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Most of the value of my home isn't the bricks and mortar, it's the land it is built on. There is a finite supply of the later and I believe it should be taxed which would encourage people to use as little as possible, use it well etc.

I think the question is "taxed how"? If you make it expensive to buy or own land then it becomes something that only the really rich can do, which plays right into the hands of rentier capitalism, which I think is exactly what we would like to avoid. I agree though that land ownership is a real problem in this country and most people don't realise how few people/organisations own just how much land. There have been various excellent bits of journalism on the subject (Monbiot probably) and campaigns to rectify this.

The wealthy aren't in many situations. They also tend to own more than typical amounts of property so would pay more tax.

Yes, again it would be about developing a tax that has sufficiently laser-like focus to hit that group while leaving owners of normal family homes untouched.

Indeed, which is why it's not necessary for houses to increase in prices continuously. That may be a red herring for homeowners but it's not a red herring for people like me who can't afford a house.

I agree completely. There are various reasons why house prices are going up (the double-income trap being one, which might be slightly blunted if people re-prioritise their work/life balance due to Covid). I think the red herring I was referring to was seeing an increase in the value of someone's primary residence as an increase in their realisable assets.

I agree, but shoes and beds are not thought of like investments, and the prices of shoes and beds are probably going down in real terms rather than up at a startling rate. I only support a tax like CGT in its capacity to curb the use of property as an investment and to limit growth to match wages/inflation.

I think houses as primary residences are "Vimes Boots"-type investments. They don't effectively make you ready money, but they greatly reduce your expenditure, while providing you with something you need. The challenge is to find a tax that reflects the fact that a (first) house is a home, rather than just an investment vessel.

You don't need to explain that to me! I feel this pain every month when a large chunk of my salary goes down the drain

With you there! I'm renting at the moment too.

You buy a house, the value massively increases and you pay next to no tax on your massive gain.

I think the increase in the value of a house is a bit of a red herring. Averaged out across the whole country a 3-bed family home has the exact value of a 3-bed family home i.e., if you buy a house then the value you realise from selling it will allow you to buy only a house of exactly the same size (actually slightly less because of SDLT and various other costs associated with selling, buying and moving). You could sell it in order to get another property that you want more, for example by moving to an area where prices are proportionally lower and getting a bigger place, or moving to a more desirable area and getting a smaller place, but a house is always just worth (in and of itself) a house.

It seems quite odd to tax people just for ownership of something that is really just a functional object for your everyday life (it would be a bit like taxing shoes or a bed), not least because you're already taxed on the income you use to pay for it and quite often have to take on significant debt to own that asset.

The real value of a house is not the gain in its value, but the fact that the money you put into paying off your mortgage is still, in effect, yours (i.e., embedded in the value of the house you can then sell) rather than spaffed away in rent. There are other intangible benefits like peace of mind, but also some tangible losses (SDLT, maintenance etc.). I don't know what the solution is, but the huge disparity in the personal financial impact of owning vs. renting might be better addressed by reducing the latter.

The latest video from Tom Bukovac is him and his guitar tech rambling on about compound radius and choking out. Not something I've particularly noticed, but then I've not played too many guitars. I certainly noticed the change when I got my Revstar, but that has a 13 3/4" radius board, which is very flat. Got used to it soon enough though.

Loving the colour and the 'thick soft v' spec and 9.5" radius on that Tele

Are tight-radius fretboards a "thing" at the moment? Lots of people enthusing about them all over the place.

It's an odd one isn't it. I wonder if it is linked to a view that the human way to do something wrong is to fail on a moral basis, which is why it's very difficult to get driving prosecutions to stick on the basis that the driver is simply incompetent. If they didn't mean to hurt anyone then it's not their fault. In contrast, computers can't fail morally at something (the morality of embedding imperfect algorithms in them is on the developer) they can only fail technically and so the bar of actual performance is set correspondingly higher.

This is quite a lot of bike for the cash.

First dibs is with someone else at the moment. Just sorting out the postage/collection logistics, but I'll let you know in the unlikely event that it doesn't work out.

Absolutely classic pair of walking boots that I haven't used for a good while. These never got as much use as I'd like and have always been very carefully taken care of. As a result they're in very good nick with a whole lifetime's use ahead of them.

