I’m all for stickers, and more generally, any modifications or personalisation of vehicles that don’t have an impact on safety. Too many bland euroboxes on the roads, and there’s a weird snootiness (demonstrated occasionally in this thread) that looks down on people who like to demonstrate a bit of individuality via their vehicles. Stickers etc can be both entertaining and informative about the driver. Sometimes not in the way intended, but that’s by the by, and useful too…

I have a small ‘built not bought’ sticker on the back on my labour of love landy.

Looks like very little sleep for a few days

Spare a thought for us shift workers, I’ll be trying to sleep during the day…

Tax cuts for business means more cash to hire and pay people.

Sorry; I lol’d. naivety in the extreme.

Tax cuts but only for business and top earners

‘Twas ever thus.

Heating oil down to 85ppl compared to 105ppl a few weeks ago; that’s a fairly substantial drop, percentage wise. I don’t understand why we aren’t seeing similar fluctuations in road fuel. If anything the higher tax component of the price should make changes more noticeable.

In any way, shape or form, it is what it is, at the end of the day.

Well, that was quite intense 😳

Steve Baker rules himself out and backs Braverman. Truly the Brexit headbangers choice.

In other news, Ben Wallace rules himself out.

God love you teej, but your anti dog extremism is hilarious. What you suggest is absolutely legal, but not particularly nice, and certainly (in that situation) overkill.

FWIW, OP handled it pretty well. Owner should have been more on the ball, and then more appreciative of her responsibilities as a dog owner, and was certainly wrong in her exertion of equal dog/child rights. In fact, that’s hilarious too.

Indeed. I’ll be voting for Labour, because ‘anything but Tory’ but I’m an engaged voter. Just being the beige alternative to Boris is going to lead to mass voter apathy and at best, a very hung parliament. At worst, more Boris.

It’s for that kind of post that we need an ‘appreciated, thank you’ button.

@Speed12 Appreciated, thank you. BTW, is your name TVR related?

I think it’s fine. I had similar when Nissan bought back my Navara. Just sent the whole thing off to Nissan UK, which weirdly, is in France. All good, got my money.

Literally laying the groundwork for a dissolution of the Union. Wow.

Ah, fair enough, didn’t spot that bit. To be honest, the way that running costs are going, both figures are pretty derisory.

If you are doing long trips and need to use motorway chargers 5ppm probably isnt going to cover it.

Not to mention that business mileage rates should cover total ownership costs on a pro rata basis rather than just fuel; in my experience, (on our second leased EV now, but also run two IC cars in our household) costs are not very dissimilar between electric and IC for reasonably new, like for like vehicles. They aren’t cheap to own, they just happen to have cheap fuel (for now).

@Cougar, as much as I enjoy the ‘every sperm is sacred’ argument, it’s not massively valid, as conception is the point at which the religious think life is created. I (along with the majority of people I like to think) tend to be a little more pragmatic about the subject and think that whether ‘life begins’ at conception or not is irrelevant, as it a) is not viable outwith it’s uterine enclosure, and b) it has no consciousness or awareness of its own existence, so far as we can tell. From this understanding I am totally comfortable with terminations happening in the first 20 weeks, and progressively less comfortable after that. I also recognise that the mothers right to life and good health should ALWAYS trump that of the unborn ‘potential human’. Again it just makes pragmatic sense as much as anything; the mother can easily survive without the foetus, the foetus cannot survive without the mother.

Finally, I am also of the opinion that whilst I have every right to hold my opinions, they are far less important than those of people who have uteruses, and absolutely of no importance compared to those who have uteruses that are currently in active use. It’s their call, not mine.

The left gave starmer the benefit of the doubt initially, unlike the centrist nutters with Corbyn, but have just lost patience with him.

This is absolutely me. Whilst I liked Corbyn’s manifestos, I could see that the writing was on the wall with him from an early stage. A career of being an idealistic but somewhat naive chancer was not a good foundation for a Leader, and gave his enemies all the ammo they needed to destroy him. I spotted SKS’s political ambitions early on, long pre Corbyn, and kind of knew he was going to be the party leader at some point. I was cautiously optimistic about him; human rights lawyer and champion of the underdog through his legal career made me feel like he’d be someone that people can get behind.

But I’ve become more and more disappointed with him. He’s rowed back on commitment after commitment and now it feels like you’d be hard pushed to tell the difference between him and David Cameron, except maybe Cameron was a bit more exciting and clearer on what he stood for. SKS’s vacuum of intent feels disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.

His behaviour in relation to the RMT strikes has been appalling for a Labour leader; talk about walking away from the working people base. It comes across as calculated and cynical. I feel very disenfranchised by him.

