kgwilson

After his election in 2016 I spoke to a number of people who thought he was the best thing for America in years. I've not met anyone in the past 2 or 3 years who thinks he is anything but a raving lunatic hell bent on destroying America so long as he looks good (to him) all the way through it.

Penny Wong is probably the only politician in Australia since I have been here (15 years now) who would be a true leader if given the opportunity even though she says she doesn't want it. I think that like Jacinda she would be able to command respect and provide empathy in any of the crises there have been and are yet to come. She always seems calm and with just a few well chosen words seems able to disarm loudmouth critics with ease. The transition to a renewable energy economy would actually be led by government rather that individuals and companies. Such leadership is rare in the world of today with populist fossil fueled loudmouths getting far more attention than they deserve hastening the climate tipping point that Covid has so conveniently slowed in the last 6 months.

I wonder if this was a decision by the military to counter Trumps attitude towards the other NATO countries saying they weren't contributing enough. The cost of this stunt with 65 year old aircraft is probably equal to the annual contribution of the smaller NATO members. Fuel capacity is almost 48,000 US gallons with a ferry range of 8,700 NM so they are thirsty beasts. The fact that they are still flying is impressive. Their use as a promo probably not unreasonable as they are pretty big & slow at 440 knots so easy to spot. As a deterrent though they are almost completely useless unless they are carrying Nukes.

Also Kelly Anne Conway his original campaign manager & special adviser has resigned. Not altogether surprising given he called her husband a whack job among other insults when he started the Lincoln group although the reason is given as more time with the family which seems to be the standard if you don't want to get a string of insulting derogatory tweets from the Orange dork. Plus 27 former republican members of congress including 3 former Senators have banded together to announce their support for Biden. The writing is on the wall.

Like all Generals Monty made mistakes. Probably his biggest was Operation Market Garden. But he also had many successes. He was though a very good leader and his men followed him willingly. Patton on the other hand was the complete opposite.

It was Boeings arrogance and failure to deal with its problems & not Covid that they ended up with heaps of 737 Max's that has now been exacerbated by the pandemic. The engineers knew it along with most of their employees. The board and senior executives thought they could sort it all out as they'd been able to do for the past 20 years with impunity but the chickens eventually came home to rest.

These are old photos based on an article published in May 2014. It had photos mostly from a 2009 Getty Images collection & although real don't depict the current situation. There is no evidence to suggest this is currently happening. See https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/unsold-cars/ and https://www.hoax-slayer.net/unsold-car-stockpile-images/

And that is one of the reasons why the USA is considered a "Flawed Democracy" and is ranked 25th in the world. The first 22 are considered full democracies. Norway is at No 1, NZ No 4 and Australia No 9.

Less that 40% of those eligible actually vote. Part of the problem is registering to vote as you have to have resided at the same address for a year to be able to even register. And then there is the process of the Electoral College so you don't even actually vote for a president. The rest of the problem is, well, just being American. They seem to be brought up on a diet of racist patriotism, guns and their unique view of freedom and many have a very jaded view of any form of social justice. Their education system is actually not one but more than 50 systems so to degree where you live determines how ignorant of the world you are. Americans who travel are far more informed than the many I met in the mid west who had no idea where Australia was.. You just have to look at a few Youtube clips to get an idea. On one 70% could not name 3 countries in Europe and many could not name states in the US when pointed to on a map, some getting them wildly wrong.

