onetrack

Taking health advice from Trump and Kennedy, is like taking family planning and child-raising advice, from Catholic priests!!

Nev, what they actually mean, is you're not quite as doddery as some of your companions! - and they're making allowances for your "senior" moments! 🙂

I don't believe "newer is better" when it comes to phones (and a lot of other electronic items). SWMBO and I each had Samsung Galaxy Note 4 phones for several years, from about 2016 to 2022. The Note 4 came out in 2014 and it was a cracker of a phone, easy to use, had a stylus in it, that you wrote notes on the screen with, and it took good photos. But we had to give the Note 4's up, because they fell behind in bandwidth capabilities. Plus, I ran over my Note 4 with my tractor crane, and didn't do it much good! - but it still worked, even with a buckled case! So SWMBO bought a Galaxy A54 and I bought a Motorola Edge 30 Fusion. Both are disappointments, and both lack many features that the Note 4 had. The Note 4's had replaceable batteries, the A54 and the Edge 30 have sealed cases. And the Edge 30 has a back and front that is made of glass (as I found out, as soon as I dropped it!) It's a PIA, because the phone is almost "unfixable" - and when I went past a phone repair kiosk and asked about fixing the cracked case, they wanted $250 to fix it! I only paid a bit under $500 for the Edge 30, so paying $250 to simply fix a shattered case is a dead loss! It still works O.K., it just looks like crap. SWMBO is disappointed in her A54, every upgrade seems to change so many features on the phone, she has to try and find out what happened, and figure out how it all works with the upgrade. And both phones have poor user-friendliness, with so many features hidden under menus and icons, that you need to spend hours figuring out where the features are. I don't know what to buy for a new phone, the new Galaxys are full of photography gimmicks, with 3 cameras and everything oriented towards taking photos. I'd prefer a basic but robust model, and good user-friendliness, over 20 imaging gimmickry setups. I must be getting old, I don't take a hundred selfies a day, and don't have a website with 100,000 followers hanging on every single thing I'm doing, every minute of the day! - so, I'm definitely lagging! 😞

A company named Rotten Apple Inc., doesn't inspire confidence, especially with the amount of white collar crime! https://www.facebook.com/rottenappleinc/

The Kidston Pumped Hydro project is approaching completion and is one of the largest renewable energy projects in Qld. However, the way they're going about it, seems complex and unnecessarily costly to me. I can't see why they need to install major tunnels through hard rock, I would have thought large diameter piping would have sufficed. But perhaps the durability of the piping was unsatisfactory for the long-term. https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/analysis/lessons-from-excavating-the-250mw-kidston-pumped-storage-project/?cf-view

Battery storage is recognised as the answer, but it will be a slow grind to a successful transition away from coal and gas, and personally I don't believe Net Zero is achievable in the tight time frame set. However, I don't think there's anything wrong with setting a time frame, it just needs to be flexible. I believe more money should be invested in pumped hydro. I see a lot of huge open-pit abandoned mines throughout W.A., that have high piles of overburden (waste dumps) placed alongside them. Most of those open pits are half full of water. With the major height difference the holes and the tops of the waste dumps, it seems a no-brainer to me to set up pumped hydro on these otherwise worthless holes and dumps. In addition, they're in rural and remote areas, and there are generally power transmission lines nearby, so the existing transmission lines can be utilised to send power back to the high population coastal areas - where no-one wants "ugly" wind turbines or solar farms.

Whoa, imagine if the machines of the future became as smart as a MAGA supporter?? 🙄

She's a dill of the highest order. A seat warmer, until the Libs can actually find a candidate with some leadership skills - which may not happen in my lifetime.

