old man emu

While it is true that any loss of life due to traffic collisions is not good, to say that the road fatality number in 2024 is "appalling" shows that you don't remember what the number was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In those years the numbers were regularly over 1,000 in NSW, probably the same in Victoria and proportionally lower in the other States and Territories. Cultural changes brought about by RBT; massive improvements in passive safety of vehicles and better constructed roads have had the greatest effect on reducing the fatality rate, although I wonder if that drop hasn't been at the cost of increasing disabilities in crash survivors. There will always be road transport fatalities. Sometimes they cannot be avoided - such as the results of sudden medical disablement. More often though they are the result of anti-social behaviour by a few drivers. As I see it, those tasked with making road transport safer and introducing countermeasures, fail to analyse the reasons for collisions beyond the old chestnuts of speed, intoxication and fatigue. In most case, those people don't have any training in collision investigation to understand the factors which are driver, vehicle, and road environment.

Friday night is pizza night for me. From Aldi I buy a box of three cheese pizzas and add my own extras. Last Friday it was Hawaiian with bacon pieces and pineapple pieces with extra pizza cheese. Tonight it's going to be barbeque chicken pieces with olives and extra cheese. 15 minutes in the oven at 200 and it's a cheap meal. I think that it costs about two or three dollars per pizza.

But the government does not control prices. Whichever side gets elected next May, it will not have the power to control the boardrooms of Wall Street. We all know that it's Big Business which is syphoning the money from our pockets. Added to that, to a degree, is the constant demand that the government supplies so much in the way of health, education, the various parts of the legal system and so on. Increasing demand for those services demand increasing costs of services and new taxes. Sure, we can vote out Albo and vote in Dutton, but we can't vote out Big Business.

I know that another word for 'apathetic' is laxative.

I think that the word 'sovereignty' is misunderstood and therefore misapplied. It's definition is not quite clear. In one sense it can mean "state or character of being in power", and in another it can mean freedom from external control. While we argue the rights and wrongs of the concept of terra nullius, we have to remember that King George the Third's instructions to Captain Arthur Phillip included a reminder that Cook, having claimed the land in the King's name automatically made the inhabitants subjects of the King, equal in legal stature to any resident of the United Kingdom. As history has moved on from 1770 and the population has been swelled the Aborigines have remained subjects of the Crown. Threfore, the seeking of Aboriginal sovereignty is akin to all Australians from every ethnic background seeking to end the current constitutional monarchy that we live within. Further, it appears that the goal of Aboriginal sovereignty is to sever the connection between Aborigines and Non-Aborigines from the body of the Nation.

I agree with you that it is not likely to be 'great', and therefore I'm not optimistic for the American people, and the rest of the World. The point I was trying to make was that this time the people in the Inner Circle will be more unified in their goals and approach to Trump than the inexperienced go-getters of the first administration were. I'd say that there will be a steady hand on the helm of the ship of State, but the course it sails might might not keep it clear of rocky shoals.

I really don't know. I don't even think the teams have run onto the field to start the game, or if they have there's only been the coin toss.

Let's look on the bright side. If the World can weather the next four years, we know that Trump can't run again in 2028, if he lives that long. (He'd be 80 and one wonders if his health would allow it.) The question is, what happens if he dies in the next couple of years? What sort of President would Vance be? I think that this time, the Trump Administration will be a bit more professional. It might not be great, but it won't be the mess it was the first time with inexperienced factions trying to gain control over Trump. At least this time he comes into office with a manifesto that his underlings have created.

I must find a pictorial pun and take a leaf out of your bok choi.

