JoeEvans

I think 'tax planning' shades pretty gently into 'tax avoidance', and as mentioned above, HMRC often have to go to court to clarify the boundary between avoidance and evasion. More broadly, it's an argument about the meaning of words, and words don't have fixed definitions - people use them in different ways and dictionaries just report those usages.

Buy a secondhand ACG. Simple.

In reality the lines between acting without regard for tax; tax avoidance; tax evasion; and downright fraud and criminality are pretty grey and blurred. They denote broad ideas not precisely defined activities.

I work for a charity and we've recently been upgrading our cyber security, on advice from our IT support company who told us that there are active teams of Russian hackers employed simply to look for anything they can do to cause disruption, chaos and expense. So it's not just about protecting against simple financial fraud, you need to protect against random professional malice too.

Although a brief Google suggests that they whole plane would have been $156m when new so the aluminium would be 0.12% of the total cost; I suspect that the plywood cost makes up a very much larger proportion of the price of a cab than that.

Couldn't the earth connection to the rails in the sliding pickup just be a bit of copper braid, squeezed against the rail by a piece of closed-cell foam, neoprene or similar, in a little recess in the pickup housing?

I think that Trump can only conceive of business transactions as having winners and losers. He's drawn to tariffs because they make he feel like a winner, doing damage to his opponents and forcing them to submit to his will. But in reality business transactions don't work like that. Every purchase leaves both parties better off - the buyer valued the goods more highly than the money, and the seller valued the money more highly than the goods. Business transactions are therefore collaborative and mutually beneficial, and when you restrict the options for such collaborations, both sides are left worse off. Tariffs damage both countries involved. But Trump can't see that because he has no conception of collaboration, cooperation and mutual respect.

Tesla's price/earnings ratio for forecast sales for 2026 is still 75 or so; a good P/E ratio is normally thought to be maybe 25. So Tesla is still valued three times higher than is justified by forecast sales. I can only assume that stock is bought and held by true believers who don't base investment (or voting) decisions on nasty facts.

The other financial factor that can't be ignored in US politics is cryptocurrencies. The amount of money now invested in crypto is insane, and around 28% of US adults have some crypto investments. For a lot of people it's tied in to a whole worldview - libertarian, techno-utopian, anti-government, and pro-Trump largely because they think he's pro-crypto. There are some wild views out there - a lot of people apparently believe that in due course Bitcoin will become the primary global currency, with a single Bitcoin worth a billion or more. But these are wildly unreliable investments with zero real value - the biggest market bubble in history - and it's highly likely that in due course a lot of people will lose a lot of money. I think that crypto and MAGA are deeply intertwined, not just practically but psychologically - all about belief in something utterly unsupported by reality. I think both bubbles will eventually burst together in a very messy way.

Tesla's share price is utterly insane in terms of price to earnings ratio. It seems to be based on the belief that in due course Tesla will be the leading global car manufacturer and the leading global supplier in a huge autonomous vehicle industry that doesn't yet exist. Meanwhile Musk has gone full Ratner and deliberately alienated the people most likely to but electric cars, ie people vaguely centre or left of centre.

I guess also international trade rules are very relevant to discussions about bass guitars, which are an international product with a lot of US customers and manufacturers.

A DPA would be a great choice anyway, whether or not it was used on that bass, although it isn't a cheap option.

Since about 50% of them are root notes, and 25% are fifths, you can mix up the order a fair bit without it changing much ..

On the plus side, you get the pleasure of being in a band, but you have to play way less notes than anyone else.

Worth bearing in mind that Russia is struggling and failing to invade Ukraine while just fighting the Ukrainians. They are worlds away from being able to roll on across Eastern Europe. The problem is not whether Russia can be defeated, it's whether it can be done gently enough that Putin doesn't lose the plot and do something really stupid.