Excellent Zamberlan quality and super-tough Vibram soles. I'll chuck in a pair of thin volume reducers so you can tune the fit and a spare pair of unused Merrell footbeds in case you find them comfier. Laces also included (obvs), I just removed them to give the boots a final treatment.

Size UK 10, EU 45, Mondo 28

£40 posted (plus paypal fees if applicable please)

Mind if I PM you @chrisbmx116 ?

We're thinking about getting an architect to help us with the extension and (relatively minor) internal rearrangement of our new place. Partly it's for their expertise in suggesting ways to achieve what we want to with minimum fuss (e.g., through smarter materials specs), partly to check that our plans for how the flow of the place will work aren't daft, and partly to draw up plans and engage with planning feedback.

It's possible that, if we can assure ourselves that our plans are not daft, that we might be able to just use an engineer and a builder, but the architect has said that whatever route we take we'll want a measured building survey, which would be £1k right off the bat. Does that sound like a sensible starting place?

This bugs me. Any whole number can be written as the product of primes, but can any given whole number be written as the product of only one set of primes? If so, why? I can't intuit why that must be true.

Help me out here folks. I want to create a twitter account (bad idea, I know). When I try to sign up using my email address it says "Email has already been taken." Ok, so it looks like someone has used it to create a spam account, which you should be able to deal with by requesting a "forgotten password" password reset, but when I enter my email to do that it says "Verify your identity by entering the username associated with your Twitter account.", which I obviously can't do, because I don't know it.

Any ideas?

Had hedgehogs on toast for breakfast. Very nice.

I think a decent policy is to buy the type of thing that the recipient already buys for themselves, but one notch nicer than they usually do.

PMed

Hah! Sounds about right for a thread about cellaring stuff.

The thread title is hugely broad, but are you just after port? If you're after sherry or Madeira do you have particular style in mind?

I still don't get how that would work. If you use the wedge of the adaptor then you don't have access to the star nut to preload the headset bearings; if you don't use the wedge then you're bolting the adaptor downwards into the steerer and relying in the interface of the flat top of the steerer walls and the tapered section of the adaptor to hold the two together. That's not how adaptors are meant to be secured, so I wouldn't trust it, especially since the tension required to properly preload the headset bearing is very low and so wouldn't force them together very firmly.

Thought I was going to run out of coffee just before Christmas. One quick order to Yellow Bourbon on Saturday morning and it arrived yesterday. Nice. I have no idea how it managed to get here that fast in the festive post though.

It's possible that it won't fit as threadless steerers might have a different internal diameter to threaded ones in order to handle the compression force of the stem (on the other hand may threaded steerers are thicker to have enough thickness for the threads to be cut into, so take that with a pinch of salt).

How do you plan to attach it and preload the headset though? If you leave the star nut in you wont be able to put the extender in as the wedge would foul it. If you remove the star nut and fit the extender you've got nothing to screw the headset preload bolt into.

Presumably you want something like this, but for a 1" steerer. I have no idea whether it would be safe to shim that.

I think I must be alone in failing to see the funny there.

I really struggle to understand the mindset of the Russian leadership outside of a frame of reference of hankering after the glory days of the USSR and a personal, kleptocratic, oligarchic power grab. I think that's partly down to my failure to understand what the practical consequences for a country of (for example) the extent of its "sphere of influence" has. Given how much gas we buy from Russia it seems completely irrational to think that nobody wants to trade with them, so why imperil that trade through acting like a violent, bullying psychopath? Likewise, anyone who thinks NATO would ever seriously consider launching a land-assault via Ukraine must be assuming that western leaders have never read a single history book. There's every opportunity for Russia to evolve into a modern, trade-forward part of the international community that has access to both China and the EU, so why continue to isolate themselves diplomatically? The only explanation I can come up with is rank nationalism and gangsterism.

Also, if you hate Rupert you should be skinned alive. He was the foundation of early 70s and late 60s childhoods!

Rupert always reminds me of Spin a Magic Tune
, which had some fantastically off-brand songs for various characters. Plus a couple of tunes that stand on their own merit as absolute stone-cold bangers.

Is she “posh”? Perhaps you know her

We're on tenterhooks for the @Jingle_Jangle "Posh bird" hat-trick after that follow-up to this corking opener.