All Activity

Just to bump this thread out of the shadows, because DJT keeps getting all the attention. I know that Ukraine has been catching up but hadn't noticed how big and constant their was is. How about Ukraine Taking out 4000 Russian drones.... in April alone! Meanwhile Putin's assistants say.... US Secretary of State Rubio congratulated Russians on Russia Day: he stated that the United States is committed to a peaceful resolution of the war in Ukraine.

Beat ya!

Peter's fast on the draw tonight. 😄

You've lost that lovin' feelin'. The Righteous Bros.

You've lost that loving feeling

Correct again.

"I'm not crazy, my mother had me tested". From Sheldon Cooper in the Big Bang Theory.

Correct.

I think a lot of the issue nowdays is that almost everything relies on computers. There's humans there but they have to work within their company's systems. Computers don't have common sense and because the human staff have to work within their computer systems, common sense is long gone from corporate customer service. A big portion of the work force these days have never known a day of their life when computers weren't a big part of it, so they don't know any better. To them, ineffective, unproductive computer bureaucracy is the norm.

Bumper season that should read.

Don't get me started, OT.. those big consultancies are the biggest scams on earth (Except, that I started with my earlier post - I think it was PWC that was consulting to the ATO on how to make changes to reduce the loopholes and were at the same time consulting to private corps on how to beat them).

Garelous Evans didn't do many things right, but Scott Morrisson made all others Look Good. He worked for the Pentecostal Church, not Australians or even his Electorate. Read His Maiden speech. That tells it all. Nev

Sugar affects the taste the Most. Unripe fruits are Bitter tasting. The Plant MAKES the sugar. Of course soils will alter the Fruit taste but not the sweetness which was my Point. High acid or alkaline figures will Kill Plants but Lime (alkaline) is considered to "sweeten" the soil but not in the way putting sugar in it would. Neutral Ph makes More Nutrient available to the Plants. Microbes and Worms Help the soil provide more nutrient and Urea (nitrogen) makes leaves greener.. Soil testing is a Must with Farming and knowing where the water table is. Nev

It always amazes me what they can do in that light soil. A cousin of mine farms around 11,000 hectares in the Tammin area and they get into a fair bit of high tech stuff. At that scale a lot of it is about minimising costs so a lot of their decision making is data based. It's another world from where he grew up with black soil metres deep.

The psyches of the ALP and the Coalition have run their course in Australia ... now they're just relying on brainless international socialist elites' policies. If they want to do that, why don't they apply to work for the UN, like Gareth Evans did. They could join him and hold hands while giving speeches to like minded Fabian socialists.

The main rock around my area is rhyolite. A lot of years ago I had a bloke with a dozer do a slight contour modification, basically pushing off the topsoil, doing a cut and fill then replacing the topsoil. Before he replaced the topsoil, he pointed out some patches of a purple coloured, soft chalky rock that had been exposed. He told me it was rich in minerals and that bananas did really well with it. Turned out he was right. I planted Lady Fingers on that area and they did really well considering the shallow topsoil depth. I fed a lot of flying foxes and bush turkeys on those bananas. The flying foxes weren't too bad; they wouldn't rip the bags apart and would just eat the end bananas on the bunch that they could reach at the bag openings. The turkeys would fly up onto the bags, rip the bags open and peck bits out of every banana on the bunch. They wouldn't eat complete bananas, just destroy the whole bunch by partially eating every single banana.

These are some of the most infuriating "progressive developments" of our time...... 1. Intrusive and annoying ads or pop-ups, that pop up ceaselessly, when you're trying to read an article on a news feed website. I click the site off, I don't need that kind of constant crap. 2. Indians on help desks, who speak English with an accent that sounds like they're speaking with a mouthful of thick custard. Why do businesses do this? Everyone I speak to, has the same complaint. 3. The pop-ups that Willie speak of - the ones that carry on about how Joe Bloggs from Outer Dumbsville has purchased a gimmicky product. Who cares? I don't, and I don't need the annoying distraction. 4. "Help desks" that are no help at all. They provide FAQ's that never answer your question. Then, when you're asked if you want to speak about a problem, you're handed over to a chatbot. If you get to the point where the chatbot actually hands you over to a real person, you get a recorded message saying you're 4th in the queue, and the wait time to speak to the "help" person is 13 minutes. 5. The sites with pre-programmed forms to fill in that refuse to recognise legit records. Every time I change my phone plan, I go through the ID quizzing, and the forms refuse to recognise my MDL, saying "there's a problem" with that type of ID. I don't have any way of getting around this "problem" unless I try a different form of ID, usually my passport, which is then accepted. But if I go into my Telstra store, talk to a real person in the form of a Telstra employee, and present my MDL - their system accepts it, as he/she types in the details, no problem at all. 6. The websites that refuse to give you the freight cost of an item, until you've put the item in your cart, filled in all your personal and shipping details, and gone through to the "payment" page. I fill in a lot of gobbledegook, such [email protected] for email address, and some spurious basic address such as 1 xxx st. - with a correct postcode, of course. I'm starting to simply avoid these sites, and look for ones that show freight charges upfront.

