Yenn

Todays news is that house prices are falling and also that rents are increasing. I would have thought increasing rents would make houses more attractive to investors. The rent increase is supposedly due to increasing migrant numbers and for the month of September it is quoted at 0.6%. Doesn't sound much until you multiply it by 12 to get an annual rate of 7.2%

I think the reason that power station owners are shutting down is not the same reason Kodak failed. I was a keen photographer way back when Kodak was in its heyday and they started producing rubbish. One example was a colour print from slide system. It required you to buy the equipment and all materials from Kodak. Only a few months after introducing it, they took it of the market, resulting in photographers having a useless piece of processing equipment with no paper or chemicals to use it. The power stations are wanting to reduce costs and cutting down on maintenance, which is bringing their end of life forward. Callide power station had a generator break apart, leaving a big piece of machinery in the roof and that generator has been off line for over a year.

Bruce. The 27 year old has the ingrained culture of accepting handouts. Can you honestly say you have that culture?

Putin and Trump are both dangerous. Putin more so because he is getting cornered. What is needed is for the UN or USA to state that any use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine will be matched by the West. It will not affect Putin, but it may make the Russian Generals think. I don't think USA will do that as Joe is too scared of the Republicans to stand up and be counted.

The reason that someone gets paid $53 million is only to ensure the shareholders and workers don't get too much. I am a shareholder and regularly decline to approve the big hand outs, but not enough shareholders do anything about the obscene payments. It wouldn't matter so much if the recipients paid their taxes and the taxes were sensible, but the LNP and it seems Labor want the trickle down effect to work. What a cock of -hit.

Joh had reached his use by date and was seen to be corrupt, plus he was closely working with Russ Hinze, the minister for everything. He slipped up by allowing another pollie to push him out. Something he never thought would happen.

Who says an aeroplane only crashes once. A lot of you would have seen the red DH Dragon which went to several fly ins in Qld. The owner pilot told me that it had crashed years ago, killing his father and uncle. He had more recently managed to buy it and it was restored. It then went on to kill him in a flight from Monto, ending up in a mountain near Gympie.

You are just seeing the current ridiculous idea of changing names to be politically correct. All words nowadays are suspect in the do gooders eyes. I recently read that weeds should not be eliminated, because they were good. The idea was that certain plants are called weeds and they were not necessarily bad. They didn't know the definition of a weed. Using the correct definition there is no way that you would want a weed to be allowed to stay.

So am I, does that apply to me?

Years ago in Britain the normal way to do a 3 pt turn, was to back into a side street or driveway and then go forwards in the opposite direction. It worked OK and was safer than backing into a through road. Of course you had to be able to use the mirrors to do the backing, which is beyond the ability of some drivers.

They don't have enough income to live on but they have a million dollars worth of land and cannot get the pension.

We used asbestos for insulation material when I was building chimneys, before the dangers were made known. I used to go home after work, looking like father christmas with an asbestos coated beard. That was up to the seventies, so 50 years later and mu lungs are just about perfect. I also used to cut asbestos pipe in the eighties. I still have fragments of asbestos cloth knocking around. The danger is not necessarily from coming in contact with asbestos, but depends upon your susceptability to it. I reckon a lot more fuss about it goes on than is logical and in my opinion fibreglass insulation is dangerous, it is definitely more uncomfortable on the skin.

I doubt that the pilot even noticed you were there, his focus was on getting from one run to the other as quickly as possible.

Those businesses include aged care providers who are raking in a fortune, while paying a pittance in wages. Now the government is thinking about directly funding the wage increase for them. What does that do? As I see it the government is paying what the employer should be paying and the employer is stuffing his pockets. We have seen this so many times with government sponsored schemes, such as the school halls and roof insulation fiascos. There is no real planning for anything nowadays, if you have a problem, throw money at it and the problem is solved. Don't look to see if the money was wisely spent because that costs more money.

I think Yakandanda in Vic runs a community power system and a friend who lives there says it is very good. No problems with power outages.

