@toby1

Is it just me that struggles to break up the old concrete even with a lump hammer and dulled chisel?

Skip the chisel, just use the lump hammer. Mine broke up pretty easily.

Did this last week. As above, break up the old post concrete with a lump hammer and chuck half in followed by half a bag of post crete and a litre or so of water. Wait a few minutes then repeat. Fill in with soil an hour later.

If I had to pick one place to live in the US it would be SLC. Great skiing in the winter and MBing in the summer. Really safe state and a great place to bring up a family. The stuff about booze has all changed now and when I was in Utah about 6 years ago it has more micro breweries than any other states and was picking up loads of awards for best beers.

Wordle 250 3/6

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Anyone do Worldle

You get a country outline and each guess tells you how far and in which direction you are out. Surprisingly I got it in 1 today.

@poopscoop I got the same grey plastic envelop as @martinhutch

It has given me massive boost in confidence having this line of treatment available and seems a great way of protecting the likes of us while the rest of the world hopefully try to return back to normal. Fair play to the people who put this program in place and for securing the antiviral drugs.

#immunecompromisedtrackworld

Any rumblings of a caddy maxi sized panel van with decent range yet?

Can’t help you with that but the guy who fitted our charger yesterday was driving a Vauxhall Vivaro E and was complaining he was only getting about 90 mile range compared with the claimed 200. And British Gas were thinking of putting ladders on the roof. He was also on a standard tariff so was paying £200 in electricity every month which he can claim back but still a lot of money.

This is still a very good read even though it’s a few years old.

Not much getting to MAN this morning and most flights have to abort landing. Flightradar24 is very interesting.

For example, since we magiced the euro out of thin air in the 90’s

Except we didn’t. It was based on the FX rates of the participating countries at the time of inception.

A combined cycle gas turbine electric plant will be closer to 60% at peak efficiency at 55-57% average around the world.

48.3% in the UK so why aren’t we investing more money in bringing the efficiency of our gas powered generation into line with the rest of the world?

You also have some gas generators that don’t have the secondary heat exchange phase, plus there are specially built ‘diesel farms’ which are used when extra capacity is required.

Thing is, if we don’t transition to EVs then we will never have decarbonised personal transport.

100% agree but I’m questioning whether we should be more aggressive on the 2050 date. For example, the biomass generator at Drax generates 11% of the UK’s ‘renewable’ power and gets £832m a year from the government in subsidies but still pumped out 13-16 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2019 – equivalent to the emissions from 6-7 million cars and is the largest CO2 producer in the UK.

So comparing ICE cars to gas power stations isn’t really a fair comparison. Gas is only one part of the mix.

Yes it is. Nearly everything that consumes electricity has no other alternative, but anyone who buys an EV also could have bought an ICE so as it’s an incremental demand on the grid the use should be attributed to the most polluting part of generation.

I’m using an extreme example but it is an important factor that people should be aware of and I’m not sure they are.

but the benefit is that when we do

2050 is the current target.

I wouldn’t claim EVs are fabulous for the environment or without their inefficiencies, but on both points they are less bad than ICE.

As at 11:35am we were running 5% coal on the grid so all EVs currently plugged in are running on coal.

ICE cars in the region of 30-40% IIRC

Assuming that figure is true UK gas turbine stations ran at 48.3% in 2020 so not a massive step change.

Bottom line is we still have a long way to go before we can decarbonise the grid.

I found out this week that SP Energy are not always automatically sending out compo cheques so if you haven’t received anything get your claim in quick as the deadline is fast approaching.

You can also claim for a hot meal allowance and as were out for 64 hours we are getting £290 for the hours we were off supply and £160 for hot food.

Most people know the downsides of EVs, but have considered that the upsides outweigh them.

I don’t think I’ve seen mention of how we need to decarbonise the National Grid? At the moment we’re at 2.2% coal so you could argue that a lot of EVs are coal powered

He did actually make his ex sign a marriage contract saying what she would be entitled to but that’s not worth the paper it’s written on apparently.

“make”

Interesting choice of word…

He didn’t really want to get married but that was the quid pro quo they agreed on. Not that the settlement would have made a difference if they were married or not.

and he wonders why it ended in divorce 🤣

after nearly 30 years, seems a common thing.

This is a really good video which sensibly talks about the advantages and disadvantages of active v passive investing. Representing active is Catherine Flood from Scottish Mortgage
link

Still crap for the vulnerable though.

@reeksy any other info you can share on this as I’m in that category. I now have a PCR test at home via the scheme which allows rapid access to drugs such as Sotrovimab if I test positive. I think the govt have done as good as job as they can for people like me, and the world can’t stop turning due to a few outliers. Before I got on the scheme I was really worried about catching Covid but now I feel a lot more relaxed and beginning to venture out more. Luckily I have a hobby that means I can avoid crowds and still get out and about.

Having just concluded my own divorce, I can tell you exactly what my solicitor told me and that is that in your case, with a marriage that long, everything will be considered marital and will be split equally between the two of you.

