Linas.P

Sorry but I don't buy this. The claim that UK got into debt to defend and free the countries mentioned ... is partially true. In reality, UK was first and foremost defending itself and destroying nazis was the way to achieve this. So on this I would say 50/50%. But when it comes to rebuilding France or Germany, or Italy UK has not contributed crap. UK was isolating itself from European trade and counter productively still acted as if it is empire with whole useless Commonwealth project. If anything by 60's France and Germany was already outpacing UK in terms of growth, and by 70's European project was so much ahead that UK really wanted into it (and benefited greatly by joining). Only after joining what was at the time called European Communities, UK finally managed to match the growth and prosperity of other countries. Not to mention that of Germany was occupied and other half still had to pay reparations. If I would point to any particular reason why UK was so poor, then I would say it was majority fault of Labour social policies, unions made farce of work and productivity was very poor. Then secondly, the Tories contribute as well, by dismantling industries and making millions of workers even poorer. All in all country was very inefficient, didn't have good long term policy, subsequent governments were destroying policy of preceding governments and the disaster capitalists benefited from such mess. The only reason we are not stinking waste swamp is that somehow somebody made good decision by joining EC and overall prosperity of the continent lifted UK out of the mess it was.

Not sure what is your point. Fact is - companies generate tons of untaxed cash. They may invest them in pension funds and contribute pennies on pounds in the value of them, so that retiring people will get maybe 5-10% more on their pension pot then they otherwise would. Still it is clear that if they would have paid taxes at the rates they should, we could simply scrap VED and still have money to spare. Or cut income tax for individual by 10%, or spend 300 million more a week on NHS without leaving EU. In fact we main not even need 3rd layer pension schemes at all, because we could pay pensioners decent pensions just from taxes alone. Let me explain how 74bn debt works... you see you don't have to pay taxes if you don't have profits. Practical example - if crapple uses it's money pot to build new HQ for 1.2bn and if they make 1.2bn profit in that year then they have to pay tax on it and on profits they made, but if they borrow 1.2bn, then they can offload all tax on profits and on the building itself into debt. They can effectively claim they made no profit! As for commitment to invest 430bn that is nothing more than PR. I can commit to many things, but they are not legally binding and as well... "oh wow"... they committed to reinvest the money they basically stolen from the society ... heroes!

