The Random thought thread

[nomadpete]

9 hours ago, facthunter said:

Is that where you get most of your Inspiration?. I just go there for relief. and don't hang around after the job is done. Nev

Some come here to sit and think.....

Others come to.... use rhyming slang.

[nomadpete]

And others come for a hit-n-miss.

 

That's a random thought.

 

 

Edited December 9, 2023 by nomadpete
Spacey's problem. Not much 'I' in A-I when it comes to spellun

[Jerry_Atrick]

,

Edited December 9, 2023 by Jerry_Atrick

[Jerry_Atrick]

1 hour ago, onetrack said:

On the left coast when I wore short pants, and the girls chased me, we got an elephant stamp for outstanding effort in the classroom.

Unfortunately, it's been about 65 years since I last got an elephant stamp, and I can't even remember the last time a girl chased me - probably about the same length of time!

In my younger days, the only time girls showed interest was when I already had a girlfriend. In between, it was tumbleweeds. Thanks dog for alcohol; girls suffer from beer foggles, too..

[facthunter]

They ALL look better through the bottom of a beer glass, I have been told. I don't drink the stuff anyhow.  Nev

[willedoo]

Argentina's new government has devalued their peso by more than 50%. I wonder if that will effect our exports. I know we compete with beef and grain, but probably other areas as well. That new Argentine president is a wild looking bloke; he looks a bit like Neil Young on a bad hair day.

[onetrack]

The Argentinians are in an unbelievable economic mess and are a basket case only a little better than Zimbabwe. They use the US dollar for transactions because the Argentinian peso is virtually worthless.

 

Their new leader is not inspiring and I doubt whether he or any other Argentinian has the leadership ability or skills to dig themselves out of the hole they dug for themselves. They will be in economic pain for a long time to come.

 

Part of their problem is an utterly ruthless American investment fund called Elliott Management, a US Hedge Fund, backed by a bloke by the name of Paul Singer.

Whereas a lot of hedge funds write off bad investments, Singer ensures blood is squeezed from every investment stone that Elliott put money into.

 

Elliott bought Argentinian bonds and the Argentinians defaulted on payment - so Singer promptly set about seizing every Argentinian asset he could lay his hands on - which included the presidential plane and SpaceX launch sites. Argentina finally agreed to repay Elliott - but they would've had to borrow money at exorbitant rates to do so, so it only kicked the can down the road.

 

Elliott are setting their sights on the fiasco that is W.A. coal-fired power generation now, and it's going to cost the W.A. Govt many hundreds of millions more than they anticipated, to settle with Elliott.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-01/elliott-management-wa-bluewaters-energy-stoush/103063852

 

Edited December 15, 2023 by onetrack

[nomadpete]

59 minutes ago, onetrack said:

The Argentinians are in an unbelievable economic mess and are a basket case only a little better than Zimbabwe. They use the US dollar for transactions because the Argentinian peso is virtually worthless.

 

Their new leader is not inspiring and I doubt whether he or any other Argentinian has the leadership ability or skills to dig themselves out of the hole they dug for themselves. They will be in economic pain for a long time to come.

 

Part of their problem is an utterly ruthless American investment fund called Elliott Management, a US Hedge Fund, backed by a bloke by the name of Paul Singer.

Whereas a lot of hedge funds write off bad investments, Singer ensures blood is squeezed from every investment stone that Elliott put money into.

 

Elliott bought Argentinian bonds and the Argentinians defaulted on payment - so Singer promptly set about seizing every Argentinian asset he could lay his hands on - which included the presidential plane and SpaceX launch sites. Argentina finally agreed to repay Elliott - but they would've had to borrow money at exorbitant rates to do so, so it only kicked the can down the road.

 

Elliott are setting their sights on the fiasco that is W.A. coal-fired power generation now, and it's going to cost the W.A. Govt many hundreds of millions more than they anticipated, to settle with Elliott.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-01/elliott-management-wa-bluewaters-energy-stoush/103063852

 

Yet another good reason to keep foreign 'investment' in essential services, out of foreign hands.

[willedoo]

I find Facebook Marketplace a strange place to visit at times. Today a bloke listed a bundle of 12mm re-bar for free. When you click on it and view the listing, he wants 4 cartons of Carleton Dry for the steel. I don't understand why people make a pantomime of these things. Why not just ask $200 for it and be done with it. For a buyer, it would be a pain in the rear to have to go to a pub, buy the cartons and haul them to the sellers place.

 

From another viewpoint, the seller would probably know it's $1,600 worth new, so why not make the buyer do a bit of work for it.

[facthunter]

Dunno why but Beer seems to get more action than the money equivalent. Maybe moreso in your neck of the woods Eh!.  Don't knock it till you've tried it.  Nev

[nomadpete]

32 minutes ago, facthunter said:

Dunno why but Beer seems to get more action than the money equivalent. Maybe moreso in your neck of the woods Eh!.  Don't knock it till you've tried it.  Nev

And here I was thinking the USD was the universal language of parleying

[spacesailor]

IF you live in a " dry " area .

That four cartons could be $ 400 , or , at $ 10 a can / bottle! ..= $ 580

Not so dumb after all. 

spacesailor

PS I was offered $ 10 for the remainder of a can of beer used to make damper . I gave it for free.

[old man emu]

What is the most useless letter in the alphabet?

 

My money is on "J". When you are playing Scrabble, it's a bloody nuisance despite being worth 10 point. There are a few words that start with it, and a few more that have it as the second or third letter. Even "X" and "K" are more useful.

