Big J

Hmmmm, hard to know exactly. Big douglas is always nice, but the longer you leave it, the harder it will be to cut. Once dry, it's no fun to mill! I'd personally be inclined to mill them into standard beam sizes and wait for folk wanting feature, non structural beams. You could get them visually graded, but that would probably not be cost effective. It's a nice, strong timber, but not enormously durable. You could do chunky garden furniture, but make sure you have a market for it first.

It'll be 2800kg. Only the Landcruiser Amazons tow 3500kg. The Amazons have a cracking reputation and hold their value very well. I would have gone for one if not for the fact that a) it's extremely hilly around here and 200bhp on a vehicle as heavy as a LC with a 3500kg trailer isn't going to be much fun on the 1 in 4 hills and b) I needed to scratch the V10 itch! ?

I like to think that if you can find a good one, it's as sensible a proposition as any £5-7k 4x4. It's finding one that is lowish in miles and has history that is the issue. I'm up to Aviemore in it on the 2nd, so that'll be the test - 560 miles in each direction!

I think that that was on 5th Gear. I think we can all agreed that big, fairly cheap 4x4s for towing heavy always end up costing a bit in repairs. I like to think that a VW is better engineered in the first instance than a Landrover, and the V10 is an addictive thing. It's such a shame that that wave of engineering innovation in the early to mid 2000s with large displacement diesels and petrols died a death. I've been getting 27-28mpg from it on the first 1 1/4 tanks. That's no worse than the Disco 4 I had, but I've an extra 120bhp. Imagine a V10 with a modern 8 speed auto. That would be magical.

I've recently bought a V10 Touareg. One owner vehicle, 102k, £5k. Spent just under £1200 getting every last little thing done on it (including a couple of bits of corrosion and getting it wax oiled). A little bit on top of that to get it remapped too. I've not had a chance to tow with it yet, but I'm fairly certain it could tow several 3.5t trailers rather than just one! It's actually never in it's life towed. I will pop it's cherry in that regard We had a Disco 4 a while back. It was an expensive thing in terms of repairs. I'm sure that the V10 will sting me similarly, but at least I'll have a V10. I honestly don't think any hill would ever slow it down with 3.5t behind it.

It was a few weeks before Christmas, but I bought myself a Touareg V10 TDI. I've wanted one for almost a decade and I finally have one. It's a one owner vehicle, full VW history and I'm hoping it doesn't bite me in the ass on repairs. In the mean time, it's incredibly comfortable and goes like a train.

Normal range for an individual is £30-80k, I'd say. Most people I know are in that range (from one end to the other) and I don't know many people either side of that, though I do know some. I agree that within the rule of law, people and corporations ought to be allowed to minimise their tax exposure. My point is that the extent to which some of the larger corporations do this goes beyond what is socially and morally justifiable, and blurs the line of the law chronically. As such they are routinely challenged in the courts. Many companies have a fair tax policy, like Lush: Company Tax Policy UK.LUSH.COM A general dislike of seeing money vanish from one’s wage packet, coupled with dissatisfaction with the quality of services offered by our local authorities and central... It's worth noting that they paid only £1m less corporation tax on less than 1/3 of the profit, and Lush's UK turnover is only 14% of Amazon's. Amazon accused of handing over 'diddly-squat' in corporation tax | Technology | The Guardian WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM Firm attacked even though it says its contribution has nearly tripled since 2017 It is possible for a company to be both profitable and socially responsible and paying a reasonable and fair amount of tax is part of that.

I didn't claim to be earning an average income. That is the tax saved for both myself and my wife as the forestry business is our sole income. We are very much in the normal range, and frankly what would be the point of the stress of running my own business for 10 years if I was going to settle for the national average salary of £28677/pa? I'd be as well just going PAYE for someone else and forgetting the stress. It's worth noting that we do collect an awful lot of VAT for the exchequer too. It's besides the point though. I use basic accountancy and due diligence to reduce any instance of overpayment of tax. I do not have a legal team on retainer to fight the HMRC or IRS should I be challenged on how little tax I pay. I also did not say that large corporations should pay more. As it stands, they pay proportionally less. I am simply suggesting parity.

They do find themselves in court though: US appeals court sides with Amazon in $1.5 billion transfer pricing dispute–MNE Tax MNETAX.COM A US federal appeals court on Friday affirmed the Tax Court's decision in Amazon, ruling that cost sharing buy-in payments made by Amazon's Luxembourg subsidiary to . . . We need an accountant in order to organise our accounts and present them to HMRC. I don't ask him to do anything untoward, anything nefarious, simply to offset the machinery I've bought against the tax I pay. We set ourselves up as a LTD earlier this year to lower our tax bill as we would have ended up paying a lot more as a sole trader. This is just basic stuff. No one in their right mind as the sole income provider is going to willingly give away £20-30k extra to HMRC.

I of course utilise my accountant to minimise my tax bill. Anyone in my position would. It's a question of scale. The tax I pay makes little difference to anyone. I make a fairly modest income from my business. I am not in the position of someone like Jeff Bezos, where annual income is measured in billions. With that kind of power, comes responsibility and a moral duty. I am in no way suggesting anything akin to Corbynism, only that proportionally that they pay their fair share, which demonstrably they avoid doing.

My point was relating to the amount of tax being underpaid by large corporations trading in the UK. They use aggressive accountancy to reduce their declared profit, and then use further loopholes to reduce the tax they pay on their declared profit. Businesses on our level pay proportionally more tax than businesses like Amazon, regardless of whether you compare it to turnover or profit.

Subscribe to read | Financial Times WWW.FT.COM News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication £24.8 billion. That's over a quarter of the UK education budget. edit: for some reason I can see the article, but it won't link properly. It refers to corporate tax underpayment.

