Bruce

My marble was in the lottery to be conscripted for Vietnam but it didn't come up. My father tried to join the RAAF in WW2 but they had learned in WW1 that it wasn't a good idea to take the bloke who operated the town's power station so he wasn't allowed to go. Quite a few mates of mine went to Vietnam and I would not have objected at the time, that's how silly I was. And space, the age of conscription has gone by. It was killed off by high-tech weapons.

I get angry at the idea of there being homeless people outside all night in bad weather. I know that some of them are undeserving, but still I demand that the government provide for their basic needs of food and shelter. Where I part company from who I call the bleeding hearts is that I would garnish their welfare money to pay for these things while they stand for the rights of welfare recipients to blow their money on drugs/gambling/alcohol etc so they finish up hungry and homeless. And space, there are 30,000 unemployed in the suburbs around here, so the problem could not be solved by me personally. But if the number were small enough, then yes I would give some direct action a go.

Gosh Nev, pokies owned by churches? Sinful, say I. I'm so sick of gambling ads on the TV that I'm going to email my MP and tell him that they are disgusting and what makes it worse is knowing that some of my taxpayers money is going into evil gambling pockets via centerlink due to the fact that they ( Centerlink) pay benefits in cash.

Wow thats a hot night in London Jerry. And as for the deniers, well the situation is similar here but a bit worse. Australia just looks so big on a map that it is easy to think that nothing can harm it and there is room for millions more.

Australia could be the Nigeria of uranium too. Not the Saudi Arabia of uranium, because unlike the arabs, we are too silly to nationalize the industry. And our abundant sunshine should be a warning that we are too close to the equator to escape the worst of global warming. 28 here today Jerry, 21 sounds good for London. Do you lot also elect extreme religious types to parliament? Here we have the examples of Rudd, Abbott and now Morrison. And a lot more I suspect, after all they keep it quiet.

If women are free to choose, the population doesn't grow much. You can see this in many countries in the world. In current Australia, 3 is considered a lot of kids but when you take into consideration those who have none, it is quite ok. What is crazy is putting those home-grown kids at risk of a terrible future by importing millions more.

Nah Marty, in Australia they produce about ten times the carbon dioxide that they would have back home.

Don't you admire how his lies are forgiven and dismissed as advertising puff? But what if the republicans win the coming mid-term elections? Amazingly, there are people ( Trump is one ) who think this is going to happen. Personally, I would bet that Trump loses control of at least one house, and the democrats will make his life miserable. And so they should. Only about 6 weeks to go.

What do : Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Abbott and Morrison have in common? Answer, a lack of science education. None of them could ( or can ) do do maths, chemistry, physics or biology. Stalin had as his chief scientific adviser a man called Lysenko, who never understood evolution. Lysenko died of old age in 1979 having spent his last 20 years trying to breed cows that gave more butterfat by feeding them the stuff. The last 3 are climate-change deniers and I bet Hitler and Stalin would have been too.

The old Ghan , when it was steam, sure used a lot of water. It seemed to stop at every siding to fill up. Took 3 days and 2 nights to get to Alice Springs. Gosh, it was wonderful. 3 ft 6" gauge, moved with a slow swaying motion. Meals were silver-service. The dunny went straight out onto the track, and there was a notice saying not to use it whilst in a station.

Space, I don't think its legal to sell stuff to your employees to cut their wages. There was a "slavery" outcry when some Brazilian ranchers were providing huts and charging so much rent that their employees got nothing.

There will be a bottle of red prize for the first steam-powered Jabiru. I'll donate the prize myself and help drink it.

There is also an HG Wells book where cannibalism ruled in the future. Personally, I reckon it is unlikely. But what if it were introduced surreptitiously into pies and pasties? This was in a recent movie made in Tasmania. ( It would never pay to farm people though, their conversion rate is terrible) In the meantime, I actually welcome the idea of food becoming expensive. A sheep should be about 2 weeks minimum wage, say I. Perhaps a months worth. Right now its less than a day.

