Reading fan here, gone from one of the best run clubs to a basket case due to poor, corrupt ownership.

Criminal how these things are allowed to happen. Wrexham fan here so the complete opposite story to you. Got a dose of reality after today’s result though.

I think Biden has been terribly underestimated by his critics and allies alike. He has spent about 5 decades in government and understands that getting results is more important than getting headlines for a week or two

I was talking to an American last week and he reckoned Biden has achieved a massive amount but it never really gets reported over here due to the Trump circus getting all the attention.

Wish I had kept my dads old camera and light meter rather than flogging it on eBay a few years ago. Now I’m retired I’ve got plenty of time for that kind of stuff. I’ve settled on an Olympus EM1-X for wildlife, motorsport and cycling events but just bought a 12 year old compact Olympus XZ-1 for street photography and bike rides. The image quality of the XZ-1 is stunning and although it has many of the features of a DSLR I usually put it in P mode and go down 0.3 on the exposure. It also fits nicely in my shirt pocket on road/gravel rides.

It really doesn’t work like that.

But it does. During the night gas is still being burned to generate electricity and of course solar is out of the picture.

Then you have people on 100% renewable tariffs which are not renewable because they include burning trees that are shipped a few thousand miles by ship and train.

On average in the UK in 2022 it was 193g/kWh of electricity, in my car that’s 41g/km of CO2.  Around a third of a really good ICE car and about a quarter of my

Attribution of the electricity used by EVs should be against the most polluting generation source as they are putting an incremental load on the grid as you had the choice of buying an ICE compared to other devices that consume electricity and have no alternative fuel source.

The government will miss their 2035 target of decarbonisation of the grid which will also impact on the net zero target of 2050.

I’m not anti EV and will probably get one as my next car as there are clearly benefits such as zero emissions in populated areas.

olddogFull Member
… the real failure is a Governmental (and not just UK) one. The failure to ramp up zero carbon electricity generation fast enough.

Very much this.  People on here talking about dino-juice when at the moment 1.4% of electricity generation is coming from coal. I’m sure some folks think electricity for their EV is generated via pixie farts.

I’m a similar age and have the same terrain options as you and I’m really happy with my fazua. But I wouldn’t bother with it on the flat if you can manage ok under meat power. For the hilly rides you have 3 levels of assistance and within each level you can have 3 levels of power as well as 3 levels of torque so you can really optimise your settings to suit your riding and of course range. I very rarely go above minimum assist except when I come to a busy road junction where I need to pull out quickly. Mrs S also has one so if I want to go out on my own on an all day epic I can pinch her battery and put it in one of the bottle holders. The only down side is that fazua don’t have a great reputation for reliability.

I had a situation similar to the OP. American company and each year for 3 years 1/3 of my gift vested. Fidelity ran the platform for selling but they took the tax at source whenever I sold a tranche of vested shares.

Dutton viaduct over the River Weaver

or M Adaptive Suspension which, from my limited experience in other cars without it, does make a significant difference when in comfort mode.

Very much this. I’m on my 4th consecutive BMW and the first time with M-adaptive suspension. Big improvement in ride quality in Comfort and also sharper handling in Sport compared to normal suspension.

Don’t discount the 3 series GT as it’s massively practical. It sits a couple of inches higher than the touring and has a huge load carrying space with the seats down. I’ve just loaded 2 builders bags of garden waste into mine for a tip run and it will also swallow a road bike without having to take a wheel off. For options I’ve found the adaptive suspension to be a big improvement on our roads compared to the standard suspension.

Matt Watson did a long term review of one of the earlier models https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cefGMlrBTc

You get 25% of your pension pot, tax free at 65. A 400k pot isn’t unheard of, and taking a quarter of that, travelling round the world for 2 years and having a £70k asset at the end of it doesn’t seem like the worst idea in the world

Currently you can actually take it at 55 which opens up a whole range of possibilities like taking an extended career break at 55 for a couple of years while you are hopefully still fit and healthy. As long as you only take the tax free lump sum and leave the rest untouched you can still pay in the maximum £40k a year back into your pension if you go back to working.

