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If you have solar, smart meters are essential as standard meters are unable to deal with feed in tariffs. I am a VPP (virtual power plant) & buy sell electricity on the wholesale market. My monthly average buy price at the moment is 18.3 cents/kWh & my average FIT is 20.3c/kWh. I have a 18.64kWh battery & sell power to the grid usually from 5pm to 7pm when the price is high. This is all managed by my system provider as the spot price is checked every 5 minutes and my system is told what to do. It even curtails my solar production when the battery is full and the spot FIT goes negative so I do not pay for exporting to the grid.

This is the age of modernist glaring white cabinets and tiles for every modern home. Imagine my surprise to stay at a recently renovated caravan park that is furnished in rustic federation shearer's quarters decor! Our mate OME has started a trend!

I have just passed 50,000km in my 2023 MG4 Essence 64. Maintenance so far nil except new windscreen after it was hit with a stone. Faults, drivers window stopped working & electric motor under tray bulging. Both fixed under warranty. Service, one at 40,000 km. Just required checks to all components & new pollen filter. Tyres still have 10-15,000 km tread left. Cost to run about $150.00 spent at fast chargers when on long trips. At home charged from solar exclusively from a 32 Amp charger purchased at the same time as the car. That cost $530.00 but energy cost zero. I reckon I have saved between $8-10,000.00 over an equivalent petrol vehicle.

That is her problem. She is a Trump Yes woman, though everyone who works for him has to be that or they are fired. Getting out before that happens is pretty rare. Anyone with a conscience wouldn't work for the orange man but her salary would have been better than she would ever get anywhere else I imagine, plus of course being in the limelight is something very attractive to some people.

She was/is exceptionally good at her job of defending the indefensible and attacking the press. You have to admire her talent and confidence. She's only 28.

Great development if it works.

Chinese startup Windrose was only founded in 2022 and planned to compete with the Tesla Semi but like most other Chines EV technologies has already surpassed Tesla. Their latest Generation 2 offering has a 700km range fully loaded & the next Gen 3 model will have a 1000 km range due out in 2028. They have their HQ in Antwerp & plan to sell worldwide. https://www.windrose.ai/ In China though heavy Electric trucks have just surpassed Diesel in sales. There are over 500,000 heavy electric trucks on Chinese roads already.

Takes a grubby type to destroy the only worldly possessions of people with nothing.

Trump goes to his doctor and takes off his hat to reveal a huge toad on the top of his head. “When did you notice that?” asked the doctor. And the toad answers: “It began as a boil on my ass.”

Nowadays I am forced to use the only tool that reduces that pain. It's called a debit card.

Purtting the intent aside, are those particular words racist? Just on the wording alone, I'd call them nationalistic as only the country was mentioned, not the person's race or religion. As an example, if an anglo saxon descent Australian person told a Pom of anglo saxon descent to piss off back to England, is that rascist even tough both parties are of the same race. Intent can differ, but the wording is the same in both cases. I always thought rascism was bias against someone because of their race, not nationality. If you are white and told two South Africans to piss off back to South Africa and one is black and one is white, is it racism in both cases, only in one case or in none?

Maybe not only an EV issue.....

People who worry that Covid Vaccine might change their genetic make-up, should welcome that possibility.

Which is why neighbourhood batteries and a more distributed grid in general makes sense. Keep generation, storage and usage close where possible.

You have to hand it to short people..... They can't reach it themselves.

Some people don't get what a will is........ I mean, come on, it's a dead giveaway.

This is you being quick?

In spite of all the stuff going on so far, It's gone beyond just a case of 'What has tRump done now?'.... Quoted from Pearls & Wisdom: "a group of 36 senior neurologists, forensic psychiatrists, general psychiatrists and mental health professionals experienced in the diagnosis of cognitive disorders and evaluation of dangerousness, who had signed an earlier statement in 2024, issued an update on 30 April of this year. They cited examples of Trump’s “marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganised and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during crucial public proceeding. Grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility…claims that his decision-making authority is unlimited – with no need to consider domestic and international laws and constrained only by his ‘own morality’. Severely impaired judgment and impulse control…Significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications – e.g., 150 social media posts in one night.” They conclude: “it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the President of the United States, and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency”. And this bloke has 24/7/365 access to instantly start launching numerous preplanned nuclear ATTACKS. https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/07/for-president-trump-starting-nuclear-war-as-easy-as-sending-a-tweet/

