I don't see that running a profit-making business and having some sort of ethical stance have to be as mutually exclusive as some people here seem to think.

(Obviously I'm using 'ethical' in a very broad way here.)

My view is that Howies has a fairly anti business message on occasion, and it's completely impossible to square that with running a business.

I've no problem with people aspiring to strong business ethics. I do have a problem with hypocrisy and cynical marketing techniques.

I wouldn't, no. I can't imagine anything worse than doing a PhD. Except for being stuck down that hole in Chile.

I would write "During my PhD, I have implemented an algorithm [function of algorithm] using F77 and Perl."

How can a business be anti business???

Well, I think selling T-shirts with slogans like "There's no business like no business", "Corporate ****" (that's one from back of the day) is providing a fairly anti-business narrative.

Then they go on about wanting to make the world a better place etc. If they really were that bothered, why not run as a non-profit?

I meant the "denialist" bit. If you're going to call someone a climate change denialist, it's probably best that they actually have been denying the existence of climate change.

Apollo full sus thing. First "proper" MTB and actually used for MTBing was a Giant.

Classy work, an article that contradicts the headline…

But many problems stem from the fact that certain deprived areas have been so neglected, that the static local popultion are generally unskilled and unqualified for any jobs that might be available if any businesses do set up in the local area.

A few years ago (ie, before the credit crunch), it seemed to me that anyone who wanted to work, could. Temp agencies would find you work very quickly, and we had several hundred thousand immigrants arrive to fill the jobs.

No problem with immigrants, but there seem to be jobs for everyone in the UK that wants one during the good times.

There are much wider problems with the benefits and housing system that tend to keep people out of work – if you live in a council house, it's very difficult to move, and if you're on benefits, everything happens in slow motion. Which means if you live hand to mouth, taking a week's work can risk having no income for the 6 weeks following.

I thought his previous argument was that we couldn't influence it a great deal, not that it wasn't happening?

On a grim note I do question the chances of this particular rescue bore-hole working and if they have to restart the drilling from a new hole and at what point

I'm struggling to understand the question.

Get / insist on better lighting? Even a bog standard bulb has a spectrum that's vastly better than fluorescent.

Put the back brake on and bounce the front end of a bike. The wheelbase changes with fork length.

You want to help the unemployed? Give them opportunities to learn.

There's more than one kind of unemployed in my experience.

I was unemployed despite being well educated and being good at my job. The economy had taken a nose dive and our customers were a) putting new work on hold and b) going bust. The people on my payscale who made the cut were working on long term contracts, masters level qualified, or about to take a masters. You're basically talking cyclical employment.

Structural unemployment of the type you describe does exist – I've mentioned on other threads how people around here are still eating as if they work in manual jobs. The thing is, the manual jobs left 20 years ago, and most of them are now old men. Retraining someone who never expected to have a desk job in their life is very difficult.

To me, the biggest problem we have at the moment is youth unemployment. If that's a pattern that continues, we're potentially paying for 50-60 years of someone doing nothing, which isn't good for them or us.

Sausage rolls are almost always pretty nasty.

On the other hand, get a big crispy pork pie from a good butcher 😀

Quiche is good if you can get it warmed through on the day – doesn't matter if it cools down again, but cold gluey out of the fridge pastry is horrible.

Wraps will fall to pieces.

BFO bain marie full of curry? 😆

It also costs the state in having to pay for the H & S cover and to inspect the premises first and monitor the placement

Surely the H&S aspect is the responsibility of the employer and the HSE? I can see the argument that the government facilitates the placement, but is that so different from facilitating someone's job advert?

As I said above, I can see how it would be very difficult to force people to do it, but I would have jumped at the chance for a bit of state sponsored part time work.

This is going to go the way of the tattoo thread in a minute.

Whatever clothing you choose will influence how people see you. It will mark you out as a member of some social tribe or another. Some people will see you as having a very utilitarian & practical view on the world, others will assume you have no cash, others still will see you as being ahead of the game by not being hoodwinked by marketers etc.

The closest a non-uniform outfit comes to being a complete blank canvas is a suit, and even that gives off subtle cues. Fabric, number of buttons, style of tie etc.

Having been on the dole myself in the past (rather unsuccessfully due to the vagaries of the benefits system and the tax year), I can't see any major issue with doing some kind of work in return for your dole payments, or perhaps increased dole payments.

I suspect that if you forced people to work for their benefits, you'd be able to trust them about as far as you could throw them, so you could only provide them with very basic manual tasks, where the stakes in case of a screw up were low. You'd be talking about almost chain gang / community service type stuff. However, that could be done well – painting the interiors of the numerous public owned buildings would be infinitely preferable to litter picking, say.

On the other hand, if it's optional, and it's vaguely relevant, I can see it being a fantastic scheme. I'd certainly have jumped at the chance, and there's work I could have done for councils which would have cost them a lot at commercial rates. Sitting around the house looking for jobs that didn't seem to exist drove me mad.

Such a scheme wouldn't be a cheap thing to administer, but it would be a good way of getting people back into work, and making a period of unemployment far less of a CV bomb.

As for whether it'd be a "make work" scheme or not, I'm not sure. I reckon there's a fair amount of stuff that needs doing and doesn't get done because it isn't a high priority / there isn't the budget to do it. Certainly it would be vital to ensure that the work didn't undercut the remaining employed workers.

No, I'm making a choice to wear the cheapest T shirts I can find of reasonable quality.

