Leaderboard

I suppose that will make it a cruise missile?

Yes one must have a benchmark. Nev

No, he was the president in between the two worst presidents ever.

I see lots of comments on Facebook from people who believe that Trump will save them from the financial problems they are facing, in other words, they voted through their pockets. Unfortunately for the Dems, a number of worldwide circumstances (Covid, Middle East wars, etc.), have caused inflation, and they are blaming the Dems for these effects. I think, when they realise that Trumps policies will increase these problems, not reduce them as he promised, those who jumped ship may change their mind at the midterms. Trump cannot be removed at the midterms, but he may lose control of the House, and possibly even the senate, which will tie his hands. I doubt they would use the 25th Amendment to get rid of him, as that would put Vance in charge. From Wikipedia: Midterm elections historically generate lower voter turnout than presidential elections. While the latter have had turnouts of about 50–60% over the past 60 years, only about 40% of those eligible to vote go to the polls in midterm elections. Historically, midterm elections often see the president's party lose seats in Congress, and also frequently see the president's opposite-party opponents gain control of one or both houses of Congress.

If I'm driving at night and there's no traffic and clear sight lines, on the straight stretches I drive in the middle of the road. Simple reason being it's the furthest point away from wallabies on both sides so more of a chance to avoid them if they decide to get suicidal.

Try it! It'll stop you rolling out of bed.

Maybe so but that still leaves the "Personality".. Nev

So. You'd deforest the whole place?

A lot of people voted for Trump because that’s who they wanted. Many others voted for him because they wanted to send a message to the Democrats that they blamed them for the cost of living increases. Kamala did well to get as many votes as she did. The Trump voters may come to regret their choice when they see what a career criminal in the White House can do when he’s immune from prosecution and free to trash their country and the rest of the world.

It is with great sadness that I have to mention the loss of a few local businesses as a result of political mismanagement. A local bra manufacturer has gone bust, a submarine company has gone under, a manufacturer of food blenders has gone into liquidation, a dog kennel has had to call in the retrievers and a company supplying paper for origami enthusiasts has folded. Draino has gone down the drain. The saddest one though is the ice cream van man found dead covered in nuts and raspberry sauce. He couldn't take it anymore and topped himself..

I have two grandsons 12 and 13. I was discussing this very topic with my son and daughter-in-law last night. What I learned from that conversation was that we have to look at the use of social media through the eyes of our youngsters, not our eyes. What is needed is not the banning of social media platforms, but acknowledgement that our kids live in a digital age and social media platforms are part and parcel of that age. Quite simply we have to do what our parents did for us and what we did for our kids: help them identify Right and Wrong and empower them to have the strength of character to tell those of their associates who are doing the Wrong thing to cut it out. My son gave me some examples involving one of my grandson, and he either came to them for advice when he was the subject, or for advice on how to handle a situation when it was a friend of his who was the target. I was amazed that this grandson sought advice, because he's not a goody-two-shoes, just an average kid. It is said that a big problem with pre-teens and young teens these days is that they have been mollycoddled and have not been allowed engage in low level risky behaviour to learn how to handle pain, disappointment etc. Most of us experienced the cuts and bruises from play accidents. What didn't kill us, strengthened us. Today's kids get their cuts and bruises from a type of play we cannot fully comprehend, but they still get them. Our job is to be there to apply Band-Aids as necessary to wounded psyches. So, "NO!" to banning kids from social media. Say "YES!" to providing advice and guidance in handling. And like a lot of stuff, the Media has latched on to a topic and blown it way out of proportion. According to my son's oversight of the boys' online activities, he suggests that the bad stuff is overwhelmed by the dumb stuff, with a bit of normal interactions making up the rest.

