coldel

I will admit I am umming and urring, would need to get it past the missus after taking 8 days off this year to drive across Europe! At least the old Celica will have new top mounts on it after one decided to collapse on that trip!

Can very much recommend Melville Castle as the Edinburgh stop over - its £60 for a twin/double room and loads of parking out front. I ended up there as booked late and didnt get into the holiday inn place with the rest of the lads but they all came to visit for a photo shoot out front!

We did a fair bit in 5 days last time, Edinburgh, west coast, john of the groats, right back down to fort william. Felt like we covered a hell of a lot of ground.

I imagine someone in a meeting sat there googling numbers stumbled across the topline figure and divided it by 52 and said 'oi you lot why dont we say we give the EU 350m because the general public will think thats a lot of money without realising in global economy terms its peanuts - they might just fall for it' Which would be followed by 'yes but we don't send the EU £350m, its in black and white on the countries accounts on the treasury website that we don't pay that much and never have done' Which the OP retorted 'yeah but its the general public, loads of them want to leave because of the hot immigration issue, this will just give them something to cling on to that is about economics instead, most of them arent going to be savvy enough to bother to find out the actual number, and this will be on a thousand Memes too which have got to be true' Which the response was 'Nigel, ring up ACME Vehicle Wrappers and order one banner with £350m on it - if anyone notices we can always change the 3 to a 2 pretty easily'

I guess it comes down to competition, what other supercars can you buy for £100k with the same performance - I am not going to google it and not as familiar with pricing but I would imagine you are looking at yank imports, GTR and R8? So its not a crowded market out there - you could argue there is more prestige of a porsche over an audi and a GTR is always going to be a loud Nissan. Thats why it continues to sell at a decent rate, if the market was more crowded I wonder how it would perform given it looks so dated, old and plain.

It was designed to fool the gullible and it worked on many to be fair. If you look at NHS funding up until 2010 it actually got more than that in increases each year anyway, it wasn't like the NHS historically had never had money like that before. Yes since 2010 funding has flatlined because the country was broke and borrowing billions, but all services had the same problem. As for 'interpretation' thats just rubbish IMO, we had to sit through endless interviews about how that money would be redirected to fund X Y and Z and within 24 hours of the vote Boris et al were standing there denying that was ever the case. Leave are very quick to point out we didn't slip into a predicted recession last year but who said we would you could argue then? Economists literally said to leave voters 'do you want to see the country slip into recession?' you could interpret the same way. It was meant to mislead and consume the gullible. What was worse than that was that when the treasury (and the guy on the leave campaign that coined the phrase) pointed out that we have never given the EU £350m per week because the rebate is given to us before we pay the bill, even when that was shown as unequivocal fact to no longer be debated, it still stayed on the bus.

And no dipstick? Not including the graphic designer on the project design of course...

Yes I think it could well be that her tact is to push back on what their plans are and force them into an admittance by inference that they have no plan and would push us into a no deal scenario. Corbyn is highly effective at debating whats put in front of him but I think most people do not trust him with the keys to the economy and thats not going away any time soon. The only issue I would really have is the undefined backstop clause, like any project, if you do not have a deadline it never gets done. I can see the EU using this as leverage to get the best trade deals for them - the rest of the exit deal is pretty much on par for what any reasonable person might expect from a negotiation.

It is political now, the real possibility is that we car crash into a no deal leave, May etc. get booted out and we are then open to the hard brexiters stepping in. It could be that was the plan all along that moderates take the fall of failing to implement the unimplementable and we spiral into a hard right wing nationalist run Tory government which is quite frankly a terrible thought.

I think people knew that the promises of the Leave campaign were quite frankly ridiculous, anyone believing we could just walk away, pay nothing, start knocking out trade deals all over the world with impunity whilst continuing to exist in a free trade arrangement with the EU probably have white coats with the arms tied behind the back hanging up in their wardrobes. But what is true is that in the meantime no one has come up with an alternative that isn't a hard leave. JRM made up some crap about Canada+++++++ which was quickly dismissed as more of the above i.e just making stuff up but otherwise its all points scoring without anyone making any progress on getting us out of this mess with something credible.

Yes economic group and age were big drivers of decision making in the vote. I remember in the early stages of the counts being announced on the night the jubilation in Sunderland with imagery of people there rejoicing, many of whom are supported by jobs in the car industry, which is now likely to be under threat if the right deal is not thrashed out as we export so many cars to the EU. Oh the irony. Oh the lack of willingness to do anything other than read the Daily Mail of the average voter.

