Bruce

i reckon they are all secretly working for Pauline.Gosh, ex labor party members like me are going to vote for whoever will send them back and accept fewer in the future. . They were brought in by Kevin Rudd and they are the kiss of death for the labor party.

I reckon that Wiki must be counting Hispanics as "white" . I guess this is politically correct. Maybe it is English-speaking whites who are now in the minority. Anyway, I would have voted for Obama. But he was brought up by a white grandmother and was spared the street culture of violent black youths by growing up in Hawaii.

Nev, the USA is no longer a majority white country. That changed about ten years ago.

Septic tanks gradually fill their primary chamber with insoluble stuff. How long this takes depends on how careful you are with what goes in, but even with care it will need cleaning out sometimes. There is a couple I have met who invested in a tanker-sucker truck and they travel the country having a semi-holiday lifestyle, sucking out a septic tank or two every few days. But...where to dump the stuff? I didn't ask.

Most arabs see Israel as a proxy for the USA. That's what Osama was all about. Alas for Osama, he never got his message through. Most people have no idea why he did it. My mother-in-law says he did it cos he hated Christians. Gosh he should have spent the same time and money on a publicity campaign instead of making everybody angry and seeking revenge in him.

wow Byron, you are a soils expert.

Gosh Nomad, I didn't know that about the USA, and Australia would be similar. Bugger, no other woman has wanted my genes..and yet my kids are OK. I think they really are mine.... what is the percentage here do you think?

Marty, you should have been the local environmental officer when I was forced to do the wrong type of effluent drain for the septic tank here on the farm. The actual guy was a scientific illiterate but he had the power to deem his opinions to be correct. So we put in a short but deep effluent drain into impermeable clay and to this day in really wet weather we have to use a pump to dispose of the excess out onto a paddock. I wanted to have a much longer and shallower ag drain running slightly downhill and dug in to just below the bottom of the topsoil. Yes it could be secretly changed and then it would be illegal but working better. Maybe my pump setup is illegal too.

It's women who have the real problem... they need a good and faithful provider and also good genes for their children. If they don't come in the same package they have to fool the provider that he is the father and not that hunky guy she sees sometimes. From dna testing, they found about 15% of kids in an indian village were not related to their "father", and this in a place where women could be killed for infidelity.

OK, I stand corrected. Here's silly me thinking of how every leaking sewer pipe near the harbor was putting stuff into the water and how some of the pathogens would finish up in the oysters. How about some oysters from the west coast of SA? The cleanest water in the world there.

OME, .If the harbor had clean water then Sydney Rock oysters would be safe to eat. Alas this is not the case.

Yep, we need to apply the "least worse" idea more often. For example, if you prevent an old guy from flying for safety reasons, you are likely doing more harm than good. If that old guy was keeping himself fit and active by flying, then for sure there are the risks of flying but the reduction in other risks more than compensates. By about 6 times. Getting back to drinking water.... I know 2 people who suffered terrible diseases from drinking non-treated water. One got his disease in Indonesia, the other from drinking tank water from a farm in Australia. Chlorine would be the least worst if you compared chlorine with no chlorine.

South Australia has had deposits on bottles and cans for many years. I have used this fact to prove that SA is less corrupt than the states without deposits. But I agree with Yenn in that it is cartons and fast-food wrappings that make a lot of the litter. What we need is much higher deposits and on a lot more stuff. Of course the packaging billionaires will be fighting this all the way.

Longer than one week Nev. After nearly a month, the car is starting just fine with the old battery plus the chemicals plus the capacitors. If it goes another 11 months it will be a financial win. A mate of mine who thinks I am silly has made me borrow his "jump start" case, which he bought from supercheap. It contains a lithium battery and leads and is surprisingly light. So far I haven't needed it.

Don't worry space, the earth is moving away from the sun at about 15 cm a year.

yep space, most of the wind and tide energy is actually sourced from the rotation of the earth and it is slowing down for sure. They can see it on accurate clocks, it is quite measurable. Back in the days of the dinosaurs the day was about 20 hours. I don't think the rotation about the sun is changing, but the sun is getting hotter anyway but this will not be noticed by your great grandchildren, it will cook us in about 50 million years I think.

Geoff, that story adds to the theory that Hess could have embarrassed some important people if his story got out.

I sure didn't know that Nev. We think of lithium batteries as new things, but it was the requirements of laptop computers which made them become viable again. Why didn't they become more common on motorbikes ( and aeroplanes) I wonder.

I didn't know cadmium was so bad Nev. Worse than lead huh. And I take your point about the old battery lasting a week... I hope it goes longer than that.. Earlier today I was in supercheaps and noticed a new battery for the falcon was more like $200. It would be good to delay that for a while. Apparently the first new car without a lead-acid is a Porsch, on sale now. I guess it has a LiFe battery plus the electronics to look after the battery automatically. How about a hobbyking LiFe for $100 plus the capacitors for $60 ? This should give 300 amps for cranking and still be cheaper than a new lead-acid. A lot lighter too, maybe the first use of such a setup should be for an aircraft?

Well I finally got the capacitors and fitted them. 6 only 500 Farads in series to get 83 Farads. These can supply 83 amps for 3 seconds while discharging from 12 volts down to 9 volts ( the battery voltage during cranking is 9 volts). The Falcon starts fine now. It had stopped starting at all till I put the cadmium sulphate stuff in, then it did start but not very well, you could tell the battery was only just providing enough amps. So now it has the old battery plus $11 worth of chemicals plus $60 worth of capacitors. And working like it had a new battery. I wonder how long this will last?

Me too Phil, on the other side of things a bit. 30 years ago I was a member of a labor party branch. Only a few weeks ago, I was considering voting for Pauline Hanson, until I found out about the sustainable population party. What I think has happened is that labor and liberal have drifted together under the pressure of opinion polls and the donations of property billionaires. I dislike them all.

Barnaby Joyce getting a "big swing" simply shows that most people thought the whole thing was a bit of money-wasting nonsense. I would not normally vote for Joyce but would have in this bye-election just to show my displeasure at the nonsense of the whole thing. As if a person born in Australia can be regarded as a "foreigner" is just rubbish.

My father used to sometimes introduce me as " this is my smart son Alec" Once or twice they were taken in enough to start calling me Alec.

There is a story about how nazi bigwigs who were sick chose catholic hospitals if they could for the reason space said. But what they were practicing in those nazi hospitals was not voluntary euthanasia, it was involuntary euthanasia, also known as murder.

Lots of things point to that conclusion, for example the fact that he wasn't murdered but lived moderately well for a jailbird. The very powerful people who didn't want him to testify were not murderers and they obviously felt some guilt.