I was involved with writing specs for tenders and evaluating them last century. Some firms always won the tendering for one big local industry, usually by $100. One tenderer was so pissed off by this that he left the cost of formwork out of his quote and it was a substantial proportion of the job. As usual he was underquoted by $100 and Benny got the job as usual. A short while later Graham, the tenderer who left out the formwork costs got a phone call from Benny. "How did you get such a low tender price? " was the question. I don't know how it was done because the tenders were sealed right up to opening time, but someone read them early and passed the info on. Tendering for military materials always looks decidedly dodgy and I reckon there must be kick backs for some of them to succeed, or maybe just incompetence. Thinking back to submarines I reckon incompetence must be No 1 choice. How could we specify diesel subs, when 18 months later they were a No No.

The new kind of warfare. Send millions of incompetent troops to attack intending them to defect or get captured and become a big drain on the enemy resources. During WW2 there was training for British troops so that they could escape or otherwise cause havoc to the German military. It was run I think by MI9.

Those poms who were put into concentration type accomodation were thankful for that accomodation and it was in some cases better than they had come from. I know because I was one of them. It allowed us to get a job, save and get out into the real Australia. That accomodation was not like the cold and bleak homes of pommie land.

I heard a very good female comedian on the radio years ago. Can't remember her name and the Gay BC doesn't broadcast her shows. She had told a few jokes about useless men and started singing "Im'e a dickhead, yes I am" repeated over and over and got the audience to join in. Then she stopped and so did all of the audience except one. Embarrassing but very funny. The big wave at a cricket match s a good example.

The reason there is corruption in Australia is because governments have become corrupt. It has happened very quietly over many years. Joe in Qld honestly thought he was not corrupt, but Alan Bond was convicted of bribing him. Joe was never convicted of accepting a bribe, because the trial fell apart when they got a corrupt juror on it. The last government, led by Morrison was into all sorts of slimy business. Only today the news is about a committee of which Morrison was Chairman and sole member having many meetings. Who did he meet and where did he find the time while he was the hidden boss of five ministries. Corruption will always rear its ugly head if we let it and that is why so many people say discussions on religion and politics are banned at gatherings.

There is a precedent for it, set by Henry VIII. What I can't understand is that the church keeps very quiet about it.

Sounds reminiscent of the late part of the Vietnam war. I wonder how many Russian servicemen are going back to Russia to spread the word. It seems a lot have stayed in Ukraine on an involuntry basis.

Surely if we have more immigrants we will have greater need for more immigrants to build the houses we don't have enough of now. We seem to have plenty of people pushing paper from one side of the desk to the other, or similar things with computers. The real shortage is of people who produce something and we have not been training theming,

I think PHEV is plug in hybrid. A friend of mine has one and it will run about 30km on a normal overnight plug in charge in fairly hilly country. It starts the IC engine when the charge gets down and as far as I know, that charges the battery and provides motive power. As the hills are not all that long, the battery will power the car on level or downhill sections, while the IC engine keeps topping it up and deceleration also adds charge. As a passenger I had no idea of which motive power we were using, but it was vastly cheaper to run. My friends vehicle is a medium size $WD and he tows an AVan with it. Has towed the van from Adelaide to near Albury in NSW so there is nothing wrong with its performance. It just seems funny to see it towing a van with no sound.

Kijng Charles is the leader of the Church of England, in fact his job used to be called defender of the faith, but I believe they have dropped that bit. In 1977 I went to Wales for the marriage of my wife's brother. He was highly religious as were all my wife's family. I think I have educated her out of that, but the rest of them are still the same. My brother in law could not marry in the church where he used to worship, because his bride was a divorcee, so they got married in a registry office and had the reception at my father in laws farm. I being a non believer anyway stayed at the farm and set up the drinks stall. Guess who was the first to arrive to sample the drinks. The local vicar who wouldn't allow the wedding in his church. Was the reason so that he could be first in line for a drink? Maybe. When I pointed out the hypocricy to my brother in law he was most upset, saying I should not think such things about a man of the cloth. Now I thought that Charles was a divorcee and so is Camilla. Would the church by hypocritical? No of course not a believer is always correct. Is the fact that a large proportion of the population don't like Charles, because he spoiled the fairy tale marriage with Diana? I reckon he will be a good king, just because he is proficient at hedge laying, which is something I did plenty of, but I didn;t do it as an art form which is what the competition hedge layers do.