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Tonight, at midnight, lift your left leg up off the ground. That way you’ll be starting the new year off on the right foot.

It's too late! The e-Horse has volted.

been talking about it for as long as the Epstein files have been in the headlines

The main problem with recycling EV batteries in Australia is that there have not been enough of them to warrant the creation of a recycling plant. This will of course change as more EVs are added to the Australian vehicle fleet. The early recycling plants in the US (there are a number of good You tube videos) have proven that almost all of the critical minerals are recyclable. We just do not have the volume at this stage & that is all lithium based batteries able to be recycled. At this stage old EV batteries are still quite valuable for use as home or commercial energy storage but there are few available & mostly they are from early BMW or Nissan Leaf EVs as well as those recovered from crashed EVs. I imagine the federal and state governments battery subsidies will have the effect of reducing the value of these as well. Once an EV battery gets to about 70% of its original storage capacity, it still has many years of home storage left even though no longer useful in the EV. Add to that the fact that EV batteries are lasting considerably longer than original predictions. I have done just over 35,000km in my 2023 MG4 & battery health is still showing 100% The good thing about all of this is that batteries have a circular life with 96% of materials being recovered during recycling. Compare that to fossil fuels which are used once & then they are gone.

The ironic thing about what Trump has done is that the majority of Venezualians are celebrating the arrest of Maduro. But remember that a lot of Sudeten Germans celebrated when Hitler annexed the Sudatenland.

Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug trafficking, was pardoned by President Donald Trump on December 1, 2025. Hernández had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in a scheme that imported over 400 tonnes of cocaine into the United States.

The E-horse was a marketing failure. Owners had difficulty plugging in a charger.

I simply pointed out that the recycling industry is tooling up to provide recycling. There have been lots of doomsday sadsacks claiming that EV's are a pollution problem. It looks like the EV has a more profitable recycling lifecycle than piston powered vehicles.

Philosophy for beginners....

This morning, my little son said, "My ear hurts, Dad." Concerned, I asked, "Inside or out?" He walked away, then returned through the back door. "Both, Dad." I think I'll cash in his university savings account.

Piss off to the USA then, if it's not to your liking here. We have fair elections. He did say, If she wasn't MY daughter, I'd be dating her. A bit ODD to my way of thinking . He free's Crooks IF their Mother donates enough to him. He's a Perve Himself. Calls under age young Females "the Merchandise" and recommends Grabbing Women by the pussy. . Nev

Your best typo yet... "untittingly" 😆

Here's a random thought... Happy new year everyone.. Hope it is a good one!

Message from Spacey: Thanks Red750 . I cannot sign in at all ! . So please tell everyone I'm fi e . & wish them all a great year . spacesailor . Bryan .

I think the message is that the USofA cannot be trusted, no matter who has the *residency. Or which political mafia (party) is in charge. At present, DjT can wear the blame.

On Facebook today. CALL TO ACTIVISM ·· 🚨READ THIS BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS. RUBIO’S CAREER AT RISK AS TRUMP UNDERMINED GLOBALLY Marco Rubio knew exactly what the United States promised Ukraine. That’s why he hoped this clip would stay buried. As Volodymyr Zelenskyy visits Washington and is met with hostility instead of solidarity, and forced peace terms that could have been written by the Kremlin itself - one truth keeps resurfacing: the United States made Ukraine a promise - and Donald Trump is now undermining it on the world stage. At the time, Marco Rubio was a sitting U.S. senator, speaking on the record - not speculating, not guessing. His fiery speech about why America must defend Ukraine was powerful: After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine was left with the third-largest nuclear arsenal on Earth - tactical and strategic weapons capable of reshaping global power. Instead of keeping them, Ukraine signed a 1994 agreement with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia. The deal was clear: Ukraine gives up its nuclear weapons. In return, United States and the UK would assure its defense. Ukraine kept its word. They dismantled the arsenal. Twenty years later, one of the countries that signed that agreement didn’t just walk away. It invaded Ukraine. Rubio warned this betrayal would echo far beyond Europe. He explained that countries like South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia were watching - being told the same thing Ukraine was told: don’t pursue nuclear weapons. Trust us. We’ll protect you. And then he asked the question that now hangs over American credibility: If Ukraine gave up its nukes and still got invaded, why would any country ever trust U.S. security guarantees again? Here’s the part Rubio can’t escape. He understood the consequences. He articulated them clearly. He warned the world. Now Trump undercuts allies, weakens NATO, and treats Ukraine like an inconvenience instead of a frontline partner - undermining America’s credibility in real time. That’s why Rubio’s past isn’t just awkward. It’s consequential - and his past words on Ukraine are now a liability in a party run on Trump’s loyalty tests. Because he knows the promise was real. And he knows Trump is breaking it. And here’s the question MAGA never answers - because they can’t: If America’s word meant nothing to Ukraine, why should any ally ever trust the United States ever again? That’s the damage MAGA owns. And that’s the truth they’re desperate to bury.

