willedoo

I used to try to get the old Super 70 Chamberlain flying but it never quite took off. It used to go faster than the front end steering could handle. The later ones with the Perkins could go as well, I think it was all in the gearing.

I doubt the social media companies would spend the time and resources on constantly monitoring over 16 accounts in real time. Most have no restriction on the number of accounts you can have with different email addresses. The point I'm making is what's to stop the older brother creating a second account that the under 16 younger sibling uses. The companies will only police it at the account creation level. How they do that I have no idea. Will it just be a box to tick that you are over 16 or will everyone over 16 have to provide proof of age to open an account. Let's say any of us here want to open a facebook account, do we have to supply Mr. Zuckerturd with drivers license details or a birth certificate. If not what's to stop kids under 16 working around the restrictions. I don't quite understand how the bill will achieve what's intended.

In his first term Trump's nasty personality and abrasive ways were a big factor in the opposition to him. In other words, if he was a really nice bloke, he wouldn't have had anywhere near as hard a time based on his policies alone. The problem is things like Jerry mentioned, getting the Europeans off their bludging backsides to pay their fare share of GDP on defence instead of hanging off the American shirt tails, I doubt would have happened if he asked nicely. The US had been trying that approach for a long time and were constantly being taken for fools. Trump's threats and aggressive style worked in that instance. I think the Europeans will be keen to see what he's like this time round. They'll be wondering whether it will be good, bad, or somewhere in between. One of Trump's problems is that a lot of people hate him that much that they want him to fail. That's how polarising he is.

Different laws. I don't know about these days but in my day you could get your articulated license at 17 in Queensland. I suppose these days a semi trailer with P plates would look a bit odd. I had a full time job driving a semi up and own the highway carting general freight at age 18. I've never liked the concept of youth wages. When I started work it didn't matter if you were 16 or 17, if you did a man's work you got a man's pay. Even when I was 15 and working in the school holidays I always got an adult's pay. That was mainly farm work driving tractors and harvesters.

Pitt and Co. have a point about rushed legislation and inadequate time for scrutiny of the bill. A senate inquiry into the bill was set up last Thursday with public submissions closing Monday. Hardly good government if we rush legislation through where the public and MPs don't have time to be properly informed. Some bills have good intent but the devil is always in the detail which needs to be scrutinised and sometimes amended to make it a fair and effective piece of legislation. In that short time the senate inquiry got 15,000 submissions but I think the bulk of them were generic Musk enabled submissions.

The point is, blaming someone ie: the American voters is a coping mechanism that helps everyone get over the shock of his win but doesn't address the reasons that he won and certainly won't prevent more Trump-like leaders being elected in the future. Trump didn't win because all his voters are stupid. Only a certain amount of his voters are the dumb rednecks portrayed in the media. We think there's a lot of them because we see them in the media all the time and at his rallies. What the media doesn't show is the tens of millions of non newsworthy people at home who went out and voted in a Republican president. Let's say Trump scored 76.9 million votes to 74.4 for Harris, beating her by 2.5 million votes in the popular vote. It doesn't work this way but just theoretically, let's say that 2.5 million were dumb devotees of Trump and they got him over the line. It still doesn't account for why the other 74 million voted the way they did. For sure we can all say Trump only won because people are stupid, but it's classic denial.

You're might be right Marty but we've got four more years to make that judgement. It will either be progress or chaos. His track record is a bit chaotic. Most presidents in their last term try to achieve something to leave as a legacy but with Trump it will all depend on how much self discipline he can muster.

Blaming the American voters and shaming them as being dumb and ignorant for electing him is a head in the sand denial of the real reasons he got back in. If they want no more Trumps they have to change things.

Trump is only the symptom and not the cause. Even after he's gone the conditions that led to Trump being elected will still be there. It's happening all over the world where people have had a gut full of governments lording it over them. You only have to look at the rise of the right in Europe as an example. People see Trump as an anti-politician, a dismantler and de-regulator who will free things up and break down a lot of federal restrictions, so he's regarded as a big winner by the disgruntled. We can whinge all we like about Trump but unless governments worldwide change their ways, there will just be more Trumps. His supporters see him as the wild card needed to shake up the establishment and break down big brother government.