Why are we surprised? Trump admires dictators and despots. He has stripped the top level of administration of anyone with knowledge and brains, and replaced them with yes-men. The only required attribute is loyalty (and tribute). He has openly said that the American public won't have to vote again, and is actively dismantling democracy. He has used his position to gain him and his equally disgusting family billions - the most corrupt public figure, let alone president, ever. He supports and enables the worst white supremacists in the country, allows and encourages political violence when it's against his adversaries, and is racist himself. And we're surprised when something like this happens?

It's a bit cool here in Nyngan. We are camped by the river, enjoying a glass of red whilst dinner simmers on our little fire pot. Life's good.

So when my son and partner picked us up from the airport they were planning to go to their sea shanty at the pub club. They asked if we would like to come? We had a brilliant time drinking beer and singing shanties. Many obscure shanties. They also make up the verses for the crowd to join in at the chorus. They have written shanties about public transport and current political issues. The crowd varies in age from 10 to very old. Most people seem to be in their 20s or 30s They sang this shanty bellow in honour token Australian. We had an absolute ball and intend to find a club like this near us.

You do seem to have range anxiety and that is normal for most people entering the full BEV sphere. When you have 48% of battery capacity left there is absolutely no need for concern. You can stop at any supercharger & just take as much as you need to get to your destination. I was getting low when coming back from Noosa to home near Yamba. Distance was about 100km & range 95km. I could have slowed down & made it but I stopped at a Tesla Supercharger & got 5 or 6 minutes at 130-140kW which was easily enough to get home at 110kmh & then some to run around town the next day. The last 20% of battery capacity takes almost as long as from 10% to 80% & it is considered bad form by most of us EV drivers to charge beyond 80% especially if someone is waiting. Planning long trips is something we all do as the charging infrastructure is still in its infancy. Back in the early 1900s there weren't many petrol stations & initially you had to buy it in cans from a Chemist. EV public charging is getting better all the time. Range anxiety no longer exists in China as they have the infrastructure in place already. I often plan a stop after about 2-3 hours driving and at a fast charger (50-80 kW) at a shopping centre. These are much cheaper than a Supercharger but slower. I then have a bite to eat, use the toilet etc & when I get back after 20 minutes to 1/2 an hour or so the car is back up to about 80% & I carry on. In my old ICE car I did the same but usually did not need to fill up if I left home with a full tank. I still had to fill up at my destination anyway. A lot of hotels & motels have "Destination Chargers". These are slow chargers like the wall charger I have at home. Some have type 2 cables but some don't so having your own is handy. You can charge the car over night and often it is free. The 3 pin charger that comes with the car is called a Granny charger & in Australia is limited to 8 amps. The maximum size portable chargers are 15 Amps & have a 15 amp plug. You can get a 32 Amp socket installed by your electrician but is will require a 6mm supply cable & you will need a 32 amp 7.4 kW charger. It is better to install a 7.4kW wall charger as it has all sorts of functions allowing you to choose to charge from solar or at off peak etc. My MG 4 is now 3 years old & has a maximum of 140 kW charging capacity. At a 350 kW charger I get at least 120 kW up to about 80% full. The problem generally doesn't lie with the car but with the grid supply to the supercharger. Most don't have a supply anywhere near as big as the cars capacity to charge and have a relatively small storage capacity which will be used quite quickly especially if there are several chargers & they are all being used at once. Note in China they now have 1.5 megawatt chargers for use with EVs having 1000 volt architecture. These can charge the EV from 10% to 80% in 5 minutes. The whole issue with having various apps & cards is a pain. Why they can't just all accept a credit card is ridiculous. I do have an RFID card for a couple of charging outfits & that is simple but it still charges to my credit card anyway. The best one is a company here called Evie & once the car is registered with the company I just plug in & it charges without any other requirements. When finished my credit card is charged & I get a notification & receipt on my phone. Way simpler than getting petrol. With no engine noise and effortless power & full torque from zero rpm your stress levels are definitely lower on a long trip. The RWD on the MG & 50/50 weight distribution provides superb handling & booting it out of a corner is magic. No other hot ICE car can compare. I am sure the Beamer is the same, most likely better. I hate driving the wifes ICE car and especially hate going in to a stinky petrol station.

