kgwilson

When I bought my new house with a heat pump hot water system I wasn't impressed with the fact that the hot water was never very hot. Then I discovered the regulator that limited the hot water to 60 deg or less by mixing cold with the hot. I simply removed that and now I have really hot water when I want it & since I put a timer on that circuit to only operate in daylight hours most of the power needed to run the heat pump comes from the solar panels on the roof. If I sell the house I'll reinstall the regulator before the pre sale inspection mob get a chance to whinge about it.

Often I'll ask for a cash price when buying in a shop but mostly it makes no difference these days but if you are buying from a business that includes a service cash talks loudly. Some of that cash never gets declared as income. I am always popping in to Bunnings for things and if I don't keep a receipt (you can get these emailed to you now) I can't remember what I purchased by the time the statement is ready (also on line) half the time.

I do pretty much the same though I have a fee free card so there are no rewards. I used to keep all receipts & reconcile these against the statement monthly. The account is always paid off fully each month. Now I only keep receipts for large items that have a warranty or multiple items on them because if I pay by phone (googlepay) a record of the transaction is kept on the phone and I also get an instant notification from my bank every time my card is debited with any amount. Without receipts though I sometimes struggle to work out what I spent the money on a month later when reconciling the statement. For me cash is almost history.

I got $100.00 from an ATM about 6 months ago & it is still in my wallet. It is kind of an emergency fund when I may be somewhere that does not have eftpos or credit facilities. I pay by credit card for everything, even a cup of coffee & on line generally via Paypal as it offers the best protection and money back guarantee. The only times I have been into banks in the past 4 or 5 years is to deposit landing fees and cash paid for soft drinks at the aero club. I keep one $2.00 coin in the car to put in the shopping trolley at Aldi. We now have an honesty tab at the Aero club & every couple of months I email members with the total they owe & they do a direct credit. There is still plenty of cash out there though, especially with older people. I see them pull out wads of $50.00 notes to pay for their groceries. The same goes for some tradies who I suspect do a few cash jobs here & there.

The argument that the climate is continually changing and has done for millennia is true but how do those who believe this is the case now reconcile the fact that the change since the industrial revolution (230 years ago) is far more dramatic than any other change in recorded history and that those other changes happened over thousands of years. Releasing carbon always occurred from all sorts of causes like forest fires, volcanic eruptions etc but we have dug up billions of tons of coal and oil that took billions of years to accumulate and released it in just 300 years. The maths and as Greta said the science is crystal clear.

Reagan was a B grade actor, an ultra conservative and a warmonger. He got a nickname "Ronald Rayguns". And the US still wonders why nobody likes them.

I believe that there are still a few Americans there. They better have enough choppers to get them out. I think their problem is going to be that the Taliban are better armed than the Viet Cong were.

Reported on the ABC today. The Taliban have taken control 85% of Afghanistan including the border crossing with Iran near Herat, the one I walked across in 1975. Sounds like a repeat of them being booted out of Vietnam when they were being choppered out of the embassy during the fall of Saigon & pushing Hueys off the deck of their ships so that more could land. Ironically this was in April 1975.

It is the same in regional NSW. We have never had a case anywhere near where I live and though most businesses now have the QR code at the door most people do not scan it. Since the Sydney lockdown and new rules regarding masks most people are wearing masks to go in to shopping centres and businesses though.

Within 2 to 3 years the lower end of the BEV range will be as cheap or cheaper than the ICE equivalent. These cars (eg. Tesla 2, BYD EA1 Dolphin) will have over 500km range, 5-10 minute charging and 1 million km battery life all with virtually no maintenance required. Why then would you even contemplate buying a new ICE car. The ICE UTE market will dry up too. The Tesla Cybertruck is not even in production yet but has over 1.2 million advance orders.

All he had to do was keep it straight & brake but was probably running out of room. It would handle like brick & the skinny front wheels and huge rear tyres just exacerbated the problem.

Scotty keeps making promises to maintain his ratings but thinks he will be able to maintain that when those come to nothing and then answers every questing with another question or changes the focus entirely. Then when it all turns to custard he tries to find another subject to big note himself with. Covid came along and the bushfires failures, sports rorts, etc got pushed into the background. Parliamentary culture came to the fore when Covid looked like being managed only to rear its head again several times with various Ministers involved. Then a cabinet reshuffle to quieten that down only to be overshadowed with a complete vaccination rollout failure. The debacles keep mounting up but eventually the chickens will come home to roost. At least I hope they will.

In 1975 I backpacked from the UK to India & spent several weeks in Afghanistan. It was part of what was known as the hippy trail back then. I found the people friendly and hospitable. I could go wherever I liked. I crossed the border from Iran on foot as the Iranian bus stopped at the Iran border control which was closed so I spent the night in a wadi in my little orange tent then after border control walked the 1500 metres to the Afghan side. They were pretty happy to see me and the US$20.00 note in my passport. This was standard practice everywhere & ensured an event free entry. I got a rickety old bus to Herat where I stayed for a week. The people were great the food was good and I eventually left for Kandahar, and on to Kabul. Then Afghans were masters of their own destiny after giving the British the heave ho and every thing was laid back and relatively ordered. It was just a matter of respecting their customs and dressing appropriately. I went up to the mountains by bus and saw the huge poppy fields. These were all controlled by various warlords but they seemed to have their own respected borders and I was never harassed & was welcomed everywhere. Even the trip through the infamous Khyber pass to Peshawar in Pakistan was a breeze. How things have changed. First the Russians who ended up with a bloody nose & then the yanks who hauled the rest of the West in with them all for 20 years of failure. Is it any wonder that these people despise us. We have never learned that we cannot change their thousands of years old culture by trying to impose ours and all its imperfections, graft and corruption. The Yanks left 17,074 pieces of equipment mostly crap there after 20 fruitless years and umpteen trillions of dollars spent, 4000 deaths and 20,000 wounded. Over 241,000 Afghans have died, 71,000 of whom were civilians.

