Bruce

But I note that it has been stated that the check is free for volunteers... is this generally abided by?

Thats exactly right OME. The employee should not have to pay for the stupid check. Then the employer can do all the checking they like. Especially, as you say, the price has been jacked up out of all reason. I'm surprised that volunteer firefighters have not said that free checks are a condition of their volunteering. I sure wouldn't pay.

My wife sure has a better understanding of all things than me. I have found out that the secret to avoiding fights is... instant obedience!

I really don't know if she understands the difference between pressure and volume. She is an arts/phys.ed teacher to this day. I'll ask her soon.

I reckon the fee is for revenue raising OME. The government needs to give cash to unemployed people to buy drugs with.

Our gliding club requires a police check for passenger-carrying pilots. We were told this by the GFA. We chose to pay the fee for the pilots to avoid them all giving up. Gosh, how could you molest anybody while flying a tandem glider I wonder.

I was once told by this hardware guy that he had temporarily stopped selling Dremel tools because they had moved to Mexico and the quality was not good enough. He thought that this would change in time. The shop itself is no longer there, Bunnings has undercut the other hardware shops. Yep, things do change with time.

I know this guy who has a phd in philosophy and who lives in Trinity Gardens ( no kidding, this is a suburb of Adelaide ). He was very devout when we were kids, so I asked him. He knew the answer, which is.... to say that the very question is serious evidence of heresy, from which the questioner needs cleansing with fire.

Getting back to xmas, it was the feast of the winter solstice. They got the day a bit wrong, but that is understandable in bronze-age times. Maybe they wanted to invoke some divine help to stop making the days even shorter? There is a scandinavian legend about the fimbulwinter which lasts 3 years. This may be a remnant folk memory of an ice age. Anyway, xmas wasn't the celebration of spring on the way. That feast is easter ( the word is related to estrogen ) . The early christians also hijacked easter for their own ends.

I just realized that the junta of 3 idea is polytheistic, which I don't think is allowed.

Here's my theological question... Who or what is/are the holy trinity? According to the pop song... " the 3 men I admire the most, / the father son and the holy ghost,/ took the last train to the coast,/ the day the music died " So the lyric writer thinks it is a junta of 3. Or is it one being holding 3 personalities ? A schizoid? Or, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, only with 3 heads not 2? Is it an attempt to have he advantages of polytheism and monotheism at once with some nonsensical idea? Of course, but what exactly do they mean?

Good onyer Space

Many years ago I quit that bank. They had just given a $20 million golden handshake to somebody, and I realized that the money was actually customer's money. Not only that, the sum could have been 200 million. The best investment I could have done would have been to buy something... lumps of gold, real estate, a farm. These investments mean that you don't have to trust "managers".

Thread drift I know, the Bali bomb was anfo, but it was so poorly mixed it only went off about 20%. If they had mixed it properly, there would have been a crater where the building was. Luckily those terrorists were so ignorant about chemistry huh.

You could be right old K. I had read that Germany simply could not import stuff by sea while at war with Britain. I reckon I assumed about Chilean stuff... gosh, since high-school I have thought they were the only big supplier.

You can't assume anything these days. The Massey-Ferguson used to be very reliable and certainly it had the best support, as measured by the amount of parts readily available. We had a terrible experience with a recent one, which turned out to have been made in Mexico. Not that Mexico is in itself bad, but this tractor sure was and the support was worse than nothing. So it could well be that Russian stuff is ok these days. For any purchase, I can only suggest looking at their parts inventory before buying.

I'm surprise that Russian stuff is reliable these days. I knew a guy who bought a Lada and its reliability was really bad.

It was Fritz Haber, a German Jew, who invented the process of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere to make ammonia. This enabled the production of ammonium nitrate, a high explosive. Germany had entered ww1 with only 6 weeks of ammunition, ( they thought it would be over before 6 weeks ) but the Haber process enabled them to make much more, plus feed their population. " Brot aus luft! " was the headlines. ( Bread from air ). They could have said "explosives from air". Before Haber, they used Chilean nitrate for their explosives, but of course the British navy would have stopped this. I never thought of nitrates as being a greenhouse gas. It washes out of the sky readily. A fair bit of nitrate is fixed in thunderstorms, and the nice effect this has on plants is easy to see. I wonder if the atmospheric nitrate concentration has been growing. Hitler killed off a lot of the Habers in ww2.

There was a young lady from Clare Who wasn't quite getting her share So she came down to Gawler where luck did befall her And she got fixed up in the air

Old K, the story of Hermannsburg illustrates your story very well. The first missionaries there found it easy to "convert" the aborigines. But those missionaries found it very hard to get rid of the Aborigines old ideas. They had simply added christianity to their pantheon. The old Germans died with broken hearts. Luckily for the place, the old Germans were replaced with South Australian Lutherans who were much tougher and Hermannsburg is there to this day. Just how could they have expected a desert Aborigine to understand anything much from the Bible is a mystery to me. Basic concepts, like private real estate, not to mention tithing and taxes, were completely unknown to them. I doubt that they had much of a concept of sin and guilt either. But they sure understood that bad fortune, like illness, was caused by evil spirits, of which they had many.

Gosh its hard to know what a person really thinks, especially if he has found a niche where the pretense of such nonsense is rewarded. Not only that, the person might not even know himself, since he will avoid thinking about things like what he really believes. As a non-Catholic, but with several Catholic friends, I found myself embarrassed by the Popemobile. Golly, thought I, why doesn't he think that Jesus will protect him, if that's what God wants... This is by no means an anti-Catholic statement. I notice the current Pope has quit the Popemobile. AND they run the most ethical old-folks homes around, a fact that I found out getting auntie Pat looked after.

If you could buy a 60 kWh battery for $6000, you could subdivide it into 300 batteries of 200 Watt hours ( about a car battery ) for $20 each. Car batteries are well over $100 for cheapskates, proper people pay $200. If these batteries sold for $50, you would make some nice money.

Police are not the right people to look after mental-health people, and it is a shame that they are so often the only ones there. There was an insane man in Port Augusta jail who walked around with poo in his pants. He might still be there for all I know. I wish we spent less on some other government things and spent more on looking after the homeless and the insane. In the meantime, I feel sorry for the front-line police as well as their clients.

That's exactly the thing Octave. What a good idea to give those cars a showcase huh.

I'd like to hear about your first job, pmc. And the school, and where all this happened. Gosh I realize my life was more sheltered than I thought, I thought school was tough.