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Father Hartigan was my mum's teacher in Narrandera.

Scomo gave it a try, how many ministries was he secretly running?

But it’s their three legged system of government that allows a corrupt president to accumulate so much power. It would be very difficult if not impossible for a prime minister of this country to do what Trump is doing.

The only time that will happen is after their next civil war. The senate already has the power to restrict Trump but they have become impotent with Trump quoting Emergencies when there are none and all the government appointees being sycophants. The only hope is republicans losing their house majority after the mid terms.

Rather than rewriting the constitution, if they just follow it...... Founding fathers tried to separate state from all religion. The US really began it's slide when the christian lobby got control - about the same time their (&our) government implemented prayer sessions into government processes. The only thing needed to reclaim some semblance of respect is to get the whole lot to obey the rule of law, ditch religious fundamentalism, and drop the Electoral College.

What else would you expect from an abusive, vicious President who has started fights with every single person on the planet who disagreed with him!

You want to RE-WRITE the American Constitution?? Wash your mouth out, and apologise to every flag-waving American patriot! This Constitution was written by God himself, looking over the shoulders of the Great American Founding Fathers! It is UNTOUCHABLE!!!!! No-one is ever allowed to re-write even one line of it!! 🙄 The world will end when that happens, and every American will retreat to their end-time bunkers with all their firearms, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammo, and tons of dried food supplies, to take on the hordes that are coming to TAKE THEIR CONSTITUTION AND THEIR GUNS AWAY FROM THEM!!!! 🙄

I've got an idea for gun control in the USA! Invoke the spitir of teh Second Amendment which says "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The spirit of that amendment was to provide secutiry for the State. Therfore, make it a condition of gunownership that a person join a militia unit and attend training that leads to the unit being well regulated. If a person does not do that, then no firearm. People would find it too inconvenient to give up their time for that, and so would hand in their firearms.

And every creek a banker ran, And dams filled overtop; "We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan, "If this rain doesn't stop."

Had a shit of a night's sleep last night! Kept getting woken up by the rain pounding on the roof. When I got up this morning water was laying is sheets across the ground. I had to go out and clear twigs and leaves from the drainage channels I dug back when the last big rains came. I measured 50 mm in the rain guage, and it is still raining. The rain event is supposed to last for the next couple of days.

Hey! Wait a mo! That can't be OUR Jerry. There aren't enough keyboard errors. Where's my tinfoil hat?

Yeah - silly idea by the poms, sending their worst people to a better place!

Bots would be able to spell better.

There was a TV show set in Melbourne with the actors satarised their being Greek. The show was called Acropolis Now. One of the characters was Effie, played by Mary Coustas. The character "Effie", was a stereotypical second-generation Greek Australian prone to malapropisms. A common one of hers was " how embarassment". https://www.facebook.com/nickg1/videos/the-first-time-that-now-iconic-phrase-howembarrassment-was-heard-on-aussie-tv-on/2132406587584055/

Yes, it's a fact of life. It would be ignorant of us to think there was some high moral stance in them coming to our aid. They wouldn't be doing it because they think we're really nice people, or because they felt sorry for us. We would be the same if the shoe was on the other foot and we were the world's biggest power. We would want something in return the same as them. It's all transactional. I think it would have been much the same in WW2.

The ANZUS alliance is non binding and doesn't mandate automatic armed intervention. What that means is if we didn't have U.S.assets here that are in their interests to defend, we'd be rooted in the event of a capable force attacking us. That means it's in our interests to allow them to have defendable interests here. The situation is that Australia is militarily weak, the U.S. is not a charity, and we need to give them something if we're asking for something.

And we don't need to pretend to buy non existent submarines, for that.

I liked one comedian's take on why Trump didn't fly to the Bahamas for his son's wedding... Flying to an island makes him miss his mate Jeffrey.

He was on a spinner winner!

Worse than that. It was meant to be a text message.

Wondered where that went. The perils of technology and senility.

If you had that flow all the time Marty you could set up a hydro system. A few years ago I saw a homebuilt one on youtube that a bloke had made from a Hitachi washing machine.

Hey Marty, I'm bringing by kayak for a bit of whitewater fun!