Yes - the social system we have works on principles of wealth redistribution. But then it is very hard to explain why richest pay the least... As well some services better than others... NHS is mediocre (other countries does it better), schools - mediocre, roads - horrible (objectively). But taxation is relatively high. I honestly can't think of any public service in UK which would be good or excellent. Taxation should indeed be raised for common good, SHOULD, the problem is that not everyone contributes and "common good" is questionable. It is all good to say that "cyclist" pays income tax and NI already, so we should get of their backs... but wait a second? Motorists do that as well. Even just mentioning as if motorists and cyclists as separate groups just shows how tribalism works and how successful is government divide and rule policy. Cyclist should not be enraged about their infrastructure - motorists literally pay 3.5times over for roads, not counting other taxes and there is enough money to both fix the roads and install separate cycle lanes everywhere. Yes our government... done a job, they existed, I would not call that good job. If anything France, Germany and Italy was in way way worse place after WW2. I would argue France and Germany in particular done way better job and even then their governments are far from perfect, so by comparison UK government did poor job. Obviously there are worse governments in the world and "current" (say last 20 years) government is the best government this country ever had, but you giving them way too much credit. I would rank UK government somewhere between acceptable and unacceptable. Not terrible, but not great. Saying that corruption is low is really hard to accept. Sure it is sometimes hard to divide outright corruption and government waste, but I can point out to at least 10 occasions in last year alone where government was found to have "lost" in excess of £100 million without much of the consequences. And those are only the ones which press got hold off and only the ones where the deal completely fell thought. However there are thousands of examples where we overpay for the service 10 fold, but goods gets delivered and nobody talk about it. This is how NHS works in principle and every NHS order is literally disaster. With some insider knowledge I know that NHS overpays for literally everything from 5 to 10 times... or more. As well it is outright corruption, not even just "waste" - simply said management gets their pockets lined with money, ministers literally sit on boards or have shares in pharmaceutics industry, even GPs get's a cut to promote certain drugs. If one party get's a benefit from ordering inferior or too expensive product using public money - that is definition of corruption. I can give specific examples, but the list would be 10 pages long. It starts from overpaying for every single drug, to pay 10 times more for things like titanium surgical screws, or sterile instruments. In one example MRI was purchased for £7.6 million, where the unit cost was £250k, fair enough they said radiological cabined needed refurbishment, but that was what - £100k extra. How many times is that? 21 times over the price! Sure enough Trust director's wife works as account manager for NHS in Siemens UK. And this is every single thing NHS buys, from basic chemicals to basic drugs. Actually, the cheaper is the thing the more NHS overpays... because it is easier to do it on cheap things. Say paracetamol costs literally like 1p per tablet, but some NHS trusts were found ordering pack of paracetamol with 8 tablets for £4.49... now multiply that by tens of millions of tablets at x56 the cost of what it should and see how much money was lost of generic drug alone. There was another example ordering hand soap and toilet paper, I don't remember the numbers but it was in similar ballpark. In short - saying that maybe there is little bit of waste here and there... just not true! NHS wastes like 50-70% of their budget. And then at the same time they can't even pay their staff decent salaries. It is literal disaster and on other hand - miracle... that being so inefficient it manages to provide any healthcare service at all.

Almost exactly that - Crapple has money "issue"... and by issue I mean they have so much money they don't know here to use it. As of 2021 it was $230billion in cash, which they can't use because it was not taxed. They can bring it back to US, but then they have to pay tax (I believe 35%). There were suggestions in Trump administration to make a deal with crapple to offer them bringing all the money back for 5% or 10% instead, but nothing happened with it. As such you often see ridiculous buy outs, where some tech company spends $10bn on some stupid loss making website or game, just because those billions are basically dirty/free money which can't be used for anything else. That is cute - car related goods and services are estimated to be ~£150 billion, that excludes VED and fuel duty. So by the same token cars pays for themselves? why tax them further. And this is typical trialist argument and both sides.

I don't think suggestion to VED bicycles was ever said or taken seriously by anyone. However, I think it just works as example - if roads are "privilege" which I don't believe they are, then all the users should be paying for that privilege, why only the car drivers should be contributing? Or at least I thought that was a gist of it. However, there is an issue in this statement, to begin with VED is just triple, quadruple, nonsensical tax out of nowhere and for nothing. It is completely made-up for no other reason except that goverment could do it, so they did. VED has nothing to do with cars and as of recently even pollution, and VED will definitely be introduced (is introduced for EVs). Why... just because... goverment had this cash cow and they don't want to stop milking it. When everyone realised that road maintenance excuse does not work, then they changed it to pollution, when pollution doesn't work it will be something else. It is not fair tax or something we inherently need to could justify, it exist for the sake of it. Could the same money be taken from somewhere else... yes, could the money be spent somewhere else... obviously. It is just general taxation, but in different name and it isn't very fair simply because it targets particular group and therefore there is no point to campaign to "ringfence" this tax for the roads - goverment knows very well this has nothing to do with the roads and they want it to be that way. With "less cars, less emissions" point you just support the statement of taxing the cyclist... because you see... eventually "less cars" turns into "no cars" and this means new victim and new revenue stream needs to be found. And this is why this tax isn't about pollution or road use - because if it would be then it would be designed to discourage such use, but it isn't - it is designed to make money out of such use. Goverment just realised that people are attached to their cars, or simply are dependant on them because they don't have other means. Maybe existing infrastructure maybe no suitable for cycling, or person can't cycle or simply don't want to cycle... and there is no public transport either, or it is too expensive, or too slow, or too disgusting... Point is - 85% of passenger miles and 75% of passenger journeys are made in car and this presents massive revenue stream, yet motorists are not organised or monolithic group, so they can stand-up to this. Taxing cyclist is just funny example, but it could be any other group of society which can be divided and can't defend itself. Maybe it is going to be elderly in large houses with inheritance tax, or bedroom tax, or excess rooms charge, or maybe they going to add tax on student loans and call-it "study excise tax"... use you imagination, it could be anything as long as they can find an excuse and form public opinion that it is somewhat justifiable.

