willedoo

I have the opposite problem. When the covid lockdowns arrived, I went mostly cashless and now use plastic or online transactions. I used to always have coins that were mainly used to buy limes from a bloke down the road with an honesty box and unmanned stall at his gate.These days I'm always on the hunt for coins to pay for the limes. When I was mainly cash transacting pre covid, I always came back from town with coins in the pocket. The gold coins I would put in a piggy bank as a reserve for times of being broke. The $2 coins soon add up to a stash in the hundreds of dollars. Now that I'm mainly cashless I compensate for the empty piggy bank by trying to budget a bit better and not experience those short bursts of abject poverty.

Sounds a bit like a poker machine in reverse.

She could do a remake - ' Kiss Kiss Donald's arse '.

Here's some tips for repurposing old pallets.

It's definitely a cult. He gets his biggest audience response when he does that weird thing with his hands (the air accordion one) and utters some incoherent strange sounds. It's not what he says that gets them going, it's the weird antics. I'm sure the twits still think it's a game/reality show. When he does the weird hand thing in combination with the little round mouth, he looks like a cross between a canary and a seal. What a buffoon.

It will still come down to votes. Poll figures show more than 50% of republicans will still vote for him if convicted. I forget the exact figure, but I think it's around 16% won't and the rest not sure. Among republicans he's still got that large cult following element, but whether they are enough to carry him is another thing.

That's still fraudulently presenting yourself as a potential buyer if you haven't got the money or means to ever buy one. I'm with ome, I couldn't take advantage like that. If I went up to the salesman, told him I was flat broke and could never hope to buy one, then asked him if I could have a drive, that would be different. I wonder how many salspeople would say yes to a test drive if you told them the truth. Not many I would think.

My suggestion would be New York. That's New York, a town in eastern Ukraine not far from the front line. With all Donald's hot air they could use him as a barrage balloon.

Sounds like sticky keys. I wonder if they are getting worn or if there's some dust buildup in the keys.

Oil certainly is finite; the specific and rare set of circumstances that created our reserves happened millions of years ago. Possibly there might be some in the making now, but I doubt the human species will survive the timeline required for new oil to be made. The theory of peak oil turned out to be a fizzer, at least in the dates predicted. There's quite a lot still there but the problem is the low hanging fruit is running out and what's left undiscovered or is being discovered will be harder to extract and correspondingly more expensive. The ocean regions are very promising except for the logistical side of getting to it. It's not only depth for drilling and extraction, but distance that holds back a lot of deeper ocean development. At present it's not practical for platforms more than 200klm out due to the limitations on servicing by helicopter. With a big price rise in oil, companies would be more inclined to find a work-around to that problem. With land based reserves there's still promise in some parts of the world, but the day could come when demand outpaces supply. A lot of oil is being found in previously worked out areas or areas that showed low prospect in the past. This is due to the rapid increase in technology of seismic data processing. The pace of change is hard to keep up with at times and previously overlooked areas can be a much better bet only 12 or 18 months later due to better data processing. Most of our exploration data was (and probably still is) processed in Texas and at times it's been like keeping the motor running waiting for their next new trick. I guess that's the way advances in computing are affecting lots of industries around the world.

Fibrillation is the heart beating irregularly and often fast as well. If it's beating regularly but raised over 100 I think it's classed as tachycardia.

I was joking, Nev. The bit out Chad was true though. For context Chad's had a beer or thirty with a large percentage of the population, so it's nothing out of the ordinary.

My first thought was maybe Madonna but when I saw the country music hint I could recognise Dolly's eyes and mouth.

I was tipped off. Expanding the photo showed the file name - countrymusicsinger.jpg

It's Dolly.

I can top that. I've had a few beers with Chad Morgan.

I remember back in the 80's seeing the biggest wallaroo I've seen in my entire life. In fact he was the biggest hopper I've ever seen and I've seen a lot of big reds. He was built bigger than any NRL front row forward I've ever seen and his chest was massive. He was standing upright and in height would probably only just fit under an average house doorway. That was near Surat.