A seemingly simple question, but one whose answer is incredibly complex. I think that Jerry has hit the nail on the head when he mentions "situational awareness", and consideration for others, which one could label as "courtesy". A practical definition of "speeding" has to include a reference to the environment in which a vehicle is moving. The speed limit in a carpark, or service station forecourt is the same as that applying to the adjacent road. However, 10 - 15 kph in a carpark can be taken to be a dangerous speed (toddlers running away; vehicles reversing out of parking spots). A speed of 118 on a freeway with a speed limit of 110 is much less dangerous to others. I believe that 100 kph is the correct limit for the open road, simply because it allows for good fuel consumption in most vehicles, as well as allowing for estimating arrival times at the next town. In urban areas, the frequent changes in speed limits is very distracting, especially if those changes are only of 10 kph. I'll accept 40 kph around schools and 50 kph in residential areas, then 60 and 80 on feeder and arterials. However I abhor 70 and 90 kph zones. As for a relentless policing of absolute adherence to speed limits, my opinion is that more acceptance of "herd mentality" should be made. What I mean by "herd mentality" is that when a platoon of vehicles is travelling along a road, the majority of drivers will travel at a speed which the consensus decides is "safe". That speed may be five to ten kph above the posted speed limit. It is the driver who tries to pass through the platoon and get further ahead who should be dealt with. The greatest danger to others on our roads currently is intoxication as a result of substance abuse. Drugs, both legal and illegal are present in more people now than in the past. One result of RBT has been reducing the number of persons driving with blood alcohol concentrations above 0.180 grams of alcohol per 100 ml of blood (High Range PCA). There are still people driving drunk, but not as drunk as people were before RBT. I repeat what I said in an earlier post - we need to recognise that operating a motor vehicle on a public road is as much a life skill to be introduced into the high school curriculum as being safe online, or dealing with interpersonal violence. Therefore, I say that driver education should be included as a part of the Physical, Health Education curriculum, even if that education only deals with the theory of motor vehicle operation.

I just had a random thought on Monday evening as I was returning from the Wheatbelt to the City, and driving South down the Tonkin Highway past Ellenbrook, looking at a huge golden sun setting. As I watched the sun sink, I counted up and realised 27,588 sunsets have gone down, since the day I first drew breath. That's a lot of sunsets. I've missed a fair few of them, for various reasons, but I've also seen some pearlers. This is one I took a photo of, in July 2019 - on the coast at Gnaraloo Station in W.A.

It was a turbine turning tool manufactured from nylon, especially designed to not cause engine component damage. The maintenance failure was simply one of slack accountability for tools. The advice to leave the tool in the engine intake for the incoming shift was totally wrong, and interfered with tool accountability, which should be paramount at all times. The tool was entrusted to one LAME, and it should've been returned to the tool-issuing dept at the end of the LAME's shift, even if it was immediately required again by the incoming shift. https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/15/tool_found_in_a380_engine/

My average power use is 7 kWh per day. This is for a 2 person household with only electricity. Solar panels provide around 50kWh a day at present & most of that is exported. In July the figure is 28-30 kWh/day. Of course it is less on cloudy days. Since February I have produced 9.3 megawatts. I have done just on 20,000km in my EV and other than the 6 long trips I have done of about 2600km all the power has come from solar and my 2 hours of free power per day & most of that is my own solar anyway. My last power bill was a $30.00 credit. The car battery stores 64 kWh so in theory I could run the house for 9 days off the car battery. Duttons devotees ignore this but most people with solar on their rooftops know these are real benefits. The Rondo system and numerous other storage systems like molten salt superheated by the sun & stored for later release are way cheaper and simpler with no radio active issues and don't take years to build.

Politicians especially the conservative lot are always talking of base load power. Energy experts say this is an invalid term and relates to coal fired power that is unable to change with demand and operates in the very small window from full on to flat out. Nuclear generation falls in to this same category. The term that is relevant is peak demand and the ability to address this as it happens at any time. This is where batteries come in to play as does Gas and (if we ever get any) pumped hydro. Batteries react almost instantly with Gas and pumped hydro a little behind. Renewables especially solar provide huge amounts of electricity on sunny days and when it is hot everyone uses air conditioning. The biggest cause for alarm is on hot sunny days when brown outs are likely due to demand. Dutton & Co are always on about what about when the sun don't shine & the wind don't blow. Simply it is the ability to store energy. Coal & nuclear won't do this and have never done this. It is just that there has been more being produced than we can use. We need a lot more storage capacity. At times there is more energy being produced from rooftop solar than required on the Eastern Seaboard. South Australia regularly exports excess wind and solar energy to Victoria & NSW. There are lots of battery projects on the way & these will have the capability of reacting to peak demand. 7 nuclear plants won't & they are supposed to use the existing supply infrastructure but Duttons mob have forgotten that this infrastructure has mostly already been repurposed. The rollout of renewable projects should be full on but it is thwarted by red tape, NIMBYs and basic ignorance.