Your point was spot-on in this context, because most of the tax is arbitrary in some way or another. Especially, those taxes which only applies to certain part of society - say smokers, motorists etc. So if we can arbitrarily say that drivers somehow are "detriment to the society" (which is crazy but goverment has pushed this narrative quite successfully probably since 60's), then clearly taxing the corporates would be far easier to justify, than say taxing the old or cyclists. The only problem - goverment owns the narrative and corporations owns the goverment (perhaps not directly, but via lobbies etc)... so don't expect much change there. If there is ever suggestion corporates have to pay even their fair share (10-19% corporate tax) there is always massive campaign to explain how they "employ the people" and how they "invest" and how basically we are prosperous just because they take 90%+ of their profits without paying any tax.

I would double on that. It does not matter whenever it is legal or not, the question is - whenever it is acceptable or why it is acceptable? Why as society we accept being double, triple, quadruple taxed... and most of us paying effective 20-45% tax rate and then on top of that we pay another 20-30% of our net income on other taxes... So for every £1 we earn we probably pay close to £0.55 in some form of tax or another. And nobody seems to be enraged about that, maybe slightly annoyed at most. Yet multibillion corporations pays effective taxes well under 10%... to be honest Microsoft was one of the fairest with close to 8% effective tax, Amazon, Google pays closer to 1% and Apple paid 0.05%! Why nobody are in arms about it? And all this goes back to tribalism, manipulation, narrative etc. Whilst we squabble who has to pay VED and who don't these massive corporations avoids paying billions - "LEGALLY"! Here you go! And I don't even blame trumpster - shouldn't our elected ones should be wiser? Or if not - are they deserving of public office?

As well I would note that we (as a society) as a whole overpay for the roads, even if we disregard position of motorist or cyclist etc. I haven't checked in last few years, but for 2018, 2019 and 2020 - VED alone was £36bn, £37bn and £37bn respectively. Expenditure on transport was ~£10bn for each year. But that for example includes £2bn subsidies to bus operators who made profit as well (it is basically giving tax money to private companies) and there were other expenses which has nothing to do with actually improving the roads. So is just motorists and just from VED already pays 3.5 times the what it cost to upkeep the roads, then realistically anyone who isn't VED paying motorists actually doesn't contribute anything to the roads, but benefits of ~£20bn+ from VED... it probably should be called vehicle "excessive" duty. As I have alluded before, and other people said - nobody is against fair taxation, or that people in need get's their care... but we are so far from that is hard to even comprehend. It just hurts to watch when say 30% of taxes we pay never benefits the society because they are just consumed by corruption and maybe another 30% are not used efficiently. You may disagree with my guestimate of %, but point is - imagine how perfect the life would be if all the taxes would be efficiently used for their intended purpose.

That is most convenient thing ever for government which wants to manipulate the public. Let two tribes fight whilst taxing both - support both views and then put some fuel in the fire for it to blow over from time to time. Just look at "vaxers" vs. "anti-vaxers" fight - both goes to extremes whilst goverment slowly introduces more and more totalitarian rules and control over-reach. As well I would not consider the roads use to be a privilege, not for drivers, not for cyclists.. and who are the users? Is passenger on the bus a user or just bus driver? Patient in the back of the ambulance? Person who called police or fire-fighters? Somebody buying potatoes in Lidl which were delivered by truck using the roads? I think we all benefit from roads even if we neither cycle, nor drive. So it is just a public infrastructure and public as a whole should contribute to it. I just remind here that for last 30 years goverment have never used more than 30% of VED collected on the roads. So just VED alone cover the cost of all the road infrastructure 3 times over and there is still money to spare.

