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On a positive note, yesterday's election results showed that democracy is not completely dead in the US and that the electoral system works despite huge sums of money being spent and plenty of vicious politicking. That's encouraging. Even so, a lot of the vote was a widespread vote against Trump rather than a vote for the Democrats, even by the democrats themselves. But at least now there's an opportunity to stop the ship from sinking totally. It's going to be a hard road to get things back on track and sort out the many problems, so I hope the new Congress and Senate can show a bit of leadership. They've got three months to get themselves organised, set a sensible and balanced agenda and then implement it. Hopefully the cooler heads can keep things on track and the hotheads under control. There's plenty of potential for it all to come unstuck, but at least they're off to a good start.

Closing the Southern border may have been a success but Trumps reliance on ICE which appears to be run as a total authoritarian outfit by its hierarchy has completely backfired. The only other thing he has been successful at it enriching himself and his family and lowering taxes for all of his billionaire cronies.

See! We ARE multicultural!

A couple of weeks ago there was a heat wave in NSW and due to various factors including coal generators outages due to breakdowns and maintenance, the spot price soared to over $2,000.00 a MW. As a VPP my system immediately began to sell power to the grid. It see sawed rapidly for an hour or 2 due to this occuring from numerous battery systems doing the same thing. Anyway I ended up with a credit of $65.00 over the 2 hours & my monthly bill just received is now in credit foe $70.00. This includes charging my EV once or twice a week.

Just another grasp at straws to try and discredit renewables

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.

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.

Lame duck l'orange.

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.

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

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

According to Google, at the moment, from public records, the government is currently committed to around $2bn in spend under AUKUS. Of course, this is from what information is available publicly. But, these contracts will have escape clauses just like that of the French - especially since the US and the UK are under no obligation to deliver anything.. So, yes, it is likely we will lose some as we did with cancelling the French contract.. some $3.5bn in the end.. But even if we are on the hooks for say $10bn, it is still < 3% of the total budget of the program, so I would be happy t cut that cheque to be rid of it. And yes, I still pay tax in Australia.. The last guy setting it up excuses the cost of abandoning it; it doesn't excuse the continual accrual of a white elephant of a project to Australia committing that much money to it. Remember c. $5bn is allocated to uplift US shipbuilding capacity

Aussie F1 legend Alan Jones passes away aged 80.

Which needs to be ditched. Independent review (because the government wouldn't do it) has absolutely slammed it. We need some courage from Albo and the cabinet now.

No tax on tips and overtime expire in December2028 but tax breaks for the rich don't expire. That's not good. Finding waste and fraud in government is a perennial aim of all parties but DOGE was a complete financial and moral failure. What he wanted tariffs to do was punish countries he thought were taking advantage of the USA because he didn't understand how trade worked. By nature, he's pathologically opposed to cooperation for mutual gain.

The only good thing I think Trump has done is stop uncontrolled migration across the border. Everything else has been a disaster for the country and the world.

Our OP Shop has to give an annual report to NSW Fair Trading. It has to be done online, and the required fee paid with plastic. Here's the gripe: The payment of teh fee can be done by credit card. It can also be paid using a debit card, provided it is a Visa debit card. The Op Shop banks with the only bank in town - Bendigo Bank, which is not tied in with Visa. A physical debit card works well for the shop since it can't be used for fraud by anyone associated with the shop. The payment of the annual fee to Fair Trading is the only payment that would require the use of a credit card. The annual fees for a credit card would exceed the fee to Fair Trading. So, in order to pay the fee, one of the members who has a credit card has to be with the Treasurer at the computer in the person's home ( we don't have in the shop because we don't need one) so that person's card can be used and then the Treasurer has to reimburse the person. The job gets done, but how inconvenient? The coming problem for a lot of people is that Banks will not issue personal credit cards to pensioners, but will issue debit cards. It seems that the officials at Treasury, who are in employment so can get a credit card, are not aware of this problem and blithely introduce payment systems that are impossible for amny people to use.

Here is an example of a good use for ChatGPT, and I suppose Calude and the others.

Jeez, that's a long game! 😁

Lst night I watched an astonishing light show in the clouds. Usually one gets intermittent lightning flashes, but this storm light show was just like New Year's fireworks. The storm was way off in the distance, but I did get about 12mm of rain in a couple of very heavy showers. However, this is a storm that moved over tjhe NSW Southern Highlands yesterday.

I agree with your skepicism. Sure, it's still early days. But so far the returns don't seem to be ramping up in proportion to the collective $billions being 'invested' in data centres and A.I.

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

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.

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.

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.” '

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

Amazing! This thread was started on 10th November 2024 and today should reach 190 pages of comments. That's a lot. There are still two years of Trump to go. Those two years will be very, very interesting. Following the Democrat tsunami, I think that Trump will moderate his bullying. He's in a situation now similar to the Leader of the Pack looking over his shoulder to see his Pack slinking away, leaving him standing alone, face to face with the Good Guy. The Democrats are also facing a hard battle. They really can't reverse Trump's Executive Orders until they get the Presidency themselves. Even then, the next presidential term will have to accept some of Trump's glorifying acts. The East Wing reconstruction will have to go on. Most likely the above-ground part will be modified to suit the architectural scale of the rest of the building. The below ground bit is probably a good idea, but one hopes that its uses can be mothballed under a less aggressive government.

