nomadpete

Yes, that's easy to see. So how can we motivate the ruling politicians to... 1. Listen to the electorate. 2. Take action to react to the electorate's concerns. 3. Communicate to the electorate about what action they are taking. 4. Restore the lost trust. Maybe by demonstrating that they fulfil their election promises. Otherwise, brace yourself for a local repeat of the trumpian disaster.

You can thank privatisation for that. User pays. A base station isn't cheap. If it doesn't make a profit over and above the install cost there, it doesn't get installed. A handful of customers will never be profitable. If you want capital city services, move to a capital city.

Debate? I see no debate. Thwaites glacier (and others) are melting. "Dubbed the “doomsday glacier”, Thwaites is about the size of Britain, but it is shrinking rapidly and is already responsible for 4 per cent of all global sea-level rise. Worse still, its collapse is expected to set off a domino effect in the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, ultimately resulting in a calamitous sea-level rise of 3.3 metres and changing the coastline of the entire planet." https://www.newscientist.com/article/2526826-the-doomsday-glaciers-giant-ice-shelf-is-about-to-break-away/ “Its final demise could happen suddenly, and to avoid being caught on the hop, we have already prepared an ‘obituary’ press release,” says Rob Larter at the British Antarctic Survey.

No, this is not about what Trump might have - done - since his business interests are looked after "by his children." And I haven't verified the accuracy. It is something I saw on another forum and may be totally incorrect. "....the family of the man at the center of it all, President Donald Trump, has indirectly been among the beneficiaries. Military contractor Powerus, about to be taken public by Eric and Donald Trump Jr., won an Air Force contract worth as much as $90 million to supply interceptors to shoot down Iranian drones. Similarly, the private equity firm 1789 Capital Management, which Don Jr. joined days after his father’s reelection, owns stakes in several other military contractors profiting from the war. One of them, Anduril, won U.S. approval for up to $2 billion in sales of drone interceptors to Kuwait. A second, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is providing satellite service to guide U.S. drones against Iran. And a third — rocket maker Firehawk Defense — won Pentagon contracts for propellants and warheads to replenish dwindling U.S. supplies. A spokeswoman for 1789 Capital, Alexa Henning, said Don Jr. wasn’t involved in the decision to put money in those companies, so there is no “nefarious connection."..... " https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-sons-iran/

Looks like Kentucky hasn't discovered 'roadworthiness' yet. No mufflers, no mudguards, no roofs, no door handles, no windows, no seatbelts......... They seem to register anything that rolls. The Munstermobile would look very ordinary in that lineup!

Aaah, but you are thinking of cars as being a mode of transport, aren't you? If they were simply a machine designed to move humans from one point to another, they would not look the way they do.

Well, he did die racing. That proves the artist's depiction.

Unfortunately, Nev, what the rest of the world thinks, doesn't matter at all. Neither does what the people of his country think, either. Meantime, what he (and all those under him) DOES, is affecting a lot of people the world over. There is no win-win outcome. For every win, someone, somewhere, is losing. And that, my friend, IS 'The Art of The Deal'. P.S. yes, that is Capitalism as practiced in USofA.

This image isn't mine but it is taken from a better angle. Also, when a motorcyle is cornering, the rider holds the front wheel a bit away from the direction of the turn. That is counter intuitive, but the artist seems to have captured that.

In a lot of racing, the rider slides his knee almost along the ground and sits a bit on the low side. I think it's a accurate depiction of Ken Blake's cornering style.

I once had a 28 Studebaker. But back then raising a family was more important than playing cars. Last week a mate sent me this pic of one. On farcbook marketplace - complete & in running condition - too good to restore.

As a party in opposition, they are suspiciously quiet. It's not as if the current ruling mob aren't giving enough mud to sling. I'm starting to think the oligarcs are bribing the Democrats to STFU.

Is DC The Swamp of America?

In my prime.... Zero debt. Low body fat percentage. Fluid balance perfect. Nutrition excellent. Cholestorol low. Mental health balanced. Zero alcohol, excellent hydration. This was my peak. I was eight years old.

Unlike our politics , The function of a motorcycle is a simple action/reaction eqyation. An honest tangible benefitial response to every twist of the RH grip.

Even when I was on L plates, I believed that. And that was so 'last century'. And YES! As long as you come home to Australia.