Definitely a step change in look though, I mean the old one on the left looks very much different to the new one on the right, or is it the other way around Man Points Score = 1

Sums it up for me, sounds utterly tripe and looks no better. I get for people that analyse cars drivability to the nth degree will give it the thumbs up but given I drive my cars to around 60% of their capability 90% of the time it doesn't matter, however having to look outside my house at that dull as dishwater car 100% of the time would do my head in

Exactly, all the vitriol has been around the backstop (and rightly so) but what miracle is everyone expecting? Boris, JRM, DD, Farage, UKIP etc. all promised how easy this would be, Gove saying 'the day after we vote leave we hold all the cards and can choose our own path' before DD caved in on day one and made no progress thereafter. I would like to know what deal you can get on the table where: We pay no exit money to cover liabilities we still have in Europe We have tariff and check free borders for trade We decide what traits of the EU bloc we implement i.e. free movement To be able to implement trade deals with immediate effect I am not sure how you tick all those boxes whilst the EU has its own agenda, it just doesn't look possible.

For a second there was expecting to open this up and see a pic of Dan stood next to his new purchase

Well the economic impact reports are coming out today, no doubt will say No Deal is much worse than the Exit Deal but that's obvious. Interesting I saw Hammond this morning in an interview say that TM would be open to a TV debate on the deal with Corbyn. Risky strategy, but must mean she isn't confident it is going to make it through parliament given her non attendance last time that had such a negative impact on public perception of her and subsequent loss of seats at the election.

Yes been umming and urring about this but three answers does leave the very real chance that the minority will get their way. If 35% choose one, 33% another and 32% the last one then you have a 65% majority of the country being pushed down a route they didn't vote for.

Its all swings and roundabouts with NASA - they fund SpaceX with huge contracts anyway so they are all kind of in it together. It would be good in my lifetime to see a bit more space exploration, seeing things for the first time.

The mind absolutely boggles that we are looking at images from so far away, was chuffed it all worked out this morning, clearly so were the mission controllers with that handshake https://news.sky.com/story/nasas-insight-spacecraft-successfully-lands-on-mars-11564652

Well Trump has had a couple of stabs at it and is getting there... ...my understanding is the issue was more to do with non tariff barriers - the EU is particularly strict on things around goods in terms of health and safety etc. whereas the US is much looser (chlorinated chicken anyone ) so to operate a free trade model with the EU we still need to be tied to those (the common rulebook) which makes it much more difficult to be working in in a free trade agreement importing goods from other countries which contradict those. But yes I agree Doc, leaving 20XX in the contract is something TM should not have agreed to - of course we need insurance if trade negotiations should break down but I think putting a proper deadline in achieves two things; firstly it focuses the parties to a schedule and milestones, secondly its an incentive for both parties to resolve challenges instead of kicking it into the long grass which is exactly whats happened here - as soon as the transition period got mentioned everything has suddenly become very vague.

Yep sounds pretty objective, although as referenced the throwaway reference in the last paragraph certainly isn't.

Quite a lot of experts out there at the moment having a say, have to disentangle the bias research though - I saw at the bottom of this article a reference to the economy losing £100b by 2030 which could be right but I did read this report the other day before noticing it had been commissioned by a pro-remain group so its unlikely to have come to a positive conclusion.

I think it has been obvious to anyone with an ounce of commercial sense that this was always going to be the outcome. Basically those people have been labelled 'remoaners' what they were are people that have more sense of the potential outcomes than those blindly waving union jacks every time Boris appeared on TV. We are the smaller economic nation negotiating with a huge economic bloc (which is the point of its existence, it negotiates deals). The main problem is that you have politicians like JRM and Boris quite dangerously throwing ridiculous notions of being able to do what we want with no repercussion and 'telling the EU to go whistle' demanding more from the EU whilst out than what we had whilst in - just to further their political careers. For all the vitriol pointed at TM at the moment, we should be reserving it for people like Boris who just picks sides depending on what way the wind is blowing that year and JRM who just wants to undermine any government regardless unless there is a overtly right wing politician who is his best mate at the wheel.

I am flabbergasted at how Nissan can release a car with a serious design flaw and then just shrug their shoulders at it. The fact that people have to pull fuses to prevent two thousand pounds worth of repairs, the mind boggles.