In other news, I was told I was “inconsiderate to other riders” yesterday morning. Apparently I should “get some mudguards”.

That was by a random bloke who had been sitting on my wheel for a couple of miles, uninvited and without acknowledging me.

He was pretty much covered in roadsh!t to be fair, but I don’t think the problem was my lack of ‘guards.

If he hadn’t jumped on my wheel and stayed there he would have been just fine.

Orange is much, much worse than Vodafone and 02 beyond Perth and away from main roads.

I was on Vodafone for years but left for Orange after the nobbed me around on a phone upgrade. Fortunately my work Blackberry is on 02 so I can have it with me for emergencies – it has worked many times where Orange hasn’t had a single bar.

EDIT: Double post removed

Have a mate who lives in Tokyo – he’s OK as was in southern Africa.

Also have mates in Christchurch who came through that quake OK a few weeks ago. House a bit of a mess but they are OK which is the main thing.

Sometimes Facebook is very, very useful indeed.

Done a lot of riding from the door this year. Can be offroad in 20 seconds and have loads of stuff I can link up.

I’ve driven to Pentlands once this year (about 20 mins drive – though have ridden out three times, takes about an hour each way), plus Glentress 3 times (just under an hour each way) and Lakes once for a 3 day weekend (about 2.5 hours each way).

Generally do more drive-to-ride in summer – probably go up north once or twice a month from March to November, and have driven to the Alps in the summer for 2-3 weeks holiday.

The NC17 one I linked to does tapered fork/ 1.5″ steerer. Either that, or I have been riding round on something that doesn’t work for a couple of months. So that’s 4 🙂

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=48293

or Nukeproof do one.

Hmmm, thanks all. Sort of confirming what I thought – hassle but not a complete ‘mare. Back wheel would only really come out for fixing flats and maintenance. Vertical dropouts would be better, though ultimately it depends what comes along and how much cheapness…

Zips are OK as an interim solution (much like a Walkman sort of did the job before we had iPods).

This would be the entire fabric opening and closing in response to windiness. It would be awesome.

Drove in as had to drop gf off at airport and need the car tonight. It was rubbish. Crawling traffic for best part of an hour.

Still, 4.30 dentist appointment 2 mins from home tonight and then out on the bike before dark. So could be worse 🙂

Is this recent? Rode it maybe 3 weeks ago and apart from the bottom one being a bit bigger than expected (gulp!), didn’t seem too bad.

Poet’s was well washed out about 2 weeks ago as well, worse (or better!) than it’s been for a while.

Yup, use mine in Pentlands and woodsy singletrack around home. Just have to take it a bit (or a lot!) easier on the big roots and rocky bits.

Did Falla Brae at Glentress on it once as well (it was in the car anyway and it scratched an itch, so to speak). Made me appreciate just how good MTBs are. Reckon it would be a giggle on GT blue, though perhaps not the red or black…!

imnotverygood – nail/ head.

It’s not aimed at people who know the cycle routes inside out, it’s to publicise the fact that there are a lot of routes. If it gets publicity for the traffic free paths network, and gets people thinking “oh I live 200 yards from entry point x, and work 200 yards from exit point y – wonder how long it would take to ride?”, and some of them start to ride to work/ shops/ visit auld auntie mabel then it’s a success in my book.

Yes, tax free Dixons let you shop regardless of where you’re flying to. Bought iPods and various other bits and bobs in there on domestic flights (mostly Gatwick North as it happens).

They want your boarding pass so they can code the sale up for VAT purposes – if you’re flying within the EU they deem you to have paid VAT and pay it over to HMRC; if you’re outside the EU they don’t.

Easyjet are cool with shopping bought at airports in my experience; other airlines (coughRyanaircough) may be less so.

Oh, and think about why your own tax rate is less than 22% of income if you’re a basic rate payer, or 40% if you’re a top rate taxpayer. For individuals there are perfectly legitimate reliefs like personal allowance and tax relief for pension contributions.

Companies are in the same boat, with near-automatic reliefs that are open to them without any planning/ avoidance, so almost always have an effective rate less than the headline rate.