And implicit in that is the rejection of non-cheap and poor quality t-shirts. Every time anyone makes a choice, they choose one course of action and reject the other possibilities.

I wonder if the lease co have paid the fine on your behalf then added it to the end of lease bill? I doubt any fine could be sat on that long without penalty fees accruing.

I like Howies, yeah they have Timberland funding them but most businesses have to get some capital from somewhere to grow.

Most businesses don't rely heavily on an anti-business narrative. Howies do, and the Timberland deal blows a big hole in what is franky, a ropey starting point. A business selling t-shirts with an anti-business message? It's certainly a testament to their marketing skills.

The banter is good, having someone about in case you brain yourself is good, but waiting for people to get their shit together before a ride…

No idea. I used to buy their kit, then I bought some where the sizing had changed considerably, with no notice in the catalogue etc. Which I thought was particularly thick for a mail order clothing company.

Now they seem to be heading almost down the route of being a casual / scruffy Rapha. I've never seen the point of spending a lot of money to look scruffy (see also: Fat Face), but a lot of people seem to like it.

TBH I didn't mind the slightly left wing slogans on shirts back in the day, but once you've completed your exit strategy and sold up to Timberland? It's about as convincing as Tesco claiming not to be run by Lizardmen who are out to get every penny out of your pocket.

It looks like it needs a tap in / forwards pressure to make the teeth dig into the plasterboard. Might be easier with an electric screwdriver.

See, the purpose of 'labels' is to help define the wearer as belonging to a particular set or group. In the same way as tribal colours, patterns, tartans etc.

It's very stupid to think that this is something you can "rise above". If you're not wearing a label, you're making the choice not to.

Eh? Is the shifting slow or something?

Bicycles are something where loads of closely spaced gears are really very useful – most people don't have a huge range of RPMs where they're developing good power. In an ideal world, you'd have a CVT.

Or is it a case that the people who've tried hub gears out have switched from singlespeeding, and are used to working over big rev range?

I think we got the divan and mattress for about £300, haggled a £100 off.

It's not difficult to work out if one mattress is worth more than another – you want pocket sprung, and then it's a question of how many springs you want, natural fillings or synthetic etc.

The law of diminishing returns is likely to apply, and selling beds is an expensive business – relatively slow moving stock, massive showrooms, sales staff on commission. As the sales staff are on commission, you can generally haggle, but probably a better technique would be to find a mattress that suits, then find someone online selling them at near wholesale.

A mate got Norton with his laptop. It's so hard to remove that he reckons it should be reclassified as malware.

Useful for Safari, stop you getting eaten by lions and tigers and that. Can't see the point otherwise.

No direct experience of scoring, but the run down is this:

CK doesn't want to pay to licence the patent on A-headsets – in particular, the compression ring. So he has his own system for tensioning the bearing. Which results in fretting, which scores the steerer.

Not a problem on a steel steerer, but it worries me on an alloy steerer – stress risers are a real issue in Alloy parts.

Personally, there's no way I'd use one – FSA headsets last ages, and cost far less.

And to me, the fact that CK uses an inferior method to work around a rival's patent makes his "superior engineering" type spiel completely incredible.

Petrol is a slightly daft material to use. It can ruin a lot of plastics, and will quickly eat through latex gloves.

2.35 or 2.4 for me.

Magura are the gods of indestructable brakes. Absolutely fantastic IMO.

I think Barclaycard do it if you want too.

The area I live in has one of the highest obesity rates in the UK. From where I'm sitting, it looks like people's eating habits really haven't adjusted with their circumstances.

At one time, a lot of people round here were working in heavy manual labour. Now, they're not. But their culture, and therefore diet, hasn't radically altered.

It's a very different situation to just telling people to get a grip – you're talking about entire families and social groups eating badly, not people sneaking off to have a bacon sandwich on the way to work. The habits are therefore far more difficult to break.

A half decent drawer box to keep everything in. Halfords do good offers on them.

Sockets & socket wrenches from Sealey – they're cheap, I've abused mine loads, and never broken anything. Snapon might be worthwhile in a Garage, but not for a home user. Get "Wall drive" type sockets, they're approximately 9000000 times better than any other shape. You can easily identify these – the corners of the hex are radiused, so that the force acts on the flat of the nut and not the weaker corners.

Halfords pro for combination spanners.

Knipex for wire cutters.

Whatever screwdrivers float your boat.

Buy cheap mole grips, they're all the same.

Get a blow torch – you'll want this for stuck fasteners, and bending a cheap spanner so you can get at whatever parts the manufacturer's chosen to bury.

I wouldn't bother with buying the big bumper box of tools setups. They tend to have loads of bits you won't actually use. Better to get a good quality range of stuff that will get used for the same money, and add special tools like brake caliper wind backs as you go.

If you must have an adjustable spanner, get a Bahco.

Does she ride? If she doesn't ride much at all, riding on the road really feels like being thrown in at the deep end. You're learning bike handling in traffic 😯

Decathlon are great for clothing. Not up on Women's road bikes to be honest, although again, Decathlon do 650 wheeled bikes if she's small.

Pounding out a dissertation. Unfortunately, this forum doesn't have the face where the bloke looks like he's got a mouthful of sick.

Student union print shops? Ebay? Alibaba?

Whyever not?

I find it odd enough for men beyond their twenties to be playing computer games, but I can understand it as there's an element of childishness in most blokes. I thought women had more sense 😆

My brain can't quite absorb the idea of a grown woman playing computer games.

You go a bit slower, you roll over stuff a bit easier. It depends how Rad the riding you're doing is.