Sometimes I do wonder about people's ability to think logically. We have yet to buy a replacement for the written off mini. It is really my partner's car and she flatly refuses to drive a manual. Which is a pain in the UK, because most cars - even luxury ones - that are sold are manual. So, after fruitlessly searching for a replacement for her that was in budget and auto, I took a look at some EV cars - as they are all "autos". Used car sellers here work a bit dfifferently to Aus (at least when I last purchased a used car in Aus, which was admittedly about 20 years ago). If you know what you want, you can buy online unseen from a reputable seller and if you're not entirely happy with it whtin 2 weeks or something like 1000 miles, they will refund you in full and take the car back. In addition, most offer 12 month warranties under similar terms to new car warranties. And of course, if the car they sell you has a balance of a new car warranty, that transfers to you (as long as the previous owner/s have kept to the terms of the warranty) and they will make up the difference if the balance of the new car warranty is less than the 12 months. There is also statutory protections as well that the larger used car dealers adhere to without resistance because they work on a model to stack them high and kiss them good bye. They don't make much on the sale of a car, but on the finance. They don't much like cash buyers, but to ensure they get the volume, they do a lot to preserve their reputation. Some of these are not venturing into making the used EV purchase a virtually risk free proces as they see a big market of better value cars and better demand. So I was looking at autotrader.co.uk for cars with bettter than 250 mile range. I selected a few, of which the MG ZS 72.x KW was one, and checked out the ads. The reputable dealers have RAC or AA battery tests performed. Fore about £9K, I was looking at 2021 - 2023 models of varying mileage, but averaging arount 30k miles (50k kms). So much for 10% degradation per year of the battery - most were showing 98 - 99% of life left in them, and the lowest was about 96%. I did some research and, ironically, apart from the mini, the real world ranges were not far off the claimed range - probably on average 10% less than claimed range. The batter checks also stated claimed range and provided estimated real world ranges at 0 degrees c ambient temperature and 25 degrees C ambient temperatures. At zero degrees, it was about 25% less range than at 25 degrees. OK, for the cars I was looking at, and taking into account the decreased range at motorway speeds, I should still be able to get to London without needing a charge and have some in reserve. Sticking it on a charger overnight would have me right tor the trip home and assuming it would be 0 - 100% charge. cost me about £35 - half that of the Volvo and about 2/3 that of the now dead mini. Not to mention the generally lower servicing costs, less to go wrong and therfore more reliability, etc. it sounds like a no-brainer - especialliy when you consider partner's driving - glorified shopping trolley and occasional run to pick up the daughter - on A roads as she doesn't do motorways/highways. So, even then, her range will normally be longer than the average. So, I decided to broach with her the subject of getting an EV. I was met with a resounding "no" at every turn. But no logical argument to say why not. Just "I want a petrol car..." I was flabbergasted.. Why? Eve3rything she read was about EV fires and lack of infrastructure. Also, when we sell this house, she may end up in a mid-terrace house with no guarantee she can park outside to connect the car to charge. OK.. the infrastrcutre down here is not what it is in London. But there is good infrastructure. First the chances she won'[t have a driveway are pretty low. But even on that assumption, I explained the area she was looking at has a public charging point and there is no petrol station for about 10 miles or so heading towards Exeter. So, it would be easier for her if she was low on fuel to get the battery topped up than petrol in her car. Then she said she would use it only hopefully once evry couple of weeks and the battery woudl discharge.. I could have put any number of stats in front of her to say that it would take anything from 6 months to a year to discharge a 72kw/h battery not in use.. and that she could expect the lead acid battery to discharge enough to make the car unuseable loing before that. Still she wasn't having a bar of it. Oh well, she will have to live with it and the costs. But the research I did made EVs even more compelling to me than they were beforehand. [Edit] I forgot to mention, most of the batteries still have 5 years of warranty left and a lot of the cars still had 2 - 3 years of warranty left, too.. Don't get that with the petrol cars of the same age.

Anyone tell her she shouldn't play with her food?

Yep, what a great move. A special military operation to remove a threat to stable Govt - which Govt, only the invader can provide. Straight out of his best mates playbook. The only thing missing is the Nazis that were threatening the countrys democratic stability.

His prospects for a Nobel Peace prize are starting to look a bit bleak, but on the positive side his prospects for a referral to the International Criminal Court are looking much better.

Putanna and Xi would be very happy. Justifys anything they do if the US can do it, so can they.

A knight on a white charger did a lot of revolting things. Nev

Unfortunately such a list would require more bandwidth than this site has in order for that list to be posted.

There's nothing like a good war-move distraction to reduce the heat level being applied to one arse.