I love techno stuff having spent 30 years in the IT/IS industry retiring in 2005. Since then of course the change has been massive & I try to keep up. I enjoy bamboozling Millennials in particular Gen Zers. They are really good at using technology at the top end but most can't work out details of the operating system. Most operating systems like Apples iOS, Googles Android/Chrome and Microsofts Windows/DOS all have their origins rooted in UNIX originally developed by AT&T in the 60s/70s & the code eventually being written in C programming language. Unix became Open Source which meant anyone could use it and modify it for their own purpose. So I always find out how to access the root directory structure of anything I have like my mobile phone to get rid of bloatware installed by the brand & free up storage space. When I retired I was given a new Dell D600 laptop which was a top line Laptop in its day 15 years ago. Most of these have now been scrapped as they can't run current modern software & got to be so slow as to be virtually unuseable. But yes they can. I installed Lubuntu a light version of Ubuntu which is a version of Linux which is a version of UNIX. I now have a 15 year old laptop that runs as fast as the latest Apple or Windows or Chromebook laptops with a complete Office suite, web browsing, email, messaging, games, the list is endless & it is all free. There is a huge Ubuntu/Lubuntu group of enthusiasts and forums for troubleshooting, tweaking and application development. But then most people are not like me and struggle with a lot of new technology. The most frustrating thing is with Government systems where they develop an on line application for the general public and don't (or appear not to) do any User acceptance testing by their target market. An example is Centrelink with it's Superannuation/ Pension software. Clients are at least 65 & they have bug ridden software with hopeless user interfaces that even their own staff can't use properly. How the hell they expect 85 year only Auntie Flo to use this stuff is beyond belief especially when it fools Centrelink staff as well.

The biggest pests on this planet are human beings. There are now 7.8 billion of us so anything that is around us and interferes with our life is a pest in the eyes of many, whether it is part of the natural ecosystem or not. Of course where this involves money it only accentuates the problem.

The attitude of the breauracy beggars belief. Lets get rid of them , they're not endangered. Well bureaucrats aren't endangered either so lets get rid of them. There are 1.4 million Roos in Victoria & they culled 136,000 last year. There are nearly 5 million people in Melbourne which is about 2 million too many. We could start culling the bureaucrats here. We have Eastern Greys here. We took over their habitat & they used to wander up the street. No-one I know was ever offended or wanted them removed. They have moved over the past 10 years and mainly graze the sports grounds, caravan park and cleared areas on the bush line. Everyone seems to like having them around. Luckily the authorites are not complete Fxxxwits like they have in Lillydale.

Just like companies when the in thing was to decentralise, then recentralise usually 2 - 3 times over a decade. We did that & also put Vaxes at all the factory sites which is something I project managed at the time. I had insulated container style prefabricated self contained computer rooms made complete with UPS , aircon, comms & power interfaces. They were set up, tested & trucked out & plonked on the factory sites next to the admin building & were fully operative on the same day. We trained the office staff to instal & replace the removable backup disk stacks every day. The DEC salesman made a killing out of that short lived project.

I was a dyed in the wool DEC VMS man and didn't embrace Unix for quite some time. I began with VMS on DEC PDP 8s then 11s and then the VAX series and finally the DEC ALPHA. When our company built a new head office in the 80s the ground floor had a purpose built computer room with duplicate air conditioning systems, false floor with a large glass front so you could see all the disk stacks, processors, comms racks, printers, UPS etc & all the flashing LEDs. It looked very space age at the time. Prior to this the company had used a bureau and we did own some of the machines there but most were owned and managed by the bureau. The big VAX installed (can't remember the model No) was huge and had a massive 2 mb of memory. DEC pioneered Ethernet and Decnet networking so we had company wide email albeit character based from the beginning of the 80s. DEC also created hardware clustering and RAID which everyone takes for granted now. DECs space was being quickly eroded by the rise of microcomputer technology and Unix. The final foray with the Alphaserver & its 64bit RISC architecture and VMS operating system was quickly eroded by the rise and rise of Unix open source. The Alphaserver running OpenVMS, Gembase with Oracle & SQLServer databases with Renaissance CS ERP is still operating today more than 15 years after I took the redundancy path.

So was Blackpool originally called Dublin & renamed so there wouldn't be any confusion?

The Washington Post has been keeping a tallly of Trumps lies. As at 9 July the total stands at 20,055 in 1267 days an average of 15.8 a day but over the pat 14 months the average has been 23 a day. The one he has made the most is the US economy being the best in history (360 times) & No 2 that the border wall is being built (261 times). Doesn't faze his supporters though. Ask any one of them & they'll say it is true. The media though have largely failed to call him out in interviews. If they try he usually accuses them of being "False News" or he walks out. The 2 exceptions are recently on Fox News (his favourite TV channel that he now has discarded) and the Australian journalist Jonathan Swann when he had Whitehouse cherry picked charts that he did not understand & was unable to counter when called out by the interviewer