My point is that the corporations that play the largest part in our day to day lives and make the most profit pay proportionally the smallest amount of tax. Proportionally, they pay less than either of us, and I dare say a lot of folk here. It's about fairness. I'm not asking the larger corporations to pay more, only the same.

Hi there. I've got several hundred tonnes of mixed hardwood and softwood firewood. It's of excellent quality and in chard.

Thanks Tom. I missed this thread.

We're on a site just outside Chard and have a surplus of firewood. We're producing a lot of very good, processor grade hardwood and softwood. On some of the site it's not possible to split them, so it's being sold as mixed hardwood/softwood with the mix being ash, douglas fir, spruce and alder in equal measure, with the very occasional bit of willow and birch. It's all poker straight, having gone through the processing head on the stroke processor (max diameter 36cm). Average diameter is 4-9". Likely to be a total of 350t. There is also a reasonably large alder coppice block to do as well. Again, completely straight and very nice quality firewood, along with some ash too of slightly lower grade. About 180t in this section. Hardwood will be £55/t roadside, mixed firewood £48/t. We will have our own lorry for deliveries (8 wheeler with rear mounted crane) as off the second week of January. I'll get some photos later today.

To you too Andy

My overall impression of the UK (and I suppose it probably extends to the oil sector) is that we are incredibly inefficient. There isn't a broad view of complete systems to iron out inefficiencies. They were redoing a couple of walls alongside a road at the northern end of Cullompton for about 4-5 weeks earlier in autumn. Two walls, perhaps 150ft long in total, red brick construction, 3-4ft high. Traffic control, many, many contractors, tens of thousands of pounds of cost and over a month of traffic disruption (and the associated costs). All that for two walls. I can't put my finger on why it is we're so institutionally inefficient. The example of high speed rail is perhaps a better one. The French have done TGV for £5-17m per km. HS2 is presently being forecast to cost £383m/km. I know we're a small island and compulsory purchase will make up some of that, but the magnitude of it is astonishing. I know that there are thousands of world leading companies in the UK, but they seem to exist in spite of the inherent environment of inefficiency, rather than because of it. It's amazing the UK can compete at all given how third rate our infrastructure is compared to the rest of western Europe. I'm not trying to UK bash here, but I'm trying to understand why in the past 50 years we've been left so far behind in this regard.

Hahaha! He just needs a good PR person! ? Again, very interesting, and I agree with pretty much all of it. The Norwegian model is a sort of ultra capitalist socialist system where you have tremendous government support so long as you are prepared to contribute. I agree with this principle. I fundamentally just think that you ought to be able to get ahead in life if you are prepared to work for it. We don't have a good balance in that regard in the UK.

Thank you for the very detailed reply. It's a fascinating industry, simply from a technical point of view. There are parallels between what I do and what you do, but your profession is much more complex. Do you think that an Independent Scotland would be in a better position to better manage it's oil reserves? I'm not convinced that the mindset in Scotland is conducive to emulating the Norwegian model. I would be glad to be proven wrong though.

I can't be bothered to submit myself to your needlessly pathological disection of my previous post. The various points I have made in the previous post can all be easily referenced online. You know this. You're just trying to bury me in detail. It's Christmas Eve and I can't be arsed. I will add that my income is perfectly average, and I need to have an accountant anyway. I, for instance, have no means of legally avoiding corporation tax on my company's profits, so I pay 19% (falling to 18% starting April 2020). Companies such as Amazon use entirely legal loopholes to avoid this, so they (for example) paid only £14m in corporation tax on a turnover of just under £11 billion in the year ending 12/2018. I obviously understand that the UK needs the investment and employment that companies like Amazon bring, but given that Jeff Bezos is the world's richest man (despite his recent very costly divorce) he's in no morally justifiable position to withhold tax.

Very interesting to see. I wouldn't dispute that Scotland has the reserves, but I'm not sure that they have the mindset to capitalise on them. What would you say is the key difference between Norway and the UK in terms of the way they profit from their petrochemical reserves? The former has created an incredible amount of wealth whereas the latter has little to show from 45 years of exploration and extraction.

In principle, I don't think he's an awful person. He's just wholely unsuitable to be PM. All style, no substance. Has been demostrated to be a pathological liar, and is unwilling to subject himself to any kind of scrutiny. He's also a complete buffoon, and diminishes our standing internationally. He's also been proven to have mislead The Queen. I object to the general Tory policy shift towards a hard Brexit. I agree that there shouldn't be a culture where it's acceptable give large chunks of wealth away to those unwilling to work for it. I do however draw the line at making it easy for the wealthiest to pay as little as possible. The gap between the tax legally owed by the richest individuals and corporations and the tax morally owed is huge. And before you raise it, yes I do have an accountant, and yes I do pay as little tax as I can legally get away with. I do not however have a surplus of millions of pounds come the end of January.

I agree, and I am. I don't see how me pointing out that both we and the Americans have pathalogical liars in office has got anything to do with being a sore loser. Corbyn was a terrible candidate. Labour could have won if they'd not persisted with this daft uber socialist agenda. It just doesn't cut the mustard with the British electorate. I simply object to elections which are reduced to popularity contests between untrustworthy and duplicitous individuals, trading personal insults and insisting they aren't held account for the promises they made the day before. All of this leaves me with very little faith in the objective value of democracy in this country. The candidates are often dispicable, the system corrupt and the electorate easily (and willingly?) mislead.

A friend had a 372xp and several vehicle batteries pinched on Sunday morning at 08:45. Quite good CCTV footage, if anyone knows the culprit. Shouldn't be too hard to find as king cab rangers aren't that common. Just what you want for Christmas!