It doesn't really matter - the VED is arbitrary tax. And when it comes to such taxes all that matters is justification for it, as long as goverment can find excuse, divide and rule, pit separate parts of society against each other and get away with it - they will do it. Because let's face it - motorists are taxed 3 or even 4 times for same thing... and all that is because goverment overtime created such "public opinion" that it is somehow "fair". We pay VAT on the car, then VAT on the fuel (which both are fair in my opinion), then we pay duty on the fuel... which is kind of borderline fair, but it isn't clear why VAT doesn't already cover that. But then we as well pay VED on top of all the other taxes as well - what is the exact justification again? And let's not forget insurance which is basically tax, because it is not optional and then on top of that you pay "insurance premium tax", the tax which is then taxed itself. Well... the common argument is that - "yeah, but what about that all expensive infrastructure". Well that infrastructure is public infrastructure and benefits everyone, regardless if they drive or not. Amazon deliveries, food supplies, police, ambulances and even the plumber or electrician you call out still has to use this infrastructure... so not only drivers benefits from it. Perhaps it could be argued that, beyond baseline - if we want to have extremely smooth and even roads, less congestion, state of the art traffic management solutions, secure and plentiful parking... overall thing which are outside of strictly being public infrastructure, only then it would be fair to charge drivers more for this additional level of service, but then lock that VED for only the roads. Now realistically we won't see tax on bicycles... part is the reason you mentioned - bicycles are just so low value, as soon as you try taxing them nobody would cycle. As well it would be very hard to find good excuse for it or somehow paint cyclists in such light that public would start hating them. This would be something which would be very obvious and people would get enraged. But let's be clear as well - hate for motorists is not justified either, it is made-up and made-up deliberately. As for NHS - it is great, but it is not perfect. Whenever we have VED or not have VED, the NHS would exist and could even be better. NHS problems are not linked to lack of taxation, or even lack of funding... the truth is - NHS is inefficient. Analogy would be - you have a fire place to heat your home, would it be better to find good quality and density fuel for fire place and buy it, or would it be better to just burn money instead. The way NHS is run now is basically equivalent to burning money instead of wood. And I am not saying it should not exist, or that individual people (especially staff on front line) doesn't do exceptional job... I am just saying the way it is run, managed, supplied and funded is inefficient and wasteful. And even ignoring this - we still collect more than enough tax to fund it, if only that tax would reach it.

Yes - I must admit this is still best system we have ever had in human history, but it does not mean it is perfect or even acceptable. Any money paid or taken against ones will could be considered theft, hence my argument - in ideal world we would all agree that taxation is fair and used for the things it meant to be used. I don't think anyone in their right mind would say that they don't want public services like NHS to exist, but at the same time when NHS spends 700million on some medicine or equipment that equipment is worth the money which was paid. Or when government pays 30 billion for track and trace system ... it actually works... or if it doesn't, then somebody goes to jail. Sadly I can't say that either of those things are the case.

And if not that, then they simply going to hike some other tax - VAT, income tax or something else. Obviously in ideal world there is another scenario - spending tax fairly and transparently, removing corruption and then everyone will be happy to contribute. But we don't live in ideal world and because everyone knows about corruption and the fact that large proportion of taxes are embezzled and otherwise wasted to enrich elites, nobody wants to contribute. Money has to be collected and to make people to contribute some way or another goverment uses very simple yet effective tactic - divide and rule. Collecting it via VED is just easier because it is easier to divide society like that, smear motorists (or any other group of society), create false narrative of moral high-ground for opposing group - let the two groups fight together, whilst they are forgetting that everyone loses and corrupt goverment wins.