Sad. I remember his awesome driving with Colin Bond in theyellow Ignis Alfa GTV in the touring cars. A little 2.5 litre taking it to the big V8s. Trounced everything in its class and often bettered the big boys.

It won't be easy. If you got it wrong you could lose the Lot. I'd like to see who got the Kick Backs on that one. (And the Japanese one). Nev

We still have AAA rating , which Murdochs Minions will never Mention. That affects the rate of Interest the Gov't Pays on borrowngs. The big debt was for AUKUS which Sco-Mo got us into. Nev

He said that four democrats had already called him after the election - two senators and three congressmen, and there were two more calls waiting. My guess is the actual number of calls was zero.

I heard a couple of sound bites of Trump answwering questions after the election. He seemed very subdued, not his usual bombastic self.

Google AI says they're one and the same, generally called split pins in Australia. They use AIMS Industrial Supplies as a reference. The AI also says the Brits call them split pins or split cotter pins, the Americans call them cotter pins, then it goes on to describe a true cotter pin. https://aimsindustrial.com.au/blogs/product-guides/split-pin-cotter-pin-guide

In the USA they call split pins cotter pins. Everywhere.

Cotter pins are used to hold the carnk to the crank shaft on bicycles. Generally old ones, newer are different.

The above answers are definitely some of the reason. Also, the UK debt is 96% if GDP and Australia's is around 33%. A small interest rate bump will compound UK's fiscal woes, while a small bump won't have the same marginal impact on Australia's. However, the BoE meet tomorrow and are expected to raise the rate anyway. Note, the UK and Aus inflation rate are about the same, so you can argue the UK have been kicking the can down the road. On the other hand, I am not sure in the current state of the economy, putting up interest rates is necessarily correct, either as energy inflation is probably putting the brakes on spending in other areas.

Its no different for the Dems..they also have a lot of dirty deeds to hide...they are all tarred with the same brush except some are outright dangerous in their ethos and thinking. I think Trump has done a lot of good things but he also is a narcisist and cant control himself certainly at times. He is one of those guys that wants to come into a situation then blow it up and see what happens then make his decisions. I just think the whole country over is rooted. It has way too many religous nutbags way too many gun crazed nutjobs...Its a interesting place to visit but I would certainly never want to live there. The problem is when the uSA sneezes the whole world gets a cold..this is the major concern I have. We have enough issues here with th left tards now. Our country is going down the shit chute as well. I just pity my grandkids that they didnt have a chance to grow up in the world that I did. I think we are probably too far gone now and it will take long after I am dead to even try to fix it. The problem is the younger generations do not know any bettwe with the failed education system we have now and the socialists have been pretty successfull in filtering into our society. I just hope I dont live long enough to see the Australia peso as our currency because its well on its way

Yes. You can still get solder with tin concentrations between 5% and 70% by weight. The European Union Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive and Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive were adopted in early 2003 and came into effect on July 1, 2006, restricting the inclusion of lead in most consumer electronics sold in the EU, and having a broad effect on consumer electronics sold worldwide. In the US, manufacturers may receive tax benefits by reducing the use of lead-based solder. Etymology The word solder comes from the Middle English word soudur, via Old French solduree and soulder, from the Latin solidare, meaning "to make solid".

It is ironic that discussing politics should not be a taboo activity. I will admit that one has to be very, very diplomatic when discussing the topic with a person you sense has differing views.

I've just listened to a piano piece written to be played with the left hand only. It was sinister.

That works out at 20 converted tries and one not converted. That's 4.3 minutes per scoring event. I bet it took longer to do the kick than score the try. The big game is Samoa -v- Tonga. Just starting as I write this. Let's check the score in the morning.

History repeats itself???? The Wall Street Crash of 1929 occurred from October 24 to October 29, 1929. The same week in October, ninety-eight years later, Wall Street suffered a big drop due to off-selling of stocks related to AI businesses.

Somewhat connected to this thread, although it relates to many more than just Albo. Our corruption rating has dipped slightly lately. So much for transparency and a proper Anti Corruption watchdog (we only got a toothless watch-puppy) https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025

You forgot the RAT RACE. That's everywhere but the BUSH. Nev

When I go into Melbourne the Large Number of Giant trucks is what I notice most. Upping the Allowed weight of them wouldn't help road surfaces, particularly when there is a Lot of rain. Once water gets under a road it's stuffed. Nev

I love old industrial machinery. Today I picked up this old J.S. Richardson drill on marketplace and couldn't resist it for $50. There's way more value than that in the steel, electric motor and other components. Good old drills, made in Sydney in the days when we manufactured stuff and employed Australians. At some stage in it's career it's been converted from a pedestal drill to a wall mount. I already have a big industrial grade pedestal drill, so my first thought with this is to mount it like the second photo I've edited with a flip-around and a cutout. In other words, use the wall mounting plate as a base stand and do a bit of sideways stuff with it. I'll have a good look in the morning and check how that will fit with the gearbox oil level/ fill and drain plugs etc. in that orientation.

This may well have been posted before.. But in case

Tom Skerritt, the Emmy-winning actor who embodied a solid, wry authority figure, whether as a flight instructor in Top Gun, a tough-but-fair sheriff on TV’s Picket Fences or the doomed captain of Alien, has died. He was 93. Skerritt died Wednesday of natural causes, his family said in a statement.