I missed this one - but Sergei I. Sikorsky, son of the famous Igor Sikorsky, died on Sept 18th, aged 100. What a great life! He decided he would design aviation machines at age 8, when he took a ride with his father in one of Igors seaplane designs. Sergei spent nearly all his life in the employ of Sikorsky aircraft, apart from WW2 and a few post-war years. He joined the U.S. Coast Guard in 1942, as a helicopter mechanic. His father was already producing helicopters for the U.S. Navy by this time. The U.S. Coast Guard was transferred to the USN in Dec 1941, and the USN allocated Sergei to the Helicopter Development Program. He joined United Technologies (owner of Sikorsky Aircraft) in 1951 as a marketing specialist. United Technologies was previously named United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, and it had purchased the Sikorsky Aviation Corp in 1929. He retired from the company in 1992. Amazingly, there is no Wikipedia information page for Sergei Sikorsky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Y6czS1hOA

Reverse psychology.

Prime ribs.

Positive-thin-king.

Negative feedback.

I've got some bad news for a very large number of "Christian" Trump supporters - and that bad news is, they won't be going to Heaven, because they place their faith in the Gun God, not in the God of the Bible. Their very worship of the Gun shows they have no faith in their Heavenly God to protect them.

Trump's constant, massive BS line, that he's going to make every grocery item cheaper for Americans, the instant he's elected, is a standing joke now. Just like his massive BS about being able to stop the Ukraine War in one day. Beef prices in the U.S. are going ballistic. The Americans are eating more beef than they can produce themselves, and their herd is at an all-time low. Steers are bringing US$3,500 (AU$5,200) a head in the U.S. So much for Trumps BS about increasing sales of U.S. beef to Australia with his tariff deal, they can't even meet domestic demand. And those beef buyers in the U.S. are now paying 10% extra on the massively-increased purchases of Australian beef (our beef exports are up 16% recently). Bacon and pork prices in the U.S. are also going ballistic, along with eggs. And now the Trump/MAGA adherents are saying that Trump never did promise anything of the kind. America must be the land of suckers. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-18/us-cattle-prices-soar-increasing-demand-for-aussie-beef/105776020 https://www.reddit.com/r/centrist/comments/1hcreaf/just_so_everyone_is_clear_heres_a_clip_of_trump/

Absolute, total, Right-Wing Christian Fundamentalist BS - the same as this Instagram post, below. These people are NRA diehards, they worship guns as the ruling God. Modern firearms are excellent for killing human beings at long range, accurately, with guaranteed results, and can kill multiple numbers of humans in seconds. The safest societies are the ones with strict firearm controls. As an additional benefit, suicides are markedly reduced with major firearm restrictions. After the Port Arthur gun buyback and the major reduction in firearm numbers, the suicide rate in Australia went down by 60% - because most suicides are by firearm and they present to depressed people as an easy quick death. All that's needed here now, is to jail murderous criminals who trade in, and carry illegal firearms, for much longer periods. You carry a concealed firearm, you're planning the death of someone. That's planning a premeditated murder, and should have a minimum jail term of 10 years, actually served, not reduced because of good behaviour. At present, they get a slap on the wrist for being found with an illegal firearm, and it's taken off them. So they promptly acquire another one rapidly. Dealers in illegal firearms should get 25 years. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOo_or-ibD2/

That's way too obtuse for me, it looks like some gaming symbols.