Yep, Octopus have paid. I swapped from Shell Energy on January 23rd so was worried there would be a glitch, but I’ve got both the £67 monthly rebate and the £200 one-off payment.

Lifestrategy 100% Equity down 1.4% Dec ’21 to now. (Has been much lower).

The money would have been better off under the bed (per OP’s point!)

So you chose December ’21 as this was the highest the fund had ever been to make your point?  Let’s choose another date in 2021, say January ’21.  Up 19% since then. March ’20?  Up 64%.

Email on the 5th of December saying lost contact, another on the 21st saying they were receiving data again.

Thanks for checking.  Sounds like the problem was at their end and not with the meter which is good to know.

Like others (there seems to be something of a pattern here) I received an email from Shell saying they’d lost contact with the smart meter and I would have to start submitting manual readings.  I replied suggesting the somewhat radical alternative of them fixing it.  It started working again a couple of weeks later.

@Cougar just out of interest do you have the dates the contact was lost?  I had an email on 5th December telling me contact had been lost and another on December 20th saying it had reconnected.

Shell are looking to exit that part of their business so don’t expect great service https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shell-considers-exiting-uk-german-dutch-energy-retail-businesses-2023-01-26/

I recently moved to Octopus who have been great so far and have some cool features if you are into that e.g. IFTTT.

Try asking around friends/family for a referral link where you can split £100

Surely, SURELY there has to be a way that isn’t about sticking it all on black??

As mentioned above check out Vanguard.  Instead of finding the needle in the haystack you buy the haystack so it’s very much a set it and forget it strategy

This isn’t rocket science if you put in some research as suggested by @Finbar above.

…so I’ve no understanding of how to change this. I’m utterly averse to any form of financial risk. The phrase “the value of your investments may fall as well as rise” strikes panic into me.

Time to put your big boy pants on

If you are off grid for sewage are you also off grid for gas and use oil for heating?  Is it definitely engine oil?

This is no longer best practice and a combined drainage system should be built for any new build

Ours is 9 years old and has a combined drainage system.

thanks now all I need is a short limerick on how you would spend £50 pounds

With fifty pounds, I’d have some fun,
I’d buy books, games and maybe a bun,
I’d take a trip to the arcade,
Play games, win tickets, and upgrade,
Or maybe just buy pizza for everyone!

Hmmm, perhaps ChatGPT isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I’ve noticed ‘fresh’ supermarket fruit and veg goes off a lot quicker these days – I guess a symptom of a converluted supply chain made worse by Brexit and other more local logistic issues

I was talking to the guy who runs the farm shop by Delamere Station and he supplements his local stuff with imports but reckons a lot of produce he gets now goes from France to ROI, then N. Ireland, then Scotland which adds another 2-3 days.

Brexit is the gift that keeps giving.

And me. I switched last week and went on the Agile tariff which gives you good prices outside of the 4pm-7pm window when it can shoot up. We’re retired and have a PHEV so it looks a good fit, but I noticed since we switched the price has never exceeded 36p khw which is roughly what a standard rate is with most suppliers. Is this because the wholesale price of electricity has dropped?

graphs here

Nothing for me this month but just had an email from the local gastropub saying I’d won the £50 monthly voucher for being on their mailing list. I was hoping to win the autotader Tesla but that will have to do.

Just get the new M2 for £649 but buy it from John Lewis with a 2 year guarantee, you won’t regret it.