One positive about nomadding during the off season.... we are not paying tourist season prices. And the caravan parks are not crowded. We got a couple of nights in a nice (warm n dry) cabin at Mt Gambier - for $55 a night.

This was the head office of the Commercial Bank of Australia Ltd. It is where I attended my recruiting interview in 1961. I got hired, and after 6 months in a suburban branch, I was transferred there to a department on the 2nd floor. I worked in that office for about 6 months before being transferred back to suburban branches. 50 odd years later, long after the bank no longer existed, (it had become part of Westpac), I worked for another company that moved into the building, and that is where I retired from in 2010. https://www.facebook.com/reel/2888786451478072

So does your car. Perhaps you should stop driving it.

--- FAMINE --- I feel that there are multiple food chain problems unfolding at present. Since they unfold in slow motion, the media seem to ignore it. 1. The Iranian (don't call it a) war is reducing available fertiliser and fuel. 2. The Ukraine invasion is causing a shortage of grain. 3. The changing weather cycles (don't call it climate change) are making for less predictable cropping (except for West Aust recent big crops). 4. The biggest El Nino event in centuries may mess up the american harvests. And maybe ours, too. 5. Australia has lost 70% of it's bird species. Biodiversity is vital to food chains. 6. The veroa mite (pestilence, anyone?) is damaging every food that needs pollinators. 7. The H5n1 bird flu has reached our shores. Among other things it has potential to interrupt Australia's most popular protein source - chooks. There must be other things that are being ignored. Am I being too paranoid?

The BS in the ME has been the biggest shot in the arm for EV ever, No one wants to be Hung out to dry by people who hate each other's guts intensely and show no concern for how the rest of the World copes with the shortage. We don't import sun wind and tides and hydro.. It comes free and doesn't pollute and no country can block it unless it's a river from someplace, that gets Dammed and used up upstream.

Is he a Stand up Comedian? Nev

That's absolute rubbish. The ABC is far less biased than any other news service in Australia. It's widely recognised that Sky News or whatever they call themselves now are among the most biased. So surely Hanson refused entry to them too? The reason Hanson doesn't want the ABC around is because they ask difficult questions. Guess what? That's their job. They do it to all sides of politics. And as a politician, if you haven't got answers to difficult questions, then what are you doing there? As a reporter said this morning, it's dangerous for democracy when politicians exclude segments of the media from their announcements. Look how many criminal investigations leading to charges have been initiated by investigative journalism, especially by the ABC. Without proper media scrutiny, corruption flourishes.

I am humbled to be graced by the presence of so many Grande Masters! I bow to your superior grandiosity

OME, give Jerry his keyboard back.

Speak for yourself. The other senator is just as much an Australian as Hanson and has a right to her opinion. While her comment was a bit bolshie, that's because she's a Greens senator and probably nothing to do with her country of origin. And if you think about her words they are 100% correct, and also stand up for the original Australians. Pauline responded in your classical racist manner and deserves to lose. Maybe she should give up HER well paid position, her overseas holidays, clothes, plane and food all paid for by a billionaire buying influence, and piss off back to Ipswich.

So the Iran invasion achieved its purpose.

Jerry? Is that you?

He means a BUBALUS (Latin for gazelle)

Can we have some video of OME leaping like a gazelle?

Here's a literary gripe. I'm reading, and enjoying, a series of fiction books set in modern Edinburgh about the lives of people living in a small, middle class area of the city. The writing is good and make for good bedtime reading. However my gripe concerns the practice of the author to have his characters include either Latin or foreign phrases in their speches. Sometimes I know the phrase, but very often I have no idea. Of course, since the characters are Scots and the setting is Scotland, some of those unique Gaelic words sometime appear, but that is what is called "atmosphere'. What gripes me is that these phrases cause me to stumble, losing the otherwise free flow of the writing. I have to pause and wonder if my interpretation of the phrase makes sense. Frotunately, the words are printed in Bold, so I can see them coming and can decisde whether to pause at them, or ignore them and leap over them like a gazelle.