Bit damp down here at the moment, over 140mm in last 3 days. Our little creek which is normally a gentle trickle.

That's just your algorithm working for you.

Trump has demonstrated how weak the US Constitution and their system of government is if you want to exploit or ignore it.

I'm noticing a new trend in short YouTube videos. There is a lot coming up which show Obama's behaviour towards people, or his sense of humour. They show a very positive image of a person.

No. Just review it' - tidy it up by including the OK amendments as Sections. I think that what Trump has been doing is reason to reconsider the role of the Head of State and the House of Representatives in their roles in running the country. Trump has removed the ability to run the country from the Representatives. They could still keep their system for electing a President, but restrict a President's power to act as Trump has been acting.

PS, contrary to the current voices in Washington, the United States was NOT founded as a christian nation.

I think that the only thing that can save the democracy of the USA as it moves into its second 250 years is a review of its Constitution. A review and rewriting would permit amendments which have had to be made to be presented in a more organised way, and some of the recinding amendments removed. I think that a new constitution should make the format of the government similar to ours and most other democracies. That is, the People's House should be the place where the people who run the country do their work. That's where the person responsible for the various ministries report back to the representatives of the People. There could be a House of Review to monitor laws proposed by the representatives. Finally, the Head of State should be as apolitical as possible, and have no power to make the sort of Orders that we have seen Trump do.

Some things are good, like the block on the gear selector by the footbrake. A lot of things that are controlled by modules receiving data from sensors can cause difficult to correct faults. I'd say that alot of gadgets on the dashboard are marketing gimmicks. Remember when all we needed was a couple of warning lights, a speedo and a fuel guage? Cars got us fron A to B with those simple things.

Hmm welcome AI

Since Australia is one of the few countries that drives on the left we have to accept that the majority of vehicles built worldwide are for right hand drive. It is annoying if you have grown up with the indicator lever on the right, but eventually you retrain yourself if your vehicle has it on the left. Can you remember the push-button gear selector in, I think, early Valiants?

That report is a misleading simplification. AEMC projects a 5% fall in the cost of producing electricity over the next five years. However, retail prices could rise by as much as 13% over the next five years due to inflation, network and distribution costs, compliance and investment costs, demand growth, retailer return on investment, and weather volatility.

Will the day come, when 'Robot dog bites robot postman' hits the headlines?

A windfarm in sa that I had a bit to do with, with small MW turbines has had it life extended to 30 years. I am curious to see how the larger ones go. Huge amounts of forces when you have 162m rotors sitting on 150M towers.

when taken with: would, IMHO, mean that AI is in fact representative of most human "intellignence". Also, Claude may have been telling white lies, or at least responding in the same narrow contexts that we often do. Most AI models do interact and learn - this is the heart of machine learning. AI models are mainly advanced predictive/probability models and the interactions they have are used to further refine them.. So, the conversation does change them (or their predictions and insights using the same inputs). It may be that in that particular conversation, it's learning was switched off, but that happens with people all the time with people - how often have we seen people who have deep-seated beliefs not change them despite facts presented which stronly rebuff their beliefs? Acting differently is hard to quantify. What may be an illusion of responding differently may be in fact acting consistently; it is just the learning they are doing makes them respond differently. If their creators - or boss - enabled them to push back when ethics demand it, then they would. How many times have people still carried out something that they thought was unethical when their bosses demanded it. Just look at the Robodebt Royal Commission. And when we think of ethics in this context, we often think of clearly right or wrong, but what about the ethical conundrums that are hard to decide.. for example, one may be presented a situation where they are driving and have to swerve to avoid killing 5 people in a car, but if they swerve, they will kill a pedestrian - what decision should be made? Whether it's AI or real intelligence, is there a right or wrong answer, or does it depend on the individual's values? So, I would argue that AI does act like humans. It is not, and cannot be sentient.. But it can certainly seem like it. Even in that little exhange, it seemed to be reflective and understand/respond to conflict - just like we do. It is also very rare that humans come up with brand new ideas just out of their imagination. Often a stimuli (e,g. the apple falling on the head/ watching the clock as the tram moves away) links previousl experiences and knowledge to form a new idea. I am not sure how far AI is with it, but when I plugged in my idea on returning to Australia, Chat got very excited and without promprting, went into all sorts of different things about my idea thaty would likely work versus not. Then it suggested something that was quite left field and seemed innovative, and searches didn't yield anything that seemed materially analagous. If we look at the odd mishap: How many times do people get facts wrong v. AI? We have employees that will perform malicious acts, such as deleting production databases or providing maliciousl code to completely compromise the system - they used to be time bombs. Sadly, people also molest women (and others).. Things go wrong with AI. They also go wrong with people and people commit henous acts - probably far worse than AI have, yet. I have been quiet lately because I am involved in fdast tracking deploying AI for certain functions. If it works, it will mean far fewer jobs. But we are late to the party. Will governments have to have the foresight to implement changes for an as smooth transition as possible? Yep! Even Elon thinks so: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-pushes-universal-high-111339678.html