I’ve got a question. For RWD EVs… how does regenerative braking work when driving “enthusiastically”? For example, a BMW i4 40. It could be a bit like pulling on the handbrake mid corner if done wrong which would end badly so I’m sure the on board computer wouldn’t allow. So what happens? No regen while cornering? Front brakes are employed to balance things out?

Skoda Enyaq; Can’t notice anything odd; you’d not know it was just the rear wheels applying braking force (in fact I’m I too you mentioned it, it hadn’t even occurred to me). I don’t think even full regen is actually very much braking at all in the grand scheme of things, and you’d really need to be driving ‘full twunt’ and be extremely close to the limits of adhesion for it to make any difference. You certainly don’t get that weird arse end settling feeling that you get when you use the handbrake to slow down instead of the footbrake (to see if you can put the right number of clicks on to gently stop at the line, obviously, I can’t be the only one who doe this on quiet roads every now and again?).

a) Norma McCorvey lied about being raped so the whole case was based on fiction,

This is bollocks. Whether she lied or not is irrelevant; the judgement did not take that into account at all when making its judgment. It was based entirely on the premise of ‘it’s none of your business’ which is exactly the right that’s being attacked at the moment; the right to privacy. It’s not a good time to have a ‘non traditional’ lifestyle in the US right now.
Full fact check

On the contrary, if Americans now want abortion they get to vote on it.

Yeah, unelected partisan officials taking repealing the constitutional rights of an already subjugated group is TOTALLY democratic. <rollseyes>

That’s a lovely looking car, but for the mileage you speak of you’d probably be better off getting the petrol version; more for your moolah and less baby robins faces will die as an added benefit.

Basically the guy was being an utter dick and acting like a toddler.

It’s the old irresistible force meets an immovable object, innit?

Or in this case; boneheaded bloke meets ridiculous rules.

Completly appaling that it is being discussed here. None of our business. Even worse is that I read that some pop singer has abused her posotion at Glastonbury to rant on about it.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree but but there is a time and a place.

Odd comment. Is it being ironic, or serious? It could go either way to be honest, and I don’t know the poster well enough to judge.

I was once refused service from a fast food drive through (shut to walk ins) at 2am because the ambo wouldn’t fit under the canopy and my solution of talking loudly from the parallel lane wasn’t good enough for them and pedestrians aren’t allowed in the drive through lane; I resolved this fairly quickly by asking the occupant of a car to order my meal for me, in a slightly amusing Chinese whispers stylee from the passenger side of said car. This made the point of how ridiculous the rule was and they gave up and served my my delicious/very bad food.

I find a sense of humour is useful in getting your own way in these sort of daft rules situations, rather than a hissy fit.

So rather than leaving it up to wvery woman do decide if the cast majority are under 13 weeks we can have laws outlawing late term abortions aside from risk to life of mother etc.

I don’t think we disagree much but leaving it entirely to the choice of the woman regardless is going too far.

@IRC I think that the only thing we disagree on really is the necessity for legislation. In reality it’s never really just ‘up to the woman’ because we are not talking about buying a happy meal here, we are talking about a physician provided medical procedure. The care decision would be in consultation between patient and care provider (that being said, I still think that it certainly should be up to the woman in the vast majority of cases; that’s what bodily autonomy means, after all). I think that ANY healthcare should be a private matter between a patient and a professional healthcare provider, who should be duty bound to act within a moral and ethical framework and in their patients best interests. It has NOTHING TO DO with middle aged, well off, opinionated MEN to decide on what women do with their bodies. Legislation, especially emotive, dog whistle legislation, often gets in the way of decent patient care.

You don’t need to ban late term (or any term) abortions because the only time they would generally happen is when they are be medically and ethically entirely justified.

Exactly, abortions, by their very nature are of pre viable pregnancies. Talk of 8 month abortions, of killing ‘babies’ etc, is deliberately emotive and inaccurate language designed to create an emotional response in people who haven’t got a full understanding, or to dog whistle those who have already fallen for the bigotry.

Don’t tolerate the bullshit. Abortions are principally performed on pre viable pregnancies, and are not ‘Killing babies’ or ‘tearing babies from the wombs of their mothers’ or any other emotive, loaded clap trap.

In theory yes. But are you OK with an abortion performed at 8 months?

Except that’s so absolutely, vanishingly aware as to basically not be a thing and is just dog whistle language. The vast, vast majority of abortions happen <13weeks gestation, with rare late term abortions happening between 13 and 24weeks. Later than that are incredibly rare, and will most likely be because of medical emergencies.

If you nationalised a supermarket chain, that would probably end up with rows and rows of porridge oats though, right?

