kgwilson

200mm and a small car will begin to float and loose traction, 300mm and most cars & SUVs will do the same. If there is a bit of a flow even though it doesn't look bad the vehicles will get carried away and once off the road and in to the river bed or flow and you are at the mercy of nature. I've been involved in a number of rescues with SES and the excuses are always the same. It didn't look too bad or I didn't think it was that deep, the current didn't look that strong etc. Any good 4WDer will get out and walk in to the flow to check it out. You can't see what is underneath especially when the water is dirty.

I'd also never heard of swooping Magpies in breeding season till I arrived in Queensland & saw people on bikes with wires poking out everywhere from their helmets. Initially I thought it must be some sort of fashion or identity thing.

Another driver ignoring the emergency services call "If its flooded forget it". The number of people who still think they can get through, even with all the publicity and evidence of vehicles swept away drownings and dangerous rescues astounds me.

I believe that SA is now 100% renewable self sufficient and is a net exporter of renewable energy to NSW.

Magpies were introduced to NZ to control grass grubs in the early 20th century. There were no natural predators & there was food everywhere so their population exploded and their range expanded through the entire country & they became the top boss bird. Eventually they were considered a pest & chased out a lot of the native species. I shot heaps of them. I had a cassette tape of a magpie distress call & when I played it they would come to help. They learned that trick pretty quick though. I also had a Magpie trap. It had 2 compartments. Food was put in 1 compartment & the bird got trapped, then another would turn up and get trapped in the other compartment & the process continued. Not surprisingly Magpies in NZ do not like humans but they are not in their natural environment and have done considerable damage. Here on the East coast it is completely different & it did take a while to warm towards Magpies. I now know that they are pretty intelligent and likeable and this is where they belong and are in their element.

My car has a WLTP range of 435km. I don't get that much as I don't drive it the way they work out that range. I do get about 390 - 400km though and that is at motorway speed on the Pacific highway (110kmh). The ambient temperature does affect the range too which is why there is a battery heater to keep the range up and is also used during charging. The range indicator in the car adjusts to your driving style and becomes surprisingly accurate over a few hundred km. This is affectionately called the guessOmeter. If you reset it it will go back to the original values until it gets some more real time data to work out the real world range. There are cable less battery chargers available now too. It requires a wireless charging pad to be installed on the underside of the car and another on your garage floor so you just drive in till the system says stop, get out and the car begins to charge. Just a bigger version of wireless charging of a mobile phone really.

Since the release of the Cybertruck and the big increase in its price, I'd have thought orders would fall away. Apparently not so. Tesla has reported that they have been receiving 10,000 new orders per day and orders now stand at 2.3 million. At their stated production rate of 250,000 per year that is over 9 years of orders. So order one now & get delivery in 2033. Most orders are from the US & Canada but apparently Australian orders are No 3. There are a lot of crazy people in this world.

And with the ability to walk on walls.

Bradfield didn't design the Sydney Harbour Bridge at all. His brief as an Engineer with the NSW Dept of Public Works was a rough copy of the Hells Gate Bridge in New York.The design was by Dorman Long of Middlesborough who borrowed much of it from the original Tyne bridge in Newcastle seen often in the TV series Vera.

I train SES drivers for 4WD courses and what we call DOV (Drive Operational Vehicles). It is all about thinking ahead and at the end of the 2 day DOV course each participant must drive the vehicle around a course they have never driven before in light and heavy traffic and must provide a verbal commentary of what they see ahead and what they plan to do and what they are actually doing. Some people do this easily but others do struggle to keep their mind on driving while looking and thinking ahead. Some fail this test, well we call it "Not yet Competent" and they need to do the course again and some of those do not even have a second go. Watch out for drivers like that.

Sodium ion battery technology has been around for a couple of years now and CATL, the worlds largest battery manufacturer is again at the forefront of this technology. Sodium is half of the chemical composition of ordinary salt and is everywhere. The BYD Seagull is also powered by a Sodium ion battery. Up until recently the problem with the technology was energy density. Now this is approaching the density of LFP batteries, common in EVs but is still a bit behind NMC lithium batteries. Manufacture costs are about 30% cheaper than lithium based batteries. Chinese brand Zeekr who produce high end EVs have already got a sodium ion battery car out in China with their own Sodium battery in the model 007 with a 100kWH capacity and 870km range. Zeeker is owned by Geely who also own Volvo and Polestar as well as a number of Chinese brands.

I don't know where you got this information. My neighbour and I had a small hydro generator for running pumps back in the 1980s West of Ngaruawahia. There are thousands of private hydro schemes in NZ. It is a hilly country with lots of rainfall so it is a no brainer. 85% of NZs energy is from renewable sources and about 60% is generated from hydro electric systems.

