onetrack

Well, Joes had a conversion on the Road to Damascus, and has pulled the pin on the election. It should've been done a lot earlier, too much damage has been done already. But the political donations to the Dems have apparently soared since Joe announced he was standing down. The main problem I see now is that Kamala Harris is a poor choice both for VP and Presidential candidate, because she doesn't display true leadership qualities, she was parachuted in to the VP job because she was the right skin colour, not because of her outstanding skills and abilities.

I wonder which fat lady will sing first?

I reckon the lawyers are going to have a field day over this exercise. It's going to create a mad rush of contract re-reading. Not every plane in the world was grounded, various airlines were affected in various ways. Some of the airlines kept flying, probably the ones who didn't employ the Crowdstrike Falcon platform. But eventually, the lack of functioning of other critical support areas (banking etc.,) would probably make them grind to a halt sooner rather than later, if the problem hadn't been fixed rapidly. The Gubbmint will be looking at "criticality" now, no doubt - especially seeing as the Gubbmint Australian Signals Directorate was a user of the Crowdstrike Falcon platform.

We went to see the Animals a couple of weeks back, and John Steel, the Animals original drummer from the 1960's, is still fit and well, and still drumming with the band, at age 83. His performance on the drums was unbelievable. He even got up and gave a talk about the early days of Eric Burdon and the Animals. https://the-shortlisted.co.uk/john-steel-animals-interview/

I've got a copy of an American newspaper somewhere, dated the day after, with the moon landing featuring as front page news. I was travelling around half of Australia with a mate in July 1969, and we heard the moon landing on the news on the radio when we were camped in the scrub somewhere between Darwin and Tennant Creek. We were heading South from Darwin to Adelaide, and then back to Perth.

Here's a link to an amazing photo of a V1 buzz bomb, taken just seconds before impact. I have no idea who took the photo.

You'd better come to W.A. for your genuine Aussie meat, then Jerry - not a single one of those JBS brands operates in, nor supplies anyone in W.A., to my knowledge. We have our own local brands still, with Harvey Beef being dominant. Aberdeen Black Acres Organic AMH AMH Black AMH White Beef City Black Great Southern Great Southern Pinnacle Hereford Boss King Island Beef Little Joe Portoro Pure Prime Queenslander Beef Red Gum Beef Right to Roam Riverina Angus Royal Swift Beef Tender Valley The Bachelor Yardstick

I always have about $100-150 in my wallet, and keep several hundred dollars in the house. I also carry around a taxi-type coin holder. I quite often give shopkeepers the exact amount required, when I purchase something. Too many people "sail close to the wind", and I often wonder what happens when these people who use their phone to pay for everything, damage or lose their phone, or have it stolen.

I couldn't imagine any WW2 fighter being capable of surviving flight through the debris of an exploding V1.

Joe has decided to press on, regardless of the senior Democrat power brokers efforts to make him pull out. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg3jw2gexedo

I'm a little surprised that the Ukrainians haven't gone for production of something like buzz bombs. With current technology, they could produce many terrifying, large size, high-explosive, rocket-speed attacks against Russian troops, military bases, and Russian infrastructure, at relatively low cost - with their speed making them very hard to shoot down. The buzz bombs lack of speed was their undoing, modern propellants would soon fix that.

I often wonder how many of these "technical glitches" are simply the result of "highly educated" IT people, who simply can't spell properly - and they install coding errors via their inability to spell words or code correctly? There's always checks designed to catch these errors before they get through - but if someone misses the error or errors, then BOOM, it's in the system, and then has to be tracked down. My middle nephew purchased a brand new Caterpillar motor grader about 8 or 9 years ago. It was state of the art, $750,000 worth, full of electronics like all modern equipment. It ran beautifully for 3 weeks - then it wouldn't go over 9kmh. They're supposed to do 40kmh for roading, and quite often operate around 12-15kmh for fast grading, such as maintenance grading. So, the local Cat dealer sent out their field servicemen to fix the problem. They couldn't fix it, so the dealer sent their "top-level" serviceman out to fix it. He couldn't fix it. The dealer called on Cat in America, and Cat in the U.S. decided it was a serious fault. Cat flew a top-level Cat design engineer from the U.S to W.A., just to sort out the grader problem. The grader is full of ECU's and has a CANBUS system. It took the Cat engineer 3 days to find out there was a "communication problem" between the ECU's. The "communication problem" was a "software flaw" according to Cat, and the engineer finally sorted it with his laptop, the grader then ran just fine, and the Cat engineer went back to the U.S. But I often wonder just what that "software flaw" was. If the engineer sorted it with his laptop, it was obviously a programming error, that only showed up once certain parameters were reached. It seems it took 3 weeks of grader operation, before those parameters were met, and this then introduced the "communication problem". Yes, we are all extremely vulnerable to, A: The reliability of our electrical supplies, and B: Reliable computerisation and fault-free programming. South Africa is going to be the canary in the coalmine - a failing, inadequate energy system, coupled with incompetence and corruption, will see them slowly slide back into a 3rd world, agricultural peasant economy.

