onetrack

On my new Samsung 26 Ultra phone, I just have to ask AI to draw me up a wallpaper image that suits my description. I typed, "I want a beach scene painting and nothing else, drawn in the impressionist style". It promptly produced a very good "art-deco, impressionist style" wallpaper, with a beach scene with chalk cliffs behind the beach, art-deco style ships in the distance, and impressionist images of people and umbrellas on the beach. I'd give it 9.9 out of 10.

My current gripe is around mobile phones. The Wednesday before Anzac Day, my u-beaut, 2-years-and-9-months-old Motorola Edge 30 Fusion locked up. Just wouldn't open the lock screen. Tried shutting it down and it took some effort as even the shutdown menu wouldn't respond to touch pressure for about 5 mins. When I did get it to shut down, and then re-started it, nothing had changed, it was still frozen. I could take calls still (although they sounded a bit funny), but I could do absolutely nothing else with it. Of course, part of the problem could've been the fact that I've dropped the phone numerous times in the period I've owned it. The screen cracked, the back cracked - in fact, it looked like a POS. When I asked repairers if they could fix it, they all grimaced, and said "$250 is the starting repair price, and it could end up more". 😞 I only paid $499 for it! The difference between the Motorola and the Samsungs I've owned previously, was that I could fix the Samsungs easily myself. I had a Samsung Note 4 for about 6 years, it was truly the best phone I've owned. I smashed the screen on it twice, and replaced it myself both times. That was the entire LCD assembly. The battery was replaceable on that phone, I replaced the battery twice. It had a stylus for writing notes on the screen with, and it had excellent performance all round. I think I paid about $360 for it off an eBay seller about 2016. The Note 4 was released in 2014 and became obsolete around 2020 as LTE technology appeared, and LTE technology made a lot of phones obsolete overnight. LTE is the current "backbone" of our phone services, bandwiths and "groups", being the latest evolution of 4G, and a still a support system behind 5G - although 5G actually uses advanced, scalable Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) framework for its technology. I have several "working" phones here - a Samsung S4, the Note 4, SWMBO's old Note 4 - and they are all useless, because they do not have LTE technology built in to them. You can install a SIM card in them, and they won't connect. I bought the Motorola as a mid-range replacement for the Note 4, and I must admit, it did work reasonably well in the 2 yrs and 9 mths before it simply locked up. So, when I had time, I set to and downloaded Motorolas "Repair Fix", the programme designed to cure Motorola software issues. But - despite loading the Repair Fix onto the Motorola, it changed absolutely nothing. I was greatly concerned that all my photos and contact information and messages were on that Motorola, and there was absolutely zero I could do to access them. 😞 In desperation, I carried out a factory reset and lost everything on the phone - and I tried the Repair Fix programme again - and still zero result. The phone was "bricked" as the young 'uns like to say. So, I decided to buy a top-of-the-wozza Samsung S26 Ultra - which comes with the stylus and some decent photographic ability. I started doing the rounds of the local stores - JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman, Retravision, the Good Guys, even Officeworks! Guess what? The phone is $2000 (well, ($1999 actually) at EVERY STORE - take it or leave it, was the message. Not a single discount of any kind. Asking about online "price matches" brought about general answers where they stated "they don't compete with the grey market". Yeah right. The "grey market" sellers simply buy the phones off Samsung outside Australia, and sell them for much less than the local "bricks and mortar" ripoff merchants. Knowing just how much profit there is in mobile phones, I was determined to not pay "the going rate". Of course, the S26 Ultra has only been out since late February and is the latest technology and latest processors, and the latest Android operating system (they're up to Android 16 now, and 6.2 standard for Bluetooth) - so discounts are "simply not done" on the latest phones, according to the local floggers. Even on the Samsung sales website, the phone was $1999. As a result, I went looking for an online supplier of an S26 Ultra. Bingo, I found "Nostech", based in Adelaide and Melbourne. Run by Indians of course - but they have 8 people working in the company, the two here in Adelaide and Melbourne have commerce degrees, and the other operatives are scattered through Asia - Singapore, HK, etc. They were selling on eBay and had highly satisfactory feedback. They buy the phones directly out of Vietnam (where they're manufactured), they go to HK and are then sent to buyers in Australia. Best of all - their S26 Ultra price was $1749. And for $100 extra, I could upgrade to 512GB memory, over the standard 256GB. So I bought a 512Kb - and paid $10 extra for Express Delivery via AustPost. Then the fun started. It was Anzac Day holiday on the Monday, and I thought that would slow things up for a day. However, I got notified the phone had been ordered on the Monday (27th May), and they said "2 to 4 days" delivery. I got an AP tracking number. I watched as the tracking said it had been processed at Toongabbie on the next day, Tues 28th. THEN, I watched in dismay, as the journey showed the phone going through no less than SEVENTEEN processing points within AP - and I watched it go from Sydney - to Perth - then back to Sydney again!! Jesus wept. https://auspost.com.au/mypost/track/details/34HFP509107801000964506 After 7 days and an "expected delivery date of May 5th", I gave up (because I really, really, NEEDED a working phone! - and went over to Costco and bought a new A37 5G Samsung - a mid-range phone - on special, for just $487. Normally selling for around $540 or more, it looked like a good fill-in phone, until I actually received my S26 Ultra I was still waiting for! The A37 turned out to be just an average phone, I was quite surprised that the camera on it wasn't anywhere near as good as I expected (and Samsung brag about their cameras). I tried some close up shots of a problem part I was seeking compensation on, and I couldn't get it to focus clearly at close range - despite using Macro (which is limited at .6, whereas the Motorola went down to .5 on Macro). Finally, the S26 Ultra arrived (on Tues May 5th, as AP promised (so much for "2 to 4 days" on Express Delivery) - and it is remarkable the difference in performance another $1363 makes. The S26 Ultra uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, as compared to Samsungs own Exynos 1480 processor used in the A37. Supposedly around 20% faster than the previous Exynos processor, the Snapdragon 8 blows it out of the water. Plus, the cameras on the S26 Ultra are incredible. All in all, a stressful 2 weeks that has left me feeling a bit ragged, but with the new S26 Ultra phone up and running, and still being fine-tuned, hopefully the worst of my phone hassles are behind me. However - GUESS WHAT. Yep, today Samsung sent me a "special discount deal" from their online store - and the S26 Ultra is now available from their store for - $1750!! 🤦‍♂️