The words "reconciliation" and "conciliation", although coming from the same etymological source, conciliare (Latin) "to bring together, unite in feelings, make friendly," have different inferences. Conciliation is the act of creating friendly relations. It is something that should be done on first contact. Reconciliation is the act of causing two people or groups to become friendly again after an argument or disagreement. The problem we face in getting the relationship between Aborigines and non-Aborigines to a mutually acceptable place is that conciliation has never effectively occured. Therefore there can not be any "reconciliation" because there was never a friendship to be broken. IN the 19th Century, Non-Aborigines came onto land which had established boundaries in the Aboriginal "legal" system and simply altered the land use patterns to suit Non-Aboriginal culture, without any attempts to include Aborigines in the process, unless it was to involve them in menial tasks. Very few attempts were made to create relationships that did anything more than discourage violent objection to those alterations. In the 20th Century, Aborigines realised that violent objection was not the answer. During the second half of that century, wider communication with the world exposed Aborigines to the efforts of indigenous peoples in other parts of the World that had been colonised by Europeans to gain equality with Europeans. Those efforts involved the use of political activism, which resulted in the realisation that success would only come from using the systems by which Non-Aborigines ran the society. Now, in the first quarter of the 21st Century, Aboriginal activists use those systems to attain their goals by relying on 'what's good for the goose is good for the gander' and turning the intent of Non-Aboriginal laws back onto Non-Aboriginal systems.

They are all types of advertising slogans. "Make America Great Again" is just another one. How about "It's Time"? It just goes to show that the candidate with the best marketing skills will succeed in modern election campaigns. Australia will be voting in a Federal election next May. The Parties should really be taking heed of the way advertising used in the US election. None of us will give two hoots about name calling and mud slinging if it is used. To harken back to that old TV police show, 'The facts, ma'am. Just the facts.'

I was listening to some commentary this morning and what I gleaned from it was that Trump stated about three things that he would concentrate on, and throughout the campaign he stuck to pushing them. Like it or not, he had a stated policy and he did not deviate from it. On the other hand, Harris never seem to have a stated policy. She tried to push concepts but never said how those concepts would be converted for implementation. Basically you could say that the difference was that Trump employed proven advertising practices which the public was used to, and which concentrated on what was affecting the public in its own domestic situations. Harris' campaign was more 'pie in the sky', and the public wasn't buying her product because it wasn't a solution for their problems.

Except for very serious offences, causing death or commercial drug importation, there is a system of escalation of punishments which begins with a good behaviour bond and move through fines to short "weekend" detention to full time incarceration. So those you might call "petty criminals" who end up in prison have developed a criminal persona that is pretty much set in concrete. Basically it's a case of not being able to teach an old dog new tricks. The problem Australia has is that we are signatories to international charters dealing with refugees. That means that once people seek asylum, and it is granted, we can't move them on.

Economically ??????? Have you seen how much we have been ripped off by the operators of detentions centres both here and offshore? But of course, the electorate will never gain access to the contents of the contracts for those detention centres. Also, we'll never know if politicians got a slice of the contract pie. Rehabilitation ???? I dare say that the crimes these detainees have committed are mostly sexual, and committed against strangers. A person whose psyche leads them to do such things is not going to be rehabilitated. Even castration would not prevent future attacks. The urge would be expressed in other forms of sexual violence.

Yamba Surf Club, in NSW, was asked by the Yaegl traditional owners Aboriginal Corporation to pay a $500 “fee for service” for each of its four events - including a nippers carnival - over the 2024-25 lifesaving season. The corporation said the payment was to conduct 'welcome to country' ceremonies at the events. The surf club is a volunteer organisation that was formed in 1908 After an outcry, the Yargl Corporation said a mistake had been made, and that the invoice should have been sent to the local Council.

C'mon you Serious Cyrils. It's a joke using irony.

They aren't copies of Tim Tams. More like a Kit Kat - several wafer layers with a filling and the lot coated with chocolate.

Unfortunately, while the uptake of domestic solar power generation has been really good, the problem the grid now has is that there is too much electricity being produced during daylight that it is becoming difficult to keep the grid balanced. The only way to handle the excess electricity is to store it in batteries, and there's the problem. The commercially provided infrastructure is lagging behind. Of course you can purchase your own battery with prices ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 depending on capacity. A 13 kWh battery installed costs about $15000, with 10 year warranty. Of course these prices should drop in the future, but we know about waiting. Info source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/battery-storage/cost/

Buffalo wings and Budweiser

A gripe. A bloke was replacing a batten light fitting with an oyster light fitting in the boot room this morning. Things were going along reasonably smoothing, including the usual stuff ups and accessibility difficulties, but finally the fitting was in place and all that was needed to do was insert the three wires into the terminal block in the light fitting. How many of you can quickly put your hand on a #0 Phillips Head screwdriver? That is what was needed to secure those wires into the terminal block. Luckily the bloke had one, but I'm sure that they put those weird sized screws in to prevent your average mug from playing with electricity. Another thing I noticed was that the terminal block had the input holes marked for Active, Neutral and Earth. With an incandescent light, it doesn't matter which side of the fitting the Active and Neutral are connected to, however, the fitting is for LED lights. An LED has two pins – anode (positive or incoming) and cathode (negative or outgoing). I found out that it only works when its anode is connected to the Active wire. I figured that if the Active and Neutral were not connected as indicated, the LED wouldn't work. Here's a diagram of an LED circuit.