I thought you were supposed to rub the bottle. Then again, Barbara Eden comes to mind.

Good one. Accurate as well.

I was listening to the wireless one day recently and they had an ecologist type talking about the depletion of krill stocks due to the growing demand for krill harvesting. The shortage of krill in the southern ocean is starting to effect whale species and also penguins. I forget the species of whale, but over the last couple of years the percentage of whale pregnancies going full term has plummeted from average 80% to 20% due to malnutrition from depleted krill stocks. It's not only the booming industry of krill oil capsules as a complimentary medicine, but also the salmon fish farms feed it to the salmon to give them colour. No more farmed salmon or krill oil for me.

I've figured it out. This convalescing after an operation is a bit like being on R&R. Except that I'm not fit enough for the recreation part so I'm on R.

Thanks Litespeed, I'll never be able to unread that. That and the thought I had mushroom soup the other night. Project for the day - Google mushroom free recipes.

As far as Twitter superspreader accounts goes, how do they regulate it and clean it up when Comrade Musk happily allows it on his toy platform. In a perfect world, Elon would tire of his new toy and sell it to someone responsible, but his ego wouldn't let him. For him, buying Twitter was a vanity project and a means to push his distasteful political views and boost accounts of the like minded. Move Twitter way to the right was the goal and the misinformation accounts slide right in. Musk wouldn't care if there was bullshit written on Twitter and particularly so as he's up there with the worst offenders. Despots and authoritarian regimes love it. Superspreader accounts can influence their enemy's public opinion and elections. The Kremlin for example use the 60/40 Goebbles propaganda method. Dish up 60% of true content to gain the trust of the people. The other 40% is mainly BS and aimed at the people who don't believe the 60% truth. Feed them BS, conspiracy bait and any other garbage that will gain the trust of the disgruntled. Once you have the 40% on board, use them to influence and undermine the 60%. It's a simple method of spreading and growing propaganda and it works.

My niece did a journalism degree at university. Post grad, she worked in the industry less than a year and gave it away. I think she got a real shock when she found out how much BS is in the industry. And that was quite a few years ago; it would be a few times worse than that now. One growing trend I don't like is whole articles presented as news, but halfway through the article they state " according to X user (insert name here)". If they are just reporting what a user posted on Xcrement they should state that at the top of the article and what the persons qualifications are. For context, they don't report what any old Joe Blow is saying on X but are hoovering news (?) content from known accounts involved with political commentary or war reporting. With higher tier accounts of politicians and people of public note, we all know who they are but with a lot of these medium tier regular commentators or social media news reporters a bit of research has to be done to find out how qualified they are. A lot of what they post is unverified; it may be accurate, it may be not. A section of the MSM is often to lazy to do their own research, fact checking and investigative journalism. They find it too easy to borrow commentary or unverified speculative claims from places like X (formally Twitter) accounts, and the lack of verification doesn't present a problem for them because of the ADD type 24 hour news cycle. The truth is most people don't care if it wasn't proven to be true yesterday. Yesterday's news is just that; most of the audience is busy moving on to today's serving of candy. The lazy media outlets know that and use it as a business model. The goal is not to present quality journalism but to find and dish up bulk content. Add on inaccurate, misleading click bait headers and you have viewers or readers flowing in and being exposed to the accompanying advertising which is where the money is. Most of the game now is about padding out content and dressing it up so that the gullible public picks theirs. There's a lot of advertising money up for grabs these days to make the media game very lucrative but also very cut-throat and competitive. There's a big pie there and media outlets all want the biggest slice. As far as our 24 hour serving of news goes, it's like we, the suckers, are a big mob of monkeys and above us are lined up different individual zoo keepers dangling their own brand of banana and hoping the monkey mob will pick their flavour. It's sad really, and pathetic in the extreme.