Bruce

One reason why home-schooling is better lies in the time wasted at normal schools. One day when I asked a grandson what he had done that day in school, he said "nothing much Grandpa, Seb was being naughty again ". In my days at school, Seb would have sat in sullen silence after getting the cane, which would at least have let the rest of the kids do some work. Not that those old days were all that great, I can remember one especially brutal headmaster. I wonder if an authoritarian school system makes people more regimented and subservient to bureaucracies . This is the opposite to what Octave did. If school was not compulsory, it would be a lot better.

And sorry to say, OME, but kids vary greatly in their intelligence. As do adults...gosh I would like to understand more science than I do, but alas my brain is not quite good enough. And as for playing music... I just was not born with the talent, bugger it.

Good onyer octave. Kids can do much better away from school if they are home-taught properly. If my grandkids ever want to get really good university entrance marks, I reckon it will be necessary to take them out of school for at least a year before the exams. But universities have sold out to political correctness and managerialism, with the result that many degrees are worth nothing now. A trade is harder to attain and worth more as a meal ticket.

Well Phil, your few days in Germany were more than I have ever had. But one of my great grandfathers was the blacksmith at Hahndorf (Adelaide hills), and his name was August Haebich, so I always thought I should know a little German. Well it sure is very little. In fact, I learned only some French at school, et tout le mond rire quand je parlez fraincais. Je avez un Alice Springs accent trez terrible. But an unfulfilled ambition of mine is to go to a beer hall in Munich und trink out of steins mit lids und sing songs und wear lederhosen.

Old K, the story about the fate of the settlement at Port Essington illustrates your point about how stupid they were to not learn from the aborigines. The whites all starved, while the aborigines in the same area had plenty. But why didn't they progress over all those thousands of years and make ships and discover England? They could have decided the inhabitants were so primitive they didn't count and called England "terra nullius".

Oh no, I thought everybody who owned a plane was a great guy and my friend. Nev, you make me a sadder old man.

Gott in himmel Phil, sie sprechen deusch sehr terribel.

Maybe those cats were brought in the same way. I am surprised though, the native animals are no match for cats and I wonder why they didn't spread through the whole country. The dingo certainly spread. Dingos have apparently been here for 5,000 years and the aborigines 40,000 years. Dingos have another life in the form of kelpies, which are only supposed to be about 5% dingo but I reckon its more. Years ago, it was illegal to have a part-dingo dog, so of course they lied about any dingo being there at all. The 5% figure is recent and comes from DNA work.

gosh coljones I hope that was a joke. Surely he is not that bad, owning a plane and all? I just thought he was lazy and will not deserve farmer's votes next time.

Dingos came in as meat-on-the -hoof (?) with Macassan traders.

Farmers in the Wimmera this grain-carting season were treated even worse ( than we are by CASA ) by transport dept types. One farmer was fined hundreds because a tie-down strap had a half-turn in it. Another because his seat had a small tear. All this terrorism was justified on "safety" grounds and defended by the minister, although not specifically those 2 cases. The tie-down strap guy later won in court, if he had lost there it would have cost him thousands. Regulated out of earning money? For sure. Where was the local MP ( Andrew Broad, a Brumby owner and inheritor of political fortune ) in all this I wonder.

Hey this topic was about over-regulation. Not that I have any objection to the drift to good vs bad instructors. And coljones has a valid point, too little regulation can be bad too if applied to workers as he suggests. Right now, the pendulum is way too far the other way. look at RAAus and the GFA and how they have been forced to behave.

It sure is important to get type-specific training. This guy at Gawler didn't and those who saw his first flight in his new sleek glass plane thought he was going to die. He was fine with the new plane when he got used to the different handling compared to his old Gazelle. Of course if your new plane is a single seater, you can't do this completely but have to settle for as near as you can get. And yes, the test flight of the new plane needs to be done with an experienced test pilot who is current on type. Don't hurry this either, not long ago we saw such a flight end badly when the volkswagen engine lost power at 300 feet on climbout.

Great story Jerry. There are good instructors out there and some terrible ones.Some of the bad ones are just using the hours to move onto other things. Space, I agree with Nev, it would be a shame to give up too soon.

Space, you are real welcome to bring your Hummelbird to my place. Is that you in the pic? You look happy and the plane looks good, but it will need wings. I have a 550 m strip, just right for a Hummelbird with wings and a happy well-trained pilot. I'm sure you wouldn't risk crashing for something as simple as missing out on flying lessons, and that is my point. You are the best person to know what you want to do, not some bureaucrat.

I just read a good story about how the first colony city on the moon operated. It belonged to Kenya...Why? because Kenya offered a deregulated environment in which things could happen without being stopped by "safety " bureaucracy. So several big companies moved there . Jabiru has a better go at being innovative in South Africa than they do here, look at the two engined plane as an example. And medically, it is already cheaper to go overseas to escape our over-regulated and litigation-hampered situation here. Gosh we could go ahead if only people could really choose to do things at their own risk.

But yes Marty, your born-again natural range-fed muesli has radiation.

There was this research project about who had the most radiation dose for their whole life... the answer was those who lived all their lives in granite-stone houses, in Cornwall I think.

I invested in the hot rocks ( geothermal energy) because they were forgetting base-load power in South Australia. Greens would approve of it as long as nobody told them it was actually a form of nuclear power. Gosh those greens are deficient in elementary science. I know this green woman who is so proud of her natural granite benchtops that I haven't the heart to tell her that granite makes a geiger counter tick. Well the hot rocks worked, but the stainless steel bore casings rusted out too fast for it to be economically viable.

Good chemistry lesson tho... I wish I knew more chemistry.

There are lots of things technically possible, like storing energy in flywheels, that are not economically an idea to invest in. Sorry to say it but plastic to oil is another.

From Octave's figures I get 16 kWh for 100 km which is well under the 25 kW per hour that was my estimate. My Falcon has a 190 kW engine but it rarely works anywhere near that so I guessed about 25 kW. Maybe the 16 kW is for a mini car and the 25 is indeed about right for a big car. I like that 190 kW when passing trucks or towing up a hill. Anyway, it is not being green to recharge your car from electricity produced by burning fossil fuel. For that crime, you should be sentenced to eating grits for a week.

You have to be very well off to afford to be green. I wish it wasn't so. Just do the sums. For example, a car which uses 25kW and is driven for 2 hours per day needs 50kWh per day. On a good day, a solar panel can produce one kWh. Let's ignore cloudy days, after all we want to be green huh. So you need 50 solar panels just to charge your car. About $15,000 worth if you install them yourself and have all the frames handy. If you want to charge it overnight, you also need 60 kWh of battery storage, which would cost $1 per Watt-hour from Hobbyking, which is $ 60,000 worth of batteries. ( I noticed that the super battery in South Australia is getting bulk discount and paying about half as much per watt-hour.) Even an electric bike fed from solar panels is quite expensive, but the idea is so nice that I am seriously considering doing it.

Messerschmitt was actually a derogatory name for the BFW 190 and 110. Like calling a Spitfire a " Mitchel". Barvarian Flugzeug Werks is now BMW. Australia couldn't make an engine, so after the war we sought out motor engine makers GMH and Ford to do this. Now we don't make engines anymore, except maybe Jabiru.

Electric cars are still only for rich people, but that is changing slowly. $15,000 US would pay for a new small real car and years of petrol. And a lot better than that Messerschmidt. Dunno if I would ever buy a single seat car , although a single-seat glider seems right.