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Stil covered in frost outside here which is not far from there. Beautiful clear day other wise. My Barometer is 1041 Mbs. Highest I can recall. Nev

Owned by Stellantis..Marty. Jerry That would be the Best way to go Broke. You need to eliminate faults BEFORE you decide to go into Production. Nev

Trump said "America DOESN'T Have MANY Geniuses". That having been said HE listens to nobody, anyhow and GOD put him where he is. And He just accidently becomes much more wealthy and dictatorial, WTF? Good on you GOP. Who's laughing the Most? CHINA. Well done! US continues to fall further behind, in debt, Inflation and infrastructure and Production. Nev

They had to get them 'Out of Sight and out of Mind' AND they DID lose the American solution. Prisons cost a lot of money. Once they are transported they end up costing nothing to support and even make money for their Masters and to run the Colony and build the roads etc some of which still remain. We are being swamped with these alternative re-creations ... Fine IF the supporting evidence is there and verifiable to replace what we originally thought.. Some of what we have been told is WITHOUT evidence at all Particularly some religious assertions.. Old unserviceable wooden ships don't float that well and would soon become an infectious Cess pit, and an embarrassment. Nev

Hypothetical" refers to something based on a theory rather than on real life or proven facts. It is typically used when you are exploring a possible scenario ("what if...") for the sake of discussion, debate, or problem. An hypothesis is about testing a question, while a thesis is about arguing a conclusion. So you are correct inlabelling what I put forward as an hypothetical concept.

My thesis is that the "history" we have been taught is not 100% correct. It is rue that the Revolutionary War with the 13 Colonies caused overcrowding in the hullks, but my thought is that we must look further afield into European history to see why a government would spend lots of money sending a few convicts from a large population of them into the unknown. It would have been cheaper for teh government to commission a few more hulks, snce these were ships that were no longer suitable to head to sea. Please remember that my initial post was more of an announcement of my thesis. At that time I simply had an idea. It is absolutely true that research must be done to get the evidence to either support the thesis, or to rebut it. I am not so ignorant as to not accept that I could be wrong. At the moment we are only at teh beginning of the search for an answer.

All I can say is 'Yep, He did this'..... Tomahawk cruise missile. The United States burned through over 1,000 Tomahawks in Iran — ten years’ worth of production. Each one’s fin actuators run on samarium-cobalt magnets. China mines and refines 99% of the world’s samarium and placed it under export licensing on April 4, 2025. To rebuild the inventory, Raytheon must turn to Beijing for samarium. Patriot PAC-3 interceptor. The seeker uses samarium-cobalt (SmCo) to slew its guidance head; the radar’s traveling-wave tubes use SmCo to focus the microwave beam; yttrium-iron-garnet phase shifters tune the array. Replenishing the 1,200-plus interceptors expended in Iran requires roughly 1.2 to 2.4 tons of high-temperature SmCo, plus yttrium oxide. Between 2020 and 2023, China supplied 93% of U.S. yttrium imports. JASSM-ER stealth cruise missile. The fin servos and seeker run on neodymium-iron-boron magnets (NdFB) doped with dysprosium and terbium for thermal stability. Strip out the heavy rare earths, and the magnet demagnetizes in flight. Roughly 1,100 missiles expended translates to between 1.5 and 3 tons of NdFeB feedstock. China refines the vast majority of the world’s dysprosium and terbium. F-35 Lightning II. For a decade, the Department of Defense itself has repeated that each F-35 contains 920 pounds of rare earths. The strategically critical content is the high-temperature SmCo and dysprosium-doped NdFeB in the engine actuators, electric drives, and radar. These are materials Beijing has placed under license. So US used up most of their ammo in Iran and now need China's permission to reload.

I thought Peugeot were owned by the same company that produces MG and a raft of other Chinese cars.

OME hypotheticals are fine and are good to promote some critical thinking about what happened in history...the problem with hypothesizing is just that...you need proof...like govt documents prision records etc and trying to egt them now from that long ago would be a hard exercise I would think. History is written by the winners not the losers and unless there was some actual proof history is normally taken to be the truth. It obviously sometimes isnt but it seems to me you are having a argument just like if the Yunger Dryus happened or not or even if there is a second Sphinx like they are hypothesizing now. Or even that there was a noah and a ark. Good luck with your efforts