The marketers of SAP have probably done the best snow jobs of any software organisation in the world over the last 20 years or so. I would imagine that there have been numerous kickbacks and bribes to gain access to governments and large corporations around the world and once they have the contracts signed and implementation is underway any thought of extrication and going back or elsewhere is so convoluted and incredibly expensive that the only way is to cotininue. In the 90s the company I worked for committed to Oracle as its RDBMS. These were relatively early days of "Relational Database Management Systems" and Oracle was at the forefront with Larry Ellison the CEO being one of the wealthiest people in the world at the time. The concept of RDBMS is like your brain where everything is linked to everything else except that retrieval should be instant . The problem is that there are things that are not perfect and when a curve ball is thrown there are roadblocks. These generally don't occur in the RDBMS core or kernal but in the application software written on top and in the user access software written for access via web based systems. In the 90s very few web based systems existed so it was Oracle applications where the user access was. It kept scores of anaysts and programmers busy with a well managed implementation and user acceptance process. The company was a $US8 billion enterprise with 10,000 employees. I left to take over the IS/IT role at a company with 1200 employees with largely manual pocesses and basic financial systems on a mini computer with green screen access. After mergers and takeovers & the company expanding to 20,000 employees with $US15 billion revenue the company I left made the SAP decision. I never did find out who got the kickbacks but had my suspicions. In the meantime I had a free reign to fully integrate an organisation from scratch. We created a network with fibre optics & PCs, worked with integrating SCADA systems with the ERP solution we chose, set up factory, QA, Laboratory & warehouse management with bar code RF systems and long range scanners and computers on forklifts etc & created interfaces with our suppliers & customers to eventually eliminate manual data entry from ordering to despatch. Siemens & Allen Bradley our PLC suppliers could not believe how we had been able to manage this. Our business expanded from revenues of around $US30 million to $US500 million & in 2004 the company I'd left bought us. They were going to convert everything to run under the SAP umbrella. I was offered a role with the 20,000 but took redundancy & provided 6 months consultancy for the handover. By the time I left my wife had been living in our Noosa appartment for 4 months while I was in a bedsit in Hamilton NZ. In this 6 months no progess to SAP had been made at all and the decision was made to continue with the companies systems as they were for another few months until they could work it all out. 5 years later no progress had been made except that most of the manufacturing was moved to China & the NZ company downsized. 15 years later and the same systems are still operating. The integration into SAP was just too hard. For years I was a member of DECUS, the Digital Equipment Corporation Users Society and at every annual conference there would be a bunch of new industry proverbs listed. One very simple and true one I've never forgotten is "Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand"

Centrelink and other Government departments have the worst web sites and on-line systems you can possibly have. The Public Service bought into one of the most expensive and inflexible ERP solutions (SAP) available. It is a German system and things must be done in a very structured way so customisations just don't work well if at all. The the Public Service employs IT people who can't get a job anywhere else to create on-line front end processes that end up being so flaky they rarely work all the time. I have MyGov with links to Centrelink, Medicare & Myhealth record. Each individual system is full of flaky software that fails often. The same comments apply to other systems I access such as the SES and Service NSW. All poorly structured & with plenty of bugs. I was an IT professional for over 25 years and would have been sacked if I'd ever came up with anything like these State and Federal Government systems. I don't think they have ever heard of "User Acceptance Testing".

A friend of mine had a Mach 4 and although it had similar performance it was all done with far better torque at lower RPM and a much wider power band all round due to the extra 250ccs more refined carburation and tuning. The frame was also stiffer. The Mach 3 was supposed to have the quickest standing 1/4 mile time of any bike in the world at the time at 12.4 seconds. 0 to 100k was 4 seconds. I had mine up to 125 mph (200kmh) on the beach at low tide. I was pretty hard on it & the first chain and rear sprocket wore out in 5000km. I replaced the chain with a good Reynolds chain & new sprocket & that lasted till I sold it to my younger brother.