Would be more interested in what Barclays paid in 2010.

2008 was a torrid year for banks, any tax losses they have from 2008 (which ought to be pretty huge) can be carried forward and offset against future profits. If they used a heap of 2008 losses in 2009 then that would explain the apparently low rate of cash tax; if they have the same thing in 2010 that is probably more interesting.

Reports are of an effective tax rate of 23-25% – I’m too tired and too pissed to explain deferred tax, but Google it and that might explain why cash tax out the door is so low in 2009, but overall tax rate isn’t that far off the 28% headline rate.

Interesting indeed. I’d sort of assumed that it would have been 50:50, most of you seem to agree.

Reckon the taxi driver was a bit of tool, while I was doing a manoeuvre many people would have done, and something people (including myself) do regularly in city traffic.

Having looked at Google Maps though, something has come to light I hadn’t quite appreciated at the time. The direction the Golf and the taxi were coming from has a pedestrian crossing less than 50m before the junction. The special wiggly lines from the crossing end about 2 car lengths before the junction.

So the taxi driver was definitely overtaking on the pedestrian crossing markings – which is very, very naughty indeed. Wonder if this would have changed anything?

BTW it was junction of West Nicolson St and Potterow in Edinburgh – here, I was turning out of West Nicolson St into Potterow heading into the city.

Google Maps

Interesting.

Was in a city by the way – 30mph limit and the turn the Golf was setting up for is very tight – it’s a narrow road and a very “square” corner if that makes sense.

Edit – the Golf had moved out to widen the turn so no doubt in my mind he was going to make the turn. If I hadn’t had to stop I would have been well clear of him before he got to me anyway.

The Blackbox ones are noticably better than older Motion control. I have Blackbox Revs and Motion Control Pikes, Blackbox is just more controlled when it gets proper choppy and less spiky (same pressure and the same on rebound btw).
.

You wouldn’t get away with it on the seatstay with the standard mount – the mount is a fixed plastic thingy so it points down slightly on a seatpost; you can’t adjust the angle.

They take CR123A batteries – not sure if that is an 18650 by another name or what.

I bought a set with rechargeable batteries and charger at the start of the winter after getting sick of lights dying on me.

So far wery happy with them – been used near-daily in all weathers and they have worked perfectly apart from once (see below). They are noticeable because of the pulse thing and far, far brighter than anything that size has any right to be. You can just about ride unlit paths with the Flash on constant, though wouldn’t do that out of choice. I use them as running lights this time of year so any time I’m out on the road and it’s not bright/ clear then they go on.

The only problem I’ve had is with the Flare. If you have the Flare on a bike without mudguards but not turned on, there is a tiny gap between the lamp and body that can get clogged with muck thrown up by the back wheel. If that happens it won’t turn on as the twist switch doesn’t make proper contact. Now I’ve worked that out they are seemingly impervious to water and mud.

Never been to Newcastleton (nor Glentrool). Might give it a go this year now it is linked into Kielder.

I do wonder how “real” the figures for cyclotourisme are, and how much they are optimistic estimates of redistribution of wealth. I know if I didn’t spend as much on biking I’d probably spend more on other stuff, and I doubt I am alone in this.

Glad to be of help 🙂

Companies generally prefer to set up subsidiaries overseas, as others have said this is a separate company owned by the parent and incorporated in the country it operates in. This is often simpler and cleaner than setting up a branch. The assets of the parent at risk will basically just be its investment in the subsidiary and the subsidiary has its own legal identity, shares and assets. A sub is easier to sell off or wind up as well if things go wrong.

A branch is the operations in a country of a non-resident company – there is OECD guidance on what constitutes a branch (technically referred to as a “permanent establishment”) – can be as little as a desk/ office space, can be as big as you want it to. I think Amazon’s operations in the UK, which is obviously a fairly big operation, are a branch of a Luxembourg company for example.

A branch doesn’t have its own legal identity so in theory the whole company is at risk if something goes wrong in the branch; on the other hand it is easy to set up a branch and there can be advantages.