The minerals and elements in the soil definitely affect the taste of the fruit or nuts. In my neck of the woods, the gravelly ironstone soils of the Darling Range produce superb-tasting citrus and stonefruits. Your Pacific Ocean-facing slopes are possibly mineral deficient, after millions of years of increased rainfall causing soil leaching, as compared to the lower rainfall, Western slopes of the GDR. The water in the Perth Hills is highly mineralised, with dams having a blue water colour, due to the mineralised water. The minerals are generally calcium, magnesium and silica, and they are leached out of the weathered granite and dolerite rocks, the pipe clays (kaolin) and the lateritic (ironstone) gravels, that are the common rocks and soils of the Perth Hills. This water is used to irrigate the orchards and provides additional beneficial minerals to the fruit and nut trees. "Cracker dust" (fine dust from dolerite or granitic rock crushing for roads and ballast) is often used as a fertilising agent, which dust acts as a slow-release provider of calcium, magnesium, silica, and other beneficial minerals to plants, as it breaks down over time. Elsewhere in W.A. where "light" sandy and sandy gravel soils proliferate, there is a need to apply trace elements to enable the plants to take up the nutrients in the soil. Failure to apply trace elements means poor crops and trees, and plants that struggle to thrive - even if you have applied other fertilisers such as nitrogen, phosphate or sulphate fertilisers. The primary trace elements needed are copper, zinc, manganese, and molybdenum. As indicated, only "trace levels" are needed in the application, but the results are impressive when carried out. For many decades, "light" sandy soils were regarded as useless in W.A., especially for grain cropping, until an ag researcher at the UWA in the early 1930's, found that trace elements were needed on the sandy soils to enable the plants to uptake the nutrients in the soils. Once this was done on a broadacre farming scale, the yields of wheat, barley, and oats multiplied enormously, and large areas of light land were then cleared for agricultural use. Trace element application is generally only needed every 5-10 years, it is a long-lasting soil beneficiation treatment.

This is pretty appropriate news...... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-12/kpmg-contracts-with-federal-government-650-million-dollars/106789994

Sugar increases More with ripened fruit where there's more sunshine. Early picked crops are More Acid (Sour) Passionfruit are a good example. . Soils can affect taste but I've Never heard of it related to soil acidity. Alkaline soils are easier to farm. Extremes of Ph make some nutrients unavailable to the Plant and soils may be Nutrient deficient in some areas requiring correction. IF you keep taking stuff out you have to replace it or your yield and quality will suffer. Nev

Your mate Trump is what you are describing there. GON. He's a VAIN dictator. who only listens to those who agree with him. Albanese is chosen as Leader by the Party as in all parties here. He governs with the support of his Ministers working together as a team. You are really raving and exaggerating. Votes get people elected here. Not Money and Power. let's hope it stays this way. That's democracy. Now let's get a truthful Media and we will be doing well.. Presently OUR Media is one of the Biggest Monopolies in the World.. Nev

The difference to what I wrote is that the transaction tax would not be able to be offset by firms on the tax paid by them by them on their inputs. What happens today is that if I am BAS registered, I charge GST on my accounts receivable invoices (output). However, I am also paying GST to BAS registered suppliers on my accounts payable invoices from the supplies I buy. These are the inputs. At BAS statement and GST payment time (commonly quarterly, but sometimes monthly and on low revenue companies, can be annually), I deduct the value of GST I paid on inputs/to my suppliers from the GST I collected on my outputs and remit only the difference to the ATO. Also there are many GST free items - mostly around staples health, school fees, and domestic rent, etc. Unlike the UK, where a firm can charge VAT (same as GST) on its products and not all input taxes are reclaimable - e.g. VAT on vehicles, Australia permits all of the input taxes to be claimable for such companies. The offset tax model is open to abuse, because once you allow the tax to be offset, people will find ways of doing it (as opposed to avoiding it altogether as in the case of the black market). The most common way is to route as many private purchases through the company as you can. Pre GST, there was a wholesale sales tax and if a company had a VS number, they could claim it to the supplier, who would not charge the tax. The family of a school friend of mine back in the day bought as much as they could through the company quoting their VS number to get stuff cheaper. I am sure that continues today across the board. There is also invoice fixing and all sorts of stuff. If you get rid of the ability to offset or deduct- and apply it to transactions across the board, it will work better. The thing you have to worry about is the shift to the black market. All those resources dedicated to investigating taxation compliance can be shifted to a simpler function of investigating black market activity. Andf, I don't think it will be much more than it is today - well at least in the UK, where VAT is 20%. How many people, ahem, already slip their tradespeople cash because the VAT/GST Man doesn't need to know everything? I don't because of the money involved in my reno (still going) is such that should a dispute be required to go to court, not paying VAT makes the contract illegal, which is then unenforceable. Also, a transaction tax that replaces all other taxes would have very few exemptions - as I mentioned earlier it could be exports, possibly rent and of course mortgage payments. The tax on investing I would argue would be on the brokerage and other fees as most assets are already second hand (i.e. shares). As I said earlier, a non deductible income tax for the wealthy to distribute to the less wealthy to offset the regressive nature could be used - and the tax would be nominal - nothing like today's income taxes.

I always thought there was just bunya nuts, but have since found out there's bunya nuts and there's bunya nuts. This year was a bumber season for the nuts in S.E. Queensland with trees bearing well above average crops. A mate of mine lives up on the Darling Downs and recently bought some nuts down from his area that he'd collected. They were noticeably much sweeter than the nuts from my area, and you would think they'd had sugar added to the water, but they hadn't, only salt added. There's a difference in climate that might be part of the equation, but we also have much more acidic soil down here. Where he comes from a lot of the soil is naturally alkaline. I'm wondering whether that's a factor in the taste difference.

It would be good if some websites could make the chatbot less intrusive. I guess it depends on your particular device or OS, but on mine the chatbot pop-ups tends to cover content. A bit similar to those retail sites that have continual annoying pop-ups covering content and being an eye distraction just to tell you someone else has just bought something. The problem with it is that if you turn javascript off, the rest of the site loses function.

Rock around the clock tonight.