Cyclists waste petrol

On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 20:11:04 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
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On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 03:13:46 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/29/2018 03:48 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

Finally, if you live in an RV you get to keep it. And modify it. Lot
rent is quite a bit less than rental properties.

I take it RV means campervan? Those depreciate way faster than
houses.

If you don't plan on selling it who cares? Besides, as you argued for
automobiles, buy them used after they depreciate.

Still a lot of repairs to do, like rust, and the engine of course.

Aluminum doesn't rust. RV's also include trailers so there is no engine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_vehicle

My brother had a motorhome but he towed a Toyota yacht tender behind it.
That's a very common practice so you have a vehicle smaller than a bus
to drive around. With the trailer, you can drop the trailer and you have
the tow vehicle for driving around.

There are quite a few full-time RVers in the US. Some are retirees,
others are younger and find employment as they go.

https://www.outsideonline.com/185778...re-you-park-it

When I hit the road it was in a pickup similar to the 3rd photo, rather
than a van or some of the pickups with larger camper shells. It was
inconspicuous and could go anyplace. I wandered around the western US
for a year, going to Arizona for the winter months, and then spent a
year as a Forest Service volunteer. It's an interesting life; you learn
to travel light and improvise.

I don't understand why they're still using steel on any vehicle,

Because its much cheaper than the alternatives
and isnt hard to treat so it doesn't rust.

Yet all cars rust. After the warranty period though.

it's ridiculous.

You are.

Ner ner ner ner ner!

On Sat, 29 Sep 2018 23:06:34 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
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On Thu, 27 Sep 2018 03:24:35 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/26/2018 12:47 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
You currently have no dollar coin?!

Effectively, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar...(United_States)

I probably have one around here someplace. I thought I'd found it but it
turned out to be a token for the carousel.

We also have a two dollar bill. I've got one that I'm using as a
bookmark. They never took off either.

We do not have a three dollar bill, leading to the expression 'as queer
as a three dollar bill'.

There is a 50 cent coin, again rarely seen. It's redundant since you can
make any sum with 1, 5, 10, and 25.

We have 1,2,5,10,20,50,100,200 pence coins. They're all equally used.
Why use two 25 cent coins when you can use a 50?

Because that's what you happen to have, stupid.

Doesn't make the 50 redundant. We use 50s all the time, in fact I'd say all coins are used equally.

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
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On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 20:37:49 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/30/2018 11:08 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
Yes. Generally called spark plug wires in this country. They may be a
thing of the past. My Toyota doesn't have any but I don't know how
common that is.

It will, but they're concealed in one tube.

No concealment on the Toyota. It has Coil-on-Plug ignition.

https://troubleshootmyvehicle.com/to...nition-coils-1

Why do they tend to put the coils on the plugs now instead of having one
big coil?

Because it works better not distributing the high voltage thru the
distributor.
And because it works better with modern computer controlled engines.

The last car I inspected may have had that, I'm not sure, all I know is
there was a bar that clipped over all the plugs, with one thick wire
leading to it.

On Sat, 29 Sep 2018 22:59:20 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 27 Sep 2018 20:04:31 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"rbowman" wrote in message
...
On 09/26/2018 09:02 PM, Rod Speed wrote:
One of the chain self checkouts used to just
dispense $20s here and I used that for that
reason instead of an ATM but they have
changed those now and they don't let you
specify what you want, it works that out
for you so you can still get $20s by specifying
you want $40, but you get $50s if you say
you want $50 or $100 etc. That chain has
now closed their store in my town now so
I have to use the other self checkouts.

I'll have to pay more attention the next time. I think you can specify a
number but the selection menu is in $20 increments. The max on the menu
is
$200, or sometimes $100 at the smaller kiosks in markets.

I've got the feeling if you said you wanted $57 the machine would make
impolite remarks. Maybe not, since the self service checkouts can make
change with smaller bills. I never thought about it. I just grab $200
and
go.

Yeah, I'm about to try them all now because I have always
preferred to have $20 notes for the garage/yard sales. $50s
can be a real hassle, particularly given that we show up
at the garage/yard sales before anyone else and hardly
any ensure that they have lots of change. I prefer to use
the self checkouts rather than ATMs just because you
don't normally have to queue for the self checkouts
and there is no chance of a skimmer on the self checkout.

You must have a lot of criminals over there.

Most of those skimming ATMs are tourists.

The problem doesn't exist here, you're doing something wrong.