To appreciate The Goodies one had to have been exposed to English humour. The show involving pizza and hot dogs suggests to me that it was American, and we all know that American humour is not as intelligent as that of the British. The British made excellent children's programmes. Did anyone ever watch Worzel Gummage starring Jon Pertwee and Una Stubbs? Pertwee was, of course the third Dr Who.

No one I know Mentioned it. Men's shed tomorrow. I'll ask there. They did something like this over 20 years ago. I was randomly selected to be on the group in the MT Macedon area that formulated various aspects of it. The idea has Merit.. I support the idea of doing such things. It's acting responsibly. Nev.

Canola time was always a pretty time to fly.

I don't have a lot of time, so. I will try to be quick (given I have only skimmed the posts since OME asked the question). The algorithm is not predictive in the sense of predicting the future. The predict what you meant by what you typed, and whether or not their response will make sense. For example, if you asked how many legs a dog normally has, it will predict that 4 is the correct answer; not that my some genetic mutation caused by increasing radiation in the atmosphere, they will grow 5 legs in the future. Well, not unless you ask it, anyway. But even if you did, it would use existing data to try and predict the correct answer based on the data it has, not to perform its own scientific analysis and determine for itself. It may take the factors and apply it to an existing theory to mimic scientific analysis and intelligent conclusion drawing, but it is not doing that itself. In terms of AI implementation, it is likely to be a lower level language such as C or C++ = not python because it is too slow; the end point AI functions can be done in Python, but that is on a precomputed large dataset - usually. The algorithm will be surprising small.. usual Bayes theorem or something similar. It is able to be repeated over billions of nodes - or data points. The code will likely be recursive in building the precomputed data set to apply simpler probability maps across the data you provide. And it will likely be recursive in using that map to answer your question. By recursion we mean the same code calls itself.. So, you will be able to crawl heterogenous data sets, over and over using the same code developing deep nested stacks (well, heaps to be accurate) of responses from which it will map as many of the different types of data that can be used to probably represent what ever bit of data it actually is. Tagging data is old these days.. That is what these maps do. This of something like if you type the number 4 into your LLM. That is easy, because it is represented by whatever coding mechanism you are using... and there are only a handful of coding mechanisms - ASCII, EBCDIC (not used anymore) UTF-8, UTF-16 and a few others. But, they are translated to the discrete representation of 4 to AI. No thinking required. Now, say you provide it a scanned doc, which contains the number 4 somewhere. It has to read all of the pixels and look at the shape of each character to determine if it is a letter, number, whitespace, part of a diagram, etc. Say it worked out it was a digit. Now it was to work out what digit it is? It has to look through its maps/nodes and get the most likely digit it is.. it predicts what digit is is because it spits out a probability index of what it has been taught what that digit could possibly be, across any digit which it may match. Is it a 4, or is it a H.. It also has to take into account font. As you know, a 4 can be represented very differently in different fonts... So, the sort answer to your question is that there will be a set of probability algorithms that will read data, build probability maps, and then apply the same probability algorithms to inputs and compare to what it has learned. Machine learning means it constantly refines its probability maps. The technical implementation is likely to to be a lower level language (a lot of Python maths/stats libraries are written in C++).. and there will be a lot of recursion.

A husband walks into Victoria’s Secret to buy his wife a sheer nightgown. The clerk shows him several options ranging from $250 to $500 - the more sheer, the higher the price. He picks the sheerest one for $500 and heads home. He gives it to his wife and asks her to go upstairs, try it on, and model it for him. Upstairs, his wife thinks, "It's so sheer it might as well be nothing! I'll just model naked, return it tomorrow, and keep the $500 refund for myself." She appears naked on the balcony and strikes a pose. The husband looks up and says, "Good grief! For $500, you'd think they'd at least iron it!" He didn't see the punch coming and should be able to see out of at least one eye by the weekend.

How do you writ up the insurance claim?

I knew I liked De Havillands for.some reason

No point posting them here then, Nev.

The first thing they'd do is start sending friendly emails to random blokes......

The Trump administration has just instructed the FBI not to investigate any incidents involving ICE anymore, saying that ICE will do that themselves. That’s not going to work out well. ICE is becoming Trump’s racist paramilitary wing like Hitler’s brownshirts.

Some guys formed a band they called 999 megabytes. Still haven't got a gig.