I can always remember the story about Pete Townshend as a young man, when he went for a jaunt on a little motorboat that was propelled by a small two stroke outboard engine. Pete was so mesmerised by the sound of the engine, combined with the burbling water against the hull - which both created a hypnotic, "sublime" musical experience, he claimed - that he fell into a hypnotic trance, and didn't realise he'd reached the shore, until the boat grounded in the mud! He's stated he's always sought to recreate that "musical ideal".

Shouldn't the blues song go .... "everybodys scrolling....."?

Perth would have only reached two-thirds of its current population level is we had to rely on groundwater and rainfall for water. We ran short of adequate amounts of drinking water around 15 years ago. As a result, two desalination plants have been installed, utilising our plentiful natural gas supply and a cleverly designed membrane, and those two desalination plants now supply around 35% to 40% of the drinking water for Perth. There are many country towns in W.A. facing a similar problem, and during drought periods, water has had to be trucked into some towns in W.A. that ran out of drinking water supplies. We live on the edge on this planet, at the best of times. Natural disasters such as extended droughts, massive storms, and earthquakes, have often decimated population centres.

Have you ever wondered about the weird and wonderful jobs that have to be done, and which never make any news articles, documentaries, or "this is your life" shows? Yes, there are hundreds of them, and many are so basic to everyday needs, that they just don't even get discussed. Jobs such as chicken sexers, aeroplane repossession agents, ball divers (yes, I know you never even considered what happens to those golf balls lost in deep water), and... wait for it - barnyard masturbators. Yes, there is even a job involving getting animals horny for ease of insemination, which must take a special type of person.

Farley seems quite a sensible individual, with a very diplomatic turn of speech, unlike a lot of the ON rabble. It will be interesting to see what happens from here on in. A well-spoken, thoughtful individual such as Farley may bring a lot more credibility to the ON Party. However, the general trend of elections in recent decades is voters vote for whoever is in Opposition, just to express dissatisfaction with the ruling Partys performance. No matter who is power, they all appear to have no answers to the ordinary voters pressing problems - inflation, the cost of living, fuel prices, housing unaffordability, lack of job opportunities - they all perform dismally in these fields. I'd like to see some politicians with real backbone, take on the billionaires and giant global corporations, and tax them more heavily, and also lay into the betting conglomerates that wield so much power, and which every politician is too frightened to offend.

It was a bit before your time, Marty. The American TV Show, Petticoat Junction, ran from 1963 to 1970. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petticoat_Junction

Geez, you've really been sucking on the Trump Kool-aid bottle, haven't you? What do you think is going to be the next thing to happen? A long-lasting peace plan engineered by Trump, where the Iranians lay down all their arms, and come meekly to the surrender table to sign the surrender document? You're off with the fairies, along with the Tangerine Toddler. He's so full of sh**, it's a wonder they haven't called the portaloo collectors to come and collect him.

