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I rest my case, M'Lord.

Our population is too Low to support mass production Industries. We would rely massively on exporting it. We are also a long way from most Markets and transport costs are rising and are more risky. Nev

Murdoch Monopoly Press,TV and Radio, LIES constantly about all this to achieve his self interested Aim . I call that FRAUD.. In Queensland, his coverage is by far the Highest. being almost total. Most of the ABC staff are ex Murdoch Employees. Nev

Primary Industries and Mining really don't do much to make a Nation economically strong. While both those industries generate income, they only generate service jobs for the rest of the community. Look at teh nations which became great, starting with Britain, then Europe and the USA and now China and India. Greatness came from making stuff from raw materials, not simply providing the raw materials.

Compare it to other countries and you will get a better Picture. How much is in Infrastructure and Defence? Population is Also growing. Money into Houses rather than Factories. Still retaining the AAA rating is significant as that affects the Interest rate Gov't have to Pay on Borrowings. Nev

Yep and the LNP continued to grow it at the same rate from 2013 to 2019.. switch looks very different to what the curve looks like since Albo came to power.. But that was my point.. Albo's government in real terms has flat lined debt - actually reduced it; yet the press are blaming him for the high debt levels caused by previous governments both LNP and ALP

If you ignore the covid era hump in the line, it's almost a straight upward trending line from about one year into the first Rudd government to where we are now.

Australia is actually doing alright but you won't see that expressed often here.. Nev

Ahhh.. Blame the current bloke for the previous guy's failings. In the current value of money, here is Australia's debt curve... Adjusted for inflation of course.. So, the total debt in today's money has reduced slightly since 2022 not long after Albo had taken over. The graph steadily increases since the previous ALP government, continues during the LNP (we'll excuse the rate of increase over the 2 year COVID period).. Albo gets in and it steadily reduces, with a slight increase but still below the levels he took over. Yep, I agree.. with pollies, it's other people's money. But it clearly isn't Albo's debt - it is the previous guys.. the ones a lot of people think are the safe pair of hands with the economy because that's what the media owners want them to think. He could do his bit to reduce the debt further - property tax gas exports, reduce corporate welfare, etc. But the press don't like that.

Probably Rembrandt Square.. Nev

Aren't those Christmas lights in a certain section of Amsterdam?

Interesting assessment of the likely rationale behind Musk deciding to spend nearly half a billion dollars on the election and what the Republican loss may be costing him.

Ball and socket joint

Too subtle for my TDS brain I'm afraid, OME. It's beyond recovery.

A lot of that was done during the Depression The cost today would be incredible. Nev

You missed the sarcasm of my post.

My opinioon, from my experience, but not in road construction, is that it is the geology that makes constructing roads for heavy weights the problem. Over nearly all of the continent, the ground is sedimentary material. Very few places have the surface close to bedrock. That results in great difficulty building a sound base layer upon whihc to build a road. Also, the way we seal the surface of our roads is a compromise between cost and results. That's why we have our roads sealed with bitumen sprayed over gravel. Where the roads are made opf concrete, the failure rate os a lot less, but the cost per kilometre is much more.

That's right. My initial understanding was that he was trying to prevent that in future and ensure that his execrable taste in fake Louis IV gold decorations lived on, but apparently he can't go that far.

There's a strong precedent for a future President to make changes to the White House. It's most recent user of that precedent was Donald J Trump.

Another issue with roads is whether they are built for the allowable load limits. I can only see two choices - build the roads better to take the weight or change regulations to reduce truck weights. Either way has a big economic impact. The inflationary pressure of having lower payload/higher transport costs would be huge. Probably much cheaper to just keep patching the roads we currently have.

Lame duck l'orange.

A bit off topic but on the subject of B-Doubles, I saw a really unusual sight recently on the Bruce Highway between the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane. Normally on those roads only B-Doubles are allowed but I went past a conventional double road train tanker (semi trailer pulling a dog trailer via a dolly and drawbar). I don't think I've ever seen one there before and the best guess is they had a special permit for some reason. Normally, conventional roadtrains coming in from the west have to drop their extra trailers on the western edge of Toowoomba and shuttle them down to Brisbane one at a time, so it's a fairly big exclusion area.

Jerry, don't forget to take into account that it doesn't matter how big, long or how much weight a truck carries, it's the axle weights that mainly impact the roads, ie: the ground pressure. A tandem axle grouping on a B-Double carries no more weight than the tandem axle grouping on a heavy rigid class truck like the bogey drive tip trucks we see everywhere.

This post on a forum did a good job of summing up some botched software updates. He's referring to CCleaner 7, but it could equally apply to others: ' If there’s one genuinely good thing about CCleaner 7, it’s that it now serves as a masterclass case study for product professionals everywhere — on how a trusted, legacy product can lose its way through poor change management. Reading through the forums, you’ll find hundreds of frustrated posts — one user summed it up perfectly: “You should have warned me this wasn’t just another update. You should have told me to save my configuration. You should have let me defer this until I was ready. But you didn’t.” That single paragraph captures everything wrong with Version 7. The release dropped with no clear communication, no migration guidance, and no empathy for long-time users who had built custom cleaning rules, cookie whitelists, and workflows over years. The result? Years of personalization wiped out in one “update.” The interface overhaul might have looked modern on a whiteboard, but it ignored how people actually use CCleaner. Merging the Registry Cleaner into Custom Clean broke functional separation and user intent. The new UI stripped out critical control options, like protecting specific cookies — the kind of tiny but meaningful feature that represented loyalty and trust. And then, as if on cue, a new “Ideas Board” appeared — asking users to submit feature suggestions for the “future of CCleaner.” The irony is almost poetic. You don’t need an idea board when your community is already shouting feedback you refuse to acknowledge. From a product-management lens, CCleaner 7 illustrates several timeless lessons: Communicate before you change: Never disguise a fundamental overhaul as a routine update. Respect user configuration: Data, preferences, and habits are part of the product’s emotional value. Don’t break muscle memory for aesthetics: A sleek UI means nothing if it disrupts daily usability. Empathy beats innovation theater: “Listening to users” means fixing what you broke before asking for new ideas. Ironically, this release has made CCleaner more valuable — not as software, but as a cautionary tale. Every product manager, designer, and QA lead should study Version 7 as a reminder that progress without communication is just chaos with better branding. Maybe the next time someone in a sprint review says “Let’s modernize the experience”, someone will pull up CCleaner 7 and reply, “Let’s also make sure we don’t modernize our users right out of the product.” '