar designed sections which are open. I just don’t have a pic of them.

In BenCoopers pic the lane ahead is closed with big barriers across it

And of course, those barriers are going to be there when the project finishes.

More than that Ransos. If you look at bencooper’s pic, the orange covered lights ahead mark a junction where if you want to go straight ahead you have to be in the lane with the tram lines. Left lane goes left.

A link with some pics of where the lines go[/url]

Not posted links before so hope that works.
If you can avoid those lines when you’re in that lane, please tell me how so I can too.

Autumn 2005 and questions to TIE on the subject of bikes and tram lines were ignored. They didn’t seem to have considered the risk.

Looking at the layout of the tramlines last week my thought was that there’s a part of the city I just won’t ride into any more.

I used to have a VR6. Black with grey Karmann leather interior which sady had to go when a company car arrived. Nothing before or since has been quite as much fun or sounded as good. My Dad still has a Storm he’s owned from new so I still get to play occasionally.

You can make a fuel duty reclaim though for use of unleaded if you use it for a qualifying purpose. Not that difficult to make an annual claim.

Interesting today that BBC reports UCI being sued by a sponsor for presiding over a loss of public confidence in cycling.

UCI on trial – who next?

I used to have to work in Paris a bit. The Parisians I worked with just assumed cars would get dented and seemed more amused that anyone would be precious about paintwork. Bumpers are apparently for bumping.

Someone mentioned the SCA claim. Vague recollection that he got the money out of them because the bonus was if he won, no qualification of how. So him being stripped of the title would mean he didn’t win so wasn’t due the bonus.

I suspect he’s going to discover how much fun it is being on the other side of an avalanche of litigation.

Back in the day when I used to price retail sales, “price” was what you got when you took a product / service / package you’d already defined and worked out what to charge for it.

“Price point” was when you took a fixed price which was perceived to be a customer’s limit and worked back from that to see what you could provide for that sum.

John Drummer – you’re probably thinking of Dunluce Castle. Similar situation but it has round towers.

A trade war with Brazil?
What a plan!

Not sure we need that, but how hard would it be to insist that the rules applying to food production here were applied equally to anything improted here?

There is already a regular running race on the WHW. The organisers of that might be a useful source of info on what would be required to stage any other sort of event.

I know TJ got banned for his intervention here, but he raised a point which at least made me go and look for info – the allegation of an state subsidy of private schools.

It looks like City of Edinburgh spends just under £5500 per child per year. 25% of the city’s population goes to private school. If the state had to school that 25%, it would add c. £100M to the city’s education budget requirements. Finding a couple of sources which suggest £100M is the nationwide benefit of private schools charitable status leads me to conclude the state gets a good deal from private schools as they save the state more than they cost.

Private fees here seem to be about twice the state spend per kid, so not really a surpise there’s a gulf in the facilities.

I don’t know that it is the state’s / school’s role to do anything more than show kids what opportunities there are. Too many sports to cover properly so just getting kids active and pointing them at clubs seems to me the best option for the state.

What’s the weather like? If you do one way into the prevailing wind and one way with it, that’ll make a difference to what you’re looking for. I’ve done similar distance commutes to several jobs and road bike with full mudguards every time for both speed and seemingly less interest from thieves than a mtb when chained to a railing.

Depending on what you need to carry, if you can get away with an old school saddlebag, it will be better balanced than a pannier.

But, against that tax on the allowance, if you do business mileage you can claim tax back. Essentially the calculation is trying to achieve the same as if you got 45p / mile (inc fuel) as an expense and taxed on the rest. So if fuel is 15p / mile and you do 10,000 business miles, (45p-15p=30p) x 10,000 = £3,000 is not taxed and the rest is.

I still went for the Co car as I do 30k p.a.

She went a bit early with the argument, irrespective of the rights or wrongs.

Trott has a couple of events still to go in the omnium. If she doesn’t win then there are questions for the team about having failed to take the opportunity to give her a rest through squad rotation. That’s when WH might have had a point.

If Trott wins gold, then DB doesn’t need to say a thing.

Seen in Portsmouth: SN11PER on a white Audi. Wonder if advertising his profession was the best idea

Mike – my experience of being abused by CM riders (Edinburgh, not London) whilst cycling past them on my way home one night does not encourage me to want anything to do with them. You want the doubters to join in, preventing that sort of behaviour might be a good start

Been running a 55 plate TiD with the Hirsch chip for about 6 years. When it works I like it. But it spends a lot of time not working properly. Saab bits are getting harder to get and although Saab UK say they can get 98% of bits ordered, my garage says thats because they’re not taking orders for the bits they can’t get.

Like someone above said, feels like it has done more miles that it has. I’ve always run VAG cars to well over 100k and this saab just doesn’t feel like it is ever going to do the same. Were saab still going I’d not get another.

Had one for just over a year & remain very impressed with it. Surprisingly good at the ups, fun going down and handles well. Warranty on the reverb sorted fast by Canyon and that’s been the only issue. Only gripe remains the ability of the front mech to collect muck to the point it won’t shift until i clear the muck out.

Now that we seem to have got murky definitions of what a terrorist is to add to the murkiness that is Irish history, STW’s probably got less chance of agreement than the NI peace process.

Maybe we should leave them to it – they’re probably better at bridging divides

There’s a degree of mandate behind the statement too. Little doubt that the majority in South Africa supported the removal of white minority government, whether they supported ANC actions or not.

IRA never had close to a majority of population supporting the aims, let alone the method.

It would have been a bit difficult for MM not to meet the Queen, given the reception she received in Ireland. Would have appeared outdated if he couldn’t be as civil as the country he wants to join and that would probably have harmed his cause.

I can’t see a United Ireland in my lifetime. I always thought European integration would make both sides irrelevant but now I just can’t see the NI population looking at the Irish economy and thinking they’d like a bit of that in the next couple of decades.