From the Industrial revolution till today, in just 260 years we have used most of the resources nature has laid down over the past 4,500,000,000 years & in so doing have released CO2 plus countless other pollutants into the atmosphere, the sea, the soil and into almost every living thing including us. So we have done this in just 0.00000057% of this planets history in time.

There are many flavours of Unix. Ubuntu is pretty popular along with Mint and there are many light versions as well. When I retired as an IT manager in 2005 I was given a top of the range Dell Latitude D610 laptop with 500 MB of RAM & 40 GB hard drive running the latest Windows XP. Fast forward 15 years and it can't do anything as everything has moved on, even Email. I was given a 1 GB RAM chip so I now had 1.5GB & installed Lubuntu the light version of Ubuntu Linux. The machine is now really fast after a full reformat & disk partition before installation. There is freeware software for everything, printer drivers, WiFi, Bluetooth etc. There is a bit of tech stuff as you need to modify bits of code here and there but so long as you have a browser you can find out how to do it all on line & Lubuntu runs Firefox better than Windows ever has.

I remember Greta Thunbergs first speech at the UN and it struck me right between they eyes. The one paragraph that I always remember is "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" I still think this is the best and most succinct statement on climate change that has ever been made. It made basically no difference to politicians though who continue to push the unsustainable growth myth and will continue to do so until extinction. Our only hope is that the young with Gretas attitude finally make real change happen. Unfortuately I can't see it happening in my lifetime which at best is another 25 to 30 years The entire transcript "This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! "For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. "You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe. "The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. "Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. "So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences. "To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons. "How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years. "There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. "You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. "We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not. "Thank you."

It was orange so would have been fools gold

The entire issue regarding the current facts that producing EVs and other environmentally friendly things use large amounts of fossil fuels and produce large amounts of CO2 to me is just what normally happens in a transition from one process to another. So long as we don't go past the tipping point during the transition period, and this may be decades, eventually all things manufactured will be done using sustainable and environmentally friendly materials and energy. The thing is we have to start somewhere and we have to start using existing materials and technologies. EVs are only a tiny piece of a giant jigsaw on the long road to the survival of humanity.

I remember that meeting when Trump later reckoned he meant "wouldn't" instead of what he actually said "I don't think there is any reason why Russia "would" Be involved" when referring to Russias involvement in the 2016 election. Then of course his Whitehouse Stenographer quit because she would not support his version and said at the time. Quote "It is clear that Whitehouse Stenographers do not serve his administration, but rather his adversary: The Truth"

The power required for all the electric systems including air conditioning in a car is miniscule compared to that required for its motivation. These are generally run from a completely separate lithium battery system. Sitting in a traffic jam it uses nothing from its drive battery system. The Victorian government is living in last century with such a dumb proposal. Of course roads have to be paid for but the current fuel excise doesn't pay for them anyway & adding a tax on EVs is a disincentive to buying one. Incentives as are now being put in place in NZ and have already been in place in Europe for some years are driving the EV revolution. Range is almost up to 1000km and the price of the latest Tesla to be released next year is aimed to be the same as for an ICE VW golf. Toyotas new solid state batteries will improve range to well beyond 1000km. Despite the governments denial and lack of action by next year we will have electric B doubles up & down the East Coast. The conversion cost is about the same as a diesel engine overhaul & batteries take less time to swap than the required amount of rest time that drivers must take before their next trip. Several centres are being set up, Coffs Harbour being one of them. The savings in ongoing maintenance are huge and the benefits massive with noise and regenerative braking being major factors.

The NZ government has just announced a rebate of $8,625.00 on new and imported used EVs and hybrids on any purchase up to 80k in value & includes at least 1 Tesla model. This will be partially paid for with penalty taxes on new high emitters which includes the likes of Ford Rangers & Toyota Hiluxes, 2 of the most popular Utes which will cost about $3000.00 more. The emissions standard is being tightened so that companies selling ICE vehicles that do not meet the new regulations will be slugged even more. This new incentive is on top of the reductions for EVs already in place due to the Emissions trading scheme. And here we are doing nothing, with no emissions scheme at all, Victoria adding a road tax for EVs & Scumo still rabbiting on about a gas led recovery & how some unknown technology will enable us to meet the 2050 emissions deadline when we are at present one of the highest per capita polluters in the world.

At that level and amount of public scrutiny it is a very long but also very slippery slope. They need a watertight case and anything to do with Trump Inc has more holes and twists than they have yet found so the timeframe will go on forever.

Trump lied his way out of military service and considers that to be a heroic thing. I said here or on another thread that he was and still is a malignant narcissist and as such is incapable of feeling empathy for any thing or any one. To him only one thing matters, himself. I can't decide whether he truly believes all the crap he espouses including the continuing big lie that he was cheated out of the Presidency or whether he knows it is all false but perpetuating it keeps the faith of his rusted on supporting nutters.

Britain didn't have to pay for any of the lend lease equipment provided during the war (that debt was written off) but they did have to pay for equipment left in Britain after the war that was still useful. But from VE day onwards every bit of aid had to be repaid. Britain was totally broke by the end of the war and the last of the lend lease money loaned by the US & Canada in 1945-46 was finally repaid in 2006.

AN bolts are quality controlled and batch identified and tested but that is irrelevant to the Metric/Imperial measurement system comparison. I assume that European metric Aviation hardware is equally quality controlled. I can't imagine Airbus or any other aircraft manufacturer that uses the metric system (practically everywhere in the world except for the US & here), using standard metric high tensile Bunnings bolts that are not quality controlled, tested or unable to be traced.