[nomadpete]

59 minutes ago, old man emu said:

What is the most useless letter in the alphabet?

 

My money is on "J". When you are playing Scrabble, it's a bloody nuisance despite being worth 10 point. There are a few words that start with it, and a few more that have it as the second or third letter. Even "X" and "K" are more useful.

Alright.

 

You win.

 

That's as random as anything

[red750]

48 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

My money is on "J". 

Important letter in my extended family.

 

Janice, Janifer, Julie x 2, Joan x 2, Jenny, Jean, Jeanette and Jessica.

 

(Oops. Forgot. There are 2 Jennys, 2 Jessicas and a John.

[spacesailor]

Or, if you Iive in the ' Netherlands ' . Were ' J ' , sounds like jacht , Jarbord.  And so many more .

spacesailor

Edited December 19, 2023 by spacesailor
It changed my spelling A I again

[red750]

There are a number of threads I could have posted this in, so I settled for this one.

 

In South Melbourne today, a female pedestrian was struck and sent cartwheeling and her shoe flew off down the road. Both the pedestrian and the motorist were at fault.

 

The pedestrian was using a pedestrian crossing with wig-wag flashing lights, but was concentrating on her phone. The car was well down the road, so if she did look up and see it, she could have assumed it would stop at the crossing.

 

The motorist was travelling at about 60 kph, but did not make any attempt to slow down, according to the dashcam footage shown on the news, and made no attempt to swerve to miss the pedestrian. Fortunately the pedestrian was almost clear and was just clipped. She was injured but the extent was not reported.

[willedoo]

I assume I'm not the only one who never went fully metric and works in a hybrid of metric and imperial systems. The thought occurred to me when adding up rainfall. For everything else I work strictly in millimetres, metres and kilometres (less said about cm the better), and measure and record rainfall in millimetres. But when it comes to looking at the annual total, a figure like 675mm means nothing to me, even though with any other measurement it's perfectly familiar. With annual totals of rainfall, I always convert them to inches which gives some perspective to my brain.

 

The other one I've never been able to shake is psi for pressure measurement.

[onetrack]

Yeah, I'm the same, I think it's all to do with our upbringing as young people when imperial measurements ruled, and metric measurements often had such poor definitions, as compared to imperial measure.

All this, despite having gone through high school and being taught in metrics in all science subjects.

MPG was such a great and simple measure, but L/100kmh seemed just a meaningless scramble to me, although I find I'm using it more commonly now.

 

Edited December 22, 2023 by onetrack

[willedoo]

I haven't done any flight simming for quite a while but I used to have trouble with Russian aircraft speed indicators in kph, even though I have no problem when driving a car. In the flight sim, I would be always mentally converting to knots.

[Bruce Tuncks]

Here's a bit of trivia for you ....   Q: in 1900, which 2 countries had the highest per-capita income in the world?

A: Argentina and Australia.

I think that if this is indeed correct, it is true because both countries had relatively small populations.

[willedoo]

You often hear during big floods the term a metre of rain. To me that just means a lot of rain, and if you said 39 inches of rain, I can visualise exactly how much rain that is. On the other hand, doing any construction or renovating, a metre is second nature. Anyone mentioning inches in a construction sense gets a worse reaction than a leper would from me. One of my pet hates is tape measures with metric/imperial combined and metric tapes that emphasise centimetres.

[willedoo]

4 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

Here's a bit of trivia for you ....   Q: in 1900, which 2 countries had the highest per-capita income in the world?

A: Argentina and Australia.

I think that if this is indeed correct, it is true because both countries had relatively small populations.

We were probably both riding on the sheep's back in those days. I remember once reading a National Geographic main feature story on Argentina's Patagonia. A lot of it used to be sheep country before the decline of wool, and a lot of it was now running cattle. As that required less labour, towns and villages had shrunk in population and economic decline had set in. In a lot of the photos, the grazing land in Patagonia looked very similar to our remote grazing areas.

[willedoo]

In the early 80's, my uncle and his family were toying with the idea of relocating to Argentina and asked if I would go with them. At the time the government there was opening up agricultural land to foreign investment, and my uncle who was a crop farmer, could see potential there. In hindsight, I'm glad we didn't go as the place is an economic basket case now. As it was, we would have got there not long before the Falklands War which would have been a bit awkward being Australians allied to the British.

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, onetrack said:

I think it's all to do with our upbringing as young people

It is an example of "as the twig is bent, so grows the tree". Having been brought up with feet-n-inches, I still visualise in imperial. Because I worked with aircraft hardware, I think of nuts, bolts and drills in Imperial. However, when measuring and cutting, I'll favour metric. But metric can be a bugger when you are getting down to 64ths. And then there are Numbered Drills which are Imperial.

 

Although I used to use MPG, because of the amount of driving long distances I've done over the past two years, I've computed my car's fuel consumption in l/100 kms and I know the capacity of my fuel tank and how the fuel gauge indicates its remaining content. So I can work out how far I can go before needing a fill-up. What is noticeable is that when I fill up, the trip computer sayd that I have a range of about 530 kms, but the known consumption suggests 733 kms. As I drive, and that's on the open road at 100 kph/2500 RpM the sum of distance travelled and estimated distance to go start to creep up to 730.

 

The one thing that really annoys me are the makers of YouTube videos about aircraft who give speeds in mph or Kph, and not  knots, and they also give ranges in miles or kilometres, not nautical miles. Or is it that only the British use knots and nautical miles?