Jonboy

And at least 8.8% extra blanked sailings this coming month to try and recover them….

How about the W series fleet to give some interesting benchmarks???

All our Chinese suppliers work in USD.

Frankly they could be difficult enough in person when based in Abingdon. A memorable one was the proprietor moaning to another customer about slow trade and people not dropping in anymore, and then immediately not being prepared to reserve, pre-sell or even simply confirm when a specific item was due in, or agree to call/email when it came in.

Southampton and London Gateway are both starting to fill with rerouted vessels from FLX so will likely get congestion quite quickly . They also apparently have form for helping for a short while in periods of disruption and then inviting the Lines to sign up for much longer contracts, or they will stop taking the overflow. Liverpool looks like it could go out on strike shortly as well…

My dad and I were out photographing a former canal. My dad stepped onto the “soil” in an abandoned lock and promptly sunk to his waist, a farmer was using it as a convenient slurry pit….

At the moment it’s becoming less the issues in China so much as the disruption from the Felixstowe strikes, we have just lost 20 days on a container as it was due in the last strikes and the vessel made all its other European stops and came back. (Another earlier shipment recently got dumped in Germany due to congestion at Felixstowe and took 30+ days to get back to the uk as no direct services). If not resolved soon these will start to cause havoc with Xmas stock….

Working for a wholesaler the number of trade customers who cannot follow a simple instruction to add an order number, invoice number or account number to a bacs payment is astonishing…the number of payments we try to reconcile that have come from “current account 2” or “Lloyds” etc without any trace of a recognisable customers name is bizarre… Not sure I would want it at a retailer level.

Not only this but the router and your local exchange will be “talking to each other” to negotiate the best connection speed. Repeated turning off and on is interpreted as a line fault so they automatically reduce your connection speed to give a more reliable connection….

I had similar thoughts this week at a headline describing the queen as frugal, not sure which palace and household they were referring to there…

Any dimmer switches anywhere in the circuit?

Bear in mind that lighting and electrics are a significant income generator for the NEC. You don’t generally see change from £300 or so for a basic 500w socket and three strip lights over a stand at a three day show (not that I have attended as an exhibitor for around 5 years)….A cynic would think the poor lighting is deliberate….

Cough up 25p per week…

I had a garage fail to check tracking after replacing various suspension components a couple of years back. The front tyres fitted at the same time lasted less than 12 weeks before wearing right through the canvas, both on the inside shoulder, and resulting in a puncture. I hadn’t felt a thing through the steering but apparently the tracking was off the scale on both front wheels…

It a USB-A to USB-B cable you need, such as this one https://www.amazon.co.uk/AmazonBasics-USB-2-0-Cable-Male/dp/B00NH11KIK?th=1 Or https://www.argos.co.uk/product/1956854?clickSR=slp:term:usb printer cable:3:83:2

Personally still an advocate for scrapping q1, q2 and q3 format in favour of drawing names out of a hat and then each driver getting a single hot lap for qualifying…(for drivers that don’t finish the lap it could be decided on distance travelled…)

Can see Mercedes overtaking Ferrari in the constructors shortly.

My windows 10 pc for work was doing that, upgrading to an SSD hard drive solved it.

The problem is the requirement in almost every EU country to have an in state fiscal representative who shares liability for VAT payments and compliance. This costs to implement and then further ongoing reporting (often in a different language) etc etc. and is likely not viable for many small businesses. (Of course you only need to register in one EU state, for sales to all states but it’s still an onorous requirement)

(I would also be interested in @admiles thoughts as I know he sits somewhere in between us both in the day job…)

Its interesting because that flies in the face of the weekly/monthly newsletters we receive from multiple freight forwarders talking about the number of vessels tied up in Asia and blanked sailings seemingly designed to keep prices artificially high… The two points that do tie in with the feedback we get when booking freight are the humanitarian cost on the crew of pandemic restrictions, and the slower steaming speeds that should have been apparent years in advance as legislation progressed through various legislators. The point about empty containers has been communicated to us as shipping companies refusing to wait in port whilst empty container are loaded onboard as there is no revenue in them…

I am wondering if Red Bull had more confidence their floors would pass the revised tests that kick in this weekend, and haven’t changed them and others have?

The problem for us as a wholesaler was that any capacity we had to absorb any energy related increases was already taken up by the Sh*& show that is the shipping world at the moment. Between the far higher container rates, (Still 2.5 to 3 times the rate at the start of 2020) and the delay after delay after delay (containers scheduled for 33 days taking 65 isn’t unusual at the moment) meaning we need to have higher stock levels on hand and in transit….

Ahhh the Maldonado clause I believe, ready for when he stuffed it into the wall and prevented others setting a time??? :)

We have just moved to a property with greens out the front and no road (everyone uses their back doors with a service road behind the property). In the first month we have seen two different takeaway drivers ride their mopeds all the way up the footpath to neighbours houses rather than walk the last 250 feet.