CTW schemes were only worthwhile for higher rate taxpayers, unless the employer also took on the VAT element of the agreement. In my experience not many did the latter because it was a faff. And if you were a higher rate taxpayer you were probably not interested in buying a £1k bike because that's not what Wiggo was riding down the shops with his mates. Quite a few of the online bike retailers would add a service charge for using CTW, or wouldn't let you buy a discounted bike on it, and certainly my local bike shop were willing to give a bigger discount if I didn't use CTW. Equally they were happy to be creative in getting around the £1k limit. What it has done is distorted the UK market with brands competing to offer the best components at the £1k limit
Posts by ITAMRocks
6 posts • joined 6 Feb 2019
Sophos was gearing up for a private life – then someone remembered the bike scheme
Gin and gone-ic: Rometty out as IBM CEO, cloud supremo Arvind Krishna takes over, Red Hat boss is president
Oracle OKs Oracle investors to sue Oracle: Put NetSuite suit before a judge – board panel
Oh, that's OK then
Standard Oracle practice is to play hardball as long as they can and then fold to avoid court scrutiny of their business practices. Mars vs Oracle, A&E Adventures vs Oracle, and a couple of other shareholder class actions have all been eventually settled out of court. This is just a slightly more public version of what goes on behind NDAs because of who is involved - SLC appointed to make the issue go away, fails, and so it ends up in court. Interestingly the ongoing Sunshine City Firefighters suit hasn't been resolved yet - case review scheduled for all parties in mid-October. And, hey, JEDI waiting in the wings with yet another appeal ongoing.
50 years ago: Apollo 10 takes an unplanned spin above the lunar surface – and sh!t gets sweary
If you ever get the chance go and take a look at a Gemini capsule. Lovell & Borman spent almost 14 days cooped up in one of those, utterly beyond belief. At least they had the coolest space suits probably ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_space_suit#/media/File:Lovell_pre-launch_gemini_7.jpg
Mercury capsules were also small but they were designed for flights lasting hours rather than days.
Re: Thanks for bringing back more memories!
It's awesome. I cried. We were there to see Tim Peake's Soyuz but for me Apollo 10 was the highlight. It's been to the frickin moon and it's literally within touching distance. Being a 1970 kid Apollo was experienced secondhand for me and so has mythical and iconic status. Would be a bit like seeing the remains of Jimi's guitar he torched at Monterey.
UK transport's 'ludicrous' robocar code may 'put lives at risk'
Oh, that's OK then
Sadly that utopia will never happen. AVs will never be able to cope with complex urban environments without the roadway being entirely segregated. The likely outcome, as with jaywalking laws in the US, will be for pedestrians and non-AV users to be corralled away from the AV roadway, in the same way that they're banned from motorways.
It seems to me that the best approach would be for a mandatory safety parameters to be baked in to all AV control systems but the issue there is that it would remove a differentiator for car makers (e.g. all cars would be the "Ultimate Driving Machine", not just BMW).
