Bruce

Thanks Jerry. You are dead right about wine. Australia was way ahead of the French in making wine-making scientific. You would find that Orlando ( where they make that good Jacob's creek stuff ) has a real lab and they rely on measurements and not tradition. Also, Australia used refrigeration ( well we had to ) but that meant ferments could be closely controlled. It would actually take some talent to buy a bottle of bad Australian wine. In fact you can mortify your wife by asking the waiter for a bottle of their cheapest local red in safety. Try it next time you are here. Australian-trained winemakers are in demand in France and California. Of course this has already lifted the quality of wine where they work, so the whole world is drinking better stuff and it will get cheaper. Please keep up the good drinking work and let us know when you will be near the Barossa.

My baggage was noticed as lost in Karachi, and stayed lost through the middle-east. Silly lot of people, thought I as I revelled in having no luggage to haul around. I got $50 as compensation, which didn't buy much even back then ( late 1970's ). Well the luggage was actually lost between Adelaide and Sydney.

I wrote that before watching the vid from Octave

Space, global warming sure has happened before. It is a feature of the geological record. The last times, global warming was caused by CO2 from volcanic stuff. This time, it is due to burning fossil carbon.

But how do argue against those who say that NASA itself is part of a conspiracy to lie about non-existent global warming?

We signed the non-proliferation treaty . What is that supposed to mean? was it a good idea?

That's not being socialist Marty, there are lots of things like defense and hospitals and pensions and NASA which need government funding. Maybe the voters will figure out that antibiotic research is really more important than they think right now. There is actually some good stuff happening in universities at the moment, but badly underfunded overall. A good place to direct your charity dollars I reckon. Mind you, as a lapsed socialist, I do mourn the olden days when such socialists as Menzies cared about things like housing for low-wage earners.

I too hate stupid safety features which make things more dangerous to operate. So I remove guards and tape triggers closed etc, which probably goes too far the other way. Why can't we find a sensible balance I wonder. My kids were always told to ride their bikes on the footpath, taking great care to not be hit by a car exiting a driveway. I would rather have gone to jail than have a kid hit by a drunken lawyer in a 4wd.( This refers to an actual case in SA. The lawyer killed the cyclist and got off scot free. He now does well as a specialist lawyer in similar cases ) 40 years later, the law now allows anybody to ride a bike on the footpath and this has persuaded me to use a bike myself. The footpath is generally empty and the roads are crammed with 4wd's, some of them driven by lawyers. I am careful to not frighten any of the rare pedestrians and have yet to meet a hostile one.

That's a great story red. I've often thought our street would be better off outside the council, since we could hire contractors to do the rubbish etc much cheaper than our rates, which have to carry fat-cat salaries before paying for essentials. it is interesting that electricity supply might be the first thing to show that smaller can be better.

OME, I would have thought it to be an amusing misspelling, why do you think otherwise?

For the last 40 years, I have always bought cars made in Australia and found them reliable, including GM stuff. But I read how Jeeps are unreliable, and so maybe US cars are not as good as asian ones. There was a video about an unhappy Jeep owner who burned his new Jeep in Qld. I personally know more than one unhappy Mercedes buyer, so maybe European cars are not so good either.

We spend billions on weapons which will never be needed and yet we ignore obvious problems which need just a fraction of the weapons money to solve. Maybe we are just to stupid to survive. PS... I'm still waiting for an entry to my competition for the most likely sortie for the 100 billion submarines. For example " we go to war with China ( substitute Indonesia, India, the US ) and we sink all of their invasion fleet with our new submarines"... this would be a valid but non-winning entry on account of lacking enough detail to evaluate properly.

My complaint is that some of the vast costs and litigation potential are not needed. The new stuff could be "at your own risk" and then the decision can be left to the patient. Making this change would mainly require legislation changes which would be cheap. Plus a change in the mindset of a lot of the public who presently want the government to fix everything with prohibitions. The fact is that lots of people are going to die because the politicians and the voters behind them are too timid or too stupid to save themselves.

Thats the problem litespeed. A rational approach would be to balance the risks and adopt a "least worst" policy. Right now, we are losing the benefits of antibiotics because we are insisting on safe or nothing.