Latest climate conference is predicting disaster by 2040. This is much later than that guy who is predicting our extinction in ten years. As far as Australia is concerned, it is more the number of immigrants than where they came from. Every extra mouth to feed will be a problem. Marty, how do you imagine Australia will feed an extra 10 million with oil and phosphorous depletion in full swing, plus climate change running amok?

It is not clear to me if the rich in Australia pay their fair share of tax or not. When I googled this up, the results were unclear. For years, it has been my impression that both sides of politics had been brib#d oops donated to the point where they do the bidding of the super rich. Lately, I'm not so sure... it may be that stupidity rules more than money. Does anybody know?

My grandparents didn't have a tap inside the house. They cooked on kero burners and had a weekly visit from the iceman for their cold chest. I never thought of them as poor and I don't think they considered themselves as poor. They had wonderful sing-songs around the piano instead of television.

How long was it to get a steam engine car going? I think a steam loco required a few hours, which would be unacceptable for a car I reckon. Well at least you could run your steam car on wood from the farm. Did they use wood or coal or oil? Sorry but I've never seen a steam car.

Nomad, most people don't think beyond the next week or so. They wouldn't blow out their bankcards if they did. But I liked something Dick Smith said..." either you don't understand the science or you don't care about the kids" Personally, I find the argument that nuclear power is the least worst to be convincing, but that puts me in a minority even on this forum.

Hanging up is the natural thing to do, but it is better to just put the phone down and walk away. This costs them much more in time. A friend we call doesn't answer the phone until she hears your voice leaving a message. I liked Octave's story... and I agree, if you have free time, it can be fun to try getting to know them. I wonder how many people they take in? there must be quite a few or they would go extinct. Nobody I know.

Hardly any would be doing it for sport. Mainly, they would honestly believe that the eagles had done the killing. I guess it is possible that this happens in rare cases but the CSIRO observers ( they spent a long time in an elevated tank with viewing-holes ) didn't see the ewes get agitated from eagles. Eagles feed on mice and small lizards and insects. In the investigation, it was dogs which did the main killing. Foxes are not a big danger to healthy lambs and ewes, the foxes are a bit small too. But my guess is that foxes do get a few lambs. Here's the main danger... sheep are not worth the price of a vet's visit and the minimum wage is about 3 sheep a day, so the sheep get little in the way of care and this is sad. Fly-strike is just an awful way for a sheep to die.

There was a CSIRO investigation done many years ago ( long before loony greenies called the shots ) where they found eagles blameless. Eagles were caught carrion-feeding but not killing healthy lambs. Often, the farmer would see the eagles eating a dead lamb and wrongly conclude that the eagles had killed it. A lamb is too big and heavy for an eagle.

It depends on what you are buying Marty. Back then, workers could afford a house.

I reckon we need to be aware of what we are dealing with when it comes to moslems. Most are just ordinary people, but the extreme ones among them are barbaric to put it mildly. Now all religions have this in common, but moslems have their murderous orders given out more clearly than others. So a nice couple can have extremists rise up from their children as they ( the children ) become infected with the religion. It's the bleeding hearts which I can't understand. Those who have nice moslem friends and so they conclude that all moslems are lovely gentle people.

Here we are on a natural spaceship. It is traveling at 2 million km per hour through space and it has built-in life support systems and supplies. What have we done? We have learned to loot the supplies while increasing the passenger load without any thought to the future. In aviation terms, we have overloaded the Jabiru with the whole family and set off across the pacific with a leaky fuel tank.

Pat is dead right about the demise of the education system, including universities. The rot set in with the rise of managerialism, when vice-chancellors began to see students as customers and lecturers as workers. In between giving themselves million-dollar rises. The end result is that you can get a Phd for grade 7 stuff. Yep, even a scientific Phd. How do I know? From being the supervisor of one until I mercifully got early retirement.