On Sat, 29 Sep 2018 22:57:44 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 22:45:11 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 20:59:41 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 15:29:04 +0100, rbowman
wrote:

On 09/26/2018 07:05 AM, Rod Speed wrote:


"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 04:20:42 +0100, rbowman
wrote:

On 09/25/2018 09:25 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
We just changed recently. Annoyingly they also changed one of
the
coins, so they're slightly bigger and no longer fit in any
machines
until they're all changed over at the shop's expense. Clueless
Royal
Mint, they do that every 5 years.

At least you don't have Loonies...

Who?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loonie

We do in fact have both a gold colored $1 and $2 coins and they work
fine
except for the terminal stupidity that the $1 coin is bigger than
the
$2
coin.
And the 50c coin is bigger again, but is silver colored and not gold
colored.

And we don't have 1c and 2c coins anymore, the lowest value is 5c.

I misspoke. I was thinking of the toonie..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toonie

I don't know if it was just an urban legend but there was talk that
the
manufacturing process wasn't ironed out for the first runs and the
core
would fall out leaving you with a $2 washer.

I liked going to Canada. In the '90s the exchange rate was
unfavorable
to the Canadians and they used different colors for their paper money
with bears, penguins, or whatever in the designs. For $100 you got a
wad
of multicolored Canadian bills. It was like Monopoly money.

What screwed me up was liters for gasoline. Between the exchange rate
and trying to do liters to gallons in my head I always assumed I was
getting screwed at the pump where the former Imperial gallons seemed
like a bargain.

Our Aldi supermarkets, being a German company, like to make everything
metric, hence they sell litres of milk instead of the pints I get
everywhere else,

Ours are all metric, and that's the law.

Do your lawmakers have nothing more sensible to do?

They do them all.

What? I asked why your lawmakers don't do more sensible things, other
than making everything metric, which nobody gives a **** about.

it makes price comparisons annoyingly difficult. They also do weird
**** like putting the prices above the shelf instead of on it, I'm
always looking at the price for the wrong thing.

They don't do that here.

In every supermarket but Aldi here, the price is on the shelf which the
item is sitting on. In Aldi however, it's on the shelf above, or for
the
top shelf, way above it on a vertical bit.

Like I said, Aldi does it the same way all the other supermarkets do it
here.

They do however have a nice tactic of speeding things up by letting
you
just put one of everything on the conveyor belt, then telling them how
many you have left in the trolley. Sometimes I guess you might feel
the
need to er.... tell them the wrong number :-)

Ours counts them even when you tell them.

Try filling your trolley to the brim, they can't see them all then :-)

I did that at one time, they required them to
all be on the belt so they could count them.

They did that to me a few times, then stopped again, it was slowing down
the queue. It seems they'd rather take the risk of some cheats than have
everyone take longer to get through the checkout and employ more staff.

Our old silver dollars were large. The latest attempts to float out a
dollar coin have been barely distinguishable from a quarter (25 cent
piece). They never have taken off.

You currently have no dollar coin?!

Yes they do. But for some reason most don't use it presumably because
they didn't crap all the paper $1 notes when they introduced it. Its
now
not even minted for general currency use, just for collectors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar...(United_States)

$1 US is worth even less than £1. Our £1 notes fell to bits through
overuse, I dread to think what theirs look like.

That comes down to how soon they pulp them, not how much use they get.

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 20:31:33 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/30/2018 10:01 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Tue, 11 Sep 2018 02:47:15 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/10/2018 12:14 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
How many miles did you do in those 12 years? What parts did you
replace
for servicing, predicting a failure might happen in the future? I
don't
believe you didn't have to change any tyres, brakes, suspension parts,
steering, hoses, etc.


What the hell do you do to cars? Tires are expendable and don't count.
I
had to replace a brake hose and heater hose in my 32 year old pickup
because a porpupine ate them. He also chewed at the upper radiator hose
but it's still going strong, teeth marks and all.

I ignore all speed limits and speedbumps and go as fast as I can without
my car coming off the road.

Ah, the washboard road technique...

It's actually more comfortable to go over a speedbump fast than slow.

Bull****.

Fast hurts the suspension, slow hurts your back.

Never hurt my back.

It's also better to accelerate as you go over the bump, this lifts the
front of the car up and lessens the jolt.

Even sillier than you usually manage with FWD cars.

It's also fun to overtake someone who goes slowly over bumps, when they
see you bouncing past them they tend to **** themselves.

Says the psychopath.

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 20:27:05 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 10 Sep 2018 05:45:16 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/09/2018 01:08 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
I really ****ed off a horserider once. I was driving a very old Range
Rover automatic which had a conversion to LPG. It very often
misfired,
made loud bangs, and changed gear without warning. I managed to cause
a
small explosion and a loud revving of the engine just as I passed a
horserider coming the other way along a narrow country road. The
horse
**** itself, and so did the rider.