I can't wait to see the vastly improved statistics in all these areas come out soon. So, I guess this means mass and random shootings will decrease to barely measurable levels? - schools will be able to report better teacher to student ratios, and better graduation rates? - hospitals will provide immediate and low cost health care? - and "genuine, legal" Americans will come out of hiding from those criminal immigrants, and line up for all those new jobs?? Personally, I reckon the mass and random shooting rates won't even alter (because its angry White Americans who are carrying out most of the mass shootings) - and the schools and hospitals will still struggle to cope, because they can't get menial jobs filled. Anyone who does front for all those newly available jobs will want high rates of pay, because they're far better educated, and consider themselves more intelligent than any third-world immigrant. It's interesting to note that the USPS has run up a monstrous deficit caused by decades of massive losses, largely caused by having to pay employees according to their education level, rather than the job they're actually doing. So you have people with PhD's sorting mail, and they are being paid double what a lowly-educated immigrant would do the job for. So, not much chance of lowering costs in any area where educated white Americans are being employed. Then there's the problem of trying to get rich white Americans to do jobs that are simply hard work - the trades (electrical, plumbing, bricklaying, etc), construction labouring work, truck driving, anything where there's a need to get hands dirty and put in long hours. Rich white Americans don't want these jobs, they want managerial positions and office jobs, where they feel they belong. America is shortly going to suffer from a major inability to find enough people to do lowly-paid menial work. That then means the pay rates for these jobs skyrocket as employers get desperate to fill these positions. Higher pay rates for these jobs means wage inflation, and an overall increase in inflation. Add in Trumps tariffs, and ordinary Americans will soon be crying out that they can't afford anything any more. Australia, despite its major immigration increase, still has problems trying to find people to do the above-mentioned jobs. I see local farmers advertising for road train drivers for upcoming harvest work. They're offering $60 an hr - and they still can't get enough truck drivers. No-one wants to be away from home and family for long periods, and put in long hours of hard, tiring work. The same goes for a raft of other jobs, I got charged $200 hr for an electrician and his apprentice recently, that was $140 hr for the sparky, and $60 hr for his apprentice. And I was lucky enough to get him within a couple of weeks of wanting the job done - and his phone rang incessantly while he was working, with clients looking to get electrical work done. I hate to think how we'd go, if we immediately sent 200,000 immigrants home. We had our bathroom renovated last year, completely gutted and rebuilt. The two blokes doing the hard yakka, ripping out the old tiling, ripping up the floor, and doing the new tiling, were both Iranians. Decent, hard-working blokes who were glad to be away from all the Middle Eastern problems of dictators, Mullahs running things, Stone-age social mores, and constant wars with random murders, caused by tribal hatreds.

Trumps attacks on the media, lawsuits and intimidation threats and having media hosts removed from their jobs if they even poke fun at him is extremely concerning and a prerequisite to criminal Hitlerian tactics. After the Reichstag Fire in 1933, Hitlers emergency decrees suspended individual rights and constitutional protections, giving the police broad power to act without legal limits. Now we see Trump Presidential Decrees of "emergencies", at whim to prosecute his plans to turn America into the MAGA model of an extreme right-wing, Christian-fundamentalist dominated society, with lesser or no rights for immigrants, gays and lesbians and any group that opposes Trump or his supporters. Under the Nazis, specific groups were targeted for arrest, removal from public life, and eventually, genocide. Trump has already had hundreds of leading public servants removed from their jobs because they opposed him. Now we see Trump using the military to replace police forces in various cities to "restore order" and "reduce crime". You only need to replace "the U.S. military" with the Gestapo and Nazi stormtroopers beating Nazi opposition protestors to a pulp, and even killing them outright on the streets, to see where America is heading. Just watch out for Trump suspending the Constitution as a result of another "emergency" - which was Hitlers final criminal act of total control. "Trumped-up" reasons behind so many of his illegal actions is a great irony.

The MAGA mob specialise in maintaining feral, visceral rage, against anything they see as counter to their beliefs, aims and plans. They especially enjoy painting anyone with anti-Republican beliefs, to be "the enemy" of America. It's McCarthyism for the 21st Century.

End up behind bars.

Turn a blind eye.

My sentiments are, I'll take all the gold I can get, cheap! 😄 I thought gold was reaching incredible values in the early 1980's, when it reached US$850 oz in January 1980 - but with pricing adjusted for inflation, the current gold price has already soared above 1980 equivalent values. However, if there comes a sharemarket crash (and there will be one, eventually), then the current gold price will look like a bargain. That's what all gold investors bank on. Not bad for a metal described as a "barbarous relic" by John Maynard Keynes, and also described as useless to any monetary value system, by many economists.

Walking ahead of British Royalty is NOT protocol. But Trump has form, he walked ahead of Queen Elizabeth, too. It's all about Donald. As someone else remarked, they should've just treated him as a badly-behaved toddler, and waited for him to come back, and walk with them.

Here's an interesting, current, Reuters article on the Chinese car industry - and it exposes what a mess the Chinese car manufacturing industry is in, solely due to Govt policies that encourage overproduction, far beyond the capacity of both Chinese and world markets, to absorb the numbers of vehicles being built. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-is-sending-its-world-beating-auto-industry-into-tailspin-2025-09-17/