All Activity

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.” '

He kept saying "Imagine I'm on the ballot." America did, and said "Up yours."

Vance, unfortunately. At least until the end of the term.

Correct.

A lot of news seems to point to the Republicans finally realising that Chump is... a chump and the electorate have cottoned on. A lot of Republican congress people are apparently very concerned about what he will get up to over the next couple of years and how it could further erode their jobs come next election. Whilst it won't be easy, there is talk that he may well not make it for much longer.. The problem is, who will replace him?

I wasn’t entirely right. Apparently a future president can still make internal changes so the ornaments and chandeliers can go. It mainly means the basic structure and historic character of the spaces needs to be preserved. His proclamation could also be challenged in court before it’s ratified.

Trump has just declared the Oval Office and Cabinet Room to be national monuments which means they have to be preserved and can’t be altered. He obviously wants to make sure that no future president can get rid of his gold ornaments and chandeliers. There’s no end to this moron’s vanity. The document still has to be ratified by Congress but no doubt that will be a formality.

I think the ballroom construction is probably too advanced to make it easy to change now, and certainly by time the Democrats would be able to do anything about. He will probably get his arch too unless the courts step in and stop it. The judge, Tanya Chutkin, is definitely not a Trump fan so that might happen.

Link to AEMO page where the previous image came from. https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem Openelectricity page for those that are interested. may need to tick the curtailment boxes as they don't seem to in the charts when using the link sometimes. Open Electricity: South Australia PEC (NSW interconnector) has been energised since early October and they have just lifted maximum capacity from 150MW to over 300. Has a price and demand tab as well.

Trump can VETO everything and probably will. What a silly system they have there. Republicans will ARC up too. There's too much Power to a President. SCARY. Nev

Live a lot better, obviously. WAR is MADNESS. Nev

They upped the Max Weight of them some years ago, and I blame that for a lot of the Problems. Nev