Based on your brief that’s pretty much my setup with a late 2018 Mac Mini 6 core i5:
– 40″ curved monitor
– External 2TB Lacie hard drive
– USB C card reader for camera
– USB C 4 port USB hub for bits and bobs such as Garmin etc

Base model will do you fine, no need for any upgrades but the apple keyboard and mouse are very nice

Put a spoiler alert in your title for anyone that hasn’t seen it. I have, others might have not 😉

You don’t need to be Mystic Meg to see where the plot line was heading ;-)

Firestick comes with YouTube app installed and the search via the remote is not bad, or you can use voice control search

Harry Kane’s penalty from the World Cup – It’s Coming Home

(Stolen from twitter)

Thanks Sharkbait, I’ll look into it.

House is 8 years old and B rated so not so bad, but both front and back composite doors have now bowed out at the top and bottom. I’ve got some draft excluder weather strip to put on but is there anything better?

Deciding I’m not going to ride at Llandegla today because the ambulances are on strike – just in case. Instead I’ll take myself off to the fireroads of Delamere on the gravel bike and hope for the best.

Be careful of when your last day is in relation to the end of the tax year. If you go before April and are already paying 40% tax all of your severance apart from the £30k tax free chunk will be taxed at 40% and perhaps even more. Hopefully you will be on a 3 month notice period that takes you into next tax year so you won’t hit this problem.

The specs on the 2 base Mac mini models are identical except for an extra 256GB of SSD storage for an extra £200. My late 2018 Mac mini still runs like a dream still but occasionally gets short on memory (8GB) so if you want more memory on these new models that will be another £200 to upgrade to 16GB of memory.

Have they kept the base price low and bumped up the cost of the upgrade options?

So the post above was right on both counts.

Keep it up sadexpunk but I would avoid the casino offers with 40x and 50x playthrough. Most of the regular bookies offer decent casino offers so take advantage of them. I managed to make £350 out of the World Cup by signing up with new bookies that had started up since I packed in the MB a couple of years ago.

2Ups are great when you land them and I reckon Spurs must be everyones favourite as the moment as they are constantly rubbish in the first half and regularly go 2 down before fighting back. If Kane had scored before half-time yesterday it could have been another good payout.

I watched The Sound of 007 on Amazon last night and it was a solid 007 out of 10 . Covers the complete history of Bond music from Dr. No to No Time to Die and is roughly 2/3rds interviews and 1/3rd music. I didn’t know Amy Winehouse was on the shortlist for singing the theme to Quantum of Solace.

Update on the £200 payment from Martin Lewis:

Information on this particular payment, which is for those in England, Scotland or Wales that use heating oil, have an LPG boiler, biomass boiler or use a similar alternative fuel to heat their home, hasn’t been forthcoming.

This payment was initially planned as £100, but it was announced in the Autumn Statement that it would be doubled to £200 and paid in winter. In December 2022, the Government then told us these payments would be made “as soon as possible in the New Year” – though it has now confirmed these will instead come in February 2023.

The one-off £200 grant, which is on top of the £400 support payment, will be paid automatically through your electricity supplier if you have a direct relationship with one. If you’re fully off grid, you’ll need apply though a Gov.uk portal that’s due to launch for applications next month.

However, how the Government and suppliers will know who uses alternative fuel, and how exactly payments will be made, have yet to be confirmed. There is no central register of people who do not use mains gas for their heating. We’re pushing for answers and we will update this story when we get clarification.

So sorry to hear this terrible news John. I’m not local to you but when the time is right I’m sure you will contact the guys and girls who have offered support. Take care.

We watched Pulp Fiction last night on Netflix and it has aged remarkably well. It was also amusing seeing the car cleaning scene with The Wolf who went on to do the Direct Line adverts.

Thanks @5lab all sorted now. It was all handled really well, with the person who declined me asking if I wanted to make a complaint which I did and was transferred to the complaints section. The person I then spoke to called me back a couple of hours later and said I had been misinformed and would I like a call back to reassess my request which I agreed to. An hour later I got a call and went through the financials which led to my credit limit being increased.

In hindsight I should have got my credit limit increased before I gave up work so something to consider if you are in that situation.