Interesting results... Although I always want to check what sizes were tested an on what car. What I have noticed is that most of the time testing is done on compact FWD car. Put same tyres on larger RWD car and results may be completely different. To my surprise in this case they used quite relevant size (225/45/17) because generally they tend to test smaller tyres (probably cost constrains). Still they used Golf as their test car. As I said previously for example tyres like Michelin PS4 are outright no suitable and overkill even for IS250, so imagine how much of overkill they are on FWD Golf with 140 horse power. Finally, I am not saying results are invalid. I am just saying they are only correct for Golf on 225/45/17. Do exactly same test on IS250 with 225/40/18 + 255/35/18 and results may be other way around. And then there is subjective factors as well - each person going to put different importance for different metric.

Yeah doesn't surprise me either. As I said few times before - I am not against EVs as long as they are not showed into my mouth by force (and that is exactly what's seems to be happening). I even considered getting PHEV myself, before pandemic it would have suited my drive quite well ~16 miles one way to work, with range of between 24-32Miles on battery I could easily drive on electricity alone if I could charge at work... even if not then I would still be able to drive like 80% on electricity and then used discounted parking for EV. And then it being PHEV - I could drive it like petrol car when I want to go for a longer drive. Win-win. Problem comes when it comes to charging - funny enough it would be most beneficial in the cities, but at the same time city dwellers are worst equipped to own EV. And if we going in the way of banning car ownership in the cities and forcing people into smelly and unreliable public transport... then what is even the point of EVs? They are not usable for longer inter-city drivers anyway. All that said I really annoyed when people say there is no issue with infrastructure, just because they don't have one. Majority of population does and this transition is not about individual circumstances. If we want it to work, then we need to ensure that vast majority of population does have access to charging, then excepting or subsidising the remaining few %. Final point - I think those "proactive" councils which currently provide "free" charge will be perfect examples of "bait and switch", at the moment it is free, but as soon as most people switch over and have no way back... I am sure the policy will be changed.

I suspect current pandemic may be partially at fault. Lexus cars are very reliable and buying one is really quite simple. I have never seen basic issues to crop-up on these cars, things like checking lights and electric switches (as you do on other makes) - they all always work. However, these cars likes to be driven and maintained. So it is better to get the car which has loads of miles and relevant service history, than get car with low miles and lacking service. What pandemic has done - many of these cares were now sitting, parked-up for extended periods of time, doing maybe only 1000 miles a year, last service 2 years ago and they are just not good for that. I even suspect there was no issue with gearbox before this cars was parked-up, but sitting for a while maybe ATF somehow sludge-up and as soon as you started driving it again it started clogging things-up. In short - I think this period of low use, going to bring a lot of owners to this forum with all sorts of issues originating simply from lack of use.

Paddles works like "limiters" on IS250, so you can't change-up with paddles, you can just increase the limit. You can sort of down-shift, because you limit the highest gear your car is in and then it has to change down. But you can easily select 6th, yet car will stay in 3rd.

If you ask them - yes. But not at glance. You most likely not going to be able to even see solenoids without removing "valve body assembly":

If you ended-up skipping, then I would argue your judgement calling it "safe" was wrong. Safe in my mind is when time it takes for car to reach my location is 2x longer than it takes for me to cross. By the time car reaches the point where I was crossing I should have fully crossed with some time to spare - that would be safe. Now think about this example and railroad crossing. You can assume to be anything you like - pedestrian, cyclists, car driver, large truck driver... anything you want. And think about it - how much safety margin you would leave before saying it is safe to cross ahead of upcoming train? Besides words are important and hierarchy means exactly that - some are considered more important than others. That is opposite of what mutual respect means. On top of that - competency based hierarchy is good thing and clearly justified, vulnerability based hierarchy is fundamentally flawed concept.