That is a very different business, though. With supermarkets, there’s strong competition, and all of the income comes directly from the customers, who can choose between five or six different shops. So the stores have big incentives to provide value, and variety to attract the money.

With rail (now I’m not an expert, but from what I can see) on the other hand, competition is limited as routes and timetables are saturated, and most importantly, the majority of the money comes from gov subsidy/contract, so there’s no incentive to please/innovate for the customer. Profit margins are improved by cutting costs and corners, rather than increasing market share.

We need to decide as a nation whether public transport is a business, or a public service, and manage it appropriately. Some things shouldn’t be for profit, and if the government (ie we, via taxes) are paying for it, then it’s one of them. See also Healthcare, Education.

At what point do we start benefiting from incentive driven privatised services?

well that very much depends on whether you are a shareholder or cattle a passenger, really.

Indeed, the “option” to go out of state all depends on the power, wealth and control of each woman.

Ah, but that’s the American dream. A persons value is directly proportionate to their bank balance, with the usual modifiers of which genitalia or skin colour they possess being extremely important if that number is small, but less important if that number is large.

Thete is no constitutional limit on numbers.

Ah, I was unaware of that. Could get a bit crowded though, if you start that particular arms race.

Biden should stuff the supreme court.

It’s a bit late for that though. They are life long positions I understand, and Trump (or his puppet masters) appointed (relatively) young judges.

I think that one nuance that is being missed is that this has removed federal power to the State level legislature. Which means that whilst regressive, loony states will act predictably, progressive states will actually strengthen abortion rights on the back of this.

The bigger story is that this is another huge step towards a fragmented and fractured USA, which may, in our life time, cease to exist in the way it does now. There are already two Americas, and the U in USA is looking more ironic than ever.

Under his eye.

Also, hated the small business bloke with 30 employees – there’s always one of them telling everyone else how they should all change to his way of doing business. Shaking his head etc.

I once worked for a carbon copy of this bloke at his haulage company. His foul attitude towards his drivers, his casual tax dodging, his rabid hatred of the ‘jumped up shop steward’ John Prescott, all combined to motivate me to get a job where making money wasn’t valued over people. I’m now twenty odd years into an NHS career, and am still massively triggered by that kind of self righteous, ignorant, arrogant attitude. Twunt. He’s dead now. Shame.

Well. That’s the first good news we’ve had for quite some time. Like a pair of sweetcorn kernels in the steaming bucket of shit that uk politics really is.

I do wonder if before 24hr rolling news, social media and a high degree of digitisation of data, we could have had an epidemic such as Covid and not really noticed as such, outside medical circles. And statisticians would have noticed, but 6-12 months down the line and far to late to bang any drums about it. That ONS data about the flu in 2000 a few post above is interesting; it talks of 48,000 ‘extra’ deaths over a winter. Around 43,000 deaths in the U.K. have been attributed to COVID so far I think, so broadly comparable numbers. I had just started worked for the NHS during 2000, and recall no fuss or fluster about those numbers. I certainly don’t recall it being a big deal in the press, although my attention priorities were somewhat different back then.

<insert Mos Eisley quote here>

Agreed; plenty of scope for properly atmospheric settings 😎

Latest teaser trailer for space legs has dropped and it looks INCREDIBLE 😁

Suddenly really excited about this; the level of immersion is going to be immense.

So the newly formed and increasingly organised Singletrack Galaxy Squadron is kicking arse under the capable direction of ‘Ever Victorious and Iron Willed’ Cmdr @Matt_bl. We’ve managed to show a much larger Imperial player supported faction in our chosen small corner of the Galaxy the door, by kicking them out of their spaceport and taking over control of the star system. Then, despite them coming back at us strongly, we’ve so far been able to resist, then fortify our position, and have strategic tactics to achieve our objectives of increasing our security further. Longer term, we are thinking of starting up an actual player owned faction to make our mark permanently on the Galaxy of E:D. That’s going to be a big undertaking though. All of our squadron comms are now happening on our Discord server, hence why this thread may seem a little quieter. Shout up for an invite link.

This game is possibly the most entertaining and immersive I’ve ever played. Incredible.

I’m really curious as to the advice being given above stating that an insurance company may not ‘allow you to buy your car back’. This may be the case, but surely only once a settlement has been agreed and accepted by the insured. Until that point, the insured owns the damaged vehicle, not the insurance company. The time to decide whether you want to keep the vehicle is BEFORE a settlement is agreed, and the damaged vehicle can make up part of that settlement, if so negotiated. I don’t think (and I could be wrong, IANAIU) there’s anything in law that says that the vehicle ownership must be forfeited automatically once a claimable accident has occurred.