I did better than that... I was coming down a narrow road that went
past
a dude ranch on my Harley. Coming the other was was a herd of dudes on
their docile refugees from a canning factory led by a genuine wild west
cowboy. ****head's horse had a nervous breakdown while the guests' nags
barely roused from their stupor.

it doesn't take much to set them off. I've worked with horses enough to
know most of them are a neurotic bundle of nerves. If the horse can't
handle public roads, trailer it to a nice quiet horse trail someplace.

Indeed. Horses on roads were fine, before the invention of the motor
car.

They weren't actually, lots got killed by them bolting etc.

They're not the brightest of animals.

They're actually quite a bit smarter than most, just a
neurotic bundle of nerves. They basically evolved that
way because they are prey to stuff like lions and tigers etc.

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 20:26:26 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/30/2018 10:00 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Tue, 11 Sep 2018 03:12:20 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/10/2018 12:53 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:


Are your roads littered with speed bumps? I go over perhaps 200 a
day.

That cinches it. No trip to the UK for me. Some of our dirt roads have
speed bumps, aka small boulders, but I've never seen them other than on
private roads.

Round here they put them in the stupidest of places, for example 10
yards from a junction, where nobody could possibly be speeding anyway.

And apparently they cost £10,000 each to install including paperwork.


We have various 'traffic calming' schemes like roundabouts and bulbouts
but speed bumps would really **** off the snowplow crews to say nothing
of the cops.

Even some of the semi-private areas are getting rid of them. I hit one
of the damn things on my bicycle. The sun was in my eyes and I didn't
see it coming so I taco'd my front wheel and did a face plant. I was not
happy.

You should have attempted to sue the council (or whatever you call them
over there). Causing injury to a cyclist can't be allowed surely?

I hope I one day catch an old lady tripping over one on my dashcam. I've
seen it happen before, a pensioner crosses the road and trips on the
stupid thing. But I need proof.

Further north, they have bollards on the narrowing things (we call them
chicanes,

Nope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicane

I assume that's what you refer to as a bulbout).

Nope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_extension

Half of them disappear when the (privatised) snowploughs come along
operated by local farmers. You can't see them when there's a few feet of
snow. Either that or it's an excuse for them to get rid of the ****ing
things.

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 20:20:34 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 02:11:54 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/29/2018 03:41 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

Cost to the customer should dictate ones further away will be less
likely to be bought, so I guess they were different carpets.

Presumably. They were all 12' rolls so I never saw the working side.
Furniture was the same deal. There still are furniture factories in the
south eastern US while most of the furniture I loaded on the west coast
was from Asia.

Other products weren't so easy to rationalize. I don't know about the
UK
but the Sunday papers (when people still read the Sunday papers) have a
lot of colorful advertising brochures and other crap that most people
strip out and use to wrap garbage. I picked up a lot of those in
Boulder
CO to take to Baltimore MD, which is about 1600 miles. Nobody on the
east coast can print useless stuff?

The whole scheme depends on cheap transportation / cheap fuel. Keep
those container ships and trucks rolling!

If your government put as much fuel tax on it as ours did, that wouldn't
be happening.

It happens in Britain and the EU too.

Britain isn't big enough to travel very far.

But the EU is.

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 20:19:23 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 02:49:56 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/29/2018 03:46 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

We have 1,2,5,10,20,50,100,200 pence coins. They're all equally used.
Why use two 25 cent coins when you can use a 50?

No idea. Almost all the coin trays have 5 buckets but the fifth is most
often used to hold paper clips, rubber bands, or other small items.

One explanation is the half dollar was the last of the coins to contain
silver and when the silver prices went up they were hoarded and fell
out
of circulation. By the time the composite coins came out people had
gotten away from using them.

Chicken or egg, but most vending machines and the pay phones didn't
take
them.

The US did have 2 and 3 cent pieces in the 1800's. There was the naive
thought that a coin's bullion value should match its face value so
there
was some jockeying around. The nickel won the popularity contest.

The 20 cent piece didn't last long either. That was a political move by
the silver miners to have the government buy more silver.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech

The US has solved that problem. None of the coinage has real worth
although you can make sort of a low grade zamak out of pennies.
Illegally, of course.

Why do you have such complicated terms for your coins? Ours are just
called by their value - 20p, 50p, etc.

Pity about the sovereign, crown, half crown, groat, shilling, sixpence,
quid
etc.

None of those are used anymore apart form "quid" which is simply a synonym
for "pound".

There are still slang terms for your decimal coins and notes.