Financial services companies tend to use branches – as someone said it can reduce the amount of capital they have to hold (capital is basically shareholder’s money – banks and insurers have to hold a certain amount to cover themselves in bad times; what happened to banks in 2008 was in part because they didn’t have enough capital to cover an exteme set of circumstances but that is a separate discussion). As a rule, for a given set of activities a lot of small companies will have to hold more capital than one large one. Various reasons – big company will have more diverse operations which reduces risk that one bad set of circumstances will take the company down, so needs less capital than the sum of the small companies. Also, a group of companies with dealings with each other have to hold funds to cover the risk someone else they deal with defaults/ goes bust and they have to pick up the tab themselves (even if all owned by the same parent). If you only have one company you don’t have that risk, so there is no default risk.

The other reason financial services companies go for branches is regulatory. In the EU you can have a home state regulator as a supervisor (so UK banks and insurers are regulated by the FSA in the UK). If they have branches the whole operation across the EU can be supervised by the FSA with limited input from local regulators in other EU countries they operate in. If you have subs, you need to have much more involvement from local regulators in respect of your subs. Dealing with one regulator gives consistency, you are only subject to politics in one country and is cheaper and easier than dealing with lots of regulators.

The other big users of branch structures are oil companies – this can be in part for tax reasons. Oil exploration is horrendously expensive and you incur huge costs up-front in the hope of making a huge amount of money down the line. If you are a UK headquartered oil company with a branch structure, at present the expenses of exploration in Kazakhstan can be offset against production profits from UK or Bolivia or wherever for UK tax purposes. If you had subs, you’d have a loss trapped in Kazakhstan until you start making money there, no further tax on Bolivia (remember the dividend will be exempt fro UK tax) and still be profitable in the UK. Oil companies are lobbying for some continuation of this set-up even if branch profits are exempt, but given the inconsistency this introdcues I am not sure how successful they will be; might be some compromise that expenses that can’t be used otherwise can be offset in the UK or something like that.

kimbers – That’s not really my area; setting up offshore companies as you describe can work for a while but sounds like the sort of thing that relies on flaws or gaps in the tax legislation; these sort of arrangements will at some point be identified by HMRC and shut down if they are costing the UK a lot of lost tax (either because a few people are saving a lot of money, or a lot of people are saving a bit of money). It could also be as much about defer the payment of tax rather than saving much tax overall.

Well, I could unpick the article line by line, but frankly I can’t be arsed. It is so uttetly factually flawed from start to finish that the conclusion is built on sand.

That article is total horseshit, as you might expect from Monbiot and the Guardian.

Branch exemption is part of a package of tax reform designed to ensure that UK companies pay tax on their UK profits but don’t pay UK tax on profits that have nothing to do with the UK. Branch exemption is common in developed economies, so it’s about competitiveness and keeping our large, successful multinationals. It will have very little impact on companies with a largely UK business, and should help keep companies like HSBC from moving their head office out of the UK. (This has started to happen – Shire Pharmaceutical and WPP have done this already, and there are plenty of others considering it.

The whole thing is very much a project started under the last government that is finally being completed under this one.

Companies usually have branches (rather than subsidiaries) for practical, historic or regulatory reasons that are nothing to do with tax, but obviously that is not a concern of Monbiot.

Some background to the whole thing, if anyone cares.

1) Dividend exemption

Since 1 July 2009, dividends from foreign subsidiaries paid to a UK parent company have been exempt from UK tax. This is partly driven by EU law and free movement of capital – until the dividend exemption, if a UK company owned a UK subsidiary then dividends were exempt, but if it owned a subsidiary in another EU country then that was a taxable dividend.

That meant there was discrimination against investment in another EU country and that is against EU law. Why the last government went so far as to exempt any dividend, who knows, but that’s what they did.