IF you are Full of it, there are more ways to die. Nev

FUN FACT: Humans are deemed to be deuterostomes, which term means that when the foetus develops in the womb, the anus forms before the mouth, or any other orifice. This basically means that at the earliest part of your development, you were nothing but an arsehole. Unfortunately, some people never develop beyond this stage.

Got it! They are clickbait.

Tick tick tick tick. Vee Haff Vays of making you tok. Nev

Did you know.... I thought that Friday was named after the Norse Goddess 'Freya' (or Freja). She was the goddess of fertility, love, and war. Not so. Friday was named after a different goddess: 'Frigg'. 'The English weekday name Friday (ultimately meaning 'Frigg's Day') bears her name. After Christianization, the mention of Frigg continued to occur.....' And after that, frigging mostly occurred on weekends.

The problem nowadays is that we don't get reporting of events, we get opinions, and if you own the media that the opinion is broadcast on, you can block out differing opinions.

Back to topic. YouTube is flooded at the moment with videos announcing Trump's latest announcement, or videos explaining how many of his MAGA-directed promises will adversely affect both Americans at home and US diplomatic relations around the world. If we started posting links to all those videos, and to other media items, this thread would soon be running into the thousands of posts, and that's without any of us commenting on individual posts. At least we can say that the owners of YouTube must be making a motza from all this Trump-related stuff.

They reckon it hurts when you get picked up by the fuzz. Nev

I've had geckos living in the house almost since I built it in 1996. They live around 7 years so this lot would be the fourth generation living here. Someone told me the house geckos are the introduced Asian gecko, but I was always a bit dubious about that. A couple of nights ago I decided to google geckos and it turns out mine are dubious after all - they are natives called dubious dtella. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubious_dtella

If anyone is in Sydney and looking for an interesting outing I highly recommend a visit to the Australia Museum to see this exibit. The workmanship of the gold and silver items on display is amazing, especially when you consider the type of tools they had back in the inca times. Knowing what some of the items were used for and getting to see them up so close is a bit unnerving. The whole display is well done and gives a lot of information in a format that is not hard to digest.

Gravity is making me fat . Turn it down a bit so the trees can grow higher . Along with me . LoL spacesailor

Quick scan of the lead stories in 2 news sites right now. ABC: Serious news about world affairs, the economy, court cases, scams, etc. News.com.au: gang rapist whinging about prison life, society fluff (Beckhams vs Meghan), Australians "frothing" over flattering summer dress, some other celebrity "wows in revealing see-through dress". (Just in case you weren't aware that see through was revealing.) And you want to defund the ABC.

Well, Jacquie Lambie has admitted on radio that there's a lot of old growth in her patch.

Genitalia are better to work with than Gaze at. Nev

Bring back those old maps of Australia that didn't show Tassie at all.

This one should be in wish list for Santa, but we don't have that yet.

Let's play the ball and not the man.. With all due respect, Nev proffers up an opinion based on reported facts. Because he doesn't blindly accept what he reads and points out why, based on other reported facts which are omitted from the general news on this provides a fuller picture.. this is a positive IMHO.

Whenever I see "Epshteyn" I think they're trying to say Jeffrey Epstein, but are too pissed.

Here's an idea that could settle or create a few arguments. Come 20th. January, what say we start a Trump ledger thread to note over the next four years of his presidency the good achievements against the bad. And then count them up in 2028. By bad I don't mean if he's p*ssed someone off or said something stupid (otherwise the site could run out of bandwidth and there's other threads for that anyway) but just policy introduced, law changes, presidential decrees and vetos etc.. In 2028 he'll either be in the black or in the red.

And his bank accounts, his office desk drawers, his waste paper basket, his Mar a Lago store rooms and his back pocket.

I wish him well too for the sake of the US population and the rest of the world, but I'll be surprised if this experiment ends well for anyone, including Trump.