Many thousands of people are dying of infections from bacteria resistant to the known antibiotics these days. One of the impediments to developing new antibiotics is the "safety" bureaucracy which , through regulations, has pushed the cost of approvals to levels which make the whole exercise unprofitable. ( The other impediment is how the bugs evolve to negate the antibiotics, so a continued effort is needed) I wonder if there is an opportunity here for a smart country to provide a base for companies to develop antibiotics in a profitable manner. I am thinking about a similarity with Jonkers sailplanes, who make world-class sailplanes in South Aftrica. One of the advantages of South Africa was the lesser burden of a negative bureaucracy. Of course, the countries which missed out, like the EU, have put regulatory impediments in the way of Jonkers sailplanes, and in Australia I think they are still only registered as experimental. Similarly, antibiotics developed in South Africa would for awhile be resisted in the big consumer countries including the EU, the US and Australia. But something has to be done. The main historical product of bureaucracy has been poverty, soon we will have to add sickness to the score.

My understanding of brewing in the bottle is that you need great precision with the amount of sugar, otherwise you will cause bottles to burst. I would love to brew my own but the wife says I drink too much as it is.

I was just looking at storage battery costs. The SA govt is offering a subsidy of $500 per kWh. LiFe's from Hobbyking are about $1000 per kWh, but the cheapest battery system appears to be much more than this. My guess is that there are big profits out there, confined to the suppliers. A 5kWh setup should cost $2500 after the subsidy . This would store 200 cents worth of electricity at 40 cents/kWh. If it had a life of 1000 cycles, it would return $2000. Mind you, if electricity moved from 40 cents to 40 dollars per kWh, the figures would favour the batteries.

Are u being rood marty?

I thought a firkin was a kind of idiot, as in " a firkin idiot".

The story about how aborigines became officially people in Australia has to do with the invasion of Hungary by Russia about 1954. All of America's allies took turns at denouncing the Russians in the UN. But the Russians were ready for Australia, and they compared, in detail, the aborigines with anything similar in the soviet union. Remember that in Australia, aborigine were not citizens. It was so effective, it bluntened the whole attack on Russia. Australia was in shame.

I don't understand, old K. If I could go off the grid, then there that be real independence (unless they could charge you "supply charge" for the fact that their poles go near your house )

It is only recently that electric push-bikes dropped below 2 or 3 thousand as advertised around here. This Sydney friend who is looking to buy one was told by an "expert" that you need to spend $3,000 to get a decent one. Of course, we rural people think everybody who lives in Sydney is rich. So you should have bought a job lot at $100. Gosh 400 bikes with $2500 profit each would make anyone a millionaire...

Don't forget the stadia.. but nobody knows just how long a stadia is . I think the distance from Alexandria to Syrena was 300 stadia. This was wrong but it caused Columbus etc to underestimate the size of the planet. Surprising that we don't know better just how long a stadia was supposed to be.

Space, I'm like you as far as an electric car goes but I do have an $800 electric bike and a mate of mine has a mobility scooter. The bike battery is 36 volts and 10 amp-hours, so it stores 360 Watt-hours or .36KWh which is about 10 cents worth. I recommend you try an electric bike, I reckon its great... like going a bit downhill when it suits you. I haven't tried the scooter yet, my mate says it has freed him from being dependent on the wife and he really likes it. I still have my driving license but the 10 tonne endorsement was going to cost money for a special medical so it was not renewed. The big tractor here doesn't seem to mind at all. The bike battery would keep the fridge cold for half the day as long as you didn't open it too much. Not worth connecting to the grid though. A steam-driven generator would return some money if connected to the grid with the right agreement, but it would not be able to pay the minimum wage for an attendant. And that's with free wood to fire the boiler.

Everybody has their price, space. If we could get the same car $3000 cheaper if we changed to LHD, would you be tempted? When in the US, I was too scared to drive myself because I thought that in an emergency, my instincts would be all wrong. A big cost of any change will be the accidents. The buggy here at the farm is LHD, ( as is the Jabiru, as Marty points out.) The tractors and bikes are center-drive, and I doubt that they make the controls different for the RHD countries. But every time I drive an EU car, I continually operate the windscreen wiper instead of the indicators and I don't like these cars.