2) CFC rules and anti-avoidance

The UK, like most countries, has controlled foreign company rules, or CFC rules for short. These are anti-avoidance rules that are designed to stop companies setting up shop in tax havens when their real activities are elsewhere. The rules are horrendous in detail but in principle, if you have a company in a low tax jurisdiction it must be a genuine business operating there rather than a nameplate for a UK business. You couldn’t, for example, set up a business in the Cayman Islands that runs shops in the UK, or provides services to your UK business in such a way that the profit comes out in the Cayman islands. Two main ways this is stopped. First, if you had a UK parent it would get nobbed with a CFC charge (i.e. the Cayman Islands company profits would be deemed to arise in the UK parent and taxed here – this is a bad thing as you don’t get a lot of the reliefs and allowances that a UK company would get). Second, if you had no UK companies, you would have a Permanent Establishment (or branch) in the UK and it would be taxed as if it was a UK company. Either way, you can’t generally route profits earned in the UK through a tax haven and dodge UK tax. Obviously the system ain’t perfect, but in general it works reasonably well.

3) Branch exemption

All that leaves us with a bit of a discontinuity. Say UK company has a subsidiary in France, then the profits earned in France are taxed there (as that company is tax resident in France) and the dividend paid up to the UK parent is exempt.

Same company has a branch in Germany – profits earned in Germany are taxed in Germany, but also included in the UK taxable profit. This gives you double taxation, so double tax relief was invented. You basically get credit for tax paid in Germany against your UK tax charge. Problem solved? Not always.

One example, say your UK business has had a bad year and you make a loss of £2m. Your small German branch has done well and makes a profit of £0.5m, on which it pays tax of £0.2m in Germany.

So in the UK your tax calculation gives you a loss of £1.5m (+0.5 in Germany, -2 in the UK), but you’ve suffered £0.2m of tax in Germany. Suddenly your German branch profits reduce your UK loss you can carry forward and you have no UK tax so you don’t get double tax relief. You end up with a UK tax loss of £1.5m but economically you’ve got a loss after tax of £1.7m

If you had a German subsidiary then you’d have had a £2m loss in the UK and a net profit of £0.3m, which is your economic position.

So along comes branch exemption. Again horribly complex in practice, but in principle it puts branches and subs in the same position. So probably a good thing.

The two two absolute bankers in our book are Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference Cotes du Rhone Villages (made by Chapoutier, one of the finest Rhone producers); about six or seven quid, and Concha y Toro Cab Sauv (Chile) for sheer reliability. For something near-universally available and reasonable money, we always go for CyT; about £5-£8 depending on where you buy it (ASDA lower end, offy in Moidart at top end) – by no means an amazing wine but absolutely nothing about it not to like.

If you have an Oddbins near you, Leyda Pinor Noir (Chile), Penaloen Cab Sauv (Chile) and D’Arenberg Footbolt Shiraz (South Australia) are exceptional at the 10-15 mark.

Shame the big guys like Rockshox aren’t doing a 27.2; anyone know what of the KS, X-Fusion and DSP ones are genuinely different posts rather than rebadges? (Not accusing or anything, just interested!)

Of what is out there at the moment, it sounds like the Gravity Dropper is the one to go for?

As a separate question, how easy is it to remove a seatpost with a remote lever? Need to take it out to stand the bike up in the car, I’d imagine with a remote post that would be harder?

Just put some F120s on my aluminium Rush that previously had a Lefty on it.

A standard 1.5″ headset will fit a Cannondale headtube. (Don’t know about integrated/ semi integrated ones.) I bought some tapered steerer F120s so got a 1.5 to taper steerer headset like this:
http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=48293

You’ll need a new stem (lefty steerers are slightly bigger than 1.5″), and at risk of stating the obvious, a new front wheel as well.

Worth mentioning that the clearance on the downtube for a normal fork crown is a bit tight as the “drop” from downtube to base of headtube isn’t as much as it is on may frames, so I’d suggest you went for a headset with as tall a lower race as you can. The NC17 I have is OK by a few mm – wouldn’t want to have much less clearance in there.

Hope that helps.

All bikes get a decent outing. Mudguarded road bike, CX bike and hardtail get more use in winter, fancy roadbike and full sussers get more of an outing in summer. All 6 got ridden at least once a month last year, on average, and I have ridden 3 of them this past week. Given one or two are generally broken at any given time, it’s not so bad overall…

My baby. 160 Float RC2s up front, DHX air shock, 70 stem, low rise RF Atlas bars. Want a ‘dropper post for it, but can’t have everything. Most excellent for bicycling in big mountains – been to Sierra Nevada and ALps, and big days out in Scotland.