The only real test I had to get my driver's license at age 17 was to do a handbrake start in our old AA 160 International body truck. The only sloping ground around was the crossing over the railway line so the local copper got me to pull up on the approach to the railway line and then take off again. I had a Commer semi lined up to get my articulated license but he was happy enough with me verbally verifying I'd driven it. In those days the cops knew all us farm kids had been driving everything from the age our feet could reach the pedals. The drive in the truck got me a car, body truck, semi trailer, tractor and motorcycle license but he wouldn't give it to me until he saw me ride my old AJS 500. I went home and rode the bike back into town. He must have heard me coming as when I rode around the corner he was standing there with the license and handed it to me. Different days back then.

I had a full beard when I was in Alberta and the worst part of those sub zero temperatures was that as fast as ice forms on your mustache, the hot breath is melting it and it's like having a permanently runny nose. Clean shaven blokes don't have as much of an issue with that.

That would be the same one I mentioned in 1984 when I was near the Flinders Ranges. Also on an open cab dozer and the wind was freezing. Even with the clothes stuffed full of rags including one tied around the face, it was bitterly cold. In that same cold wind blast, my dad up in Queensland had a couple of inches of snow over the lawn. He was born there and only saw snow that one time in his 89 years.

You could be right. I heard him again at the 10 hour mark have a bit of a shuffle in the bucket, but for most of that time he's been dead quiet. I wonder if they have a survival mode where they slow their metabolism right down to conserve O2 and energy, a bit like how a bear hibernates.

I think a lot of the government's problems go back to the Voice. I think they should have left it to later rather than jumping in so early in the term and expending a lot of early term energy on it for no gain. It was a high stakes, all or nothing political gamble and the defeat left them with egg on their face. After that they went into shock and have just bumbled along since until this latest 11th. hour traffic jam to rush through a lot of ill-prepared legislation in the hope of having some election ammunition. If they hadn't had the Voice and it's failure they could have concentrated on a lot of other legislation earlier in the term and had more time to present a better case for the Voice. It's not that they're an inherently bad government but they just haven't been able to win the politics since day one. Unfortunately that's how our system is these days. Voters don't take much notice of all the small stuff governments do all the time. It's the big politics and the 24 hour news cycle that makes or breaks a government in the eyes of the punters.

On the social media age restriction bill, Nationals MP Keith Pitt has made a good point. The bill doesn't kick in until 2026 so his point is why can't they allow a few more weeks for MP's to scrutinise the bill properly instead of rushing it through. My best guess is Albo and Co. know they're in trouble electorally and are trying to push as many bills as they can in this last week so they've got bragging points for the election campaign. It wouldn't surprise me if they are going for an early election, if so this is the last sitting of parliament before the election. Here's a cut and paste of Pitt's comments to the press: " If you can’t actually fine anyone for not taking action [until 2026], then what difference will it make to take a few weeks to look at this in detail – this is one of the rare occasions I agree with my colleagues in the Senate where this is something that should be looked at more … My job as a backbencher is to make sure that people are doing this right. It’s not simply to trundle along and agree with everything that’s put before me." His main argument was that teenagers will be able to work around the ban – along with wanting more time to scrutinise the legislation.

I must admit it's nice and quiet with an entrapped rat. It's been around for about a week trying to make a nest in the ceiling and making a racket and general nuisance of itself. It wouldn't take the bait on the trap which was peanut paste encircled with cotton thread to hook his teeth. It usually gets them but not this character. He got into a garbage bag and that's where he was caught, so now he's in the Bunnings bucket inside that garbage bag. I haven't had rats or mice for ages and thought there must be a carpet snake around, but if so the snake must be on holidays. Below my place is mainly canefields and they are a breeding ground for rats. When they harvest the cane, the rodents head up here into the hills and annoy everyone. We sometimes get the small marsupial rats here. I have a live cage trap with 25mm x 10mm mesh and they get through that in a flash. If they can get their head through they're out. I've heard the stories of rodents being able to flatten out their bones to squeeze through small spaces. I've watched the marsupial rats escape the cage and they seem to be able to flatten their skull somehow as well.

20 litres = 20,000 cc of air, but the oxygen content depletes with every breath. I think the CO poisoning is more prevalent where there's flame burning in a confined space. Some people over the years have run into trouble by having the gas stove flame burning for heating in winter in a sealed caravan with not enough ventilation.

I've never driven a car with an electronic one. Are they better or worse for handbrake starts on slopes?

