Bruce

Willedoo, I had never heard that stuff.. thanks.

Russia is a big oil exporter and one of the countries which will benefit from global warming. They are terrible in how they treat their population so badly. In Australia, our best wheat lands have 10cm of topsoil and 400mm of rain. I Russia it is 100cm of topsoil and 1000mm of rain. Well we treat our people better than they do.

Jerry, thanks for that sad story. Family farms repeat that sort of tragedy all the time. There are several instances I could relate. I think the lesson is that inheritance should occur at 21 and not when the old guy dies.

By comparison with the rest of humanity, we are all among the rich. Gosh, owning an aircraft must put you into an elite group. Personally, I don't feel envy towards those who are richer than me, but I certainly reserve the right to complain about government policies which divert my tax money in a stupid manner. And giving monopoly commercial power to a small group such as medical specialists is plain stupid. For example,some years ago, my gp was not allowed to prescribe a particular skin treatment drug, so I was referred to a specialist ( who did indeed have a very expensive sports car) who didn't even look at his new patient while he scribbled out the prescription. That would have cost the taxpayer hundreds of dollars. I can think of many ways that money could have been better spent.

Never thought about checking the cars Nev. I do dislike it when the only magazines in the waiting room are Vogue types ( there are several ) which have plainly come from the specialist's wife. How to struggle by on 50,000 a week ? you need help from vogue.

Old K, when Howard wrote up his anti-union laws, he had to exempt the medical unions...er...colleges.. at every turn.

University of Adelaide circa 1990. I was there, on a committee to do with enrollments. The governments of the day were worried about medicare costs blowing out, and they limited the medical places so that it was nearly impossible to get in. The university itself ( funded by the commonwealth) had no say on the matter. They ( the commonwealth) don't do this now because it occurred to them that you only needed to limit the medicare provider numbers to contain this cost. But to this day, they limit the specialists costs by limiting the number of specialists. And how? By letting the colleges...er...unions.. decide the number of mouths at the trough. And yes we are better off than in the US where the AMA controls the GP's too on the same deal as our specialists.

And, old K , lots of straight "A" students didn't get into medicine. There was a time when you got extra points for "English being not your mother tongue" and without those extra points, it was impossible to gain entry. Yep the first-year of medicine looked like a foreign-student gathering.

Old K, it is not the medical graduates but the specialists that I am referring to. Lots of those young medical graduates would love to become specialists, but they find out that it is a closed shop. Entry to being a specialist is NOT based on fair exams.

Apparently, medical specialists in Australia have a monopoly protected by the government and within this monopoly, they are free to prevent any more new entrants than suits their pockets. The obvious outcome of this is that they all have full patient bookings and earn 3 or 4 million a year. The downside is carried by their patients, or would-be patients. A friend who had a brain problem was told that it was over a year's wait to see a neurologist. He only got to see one sooner by turning up as an outpatient. He is dead now, less than the year since he was told about the waiting time. Another person I know well needs to see a rheumatologist, so far ( a couple of months) no dice. The first one she was referred to had excess bookings and was refusing new patients. I say blame your local federal MP. This situation is unionism gone crazy and could be fixed with the stroke of a pen. Gosh, imagine if plumbers had a similar monopoly.

I agree with the Brexit lot wanting to have less bureaucracy in their lives. The only product of bureaucracy is poverty. This has been demonstrated repeatedly in history, where material progress takes place in the few periods where the bureaucrats are temporarily powerless. For proof of this, you only have to look at the history of Jabiru vs CASA. How Jabiru survived is a wonder. There are many other examples to prove the point.

True story, this... a mate's daughter bought this car with an oil-pressure gauge. She kept putting more oil in but it stayed stubbornly half-full. Well that is until the engine broke. I blame her father, I can remember just after she bought it , him wagging his finger and telling the girl " don't you let that car run out of oil."

That's right willedoo. They had it right last time, where the head of state needed 2/3 of the parliament thus ensuring that the person would be bi-partisan. And leaving the real power in the lower house where it belongs. This was overturned by stupid arguments which had the effect of leaving the head of state as the sole perogative of the pm, thus ensuring that we got partisan fools. I always wondered if Turnbull was a fool or did he deliberately sabotage the republican campaign.

It's not enough to just stop digging it up. In addition, you need to make more and bury it. There are other ways to take CO2 out of the air, but charring organics is the cheapest way. Unfortunately, there is not much profit in this for the rich people, so it's not going to happen. Spreading chemicals into the stratosphere would work too. I doubt that this will happen either. Things will just get gradually worse, and Trump types who promise to fix things by blaming whoever will get elected .

I would like to buy a phone jammer to use just under my roof. Once I had a dinner-guest who answered his phone loudly and at length while at the table. There should be a logo you could stick on your front door to say that visitor's phones don't work in here.

Sodium based batteries might just be the answer to living off the grid. It's very cheap compared to lithium. Of course, if the electricity is made with coal burning, the whole system is dirty. We could pay farmers to char and bury wood and straw etc, which would be the exact opposite of mining coal. BUT coal sells for about $125 a tonne, and the farmers would need at least $250 a tonne to do this. So the planet has to die, at least as a home for what we foolishly call civilization. The alternative could be to stop coal mining everywhere, and to stop military spending everywhere, and to use the ex-military money to char and bury until the CO2 is under control again many years from now.

Read it and was impressed willedoo. He was a better bloke than I thought.

cripes Jerry, how much is it per kWh? right now in South Australia we are paying about 40 cents /kWh and it is said that this is the highest in the world, due to those greenies of course.

In my case the grid was cheaper by a long way, but being off the grid would feel a lot better. With water and sewerage, we are off the grid at the farm and its better and cheaper than being in a suburb and paying rip-off prices. Alas, they get you at the farm with exorbitant council rates and you can't go off the grid with those.

I reckon the Russians did them a favor. If I was Putin, I would keep that ability to jam GPS as a secret weapon. In WW2, it was known that aluminium chaff jammed radar, but both sides didn't use it for years because they were enjoying their new toys too much. Getting back to the GPS stuff, what if you could take over the GPS signal and send the missiles back to where they came from? What fun.

Space, what do you mean about Jabiru adjusting wings? I never heard of it.

gosh OME, the power of the net amazes me sometimes. That report confirms that the RAAF thought Whitlam was good too. Not that I approved of all his politics though. Bringing in thousands of Lebanese moslems was harmful, but at least he did it for compassionate reasons. And they are still wondering about Connor's north-south pipeline. I reckon that needed more analysis before dismissing it. It was too easy and nasty to call it a pipe dream.

I never heard those stories wille. I grew up in Alice Springs and I would have heard about claiming the centre I reckon. Not that anybody would have taken notice if they did. Aborigines had exactly no power and lived on whitefellers handouts as far as I could see as a kid. They were a bunch of warring tribes who would kill each other if they could. The idea of them getting together and making land demands in those days is ridiculous. The father in law also told a story about Blamey making a horrible speech in New Guinea which angered the troops there, but this was second-hand in that he wasn't there but some of his mates were. Apparently Blamey told them that the Japanese were not much more advanced than monkeys and only dangerous if you turned your back on them while running away. In the 1970's I was at some event attended by Whitlam and the father in law, and Whitlam remembered him well and they chatted for a bit. A few years ago, I could have checked out the story about saluting, but alas its too late for that.

Jerry, don't you think that Australia with its vast empty spaces and plentiful uranium is better for nuclear power than the uk?

My father-in -law was a junior armourer and he served at the same base as Whitlam. He said Whitlam was a real gentleman who always treated the men in a friendly manner.