Well, positives are things are slowly moving forward. Currently preparing for Wednesday's flight to Melbourne. I realise it has been 8 years since I have been to Aus. Ship! Time flies. Not going to tell you which day in case you alert immigration 🤣 Although I could be out for as much as a month, I will be travelling light - hoping to get away with carry on only. I don't think I will, so it will probably be a small backpack. Also, on the reno front, things are picking up. I am not sure if I mentioned the need to rewire a floor of the house. Not a terribly big job, but more cost. That was found when they pulled a fuse board out to replace with one up to current regs. The spaghetti behind it, including a circuit that bypassed it altogether made some of my early coding deliverables took well written. We have found a tradie who is working through stuff. He has done these doors we had to put in for building regs; but the building inspector allowed us to not procure fireproof doors or even install them to be a barrier against fire spreading as the listed (heritage) building officer would be dead set against them even being installed. And that is the regulatory environment we are up against. Now, the downstairs loo and bootroom, that I made major progress on until work really heated up are done, and the formal living room is under way. If this fella keeps it up, I think we will be done by mid August and ti will be on the market. And he is doing a good job, too. And on the work front, an opportunity to climb the greasy corporate ladder opened up. I was invited to apply, but because of my plans, declined. I was supporting the application of a colleague, but it looks like he won;t get it either, and it will be an outsider. Which is fantastic, because that person will be both of our manager. Things are transforming at work where it will slim down in the not too distant future. I have already been implementing a succession plan where today, apart from being the doyen of our delivery function, my reports are coming right up the curve and even a contractor has been earmarked to be a sucessor. So, a new person in that almost exec role will want to stamp his or her authority and make changes - and as I don't feel I owe that person anything, the conversation will be something like "don't let anyone go on my account." Employment laws will mean they will have to make me redundant - and that will mean enough to accelerate this reno and put it on the market and take a little while to sell. Even if the latter (which I have been trying to engineer for about 12 months now) doesn't work, I am hoping by the end of the year, it will be all done and dusted.

Hope the flying went well.

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/motoring/motoring-news/peugeot-suspends-australian-car-sales-amid-pressure-from-cheaper-chinese-rivals/news-story/194491500cf89f20e2a560fe73013f08

Crap day for me. I went to use my lathe and it wouldn't turn, headstock bearings jammed for some reason. So I took my old car for a drive instead, and went through one of those cameras that spots your phone on the passenger seat, where mine was. Then got home and, being annoyed, scraped the paint on the garage door. First damage to the perfect paint job in 25 years of ownership. I'm going flying in the morning, hope my luck has changed by then.

We already know Cook observed Venus in Tahiti as a guise to setting out to the Great Southern Land to claim it for England. The "politics" was evident even then. So it shouldn't be surprising that politics played it's part in the transportation of convicts to a far away land. We also know the French were cruising off the East Coast at the time. Is "politics" the right word? It seems like "land grab" is more appropriate. I just wish the Poms had not depleted Australia of all the Red Cedar trees, there was none left for repairing antique Cedar furniture in the 1900s when I was dabbling in selling old furniture.

The best form of testing is to release to production

Just when you make it foolproof........ along come smarter fools. Oh, wait.... did that happen to USof A last year?

Also known as Murphy's Law.

That is the myth I am attacking. Britain had plenty of old ships it could use as prisons. They had hulks in many ports around England. A few more would not have mattered. Also, the hulks were not run by the Government. The running of the hulks was contracted out to private entrprise. Those operating prisons in hulks had to meet minimum standards of care. I'm not sure if the convicts were hired out to do work for the government, or if that work was simply part of their sentence to hard labour. The roadblock in the system was that Courts were sentencing people to transportation which meant that once convicted a person had to be held until a destination was available. The government was unable to send more convicts to the colony until word arrived from Governor Arthur Phillip that the new colony had survived. Concentrating the debate on the crowding in the hulks distracts from my thesis that the reason an effort was made to establish a presence in Australia was political. That presence was aimed at preventing other European powers from gaining footholds in new lands. If Britain colonised Australia, it provided locations for naval bases and the possible opportunity for the production of materials needed to maintain ships. Those ships could be used to block the activities of other powers.

Because you can't cover EVERY Possibility by simple LOGIC. Nev

Wash his mouth out with Soap? . Nev

Every country has a different situation to cope with. You can't just apply one Places solution to all places. Australia has about the same area as the USA which has about 13 times the Population. and uses Gasolene like there's no tomorrow, and a Leader who loves to Pollute because he has $#!t for Brains. Nev

A Crook amongst Crooks. How does Pentecostal fit with Hindi? It's an American construct to justify GREED and the Worship of MONEY. Nev

What about the Incredible Hulk.? Also after the USA broke away from England Another place to take the So called BAD people had to be found as a matter of urgency.. The Irony was that Here became a better place than back home and wasn't Gov. Macquarie admonished for doing some of that? Norfolk Island was also a Penal Colony Like Port Arthur in Tasmania. the Natives looked after some of the escaped convicts I believe. Nev

I agree Peter - part of a previous job was system testing changes to a large organisation's primary database before they were deployed. For five weeks at a time we'd try to break it by doing the stupidest things humans could do to it. After deployment, when the programmers had applied fixes to any weaknesses we'd found, inevitably some moron still managed to break it.

There were no experiments in prison reform at that time. The call for prison reform wasn't heard until the mid 19th Century. The use of hulks was a convenient way to house prisoners without the need to go to the expense of building new gaols on land. The hulks were ships that could still float, but were condemned for use at sea. I thinbk, too that we don't have an idea of how big those hulks were and the available space to accommodate people. Also those prisoners provided a cheap source of labour to carry out tasks for the Government on the docks of England. Did you know that hulks were used in Sydney Harbour to hold the worst convicts? As in England, these convicts were taken off the hulks in chain gangs to do the more arduous work. I am of the opinion that most well-behaved convicts moved about the colony unfettered by chains. The pictures in the history books of convicts in chain gangs no doubt depict these hulk residents. I hope that you have used that link I posted to get a bit of truth about the use of hulks in Britain.