onetrack

The W.A. Govt clamped down on wood fires over 20 years ago. Not a ban as such, just regular encouragement to get rid of them. Unsurprisingly, there are still plenty of houses in the Darling Range and the S.W. of W.A. still using wood for heating and hot water. You can tell where these areas are on cold still mornings, the choking wood fire smoke hangs around in the valleys for hours, making them quite unpleasant to drive through. We have electric RC A/Cons, best thing since sliced bread, we got rid of the previous oil heater in 2005. The oil heater was installed in the original (wood) fireplace by the previous owner, so that was a long time ago, we've been in this house for 35 years in early June.

13°C to 22°C here today, quite cloudy, with the odd light shower. It's fining up though, with 15° - 31° and 15° - 30°, and sunny, forecast for Thursday and Friday. We had a very small amount of rain on Saturday, but nothing more in sight for a week or more.

He got all the power without any knowledge - just rat-cunning and deviousness.

I'm chuckling over some of the election comments. Jacob Greber's quote (ABC), re the shocking Liberal loss - "It's like one of those gory horror movies, where half the headline cast gets decapitated before the first act is over..."

The part of this election that gives me huge satisfaction is seeing Clive Palmer get his Trumpet shoved up his arse, and seeing him spend $60M for nothing - and sighting a major collapse in his share of the vote, from a former 4.1% to just 1.8%. That, despite his party promising a 15% tax on iron ore exports to help reduce the national debt. Just goes to show, how voters don't trust a word he says. https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2025/results/party-totals

I stand by what I said previously - Labor will win, and any swing to the Conservatives, will be minimal at best. As with the W.A. election, the Greens and Independents will pick up the swing that would have gone to the Conservatives in previous decades. The Liberals need to take a long hard look at themselves, with their Trump alignment, stepping back into fossil fuels, clamping down on migration, and generally wishing for a return to the 1950's, where White Anglo-Saxons ruled, and women knew their place - in the kitchen. We live in the 2020's and things have changed in a big way - and we won't be going back to manufacturing in Australia any time soon, either.

I lived in Casula for 9 mths during 1970, I didn't think the climate there, was all that bad. Maybe 1970 was a very pleasant year.

There's been more than a few crooked, corrupt and downright evil popes. Perhaps he's getting ready to align himself with Pope Urban VI (1378–1389), who tortured Cardinals who had conspired against him.

When I first started in earthmoving, I knew a rough, tough and crusty old WW2 Veteran, who was a local Shire Council Foreman - and his version, which possibly predated WW2, was the message to any girl - "Do you believe in the hereafter? Because if I don't get what I'm here after, you'll still be here after I'm gone!"

Turning yourself into shark shit is another favourite way of departing this planet.

There's an interesting article in the link below, that explains precisely why manufacturing of everything on a large scale in the U.S., to try and beat China, is never, ever going to happen. A big part of the problem is that a huge percentage of Americans want manufacturing returned to the U.S. - but only 25% of Americans would choose to work in a factory job. https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/steve-jobs-quote-on-american-manufacturing-still-applies-today/91181530

I'm looking forward to placing Clive Palmer last.

Spacey, forget about acquiring a Storch for a low price, Slatterys are as devious as all the other auctioneers, they fail to advise the item has a reserved price, and they will keep auctioning it month after month, until they get what they want for it. Either that, or they will flush out the bidders and then call them, and try to get them to pay the reserve price.

Oh, but it gets better! The would-be chopper pilot suffered from Parkinsons disease, and senile dementia - and he'd previously had a stroke! Plus, he was taking a range of medications, some of which were listed as "Do Not Fly" medications! When he purchased the Robinson (as an "investment") in 2016, he apparently quizzed an instructor if he could teach himself to fly it! The instructor related how he strenuously insisted that the Robinson purchaser get proper chopper pilot training. https://www.globalair.com/articles/ntsb-93-year-old-non-certificated-pilot-likely-conducting-ground-run-when-r22-became-airborne-crashed?id=8922

We've been having discussions with a number of local youngsters, and how they're going to vote. The word is, that young voters are going have a major impact on this election. Hardly without much variation, every one of the youngsters we spoke to, expressed great concern about the altering climate, increased pollution, and general environmental destruction - and they nearly all said they were going to vote Green or Labor. I think the Federal Conservatives are going to get a shock when their much-vaunted swing to them, turns out exactly the same as the recent W.A. election - a slight swing to the Conservative parties, but not enough to make a measurable dent in Labors hold on Government. https://www.9news.com.au/national/federal-election-2025-yougov-poll-predicts-labor-majority-coalition-losing-seats/5a0ccacb-f753-4c5e-bd01-de9243d495c8

It looks like the apartment owners have a good case for a class action, under misleading and deceptive conduct under Consumer Law. It seems obvious people have signed documentation without the ramifications of the contract being explained to them, in clear and unambiguous terms.

I can recall reading a local story from early WW2 when some pilots in an RAAF fighter or bomber flew at extremely low level over a farmers horse team working a paddock. The horses went berserk and took off in all directions, the threw the farmer off his seeding rig, and damaged his horse handling equipment. He was outraged, and contacted the military authorities to complain, but not surprisingly, the offenders "couldn't be identified". It was Wartime, after all. The poor old farmer got no satisfaction, and no compensation, but the aircraft crew probably thought it was all great fun.