Make that, the worlds richest DH who has scammed an unjust amount of financial reward out of "his" company. RIpping off shareholders and clients alike, and even making a judge aghast at his blatant financial renumeration greed. The scary part is, Musk has now thrown his multiple billions into wholesale support of Trump - to the tune of donating a regular US$45M a month, to one of the Trump PAC's. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/19/elon-musk-trump-endorsement.

Sounds like our diesel field-portable shower water heaters we had in the Army, we called them "Choofers" for that same reason, they'd do that "choofing" sound as the diesel burnt. Our Army Engineer choofers were just a 200 litre drum laid horizontal, with a 1/4" feed pipe of dripping diesel feeding a firebox underneath them. They were just knocked up out of readily-available materials, they weren't a proper Army issue unit. Funnily enough, I can't find any photos of them. The Yanks had an immersion heater that they used mainly for cleaning dixies, it was a proper military issue unit called the M67 - but they still got called a Choofer.

Spacey - You mean to tell me now, that there's buried Spitfires at Molong? - and not Burma?? 😁

Not a single American - and certainly not any MAGA adherent - has mentioned the fact that the MURDEROUS CRIMINAL who tried to take down Trump, wasn't one of their greatly-feared, murderous, invading, illegal immigrant Hispanics - but a good ol' country white boy, one of their own!!

I don't think anyone minds paying off a house that's a reasonable price, especially if you utilise it daily. The worst scenario is purchasing a mega-dollar house and hardly spending any time in it, because you have to spend 80% of your time, away working, to pay for it. The current problem with Australian property is that the flood of Chinese and criminal money is sending house and property prices into the tulip bubble region. You can't have house and property prices rising at 10% annually for 20 years when the long term average is a 3% increase in prices. Either our money has become the equivalent of dunny paper, or people are losing huge amounts of purchasing power because their incomes aren't keeping pace with house and property price increases. It must end in tears, but I can't see exactly when. Usually it takes an unforeseen adverse economic event to cause a major tumble in house and property prices. I am constantly staggered by the property prices increases that are filtering through to remote and rural regions as well. Get a look at this little fibro 60's house in a tiny rural town in W.A. It's been nicely renovated, but the yard and surroundings are shabby, the town is only accessible by windy, tedious roads, it has a town population of 75 people, just one store with outrageous prices, bugger all employment opportunities, apart from rural labour - yet it sold for $250K in Nov 2023. 20 years ago, this house would have struggled to reach a $50K sale price. https://www.domain.com.au/35-george-street-bolgart-wa-6568-2018767931

The number is 1, it appears 301 times between 1 and 1000.

Stephen King, the movie maker has posted a warning meme on his "X" account, advising why Trump needed a new VP ....

Zebra

Bill Posters is still around, they've never managed to catch him.

There was obviously an error in the credits titling. Shouldn't it have read Director of Pornography, instead of Photography? 😛

The Phantoms are a bloody legend. The Greek ones have had massive frame and avionic upgrades to bring them into the 21st century. They have one major advantage - 2 crew. That's 4 sets of ears and eyes and 4 hands to run the complexity and handle threats. I can still recall the Phantoms bombing the crap out of NVA and VC strongholds in the mountains in South VN, within a couple of kays of my location, they were impressive to say the least. https://www.key.aero/article/gods-war-exploring-operations-greek-f-4-phantom-ii-unit

Get yourself a 3 wheeler, Spacey! Problem solved!

The Japanese are on the ball again, when it comes to wind turbines. They have adapted aircraft wing design for turbine blades (airfoil design), along with contra-rotating vertical turbines, to produce a substantial improvement in wind turbine design, with their VCCT (Vertical Coaxial Contra-rotating Twin-blade) turbine, which has all of the features listed below .... 1. Quiet (<40dB) 2. No flickering blade shadows 3. Can produce power at wind speeds as low as 7mph (11.26kmh) 4. Can still operate effectively at wind speeds up to 70mph (112kmh) 5. Is extremely bird and wildlife-friendly, with little chance of bird or bat strike (except for the dumbest birds and bats, of course) 6. Is durable against lightning strikes, strong wind gusts, and typhoons 7. Is low maintenance 8. Has a small site footprint 9. Is a complete standalone system 10. Has a low visibility outline, with 23 feet (7M) in height, all that's needed for residential/small commercial installations 11. Is scalable in the current design from 0.3kW up to 20kW. Has potential to be scaled up to 1mW. The contra-rotation balances out inertial forces and provides a gyroscopic effect. Somewhat surprisingly, the VCCT turbines have been in use in Japan for 15 years, but it's only now that the Hawaiians have decided that the design suits their needs. https://interestingengineering.com/energy/us-to-put-japans-tiny-cylindrical-turbines-to-the-wind-test https://kanoawinds.com/vcct-wind-turbine-details/ The manufacturer videos in the last link are very interesting.