My mate is just going through this and is in the exact same position. Solicitor said he should split 50/50 without going to court but if he wants to fight it it will cost him £70k and the judge will still split it 50/50. He did actually make his ex sign a marriage contract saying what she would be entitled to but that’s not worth the paper it’s written on apparently.

He’s having to pay an actuary a few grand to sort his pension stuff out plus of course his and her solicitors fees as he’s taken the wrap for the divorce as the ‘no fault’ rule isn’t in play yet.

For beer money amounts, Osmosis and Keplr are brilliant. Very low fees, high interest, daily rewards, airdrops. Lots of gambly fun 😉

I’ve put some money in to find out a bit more about this. It reminds me of a roulette wheel in the casino which I guess is what you are saying?

There’s also ARK etf run by Cathie Wood who is a massive proponent of Bitcoin, and has various holdings in things associated with crypto. It’s taken an absolute battering recently of course.

From what I can see you can’t buy these in a SIPP or ISA wrapper?

I’ve been a critic of the ‘beer money brigade’ on here but I get that blockchain, web 3.0 and crypto has a massive future but I’ve been struggling to see investment opportunities. I started looking at investments that I can make inside a SIPP or ISA but the FCA have brought the shutters down on EFTs linked to crypto which leaves very little to go for:
1 a fund based on companies that hold significant bitcoin e.g. Microstrategy
2 Argo Blockchain – good mini series on the company on Youtube, and how they are getting into clean energy for mining and they also have some smart people in the company. But the Khazaks are doing massive mining with cheap electricity using chinese rigs which will hurt Argo.
3 Block aka Square run by Jack Dorsey. Share price is massively down and took another hit recently when apple started talking about taking payments on iphones where you go into a small shop and tap your credit card on the owners iphone so no need for the devices Block are pushing.

It seems a bit like the early days before the dot com bubble burst with companies like aol, yahoo etc that were huge at the time but are now bit players or bought up for buttons.

Any other areas to look at?

Credit where it’s due, that’s bloody great.

We had the 4.2 diesel some years back. Most comfortable car I’ve ever been in and can be fixed with spanners as opposed to a laptop.

3x£25 for me.
Return since 1st July 0.93%
Equivalent annualised return 1.39%

Another shout out to a local butcher H E Coward of Frodsham. Just off the M56 if you are within striking distance and they do the most amazing pies. I had a couple of sirloin steaks from them last week for £9 which thinly sliced made a fantastic beef in black bean sauce.

Just a reminder that if you want to use your phone for satnav and not incur data charges you can download google maps to your phone before you travel and use them offline. Very useful for outside EU.

With that and wifi phone calls/messages you shouldn’t generally have to worry about roaming charges.

Buy the dip!

Anyone using dexs and liquidity pools?

I prefer Paddy Power and Bet365 for my gambling habit

You are also locked in to the supplier of the tank (they will only fill their own), so you can’t shop around, and if/when you run out, you are at the mercy of their emergency delivery service (You can’t nip to the depot and get a full cylinder yourself).

Not strictly true, you contract with a supplier for usually 2 years and are free to switch to another supplier when the contract runs out. Our tank is buried under the front lawn and some suppliers don’t take on below ground tanks so choice for us is limited. We are also on a top-up system and have a telemetry gadget fitted to the tank which ‘phones home’ so they fill up as and when the usage changes.

Cool – thanks. I’ll take a look. This is Flo Gas I’m with.

So am I @convert but live about 5 miles from Stanlow so that probably makes a difference but based on petrol prices around here I doubt it.

lpgsave came up with 42p + 3p increase in year 2 with flogas then flogas called me up the next day asking me to renew and offered me 44p for 2 years. I went with lpgsave and all the contracts were handled via docusign so really easy.

I was paying 47p a litre in Summer 2020 – It’s now 72p

@convert you are being shafted. I’ve just renewed my contract for the next 2 years at 42p for year 1 and up to +3p for year 2. Try lpgsave.co.uk

Don’t forget LPG is made from crude oil sohas a very different price profile to mains gas.

Or buy the dip

Or try catching a falling knife.

Can’t beat a bit of greed to separate punters from their money.

Very much this. I see lots of people saying they only chuck £x amount a month in bitcoin which is the equivalent of beer money so can afford to lose it all. Thing is there are literally millions of people doing this around the world so the whole thing becomes a rolling ball of s***

Whenever you see someone carrying a suitcase it’s obviously empty.

Go down to your local second hand office furniture warehouse and try them out. I got a really good one for ~£100 from https://cityusedofficefurniture.co.uk/

Just bagged a Xbox Series X from Argos, pick up on Thursday.

There is simply no other explanation.

After the race, Sergio Perez revealed why Red Bull retired his car at the end of the Abu Dhabi race. Perez was 3rd and hence many wondered why Red Bull relinquished a podium place. But Perez admitted that his engine was on the limit and hence had his engine failed at the end of the race, which would have extended the safety car and prevented Max’s last-lap pass on Lewis.

I reckon so. It will be a bit of a pain building up your library of rides but once you’ve got them you can go back and ride them again without downloading.

You can get a 14 day free trial, possibly 30 so give it a go.