An adjustable fork would be perfect – it goes a little light at the front on steep climbs, but legs run out before I can’t keep the front end down. 36 TALAS with a 1.5 steerer if I ever win the lottery.

This pic is taken after I pedalled up and over Morrone from Braemar. Rode the climb, pinned the descent. TIDY.

And at the top of the Burma Road (nr Aviemore).

There are 4 grades of gin and tonic

recreational (about 6 parts tonic to 1 part gin)
robust (about 4:1)
racy (about 2:1)
Rantzen (about 1:3) – just enough tonic to make it fizzy. So called cos it strips your gums off your teeth and makes you smile like its namesake.

[/url]
27 July 2010 – Monster Ride[/url]

Probably a road ride this year (ah, the shame!). Out in the Alps, 27 July, rode Samoens – Col de la Joux Plan – Morzine – Avoriaz – Morzine – Col d’Encrinaz – Pont de Gets – Taninges – Samoens.

95km and 2,500m of climbing. Monster.

Onzadog – Member

I really do hope that those who have waited this long are really happy with them. Personally, I’m glad I dropped out when I found he was getting a coloured face.

Now we have RACIST on the thread!!!!

Got some arsey direct messages on twitter but long and short of it is the stuff has been posted

John – the point is this is also paying work. We are also customers. Maybe the key distinction is that we paid Jo first whereas Future pay him when he’s done? Fi sent Jo money in April for cufflinks for me as a “new job” present. I’ve been here for 8 months now.

If there are hold ups outside Jo’s control then that is fine but if (as seems to be the case) he’s had our stuff for best part of a month and has time to go riding, drink coffee , take new comissions and tweet about it then that is very different.

Only work on BA. Not that great TBH – I have a huge number of miles but hardly use them. Main problem is that availability isn’t the best – summer Saturdays tend to sell out fast, as do Friday pm outward/ Sunday evening back flights – plus I have to go to London or via London from Edinburgh which isn’t entirely practical when Easyjet do lots of places direct.

Also not often great value – by the time you pay taxes and charges, you can often get a budget flight for domestic or short haul, or fly via Paris/ Amsterdam/ Frankfurt for about the same money. They work best on routes with less competition (e.g. somewhere like Luxembourg that budget airlines don’t go to), or if you buy a basic BA flight and use the miles to upgrade to Economy+/ Business.

Add me to the list of 170bhp VAG drivers with fat tyres.

Yep my Passat isn’t great 😀 I got stuck on an icy hill last year and it span the wheels in 5th at idle. Got some autosocks but haven’t used them as it’s either been OK getting out the street so don’t need them, or would use them to get out the road but the main roads have been so choked I’ve not gone anywhere.

(and it’s not my driving as I can get my g/f’s Seat a long way past where I can get the Passat in the snow).

I’m glad I didn’t get in today. Worked from home, much better idea.

Lothian Buses twitter is about the only thing of theirs on the web that is still alive:

http://twitter.com/#!/on_lothianbuses

Lothian Buses
on_lothianbuses Lothian Buses
1530 UPDATE: Services are now gradually being restored on most routes. Full details to follow shortly…
29 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply
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Lothian Buses
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1500 UPDATE: We’re assessing the road conditions at the moment. Stay tuned for further information as we get it.
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All Lothian Buses services are still withdrawn until we can reassess the situation. We hope to restore services as soon as conditions allow.
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igm

“to mix penderyn and meths is a waste of good meths”

T-FIFY

Drinking Penderyn felt quite a lot like the time I pissed on an electric fence. I wished it would stop doing what it was doing to me and I never wanted to experience that again. It’s up there with black olives off an olive tree for the worst tastes I have ever had. And for the money I could have had an amazing single malt…

Some Japanese whisky is excellent – better than most Scotch I have ever had, but comes at a price.

English whisky just seems wrong for loads of reasons – geographical, political and historical.