The Mach 3 was pretty lethal but I survived. The power came on at around 4000rpm & was neck snapping up to about 6000. I had no fear then. I used to pull ot to pass a car doing about 90 kmh, drop 2 cogs & scream past on the back wheel leaving a huge bue smokescreen in my wake. Until I got leather pants I would slide back to the hump at the rear of the seat fully outstretched so I couldn't turn the throttle down but always regained control as the revs went past red line. It had awful handling with a frame that flexed like a rubber band but I eventually mastered it & could out ride most of my mates on winding hill climbs. I took the centre stand off as I kept digging that into the road on corners. My flatmate had a Norton Commando 750 which was a beautiful bike to ride. We swapped bikes for a ride one day & I lost him & had to go back. After an expletive filled tirade about my bike he got his Commando back & we never swapped again. Mine was the blue one, the last with drum front brakes which worked well...Once.

In 1971 I bought a new Kawasaki Mach 3. I was 21 and bullet proof. I used to love tearing down the road on the back wheel. One Friday after a few beers everyone left the pub & went back to my flat. They were all standing around when I came up the drive so decided to treat them to a wheelstand. It was pretty good too but I didn't get the front wheel down quick enough to brake before I hit the concrete block wall of the flat. The front wheel rim was pushed flat up to the hub, the front staunchions resembled bananas & my head contacted the wall which smashed the helmet. I got away with it with concussion & a sore body. In 2007 I was riding my mountain bike down a cul de sac in Mudjimba & pulled the front wheel up to jump the kerb & head down to the beach. I pulled it up too soon & the wheel came down right in the jaw of the kerb & I sailed over the handle bars & whacked my helmeted head on the concrete footpath. Result was dented pride, broken helmet & a sore body. Wear a helmet. Works for me.

Trump has often complained about vote rigging especially postal voting although all the evidence is to the contrary. Many think this is one of his strategies to refuse to leave office if he loses the election. If he loses most of his supporters in the white house will likely fade away and the men in white coats will come and take him away. When asked about this some months ago Biden said the appropriate authorities will remove him with "Great Dispatch". He is slowly losing his marbles & he didn't have many to begin with. It is very interesting to watch from the sidelines. The disintegration of the wordls biggest economy. China is laughing all the way to the bank.

The Pandemic was the best thing to happen to ScoMo. He was reeling from failures during the bushfire crisis and the Sports Rort among many things. Covid has allowed this at least for now to be put to the back of peoples minds so now he is supposedly doing a good job. Trying to get States and territories to cooperate though is like herding cats but that is just a product of our system. Generating the biggest debt we have ever had with no end in sight due to the latest 2nd wave isn't doing a very good job in my estimation. A focus on elimination rather than suppression would have had far less impact on the economy in the long run though ScoMo keeps denying this. Other Island nations have done it. Taiwan & NZ are 2 notable examples. NZ exports are now higher than they were pre covid & life is back to normal there (except tourism and border control). Australian Governments have had this incessant fear of going in to recession though Covid has provided an excuse now. We were one of the few countries not to go into recession during the GFC when Kevin07 gave us all $900.00 but we have never been out of deficit since. NZ went into recession but was back in the black in 2 years & now after Covis still only has a 20% debt to GDP ratio. Ours is now over 40% and climbing rapidly. We also have the highest household debt in the world. No not a good job in my opinion.

Biden may be old and a bit doddery but at least he has empathy and when he does make a statement it is delivered with reasonable intellect. He has hardly been seen but has led the polls by between 10 and 15 points for months and the elction campaign hasn't started yet. Trump continues to rage and cry woe is me with the latest "I am the greatest" claim being passing a simple cognitive test aimed at establishing the early onset on dementia. He has continued to bragg about it even after being told it is a simple test saying the last 5 questions are hard. One of the last 5 questions is deduct 7 from 100. I can believe that would be hard for Trump. His neice summed him up well. He is a malignant nacissist, a mysoginist, a racist, a comulsive liar, a con man, theif and a 6 times bankrupt. Who could be better qualified to run the disunited states of America.

It is hard the believe that there are so many who still think Covid is a hoax. Just after the start of the 2nd wave in Victoria it was reported that 10,000 people refused to take the test. The most common reason given that the virus is a hoax. But then these are people who only watch sky news, read nothing but sensational BS on facebook and think Trump is a genius because he said so.