Why China Is Quietly Winning At EV Battery Recycling

More perverse than "I grab them by the pussy" More perverse than telling a very young girl (about 8 years old "I will be dating you in about 10 years. More perverse than being found civilly liable for sexual assault. More perverse than calling Epstein a terrific guy. I could go on and on.

I'm just imagining an AI untittingly trained on Jerry's posts.

I came for the discussion but stayed for the "untitting"

A lot of government business is done digitially (online) these days in the UK as well. Most of it does not require a letter to be delivered, but the government still posts letters - reminders if you will. Some stuff is sent out via email, too. For example the UK has a separate TV tax to pay for the BBC (called a TV licence). As I recall I opted out of paper reminders and I get thw two I have to pay for by email. I am comfortable getting them by email as I have pretty good anti-scamming defences in place. I am not sure elderly, younger, or less diligent adopt the same approach. At the moment, other government services - even reminders by snail mail don't have an opt out of receiving paper based correspondence. His Maj's Revenue and Collections (HMRC), the DVLA (government road authority), and a hist of others will send correspondence via snail mail, and you have a chouce to satisfy the givernment business online or offline. So, yes, they are done digitally. But, they offer the service "manually" as well.. which with today's technology is largely automated from teh receipt of the form, anyway - well except for handwriting like mine. The problem I have with being forced to receive email is it is a scammers paradise. Sophisticated phishing scams presented as authentic emails (and SMS) from HMRC and other government departments have untittingly cost billions in stolen money, because people click the link in the email (or SMS) that takes them to very well imitated sites where they enter their credentials and before you know it, their accounts have been siphoned or their identity sold on. Because, for these scammers, they have already automatically logged onto the real system with your details before you realise it was a fake site. Yes, letters have their downsides - I have said that in my first post. Sadly, for Australia - not getting delivered ort being deliverered very late seems a common theme. Although the Royal Mail was privatised, it still is held to high standards and is seen as a very reliable service. So, as I said, it is horses for courses. But, one of the things post is good for is reducing the occurence of this style of scamming. It is expensive to send lettets - especially since privatisation - but because the success rates of phishing is very low, the net result is likely to be a cost to the scammer - not a profit - so they don't bother. Contrast email - especially since very few people are on encrypted and secure email - once I have the digital assets to accurately impersonate the site - which is not expensive - gooing phishing is cheap - how much does it cost to send a few billion emails? Probably the cost of one postage stamp here. Yes, snail mail is expensive at point of use.. but at what cost later? I am not sure about Australia, but here the law or at least the code of conduct is that banks will reimburse money scammed from customer accounts (after proving it was a scam - and some banks are worse than others). If it is the same in Australia, don't complain about the account fees you get.. everything has to be paid for at some stage. I am not against the dropping of snail mail, but email is a horribly insecure method of communication. Using simple packet sniffers, the vast majority of emails can (and probably are) easily read by anyone. No doubt, Kali Linux has some tool that makes it even easier than masterin TCP/IP to get at your email. I think snail mail should be an option for official government business unless the user opts out after being explained the risks, as they accept (or choose to ignore) the risks. People are naturally lazy, and email is quicker and easier. For 99% of correspondence, that is probably not an issue, but for formal correspondence, it can be,. Banks here and in Europe send emails, but never provide a link, nor provide attachments. The email will tell you to use your app or log into online banking. Same with utilities and other businesses. And they are forever sending emails to remind us never to click on their links. Yet, people receive an email looking authentic saying their accoutn will be closed unless they confirm a transaction - and click here to confirm... and they click. I agree with everything that is efficient and beneficial of using email over snail mail.. but I am not convinced the security has been properly addressed and we are paying for that downstream.

Happy new year all! Only in Tassie - sitting at Kingston beach following a ride. There's 10 lifeguards with RHIB, paddle board, ATV and all the equipment - and about 6 people braving the water! (I know it's bloody cold, we went snorkeling this morning and even with full wetsuit boots and gloves we were freezing). So your chances of rescue are pretty good!

??? He posted it on Facebook. He's always coming up with this oddball sort of stuff. He posted this one this morning - "I must admit that Joan and I had a battle of words last night. You know you are getting old when New Year’s Eve sees you playing Scrabble."

Funny how your perceptions change as you get older. The year 2000 doesn't seem that long ago, and it comes as a bit of a shock when you realise it was quarter of a century ago. That's what happens when you are more than three quarters of a century old.

Mine doesn't. There is no filler cap at all.