It's lucky the BBC and King Charles didn't employ Lonesome George to deliver his birthday wishes! 😄

The Japanese trains are quite profitable, despite Govt caps on fares charges. There is an urban legend doing the rounds that the Japanese rail companies are only highly profitable because their rail travel is subsidised by their other investments such as real estate, shopping malls and other enticements, by which they extract more money from rail travellers. But the reality is that Japanese laws state, that rail accounting rules are not allowed to include cross-subsidisation from other company sources, so the urban legend is not true. AI will tell you it is true, but it's wrong.

People pay big money to go for long train rides, and the aura and advertising associated with the "Great Train Journeys of the World" is very prominent. Both the Ghan and the Indian Pacific make money from passenger traffic. These trips are advertised as "premium" tourism events, and the passengers pay high prices for premium accommodation, premium food and dining experiences, and associated events in towns that the lines pass through. A company named Journey Beyond runs these train trips and the whole operation is quite highly profitable.

Agree. The kids will need to be re-educated into civil behaviour, in a big way. Most of them have been taught nothing but hatred and cruelty as normality, and they all would have been taught how to shoot and kill.

The project won't be canned for good. This stoppage is just a reset to get all the unnecessary hangers-on, off the gravy train, so the project can get back to realistic costs. I've seen so many of these major projects just become an open cheque book for opportunistic businesses, charging anything they like, simply because lazy, inefficient management, just wants to see progress. Once the shock of the gravy train ceasing to exist comes home with a thump, the companies and contractors then become a lot more realistic and competitlve.

Here's a short news video on Ford's new EV move - which goes against everything the Tangerine Toddler has been promising, as regards fossil fuel power in America.

I should've added to the story above, that the trailer was a van body trailer, not a flat-top, so it was already somewhat top-heavy, which would've aggravated the loss of the set of duals.

Back to EV's - the original subject of this thread. Ford are going all-out to try and beat the Chinese EV onslaught with a new EV pickup. It means starting a whole new style of assembly line from scratch. The Wall St Journal has the original full story, this part below is merely an excerpt. You need to pay a subscription to the WSJ to read the full article, but the excerpt provides the "guts" of the story. QUOTE: "Crews are preparing Ford's Louisville factory to make a planned line of EVs. Photo Credit: Houston Cofield for WSJ The secret is now out as Ford races toward building its first model, a new truck it says will be nearly as fast as a Mustang, travel around 300 miles on a single charge and feature in-car technology to compete with Tesla and China. It’s aiming for a 2027 launch and a price tag of around $30,000, the cost of a Toyota Camry. Getting there means tearing up a century of manufacturing practices in a notoriously hidebound industry. At stake for Ford is securing a future beyond the gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs that have long defined its bottom line. The project had been kept quiet from its 2022 start, led by veterans from Tesla and Apple who worked on designs out of a California office. Ford eventually brought in some of its own employees to help execute the vision. The process was filled with misunderstandings and distrust as the techie outsiders worked to win over the risk-averse industry veterans. To build these new EVs, the company must use fewer people and simpler parts, and dismantle decades of engineering inertia. Chief Executive Jim Farley is calling it Ford’s new “Model T moment.” Rival automakers say overcoming China on EVs can’t be done, given their advantages: extensive government backing, low-cost labor and a massive head start. With its new truck, Ford says it has eliminated thousands of feet of heavy copper wiring, cut out hundreds of parts, and made it 15% more aerodynamic than its other pickups. The process included rethinking the assembly line, which Ford helped to pioneer. That process is traditionally iterative, slow and depends on scores of outside partners. On Ford’s new “assembly tree,” a modular system stamps out two massive, aluminum castings and a battery that get merged at the end of the process—closer to how Tesla and China’s automakers build EVs. “We’ve never blown the whole thing up before and just started over,” Coffey said. “If and when we build this, we will rewire Ford.” For a year, a team of 17—tiny by Ford standards—worked out a design for the first new EV. Their vision collided with Farley’s. He nixed the first vehicle the California team was developing, an SUV-type model. Build a midsize pickup instead, he told them. It fills a void in the EV market and will be a bigger hit with car buyers, he said. Then they attacked Ford procedures and mandates the team deemed obsolete, or even nonsensical. Field described one such rule. All Ford vehicles must be built with a slight lip above the opening to prevent rain from spilling in the window when a driver or passenger cracks it to smoke a cigarette. Nicknamed “smokers window,” it added aerodynamic drag, costing battery range. The new truck won’t have it. Managers were fanatical about keeping Ford’s ranks away from the project. “There were so many times that I protected the team,” Clarke said, fearing that outsiders could slow the building momentum. Dreaming up a design was one thing. Building it was another. That’s when Clarke and Field started recruiting company veterans to join its ranks. They sought out the misfits and malcontents within Ford—the type of people, Clarke said, chafing under Ford’s often-rigid structure. The freewheeling phase is over now. At a sprawling factory in Louisville, Ky., where Ford used to build gas-powered SUVs, crews are working to set up tooling and the new trio of assembly lines to build the EV. The company tested about 30 hand-built prototypes to try to root out problems earlier in the process. Later this year, they plan to start building—then road-testing—the first factory-built models. Ford says the truck’s interior will be roomier than a compact crossover SUV’s. Hyundai Motor CEO José Muñoz, asked recently whether it’s possible for an automaker to build a vehicle in the U.S. that competes with the Chinese, was unequivocal: “It is impossible,” he said." The future of Ford will likely hinge on how effectively it can counter the Chinese car onslaught. I guess Ford is hoping this EV will pull a rabbit out of the hat for them. IMO, they have left their run too late, the Chinese have a massive head start, and have virtually unlimited financing from Xi and the CCP. Only time will tell.