And yet, the accuracy of the art captured the whole racing motorcycle and rider.

Jerry for Pres! Jerry for Pres! Oh, wait, don't we already have some Jerryatric's in government?

He can name his end of it. But it still doesn't win his tariff tantrum with the Canuks

I look forward to suffering such delightful political boredom.

We live in hope, but may die in despair.

Sorry but I don't share your enthusiam. I think that date will be when the real pandora's box will open. The flow chart of Distopian possibilities starts branching before that, but gets bizarre after that date.

Another unanswered question.... Are 'data centres' just big server centres needed to cope with the enormous increase in internet traffic? Sure, a A.I. request from me is not much traffic, but does the A.I. server then propagate a lot of worldwide traffic searching before it compiles it's answer?

Weell. Not that anyone would ever do this.... but hypothetically if they did.... If I was powerful and wanted to tank the dollar and get rich off it, here is exactly what I would do.I would hire a Treasury Secretary who already made $3.5 billion crashing another country's currency. I would put my guy in charge of the agency that approves bank charters. I would install a crypto czar with $200M in crypto holdings and give him an ethics waiver so nobody could challenge it.Then I would sign an executive order banning the government from ever creating a digital dollar so there was no competition.Then I would have my family launch their own private digital dollar. My family takes 75% of net profits. I would grow it to $4.6 billion in circulation and route a $2 billion Abu Dhabi sovereign fund deal through it to prove it works.Then I would get Congress to pass a law requiring every stablecoin in the country to hold short-term Treasury bills. Now every dollar of my digital currency is a forced buyer of government debt. Brookings projects $2.3 trillion in captive demand by 2030.Then I would have my OCC guy grant my family's company a federal bank charter. Now I can issue my digital dollar with federal authority.Then I would have my Treasury Secretary weaken the actual dollar. Bond buybacks that suppress yields but tank the currency. Build a $950 billion war chest for more. Let the debt hit $40 trillion. Dollar index drops to 99. Gold goes to highest point ever.Then I would kill the Corporate Transparency Act and delete the FinCEN beneficial ownership database. That was the one law that required every shell company in America to report who actually owns it. Without it, nobody can trace who is buying my stablecoin, who is routing money through it, or where the profits land.Then I would let the loop run. Weaker dollar drives demand for "stable" digital alternatives. The law I passed forces those alternatives to buy T-bills. That funds the government's debt. My family takes profit on every transaction. Foreign central banks walking away from Treasuries get replaced by legally mandated stablecoin reserves my family controls.Then I would use sanctions to start cutting countries off from the dollar system entirely. And when those countries need a new way to transact in dollars, the only federally chartered private digital dollar in existence is mine. They can buy it through shell companies nobody can trace because I deleted the ownership database.I just built a toll booth on the global financial system. I take a cut every time someone uses the dollar. And I made it so nobody can see who is paying.And every single step I just described has already happened.So what does that mean for you and I?The reason the United States can borrow at low rates and keep your mortgage and your car payment and your import prices stable is because foreign central banks hold trillions in dollar reserves. That system has always been public. The benefit went to everyone. Lower borrowing costs, cheaper goods , and the single biggest economic advantage any country has ever had.What I just described is the privatization of that function. The entity buying the debt is no longer a central bank acting in the public interest. It is a private company taking 75% of net profits for one family. The reserve function used to generate a public benefit. Now it generates a private fee.Your purchasing power shrinks every time the dollar weakens. Your 401k buys less in real terms. Everything you import costs more. And every time the dollar drops, demand for the private digital alternative goes up. The one the president's family owns. The one that by law must buy government debt.You absorb the cost of a weakening dollar. His family collects the profit. That is the trade.The enforcement mechanism to stop a sitting president from doing this? There isn't one. Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter says it would be a violation for literally any other federal employee, but not the president.Nobody voted for this. No one was asked. There was no debate. There is no enforcement mechanism. There is no one investigating it. The Senate tried and it was blocked.This is the largest conflict of interest in American history happening in broad daylight while everyone argues about something else.So what do you do? Share this. Make it impossible to ignore. Send it to your representative, your senator, every journalist you follow. We make them answer for it. Because the only thing protecting this scheme right now is the fact that not enough people understand it yet. But that would never happen, would it?

If you look closely, you see the artist used Sidchrome spanners. So it has a high Australian material content.