You have to determine the number of dyed-in-the-wool supporters for each Party. They are the people who would never change sides. Each party can rely on those votes without having to do much to gain them. Then you have the voters who have considered the merits of each Party's platform and vote based on the results of that. I doubt if the numbers of those are great enough to have a great impact on the result. Finally there are the swinging voters who respond to the sales pitch. These are the ones who provide the numbers to determine the result. In gathering those swinging voters, it is pretty clear that while Harris's campaign was formulated by people experienced in running a government, Trump's was created by experts in advertising psychology. The swinging voters were won over with 'bread and circuses', but never were asked to investigate where the flour and entertainers were coming from. The presenter of this video points out the self-centeredness of a lot of people which biased them towards the "them versus us" theme of a lot of Trump's advertising. Bear with the Southern accent.

When it comes to trying to reason "WHY", I find myself agreeing to everyone's comments. I'm sure they all apply to some extent at least. I am looking for a major factor that would have appealed to the majority of voters. The 77 million that Marty mentioned. I suspect the common cord that DJT struck was the almost universal distrust that everyone shares for the faceless bureaucracy that regulates everybody. Hollywood has been promoting this for ever. Anecdotes abound. Sure there are bureaucratic Departments that need reinventing. Top heavy departments can hold back the country. But Nobody gets up and says what a good job a good bureaucracy did about something. Nobody says how bad things get when we don't have regulation. Along comes DJT running rough shod over 'official process'. Drain the swamp! Throw out the rules! Hurrah! Average punters do know he is erratic but overlook that because just maybe he might make changes - the Dems only offered 'more of the same-old'.

The point is, blaming someone ie: the American voters is a coping mechanism that helps everyone get over the shock of his win but doesn't address the reasons that he won and certainly won't prevent more Trump-like leaders being elected in the future. Trump didn't win because all his voters are stupid. Only a certain amount of his voters are the dumb rednecks portrayed in the media. We think there's a lot of them because we see them in the media all the time and at his rallies. What the media doesn't show is the tens of millions of non newsworthy people at home who went out and voted in a Republican president. Let's say Trump scored 76.9 million votes to 74.4 for Harris, beating her by 2.5 million votes in the popular vote. It doesn't work this way but just theoretically, let's say that 2.5 million were dumb devotees of Trump and they got him over the line. It still doesn't account for why the other 74 million voted the way they did. For sure we can all say Trump only won because people are stupid, but it's classic denial.

With a pro-Conservative media, little of the good, or even OK, stuff that the Government does gets reported. I think one of the good things Labor has done is to fix our relations with China that the Conservatives ruined by their lap dog pandering to the USA. At least now our Government cans say to China that we don't like something they are doing, while at the same time having good trade, cultural and educational relationships. If only the Government would have the guts to tell the USA that their policies aren't the best for promoting peaceful coexistence.

The problems associated with scammers, crooks, con-artists, online bullying, and all internet crimes, could easily be solved by ensuring that anonymity cannot be part of your online presence. The crims, bullies and scammers enjoy the anonymity of the internet, as it provides them with cover they can use, to avoid recriminations and penalties.

One of the reasons I don't post photos of my face or any identifying features, or what I'm doing, or where I live, on social media - is because it's simply giving vital information freely to criminals, anywhere in the world. Even when I give personal details to companies, Govt Depts, and other organisations - and they solemnly declare that they have the best encrypted security going, and they treat my personal details with unparalleled care - it usually all ends up in the hands of scammers, crims and con-artists. The media have a lot to answer for, stealing peoples photos off their social media, and broadcasting them globally in salacious and often untrue articles in their mastheads and subsidiaries.

It's NEWS because they Died by drinking a poison. They are just normal people who got provided something you'd normally not expect and which is being treated as a criminal act of the suppliers by Police.. Young people with a big future ahead of them. Devastating to families and friends. Nev

Electric motorbikes have been around almost as long as electric cars. The bigger ones have stunning performance with low mounted batteries providing a low CoG & superb handling.

Old people . Are the same , whenever I catch sight of my reflection . it startles me . Bloody old fart in my mirror. hateful things mirrors. LoL spacesailor