This morning dawned overcast, so I took a look at the weather radar. There was an indication of light to moderate rain moving towards my place from the west. Another look around midday showed that although there were areas of rain approaching, the main body seems to have split up as usual and will go around my place. Waste my time checking the debris screen on my rainwater collection system.

More "not usual" than "unusual". The "not usual" idea comes from the fact that what happened in Spain was something that the current population has never experienced. Remember that maps are produced that show the expected areas of flooding from 100 year and 500 year floods. No one alive today has a personal memory of what happened 100 years ago. There are people who are centenarians, but they would have been toddlers at best 100 years ago. The Sydney Basin is a good example of history either being forgotten, or other factors influencing flooding. Floods along the Hawkesbury River, which forms the western boundary of the Basin, have been recorded from the earliest days of European settlement. Steps have been taken to use the knowledge of those historical floods to minimise damage. However, the nature of the land use has changed dramatically. Over the past 40 years, and more specifically in the past 10 to 15 years, vast areas of that Basin have been converted from pasture/forest/bushland to residential occupation. That has resulted in a high percentage of that land, which was able to absorb heavy rainfall, and slow the flow of what could not be absorbed, in become impervious to water, resulting in rapid drainage into the natural watercourses which quickly overflow and start to make the water back up and flow well away across floodplains where housing and industry have been built without proper assessment of the effects of making those areas impervious.

It's not too important to dwell on those two particular vehicles. I was simply exploring the cost of hydrogen fuel, if its use was widespread amongst the general public. The two test models could well be called prototypes, or proof of concept, and items falling into those categories are always way more expensive than they become when they go into mass production.

Got this from here: https://www.carsguide.com.au/ev/advice/how-economical-are-hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-88672 A comparison between the Hyundai Nexo and Toyota Mirai (both of which are available here in tiny numbers as evaluation and government fleet vehicles) showed that either vehicle could travel 100km in freeway conditions on between 0.76kg (Mirai) and 0.9kg (Nexo) of hydrogen. Since the vehicles both have tanks of about 5.5kg capacity, that gives them plenty of range. Let's say 1 kg/100 kms. That's 550 kms which is said to be the range of my ICE with a 55 litre tank. The catch is the current wholesale price of hydrogen. At $15 or so a kilo, filling each car is about the same as filling a petrol car with a 50-litre tank. However, pundits predict that price will fall, but where it will ultimately land is anybody’s guess. The $15 quoted in the article may be a bit high. In Australia, it is estimated that if green hydrogen were produced from high-quality onshore wind generation with a capacity factor of 45%, the cost would range from A$3.10-3.60/kg in 2020 to A$2.70-3.20/kg in 2030.

We're a weird mob! If you think about the acceptance of gun control in Australia, there didn't seem to be much protest about it. It must have been a gradual thing. I can remember in the 60s, kids had air rifles. Shotguns and .22 rifles were commonplace. I remember my dad taking me out once to shoot kangaroos with a borrowed .303 rifle. And I went pig shooting armed with a .22. I don't know when firearms licensing came in. I can remember the gun buyback after Port Arthur. We filled a decommissioned holding cell with Otto bins stuffed full of firearms several times between pickups. After that we were often tasked with doing firearms storage checking, if we had a bit of free time between break & enters and shoppies. (Ah! The good old days when you didn't spend your shift dealing with domestics of the lowest order.) I've no interest in getting a firearms licence. I like the engineering of firearms, but don't have much interest in either hunting or target shooting. However, it's nice to know that the authorities know that the law-abiding people have at least completed some rudimentary firearms safety training, and where their firearms are located.