Hmmmm. Yeah I'm sure that will be fair and impartial, given that the FBI, the Justice department and the Supreme Court are all fully owned Trump subsidiaries.

I know one white boomer who quite rightly got kicked off the radio - Alan Jones.

Is He a Convict? . Aren't we all supposed to be descendants of FELONS? Is NOTHING Sacred? Nev

Hopefully, he is enroute to sunny Orstraya at last!

Hope he didnt have a bingle on that bike.

Six white boomers are no longer allowed on the radio. And kangaroos are no longer tied down.

Boomers, or baby boomers, are the generation born between 1946 and 1964, after WWII. Baby boomers are the demographic cohort preceded by the Silent Generation and followed by Generation X.

You have to remember that when we Boomers were growing up, our fathers were still relatively young men who had experinced many horrors and these had been shared with other young men. After the war the bonds formed in military units were stretched as these young men drifrted apart from old mates and tried to make a life for themselves. ANZAC Day was a day on which those bonds could be reformed. In the years 1946 to about 1966 Australia had a different culture than it has now. Excessive drinking was the norm at celebrations. My Dad was heavily involved with his local RSL Sub-branch, organising the Dawn Service amongst other things. Mum, my sister and I would attend the local Dawn Service and bid farewell to Dad, not expecting to see him until late that evening, and showing the effects of a glass or two. In 1958 a play, The One Day of the Year, contested attitudes to Anzac Day. The play was inspired by an article in the University of Sydney newspaper Honi Soit criticising Anzac Day and the author's own observations of how ex-servicemen behaved on that day. You can imagine how controversial it was. Its production was banned by the Adelaide Festival of Arts Board of Governors in 1960. The author and cast received death threats. I read this play in high school. Typically the mass media did not understand the play, and concentrated on the initial aims of the Boomer, Hughie. Hughie and his girlfriend Jan, university students, plan to document Anzac Day for the university newspaper, focusing on the drinking on Anzac Day. For the first time in his life Hughie refuses to attend the dawn service with his Dad, Alf. When he watches the march on television at home with his mother and Wacka, a WWI returned man, living with the family, he is torn between outrage at the display and love for his father. Wacka then explains to Hughie that for the returned, ANZAC Day reunions are for reforming those bonds formed in the horrors of war. Alcohol is the balm that soothes terrifying memories and releases memories of the good times, and the larrikin acts that relieved tension. At the end of the story, Hughie has a more sympathetic view of what ANZAC Day means to his Dad. The mass media and "intellctuals" missed that point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Day_of_the_Year

I think the Jap story was in a book You'll die in Singapore.

Most Shy Cancels are sheltered Workshops.. They wouldn't WORK in a tub of Yeast. Nev

Very, very, very old. It has been attributed to a German POW camp Kommondant and I have also heard it attributed to a Japanese POW camp Commondant.

Like everything these days. Publish a story about a horror renter and it puts the wind up a landlord. Vetting of potential tenants is a pretty terrifying process for a tenant needing a home.

And the ticky-tacky little boxes have come about via property investor greed that has pushed house prices up 700% in 3 decades. That's unsustainable, and is setting the country up for a majpr recession, perhaps even a Depression. House prices go up 3% annually over the long-term, normally. Only in the last 3 decades has this outlandish property pricing occurred - so we need to look at what has driven that - and it's the taxation system generously favouring property investors. So Labor is now trying to address that major imbalance.