In 1971, a man sent himself a message nobody remembers—and accidentally invented the way 5 billion people would communicate for the next fifty years. Cambridge, Massachusetts. BBN Technologies. A basement lab filled with machines the size of refrigerators, humming and clicking, connected by wires to a strange new network called ARPANET. Ray Tomlinson sat alone. He was a 29-year-old computer engineer working on a problem nobody had asked him to solve. ARPANET already allowed people to leave messages on shared computers—but only if you shared the same machine. If you wanted to send a note to someone using a different computer, you were out of luck. Ray thought that was silly. So he started tinkering. Not because his boss told him to. Not because there was funding or a deadline. Just because it seemed like something the network should be able to do. He wrote a program called SNDMSG—"send message"—that could transfer a text file from one computer to another across the network. It worked. But there was a problem. How do you tell the computer where to send the message? You needed a way to separate the person's name from the machine's name. Something clear. Something simple. Something that wouldn't confuse the computer. Ray looked at his Model 33 Teletype keyboard. Most keys were letters or numbers. Punctuation was sparse. But there, on the upper row, sat a symbol almost nobody used. @ It was an accounting symbol—shorthand for "at the rate of" when calculating prices. It had survived on keyboards mostly out of habit. Ray figured nobody would miss it. He made a decision in seconds that would shape the next half-century of human communication. Username @ Computer Name. Simple. Elegant. Permanent. He typed a test message. Something forgettable—probably "QWERTYUIOP" or another string of random characters. He sent it from one machine to another, both sitting in the same room, connected through ARPANET's sprawling network. It worked. Ray sent the first networked email. To himself. In an empty lab. With no witnesses. He later couldn't even remember what the message said. "Entirely forgettable," he called it. But what happened next wasn't forgettable at all. Within weeks, ARPANET engineers started using Ray's system. Within months, email accounted for 75% of all traffic on the network. People who'd been sending memos and making phone calls suddenly had a faster, quieter, more efficient way to communicate. They loved it. By the 1980s, email spread beyond research labs into universities, corporations, and eventually homes. By the 1990s, it was everywhere. The @ symbol—Ray's casual choice from a forgotten accounting character—became one of the most recognized symbols on Earth. Today, over 330 billion emails are sent every day. That's 3.8 million per second. Email created entire industries: marketing automation, cybersecurity, productivity software, spam filters, customer service platforms. Careers were built on it. Relationships formed through it. Revolutions organized with it. And Ray Tomlinson never tried to own it. He didn't patent email. Didn't trademark the @ symbol. Didn't start a company or demand royalties. He was an engineer, not an entrepreneur. He built it because the problem was there, and solving problems was what he did. In 2012, Google invited Ray to their headquarters to celebrate the 40th anniversary of email. They gave him a cake shaped like an @ symbol. He seemed slightly embarrassed by the attention. When reporters asked him about inventing email, he downplayed it. "I just happened to be in the right place at the right time," he said. "It was a fairly obvious thing to do." To Ray, it wasn't a revolution. It was just good engineering. In 2016, Ray Tomlinson died of a heart attack at seventy-four. Gmail's official Twitter account posted a tribute: "Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for inventing email and putting the @ sign on the map." Millions of people saw it. Most had no idea who he was. Because Ray never became famous. He never gave a TED talk or wrote a bestselling memoir. He never became a billionaire or household name. He lived quietly, worked on projects that interested him, and died having changed the world in ways most people never realized. Think about that. Every email you've ever sent—job applications, love letters, meeting invites, password resets, breakup messages, acceptance letters, apologies, thank-yous, spam about discounted furniture—all of them carry the ghost of Ray's decision in 1971. That @ symbol you type without thinking? Ray chose it in seconds, alone in a lab, solving a problem nobody had asked him to solve. No venture capital. No product launch. No press release. Just an engineer noticing something missing and quietly building it into existence. The world celebrates founders who raise millions and disrupt industries. We make documentaries about visionaries who change everything with bold speeches and flashy keynotes. But some of the most important revolutions happen in silence. One man. One keyboard. One overlooked symbol. One message sent to himself that nobody remembers. And suddenly, billions of people had a way to say: I'm here. Are you there? Ray Tomlinson didn't change the world by shouting. He changed it by typing. And fifty years later, we're still using the language he invented—one @ at a time.

I think they are going back to before that. . Putin's promises aren't worth Much. They point blank Lied to the UN. Nev

I like the text at the bottom.

I would have called them" Burley". Stuff to attract the fish. The stuff they inhabit is "flotsam and Jetsom". Nev

I know I posted about James Moylen, but I didn't mean for the thread to be dragged off with all this car stuff.

What was wrong with knowing where the filler cap was located before getting in the car. I had no idea about the arrow/bowser indicating where it was. Never had a problem locating the filler cap yet.

The inventor of the arrow on a car's dashboard which indicates which side of the vehicle the fuel filler is located on has died at the age of 80. James Moylan came up with the inventive solution in the late 1980s and has made life easier for millions of drivers ever since.

Brigitte Bardot, the French actress and singer who became an international sex symbol before turning to animal rights activism, has passed away aged 91. Bardot had been ill in hospital in Toulon, according to local media. The star’s animal rights charity announced her passing on Sunday morning with a statement.