The climate deniers, Trumpists and even Australian conservative politicians have jumped on the disinformation bandwagon, all claiming that the blackout was caused by excessive power generation by renewable energy sources (mostly wind), causing massive grid instability, which resulted in the blackout. The problem is, the disinformation about renewable energy is all BS, it is being promoted by one major climate denier, and his claims are being repeated ad infinitum across all the media. No-one knows for sure what caused the blackout, it will take weeks to pin down the cause. No doubt it will be something that no-one thought about, when all these countries grids were interconnected. https://reneweconomy.com.au/spains-blackout-has-already-triggered-a-firestorm-of-disinformation/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=spains-blackout-has-already-triggered-a-firestorm-of-disinformation

So much for the much-vaunted U.S. Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, and Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. It leaves Trump and his slavish MAGA adherents with the ability to drive a truck through the loopholes in it. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8-7-2/ALDE_00001262/

There's a revealing article in the link below, showing how much Trump has stuffed the American economy with his moronic and chaotic decision-making. What is interesting is the chaos he's creating in shipping, with the container trade about to revert to COVID-19 chaos, whereby empty shipping containers piled up in the wrong ports, and ships sailed with only part cargoes. Coupled with American businesses inability to do any forward planning, while Trump bounces off the walls, and the end result will be nothing surer than goods shortages on American store shelves (which drives up prices), increased prices as a result of tariff impositions, and American ports withering, as cargoes diminish. The thing is, it's not just imports being affected, the Chinese are effectively embargoing American goods and produce, so the number of containers leaving American ports will reduce substantially. Boeing are getting a pile of new aircraft returned, that the Chinese were going to buy, so another kick in the nuts for Americas largest export earner. It just makes one wonder how much longer Americans will put up with his idiocy, as regards his pathetic economic decision-making, that is going to make life harder for a lot of Americans. https://prospect.org/economy/2025-04-24-permanent-tariff-damage/

There's a good video below on U.S. War production during WW2. It's long, at 43 mins, but it's very interesting to see how the U.S. went from an isolationist stance and very little War production in the late 1930's, to a position of "the World's Arsenal". https://www.google.com/search?q=Bill+Knudsen&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:62a21db5,vid:2YIuuJQH6Sc,st:0

The U.S lost 733 Merchant vessels to enemy action during WW2 - mostly U-boats. The total shipping tonnage of these 733 vessels lost was 3.1M tons - and the tonnage was measured, using the pretty standard maritime measure - Gross Tonnage. The weight of steel used to make one Liberty ship (and I'm using the Liberty ship as an example, as over 2,700 were built during WW2, making it the most common U.S. freighter) is estimated as between 8,100 and 9,180 tons. Using 8000 tons as a rounded number, and multiplied by 733 lost ships, the steel weight lost in the shipping was 5,864,000 tons. However, many of the ships lost were smaller than Liberty ships, so the actual tons of steel lost would probably be far lower. A vast amount of steel produced during WW2 went into construction machinery and armoured equipment. The tank factories turned out thousands of tanks, and the construction equipment manufacturers went full speed ahead on construction machinery. Caterpillar provided 98% of their output to the War effort, producing mostly Cat D7 and D8 bulldozers and Cat 12 motor graders, which were the primary machines of the U.S. Forces. The wartime D7 weighed about 15 tonnes fully equipped, the wartime D8 weighed about 23 tons, and a Cat 12 grader weighed around 10 tons. Looking at just Cat production figures, they built around 10,000 x D7 tractors, 9,500 x D8 tractors, and around 6,000 x No. 12 graders during the War period. That makes a total of 428,500 tons of steel that just went into Cat tractors and graders alone. There were also substantial number of other tractor manufacturers and equipment manufacturers who built a wide range of war/construction equipment as well, so the total amount of steel required for manufactured equipment was colossal. The 2,000,000 tons of steel used in Marsden Matting was probably a low percentage of overall U.S. steel production during WW2. Machine tools were produced by the tens of thousands, and vast tonnages of steel would have been consumed in that area. I have a copy somewhere on a computer hard drive of the history of the USACE (U.S. Army Corp of Engineers), and it gives the background and order figures of steel production during the War years - and the production orders for steel were just mind-boggling - and they changed weekly, as War orders were delivered. The figures bounced all over the place and reality and priorities had to be balanced. The appointment of Bill Knudsen (from GM) as Head of War Production was deemed crucial to instill some orderliness into both civilian and military Wartime orders and production.

Going back to the original aim of the thread 🙄 - I see where 540,000 people cast their absentee vote on the first day of absentee voting. Seems like a substantial amount of people have already made their mind up, and no amount of election speeches, or last-minute pork barrelling, is going to affect the direction as to how a lot of people vote. I think there's only about 7M registered voters.

I watched an interview with Musk, as regards the performance of DOGE, and he was claiming that they were saving $4B a day in Federal expenditure. However, that claim is rubbery, because so much of their claimed "savings" were from processes that were already in place when Trump took over as President. To add to that, the interest bill on the U.S. National Debt is running at $3B a day, and what Trump and Musk are doing, is actually doing very little to address that debt level. What they ARE doing is causing increased U.S. unemployment, reducing Americas ability to keep tabs on what is happening in the world outside the continental U.S., damaging Americas standing in the global arena as a reliable and trusted partner - and as the bloke in the video above clearly points out, there is no statesman-like vision in Trumps and Musks agendas for Americas future, it's all about money, chaotic decision-making that takes abrupt reversals, promotes bitter divisiveness, chases retribution and vicious revenge, and which concentrates on belittling people who oppose their agenda. And the very worst part of Trump and Musks beliefs is that Putin is a good bloke, and his vision for Russia is worthy of support, and that Ukraine is just a corrupt failed state. To top it all, anyone who thinks that American industry can return to low-cost manufacturing, and beat China at their low-production-cost game, is living in La-La Land.

Somebody wrote that for him, I'll wager! It contains nothing about crooked judges, crooked Democrats, fraudulent elections, fake news, or even recommendations for Trump Hotels or golf courses.