Wait, you can wear tyres out and then just send them back to Wiggle? Did they refund you?

Don’t do what I did last year and run a Nobby Nic on the back and rip a nob partly off 2 minutes into qualifying. The sealant won’t stand a chance and you’ll end up pushing back up to the get the lift down.

It’s worth noting the qualifying is more of a DH trail and the main race more of an enduro one, so you might want to choose tyres accordingly, I also think it’s more important to do well in the qualifying as if you miss out on a mass start race you’ve missed out on the whole point of the Mega, so I’d practice the qualifier the most, particularly the top half picking out all the overtaking spots. If I was doing it again this year and picking one tyre I’d go with tubeless Magic Marys.

People with a lot of money generally don’t have a lot of time. I could buy another bike that cost £5k+ and not notice it in my bank account but it would piss me off because I wouldn’t have time to ride it. I also put a lot of effort into freeing up time to do things like ride my bike and things like researching which bike to buy, shopping around, arranging test rides, setting up a new bike, swapping tyres etc. would all go counter to that.

I wouldn’t say they’re brutal in terms of steepness or mandatory drops, but they are quite rough and technical, and the amount of vertical you cover in a day means wear on bike and body accumulates quickly. I just did three days of uplift and I’d say that’s equivalent to about a year of riding when I lived in the UK. They are all really fun tracks though. Take spare brake pads, go tubeless if you can, and make sure every bolt and spoke on the bike is still tight every day.

The XC-only tracks closer to the sea get less traffic so aren’t as rough. Make sure you’re not pedaling up to access tracks you can get to with the uplift vans though, as that’s a bit pointless imo even though plenty seem to do it.

I think I did last year. Are you booking uplift with them, or XC guiding? They subcontracted the uplift we did last year to Eze Freeride who we booked with directly this year, but the XC day we did was good. Finale is amazing.

Yes. This generation has benefitted enough from huge government-supported house price inflation without also passing on a £2 trillion debt to future ones. What kind of person feels entitled to a lifestyle their kids can’t hope for and then asks them to pay for it?

People also portray them as a party of the rich vs. the poor, whereas I view them more as a party of the working vs the non-working, and I think it’s easy enough to get a job right now that I’m ok with that.

When are you going? You’re not supposed to ride the footpaths in July and August which cuts out some fun trails, although midweek it’s less of an issue.

There’s nothing bizarre about it at all. People respond to economic incentives in all areas of their lives. It’s the fact some seem to think it’s immoral when others do it but fine when they do it that I find hypocritical.

It’s a bit more complicated than that though isn’t it? Suppose I have a job that pays me £32k which I like. It’s enjoyable work with great colleagues and the commute is easy. I see a new job though that’s a bit further away, and I don’t think I’ll enjoy it as much, but it pays £35k. Maybe that extra £3k is worth it? I can buy myself that bling carbon frame for Christmas! Oh wait, I’ll only get to keep £1,800. Screw it I’ll stay where I am.

Yes thanks, I do. The 40% marginal rate is still a strong incentive not to earn more, even if you are lucky enough to keep 60% of what you earn. The 62% marginal rate above £100k even more so. If you work a fixed 40 hour week for a fixed salary I can see why you wouldn’t have this perspective, and will obviously never turn down a raise.

It does seem a tad hypocritical to criticise LH for minimising his taxes in the letter and spirit of the law, whilst avoiding tax on savings by using ISAs etc. How many of us could afford to pay more tax and support those less fortunate than ourselves, but instead only pay the minimum we owe?

At least LH has likely already paid far more into the UK system than he can ever take out. Contrast that with someone managing their work hours so they don’t hit the top rate of tax, using their full ISA and pension contribution allowances, claiming child benefit etc.

Exactly, tax avoidance I’m in the position to do = fine. Tax avoidance I can’t = immoral.

Moving abroad and paying local taxes instead of UK ones is a completely legal, and deliberately legal, way of avoiding tax, just like an ISA. It is not in any way a ‘loophole’. The major difference is the former is something other people do to get out of tax (morally reprehensible, how dare they), and the latter is something you do, which obviously makes it 100% ok then.

Your ISA is still tax avoidance I’m afraid. People in glass houses etc.

The sense of entitlement some people feel to other people’s money is always interesting. The poor guy has probably paid enough UK tax in his life to build a hospital wing and yet he’s somehow not pulling his weight.

Has to be nutmegging someone

To update this I also emailed the same question to DT Swiss at the same time I made this thread and today I received in the post 3 spokes from them, free of charge. You can’t beat that for service.

That’s a very kind offer but I live in Switzerland so probably not worth the postage. If any spoke will do it I can just pick one up locally.

Could do worse than invest in bricks and mortar that he lives in and rents out to other students

Depending on how sensible he is this is the best idea purely because it will stop him pissing it up the wall. If it’s in ISAs it’s very easy to get at.