Following distance is a feature built in to all cars with adaptive cruise control. Mine has 3 levels represented by green bars on the graphic which displays the car in front and mine behind, 1 being the closest & 3 the furthest away. They seem to change with speed. I usually set it on 2. 3 seems to be way further than necessary & 1 is a bit close at 110kmh. 1 is OK at 60kmh.

The Tesla Model Y is the largest selling car of any type in the world. That says a lot. It beat the Toyota Corolla off the No 1 slot it has held for years.

The system in my car is called MG Pilot & with lane keep assist, lane departure assist, forward collision assist, speed sign recognition, forward radar, rear collision assist, blind spot monitoring and 360 deg camera plus a heap of other things. With adaptive cruise control on and on a well defined road like the pacific highway the car will follow the lane by itself until the woman who lives in the computer tells me to put my hands back on the wheel. The handbook has all sorts or warnings about the systems must not be relied on but then you get people who buy cars and have never read anything in the handbook. I hate the lane keep assist & nearly always turn it off. The problem is that to maintain the 5 star NCAP rating the system must always be on by default. The only things I have found really useful are the cameras when parking, adaptive cruise control and traffic jam assist as the car will automatically start & stop & keep up with traffic.

There is a huge amount of misinformation about EVs as well as complete and utter falsehoods. Someone will have a problem with a battery and all of a sudden that is all over the web that the batteries are useless. If EVs are no good how come there are 26 million of them on the road as at the end of last year with the forecast number by the end of this year to be 40 million. MG wouldn't give a 7 year unlimited km warranty on the car & battery if they didn't think the battery would last. Other manufacturers give between 5 & 8 years. The battery is typically about 40% of the cost of an EV but the quality of the batteries and the battery management systems included all but guarantee a long life. CATL is by far the largest battery manufacturer in the world and produces the best batteries. The 64kWH battery in my car should according to CATL have degraded to about 80% of new by the time the car has travelled 1 million km. On that basis the battery will outlast the car by a long shot. I speak to every EV owner I see at a public charging spot & I haven't met any yet who say they will go back to ICE. In the US there were government incentives to produce EVs & the US car makers all took the money & produced some good ones and a lot of awful ones. Now many are sitting in car lots without buyers. The public charging infrastructure wasn't/isn't there and little was done to promote and stimulate demand. Funny thing though it hasn't dampened Teslas market which continues to grow. Also the US does not allow importation of Chinese made EVs who make most of the worlds EVs and many of the best. Apparently some 3800 car dealers in the US petitioned the government to stop promoting EVs quoting all sorts of problems but omitting the main reason. Most of their income comes from servicing and maintenance and the lack of this requirement for EVs means a large part of their bread & butter income is not there, at least for the first 160,000km. Charge points don't throttle back when there are multiple EVs charging. The problem is the supply to the chargers is under specified. If the supply to the hub is 1 megawatt and the maximum out put of all chargers combined is 2 megawatts then they will only run at half speed when all are operating. This is being resolved by battery storage at multi charge point hubs. There is one new charge hub outside Shanghai airport that has 259 charge points & all can be used at the same time. This is operated by Shell, an oil company. They see the writing on the wall and want to survive. Also Teslas have a lot of hi tech sensors all over and around them and automatic car wash machines may affect them. My car has 360 degree cameras, forward and rear radar etc as well and so do a lot of ICE cars. This issue applies to all high end cars. I would never take any car I own to an automatic car wash. Tesla warns owners about this. Other car makers don't bother & the dealer rakes in more money when the item has to be adjusted or replaced. Tesla does not have any maintenance requirements during the warranty period at all. If something goes wrong you just take it to the service agent. It is not surprising that dealers are scared. They can see their income stream disappearing & so the misinformation stream grows and is stoked all over the web.

EV batteries are designed to remain inert when submerged so do not electrify the water surrounding them. Being submerged in salt water of course causes corrosion especially of electrical connections but the risk of a battery fire is very low. So far only 2 EV battery fires have occurred globally after being removed from being submerged in flood water/sea water. Whether a car is ICE or EV, once it has been submerged it is always written off by insurance companies. Similar to the Old Chev story after the 2022 floods I had a whipper snipper, 2 lawnmowers & a generator all submerged for 2 days in flood water plus an electric fan and a transistor radio. I just gently washed the fan & radio out with fresh clean water & let them dry for a couple of weeks. The rest I drained fuel & oil, washed out the electrical bits with clean water & renewed filters cleaned carbies etc & again left everything for a couple of weeks & got everything back in working order as if nothing had ever happened.