Again matter of perspective. IS-F which is 5L V8 with 471HP costs about same to tax as manual IS250. As well manuals needs a lot more attention than autos. I know recently there were few thread of gearbox solenoids and similar stuff, but we need to recognise that these cars are now 16 years old and many have over 150k miles. Many have not seen anything done with their boxes either... whereas in same time it would have been at least clutch work on manual, 3x fluid changes and maybe some odd DMF. Again that is not to say manual gearbox is bad, but it is certainly more costly... and in London trust me I don't want to be sitting for hour in standstill traffic with manual of any kind.

Makes sense - so basically as soon as it needs to change to 3rd gear (which is ~20mph), solenoid/solenoids responsible for it fails for some reason and sends the signal for the cod to be displayed again. In either case, I think issue is more than just "solenoid performance", it is likely stuck. Fluid change will not hurt, but solenoid may need some persuasion to start working again.

Nothing exists in isolation, so nobody is saying that IS250 Manual or any particular car is all bad or all good. The simple case is that if there is something better, then automatically something else is worse. In UK owning manual your are penalised right away by tax (and this is by the way strange exception) and then having manual in the country with most congested roads in the Europe is no fun either. I said before that driving manual is more fun, but on balance on probabilities you going to find auto in more useful and easier to live with. Strangely in UK it is opposite, you can get manual for 30% less compared to auto, but the saving is not enough when annual tax is almost double. As for IS250 being underpowered, again compared to what? Contemporary E90 325i? certainly not... but it is not as fast as 330i or IS350. I think for it's time (2006) IS250 was great on both power and economy. As well we need to look into the context of what it replaced - it was more fuel efficient than IS200 and faster than IS300, so it was great. It was as well comparably fast to BMW325i, but more economical and sounded way better, although BMW handled better. Anyhow - how fast or slow it is matter of context and perspective.

Cars sitting for prolonged time can certainly develop all sorts of weird issues. However, you are 10 times more lucky than me when it comes to buying - mine just suddenly stopped starting altogether 😄 The codes does not mean you going to be locked out of using certain gears. As I said I had codes and most of the time even with the code car would change the gears, so assuming that car does not shift just because it has code would be incorrect. You stating this kind of changes things a bit. Now you will never know if seller knew about it or not - there is possibility that car was sitting and was only started, moved on driveway and because it never reached 50MPH, it never showed the problem. Now that you started driving it regularly it manifested itself.

Makes sense - I got the same with GB40. However, my point - I don't think they are intended to be charged from dead battery. Rather assumption is that you come with fully charged booster, start the car if it needs boosting, connect the charger to socket whilst you drive to your destination just to recharge what you used to start the car and then if the car dies again, then boost it again... and circle continues. However, to charge the booster fully it may require driving for a while, certainly not for 15min. There are different type of booster based on capacitors and they work differently, you connect them directly to "dead" battery and it charges from the battery to give you one last charge. Personally, I think they are the most likely way to damage the battery. That is probably correct for RC, but I know some RX/NX have ports in the boot which works under different modes. As well I am sure USB ports works on just ACC. Point being - Various cars have various configurations, so it is not the case that "modern" cars don't enable sockets only in IG.

It depends. Some cars have direct connection even when off, others only when ACC on, or only when IG is on. Or combination of some sockets working on some modes, whilst other don't. Lexus seems to only allow some ports to work on ACC and some on IG. Although in this case I can't see rationale for using socket - after all it feeds from battery which is already dead.

GB50 seems to be the one to get. I have purchased GB40 jump pack and GENIUS1UK charger, but it was mistake. GB40 jump starter can't even turn over IS250 and GENIUS1UK is only rated to charge batteries up-to 30AH, meaning it took me 6-days to charge 85AH battery. I think I will return both and just get NOCO GENIUS5UK charger. Jumps starter if less relevant is battery is maintained, so I reckon I better keep it charged than let it die and then use jump starter.