onetrack

I find most of the scratchies pretty tedious, and greatly time-consuming, though - and I like fast results, so I can get back to productive work!

You don't even have to go to all the trouble of scratching and matching dozens of letters and symbols on a "scratchie" to find if you've won anything or not. The barcode along the bottom of the scratchie can just be scratched and scanned without scratching anything else, and the barcode scanner will tell you straight away whether you've won anything.

A criminal behaviour record is the primary reason for rejection in an application for admittance to Australia - and always has been - the same as most countries. But unfortunately, many refugees make sure their criminal behaviour records are erased, lost, or otherwise made unavailable. This is how the criminal Lebanese arrived in Australia as "refugees" in the mid-to-late 1970's. They claimed they were refugees from the civil war in Lebanon - but the truth was, they were largely jailbirds with a long history of criminal behaviour, and the Syrian Army purposely destroyed all their criminal records, so nothing showed up in a search by immigration authorities. As a result, they fell into limbo in the Immigration Dept applications - and Malcolm Fraser overrode the Immigration Dept heads who wanted to send them back - because Fraser was a "softie" who claimed that sending them back meant certain death for them. As we've seen with all the recent "Middle-Eastern Crime Gangs" murderous activities in mostly SW Sydney, they are still criminals, and still indulging in massive amounts of high-level criminal behaviour. If you watch "Border Security - Australias Front Line", you will see many arrivals by air producing fake reasons, fake documentation, and outright lies to gain entry to Australia for various nefarious reasons. Many just want to disappear once they get into the country. They're interviewed and checked out at length, by BS officers - and sent straight back to where they came from, if their stories and information don't stack up. All immigrant applications should be treated the same, regardless of whether they are claiming to be refugees under threat of death if they return to their country of origin, or not. The problem is, a lot of these people are sent here, or come here, simply because they're troublemakers where they came from, and the locals want shot of them. And of course, numbers of them are either drug mules, full-time scam operators, and "footmen" for major crime gang operations. They arrive with ill intent.

I really think the AUKUS deal and the Yank submarine deal needs to be cancelled - from our end. The last thing we need is to deal with, is a tantrum-throwing toddler when he's supposed to be leading the worlds only remaining superpower, and setting statesmanship-like behaviour and standards. On top of that, the subs are vastly overpriced, and will be delivered 30 years too late, and be obsolete when they are delivered.

I reckon a lot of people are looking for about 450-500km range in an EV before they're comfortable with the technology. "Range anxiety" is still a real psychological killer for EV's.

I don't know how much more moronic behaviour this clown can indulge in, before he backs himself into a corner. He's already trashed the support of a lot of rusted-on MAGA adherents. I'm just waiting for the major Iranian attack on American soil or a military base that results in hundreds of American casualties and deaths. That will really bring home to everyday Americans, what this idiot has led them into. Israel is being spread thinly as well, what with a major incursion into Lebanon. The Iranians will still have plenty of nasty surprises up their sleeve.

Young motorcyclists are greatly over-represented in the injury and deaths road toll, and the premiums reflect that cost. They love wrapping the throttle on away from the lights, with no thought to the consequences - because they're young, male, and invincible! I can recall a young woman in court locally, sobbing her heart out, as she faced a manslaughter charge for killing a motorcyclist. The charge should never have been brought. She pulled out of a sidestreet in her little car, onto a major arterial road. She stopped and looked both ways and saw a motorcyclist to her right, a substantial distance away - so she pulled out. The problem was - that young male motorcyclist had just wrapped the throttle on, in a 60kmh zone, until he was doing over 120kmh. She didn't have the driving experience to judge that he was coming at double the normal, expected speed. The young motorcyclist couldn't stop, and he buried his bike in her car, right behind her seat and B-pillar, spinning her car around, as he did so. He died almost immediately, and the relatively uninjured young woman faced the trauma of seeing the carnage inside her car. It would stay with her for life, and no-one deserves to see that. On the manslaugher charge, she was found not guilty, and rightfully so. The judge was pretty scathing of aggressive motorcyclists who don't believe road rules apply to them.

Giving her a beer mug?

I couldn't see Gina fitting into the back of a 172!!

They got outfoxed.

The amount of electrical power generated by house rooftops in Australia is more than all the public and private power stations combined. All that's needed is electrical storage, and most States are addressing that angle as we speak. Here in W.A., the State Govt is installing massive batteries at Collie and at other locations, to stabilise the grid and to make use of the power generated by house rooftops during the day. A large percentage of people aren't home during the day, so the power being generated just needs to be stored. https://www.synergy.net.au/Our-energy/SynergyRED/Large-Scale-Battery-Energy-Storage-Systems/Collie-Battery-Energy-Storage-System

When global corporations and local huge companies can afford to employ teams of double degree account/lawyers, who can drive Mack trucks through legislative loopholes in tax laws, ensuring those corporations and companies pay only lip-service levels of tax, it's time to resort to a flat tax on transactions and get rid of the current company tax system. Nissan Australia paid a grand total of $476 tax in Australia over the 3 years between 2015-2018, despite earning $7 billion in vehicle sales. That's just wrong by anyones measure.

W.A.'s Kwinana oil refinery, just S of Perth, was Australia's newest and biggest oil refinery. But it was built in 1954, by the "Anglo-Iranian Oil Co", which became British Petroleum. However, it was shut for good in 2021, as BP stated they couldn't compete with the oil refinery running costs of the S.E. Asian refineries - which all had huge capacity and cheap labour. The bottom line is, we are dependent on overseas oil, regardless of whether it's refined here or not. As Jerry says, EV's are the way to go, with many EV's having 400kms range today (or battery options to increase to "long range" ability) - and with many people having solar systems on their house, it's free energy from the sun, right where you are - and no amount of warring or global upsets can beat that.

The part that gets up your nose is that over 80% of our petrol and diesel comes ready-refined from huge refineries in Singapore, South Korea, Japan and China. These refineries source their crude from probably 20 or 30 different crude oil sources - then blend it to make it suitable for their particular refinery feedstock. It's not like a slowdown in Straits of Hormuz oil shipping is going to affect our fuel supplies or prices to the levels we're currently seeing. Maybe 15% - 20% at most, not the 70% - 90% increases we are currently seeing. We're being reamed senseless with a large pineapple with no lube, when it comes to fuel. Only 25% of the worlds oil moves through the Straits of Hormuz, so that means 75% of oil supplies are unaffected.

Chip shortages still plague most car manufacturers, bu the Chinese seem to have gotten around it by using less chips, and cheaper varieties - and by ramping up their local chip production. They're satisfying themselves with older-style chips, and by eliminating high-tech options that require cutting-edge chip technology.