If you are suspicious do some research. Use google to search for a particular website to find out if it is legitimate. Always check the email address if you get one for some bargain priced item that seems almost too good to be true. It almost certainly is. It will have all the right words and copies of logos, colour schemes etc in the main body but the email address will have some strange names, letters or numbers in it. Also check for grammatical & spelling errors, upper case when it should be lower case and so on. Go to the real website for the product you are looking at and check the contacts page for correct email addresses, phone numbers etc. Temu and JB HiFi are both legit but they are constantly being cloned by scammers. I got an Email recently from a scammer not long after I'd purchased an item from Temu saying they were having a pallet sale of returned and incomplete items with a promise of a pallet lot of these goods as I had been randomly selected from thousands of other customers. To get this I would just have to pay the freight which was a relatively small amount. Then they asked for a small payment first to confirm the deal. People fall for this crud all the time & once they have your details they don't stop. I've bought stuff through Aliexpress and Banggood, both Chinese on line retailers and have never had an issue. Often their delivery times are faster than buying from an Australian on-line retailer. Once an item was received damaged & I took photos of the packaging as received & the damaged item. They gave me a full refund & told me to keep the item which was a 4k action camera with a heap of fittings, underwater case and accessories. I still have the camera & it is still working perfectly after 4 years.

Con artists have been around forever and tricking people via the web has become easier as a large portion of users, especially the elderly and poorly educated have little understanding or knowledge when they get emails or messages that seem to know who they are and what they are doing. Once they get pulled in to the web of deceit and trickery they end up forfeiting money that is almost impossible to trace and in many cases not returnable. Banks and financial organisations are now slowly starting to implement warnings and transfer delays to combat this but usually the fraudsters find even more devious ways to relieve honest people of their hard earned money.

Australia has been slow to get rid of cheque books. Cheques are no longer used in many countries. NZ got rid of them several years ago. Cheque fraud has always been a problem and most businesses will not accept a cheque nowadays unless it is cleared before delivery of goods or it is a bank cheque.

Netanyahu has to go. This war is what is keeping him in power & he knows it. He tried to control the judicial system and that led to major dissent which may have led to his downfall, but then this happened. The Hamas attacks were horrendous and the Israeli response predictable. Now with over 20,000 Palestinian deaths, 60% women and children and the original international outrage and sympathy for Israel has now almost all turned against Israel. Most of Gazas infrastructure has been destroyed and the humanitarian crisis is bordering on Genocide. The USA is almost their only ally left & they have just approved a $14.3 billion package including sending 1000kg bombs to Israel. While the issue is steeped in history for more than 2000 years, the current situation has grown out of the 1967 war, occupation of the West Bank and Israeli control over the Gaza strip for virtually everything. Restrictions led to disaffected people, leading to resentment, hatred and organised resistance. The people eventually were seeing no improvement under Fatah & so Hamas took over and resistance became fanatacism with little concern for ordinary citizens just trying to survive. On the West Bank, Israeli settlements popped up and grew. Everything was controlled by the Israeli police & military. Disagreements became clashes, 1 killing led to another. Eventually hundreds, then thousands of Palestinians were incarcerated by Israel, many without charge or any reason given. Some were released in the hostage exchange, and most support Hamas still. I can't see an end to this at all. It could end up as a massive middle eastern conflict and the winner will be no-one.

In the world democracy index the US is not considered a full democracy but a flawed democracy and comes in at No 26 ranking below Chile and Spain and just above Estonia. https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/most-democratic-countries/ The states stack their individual systems to suit their political and racial agendas, especially the Southern conservative mostly one eyed republican states. They have slowly garnered more and more hard line irrational republican politicians, local authority and community leaders who seem totally unwilling to find Trump has any faults at all. They seem quite happy to promote the undemocratic and authoritarian rhetoric Trump continues to espouse, and I think in the back of their suppressed sub conscious, knowing full well that the charges against him are all true. Their problem is they have no-one smart enough to challenge him. When anyone does he calls them horrible, bad and terrible (3 of the dozen or so adjectives in his entire vocabulary) and the MAGA clowns go gaga & throw him some more money.

I do solemnly swear "F**** Trump" or is it I affirm Trump is a F***wit". What's the difference.

No surprise there. Who else would hold a press conference outside a sex shop & put some crappy colourant in his hair that ran down his face as dark rivulets as he sweated. A complete fruit loop.

What's the go with those headlights if that's what they are? Looks like 2 eyes with the iris wide open so most of the pupil is exposed. Putin will have these on the front line in Ukraine so they can see what the Ukrainians are up to no doubt. Russia has always had the knack of building ugly vehicles.