That one in 1984 was one of those things that sweep up from Antarctica and travel a fair way north. It snowed in Toowoomba that time, common around Stanthorpe district but fairly rare around Toowoomba.

spacey, I remember a very cold winter in 1984 when I was working in the Flinders Range area. We had sleet and the wind chill factor was bad. None of us had the gear for that so we raided the rag bag and stuffed our clothes full of rags plus a rag around the face like a bushranger. One time on a motorbike, we pulled up and got some newspapers to stuff down the front of our coats. It worked ok.

The way I understand it, Alpha particles can't penetrate very far and don't penetrate the bare skin. With old aircraft gauges the radium paint breaks down over time to form a very fine dust inside the gauge. The danger with opening them up is not so much getting it on your skin as that can be safely washed off, but the big danger is breathing it. Internal tissue is soft enough for the Alpha particles to penetrate and do damage.

This is not a random thought but is a random topic. I've got a rat trapped in a 20 litre Bunnings bucket with the lid sealed on top. I'd say it's fairly air tight as it's one of those press fit type of lids that clip on. Rattus Rattus has been in there for about nine hours and things are fairly quiet in the bucket. My question is, how long would it take a pair of little rat lungs to use up the oxygen in a 20 litre bucket. The way I see it, eventually the O2 molecules would deplete to the point of making CO instead of CO2 and Rattus Rattus would pass out from carbon monoxide poisoning. I just need a safe timeline so I don't open the bucket and a mad rat leaps out at me.

In 1985 I found myself in Calgary and I was intending to head up north and get a job for the winter. I got talking to a Canadian surveyor who was on a break in Calgary and he filled me in on a lot of detail about working in the cold. he showed me a permanently numb patch on his finger where a glove developed a pinhole and his finger got damaged before he picked up on it. He said the biggest danger is breaking through the ice, and that he'd only seen it once. They carry spare gear, towels and blankets etc. behind the seats of the Toyotas for such emergencies so they were able to strip off his wet clothes, rug him up and get him in the heated vehicle before he froze to death. I'd previously talked to a Canadian when I was working in WA and he related stories of escape hatches in the top of machine cabs and how dozer crews used to walk manless dozers over sections of dodgy ice by using long wire cables attached to the steering clutch handles and other controls. I left Calgary and made it to Peace River where a lot of contractors were based and intended to scout for a job the following day. That night the temperature dropped much colder than -30 and the river froze rock solid on top. I realised that to work in that sort of cold you need to be in country a bit earlier to allow time for a bit of cold weather education. I thought that with my inexperience I was likely to go up there and lose fingers and toes so I pulled the pin on the idea. Another deciding factor was that the money was no better than in Australia working in the heat, so I came home and went back to the desert I knew and kept all my digits. The day after I left Peace River the bus stopped at Grand Prairie a bit further south and the temperature dropped to -40 around lunchtime when I was there. A ten minute walk in inadequate boots took twenty minutes of thawing in a heated shopping centre before I could walk on. You need proper snow boots in those temperatures. Minus 20 at Calgary was quite pleasant if the wind wasn't blowing.

I'm the opposite. Winter and the cold is my favourite time. Always happiest when I have to wear long johns, a coat and a beanie (plus other stuff), not keen on shorts and T shirt weather. The only cold I don't like is when you have to wear gloves as it's a bit restrictive on what you can do. Unfortunately for a cold lover I live in a relatively hot area.

That's a very good summation of the issues, ome. None of the critics of the bill (and there are many) are denying that something needs to be done. What they are saying is that the government's legislation is a poorly thought out blunt instrument approach. Surely there must be a better way than a blanket ban. It's sort of like if a motorist runs over a pedestrian. Do you ban pedestrians or do you ban motorists or just ban both. That way nobody gets run over. Or do you put more thought into it and find some other way. I can understand how older people who are not familiar with the huge part social media plays in young people's lives would think a total ban is a great idea. But they are looking at it from a viewpoint that is only partly informed. I guess some people think all social media is to kids is a format to chat with each other, but it's much bigger than that. Things like TikTok and Instagram for example are used by talented kids to launch their music careers. Young people trying to make a career in the arts use social media to promote themselves in the same way it's used by adults to build a career. You can understand how they and their parents feel about this sledgehammer of a bill. It's effectively career ending for some young people.