Regardless of the petrol cost the other downside of ‘not very economical’ is if it doesn’t have a big tank you feel like you’re stopping at the petrol station every 10 minutes.

Would like to see the logic that ends up with them being be anti religion in schools but pro alternative medicine.

What are French property taxes like? If I bought an apartment in Morzine or Chamonix for €200k what would I have to pay per year in the French equivalent of council tax?

no, it isn’t, it fails the “will it start?” rule for a kick off.

All modern supercars fail that rule.

I think by definition a supercar can’t be made by a mainstream high-volume manufacturer, so the R8 isn’t one as it looks like every other Audi:

The Lexus IFA is the exception that proves the rule.

Chamonix’s an option too.

If I was going to the Alps with non-bikers I’d pick Chamonix over Morzine, especially if it was for a full week. It’s more of a town than a village, so has more restaurants and shops, and there are more non-biking things to do.

I don’t know why I like these threads so much. The OP would never dream of buying a used frame for new money but somehow thinks everyone else will jump at the chance.

We had a day with Karim in Tolfa last year – as you say, his ability to straight line stuff by just jumping over it is ridiculous. Trying to follow him and Ducci down one section on a full practice loop was terrifying but probably the steepest learning curve I have ever had.

Did he do his whole “don’t stress the suspension, unweight it, slow down to speed up” thing? Seeing him carry speed and almost float was amazing.

Yup, he’s certainly smooth. The most impressive things was at one point he managed to pull one of the grips off his bars but somehow didn’t stack it.

Karim Amour (2012 European Enduro champ) was in our uplift van for the day earlier this year in Finale. On each run I tried to stay with him but could never keep him in sight for more than a minute, and that was with him just pumping the trails and me sprinting between corners.

The most interesting thing was how much time he gained by straight-lining corners. Any sort of left-right kink in the trail and he’d just air over the whole thing. I wish I could ride with riders like that all the time. It would make me so much better.

What have you done to remove them accu and what tool is that? I have the same problem not being able to lower the post far enough. It’s a frustrating design mistake given it’s supposed to be a ‘chameleon’

Shoulders and grip are fine. It’s the ‘pads’ of the fingers, knuckles and wrists that are hurting, and you can’t really train those in the gym. If you don’t think a 180mm fork can feel harsh it sounds like you don’t do a lot of lift-assisted stuff. Even with a big bike the wear on your hands builds up if you’re doing kms of vertical in a day.

The trouble is having spare time is expensive because of all the stuff I buy. I think my living costs would double if I didn’t spend 5 days a week trapped in an office.

Vaccines and modern fertilisers are the only two inventions that can each claim to have saved more than a billion lives.

Thanks Brant, nice to see a company giving the option of different flexes and reassures me it’s not just all in my head. I’d definitely give it a go but I live in Switzerland and they want to charge me a whopping £60 postage whereas someone like CRC charges £5.

I wish I shared your confidence. Theres absolutely no sign that it will ever happen at all. Quite the reverse. The food industry is a vastly profitable corporate juggernaut, with a massive lobbying budget. And it wants things left exactly as they are, thank you very much.

When the government wanted to bring in nutritional labelling on food last year, it got in such champions of public health as Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo, Premier Foods, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, and Morrisons to basically write the policy for them. As a result, nothing has changed.

Do you see that changing any time soon? I certainly don’t

With no prospect of the budget deficit going away and the government running out of things to cut, taxes will have to keep going up, and ‘sin taxes’ are the easiest to raise. We’ll get a tax on unhealthy food because it’ll raise so much money. At the very least we’ll see VAT extended to more foods.

I’d happily see a substantial tax on sugar and a corresponding subsidy on vegetables. It’s going to happen sooner or later and in decades to come we’ll look back on this period and be amazed that we allowed a bottle of coke to be sold so recklessly cheaply, and to children too.

I think the best way into it for technical people without much analytics experience is to download R and try and enter some of the Kaggle competitions. You will get an idea of whether you like the work, will make some useful contacts and can put it on your CV if you do well in a few of them.

To me ‘Big Data’ means machine learning and not just standard BI on big datasets.

You hit it 6 times even though you were a ‘bag of nerves’. Just hit it another 20 until you’re so bored of it you can’t feel nervous.

Well they’ve been coming down pretty consistently so it doesn’t seem to make much difference. The snow only effects the first 5-10 minutes of the race.

The first Megavalanche was in 1995. I think the course has stayed roughly the same as it still starts and ends in the same place, and would give you a good idea as to how pro and amateur times have evolved, if they even timed it back then.

The earliest result I can find on their site is from 2001 when the winning time was 1:04:14, and has come down gradually since then to the winning time in 2013 which was under 40 minutes, and in that year a time of 1:04 wouldn’t have got you in the top 300.

I can believe a strong amateur (typically finishes in top 20% of field) would win a race if they could go back in time 20 years with a modern bike.

There must be a track somewhere in the world that the pros raced 20 years ago and we can compare times to?