I've seen the rear bogie on the last trailer of a badly-set-up triple roadtrain, sway as much as 1.5 - 2 metres out to each side. The bogie was actually tearing up the gravel road surface with the amount of sway it was doing. Top-heavy trailers will also indulge in sway, especially if the suspension is in poor shape. However, the most interesting story I got was from a truckie neighbour next to my workshop, who told me how he did in a wheelbearing on the centre axle of a tri-axle trailer one night, on the Nullarbor. He decided to remove the offending hub, chain up the end of the axle, and to keep proceeding, until he could make it to a biggish town where proper repair facilities were - such as Kalgoorlie. But he said he was staggered at the trailer performance with a missing set of wheels on one side of the triaxle set. He told me, "the trailer was all over the road" - he couldn't make it go in a straight line, no matter how hard he tried! But he had little choice to keep going, at a much reduced speed, until he could reach Kalgoorlie. He said it was a real eye-opening exercise.

More info on oil benchmark pricing ..... https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=18571

Roadtrains don't sway if they're properly configured with long drawbars. Short drawbars create trailer sway, and short drawbars came about due to roadtrain length restrictions. Spring suspensions are the hardest on road pavement, air-ride suspensions have been proven to be kinder to road pavements and bridges - to the point where you can get higher axle loadings in trucks and trailers with air-ride suspensions, as compared to spring suspensions.

Show me the country that has "first past the post" voting, and which has a far superior style of Govt to the one we have here in Australia? FPP voting is highly susceptible to gerrymandering due to unfair electoral boundary distributions. This is the reason why Trump and the Republicans are seeking to alter electoral boundaries in many U.S. States to favour the Republicans. In FPP voting, smaller parties get no representation at all. The Republicans want the poor, the blacks, and Democrat voters to have no say in what they want to do, and to have no power to oust any Republican Govt. It's gerrymandering at its best. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting

Because even though America produces all the oil and fuels it needs, American oil companies don't set the "global benchmark" for oil pricing. This is done by international oil traders, and especially oil futures traders. The benchmark prices for oil are Brent crude ("Brent") and West Texas Intermediate ("WTI"). As a result, American oil prices go up when the benchmark prices go up. American oil companies will sell their product to the market that is paying the most. If that market is somewhere else in the world (such as Europe), American refineries have to pay more to acquire their crude oil supplies. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2026/03/20/america-produces-the-most-oil-so-why-are-gas-prices-surging/

Knowing Trumps total lack of strategic planning abilities, with his off-the-cuff, instantly-reversible decisions usually catching all his staff and operatives off-guard - I'd have to say definitely not.

Your social status is defined instantly by the vehicle you drive. So you buy the biggest 4WD dual cab you can, regardless of the economics or running costs or practicality of the vehicle. Plus, nearly all the owners of these vehicles are operating businesses and they're simply a big tax deduction, paid for by business income. Add in the fact that when you're a business owner, able to quote an ABN, you can get "fleet" discounts, as well as factory-backed low interest rate financing (as low as 1%) - so the dealers have to knock back buyers with a stick. The waiting list for nearly all 4WD's is huge, up to 6 to 12 months for some "high range" models. And the factories keep production at precise levels to ensure that the demand is just being met, and that there's no oversupply. However, the Chinese are flooding the market with their new vehicles, so people who can't wait, simply go and buy a readily available Chinese car.

The U.S. has more than adequate oil reserves themselves to provide all their domestic needs. They actually export fuel. They have no need to import Middle Eastern oil, they only do so to acquire the more desirable "light crude", which is easier and less costly to refine. All American refineries are built to refine both light and heavy crude. They have access to all the Venezuelan oil they want, after ensuring the Venezuelan Govt became more compliant to U.S. demands.