old man emu

Octave hinted at a reason that EVs are OK to use in NZ. He said that electricity there is produced by hydro generation. Is it reasonable to think that the cost of electricity in NZ is much less than here?

Once again I am staggered by the industrial production of the USA in such a short time. The mind boggles at the volume of steel that must have been produced in order for the production of everything from nuts and bolts to Liberty ships. And then I think of the current state of US manufacturing. How the mighty have fallen!

How do you make roads and runways in a battlefield? You just throw a few sheets of steel on the ground.

A-line is a form of a-dress.

Even in Latin after the fall of the Western Roman Empire had a lot of variants. One could almost call Medieval Latin a variety of pidgin Latin. Medieval Latin had an enlarged vocabulary, which freely borrowed from other sources. It was heavily influenced by the language of the Vulgate, which contained many peculiarities alien to Classical Latin. Vulgate, or Vulgar Latin, also known as Colloquial, Popular, Spoken or Vernacular Latin, is the Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward by everyday people. Those areas of the Western Roman Empire have languages strongly based on Latin and Greek. The languages of the rest of Europe that the Roman did not conquer have languages based on the expansion of the parent Indo-European languages and the effects of isolation on the development of dialects which eventually became common languages. Compare the Slavic languages with the Germanic or Celtic and you see how isolation produced the different languages. During the Medieval Period the increase in knowledge from native sources or through trade and interaction with the Arabic world introduced many new words which the intelligentsia Latinised to include in correspondence which was mostly carried out using Latin forms.

There is nothing worse than reaching for your wallet and it not being there. I often just put my wallet on the centre console of my car and forget to pick it up when I dive out to go to the supermarket. Even realising that I don't have it while I'm halfway to the supermarket gives me a jolt. I can imagine PMCC's horror having lost his in a foreign country. Both his and Onetrack's happy result restores one's faith in the goodness of most people.

And you can blame that damned Yankee, Noah Webster, for the abomination of American spelling.

I condom that comment.

Random thought: Paper wasps are hanging around my place at the moment. They are nasty bastards and I make an effort to destroy their nests when I see them. I spray the nest with surface insecticide and come back later after the wasps have left and knock the nest down and stamp on it. When I did this to the last nest I destroyed I was taken by the intricacy of its construction. These nests are the same year in, year out. It made me wonder where in the DNA of these wasps are the plans for their nests, and their reproductive behaviours located. Then I started to think about the behaviours of all the other insects, fish, birds and mammals. They have the knowledge of millennia stored in their DNA. How come humans have lost that innate knowledge?

Statistics can trick you, especially when you are dividing one number by another. If the pollution remains the same, but the population increases, the per capita number comes down. I thought that natural atmospheric conditions exacerbated the industrial pollution in Beijing. Isn't the area subject to inversions which prevent the pollution from blowing away?

A mobility scooter with a tweaked motor.

Using the NYPD figures, which are more likely to be correct, Trump's BMI is 41 (obese), but that is obvious just by looking at him. However, let me reiterate that BMI is a population statistic. In other words, it is a figure reached by taking measurements from a sample of people. It is not a diagnostic tool. I would also say that Trump is most likely to suffer from sleep aponia due to obesity and age. Those of us who suffer from sleep aponia know the effects of it on mental acuity and general vitality, it it is not helped by things like CPAP usage.

I'd prefer Lilly the Pink a saviour of the human race.

The "Eye of the Needle" in Jerusalem is a popular but largely unsupported claim that a narrow gate existed within the city walls. There's no definitive evidence of such a gate ever existing in Jerusalem Don't forget that the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE and most likely demolished the city wall. So, if there had been a narrow gate somewhere in it, we have no evidence of it now. The narrow would have made it difficult for large animals like camels to pass through unless they were unloaded. This claim is often associated with Jesus' parable about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is a simile used to illustrate the difficulty of entering the kingdom of heaven. Since Jesus often used commonly encountered things as similes to clarify his parables, I would imagine that his contemporaries would know what he was referring to. Perhaps a modern equivalent of an "eye of the needle" is the small door in a much larger door such as a factory roller shutter of a hangar door.

The way the tourism into the USA story is being given to us, it would appear that, to paraphrase Luke 18:25, "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a foreigner to enter the Land of the Free.

How's this for an alignment of the members of the LC? Greens 4 + Legalise Cannabis 1 + Animal Justice 1 = 6 Liberal 10 + Nationals 2 + One Nation 2 + Australian Christians 1 = 15 Labor 16 It will be a great time on the Cross Benches doing deals with the other two groups.

I thought that a simple way of thinking about Deficit and Surplus budgets was that a Deficit budget indicates that the government has been spending on its credit card while a Surplus budget indicates that it has not been spending. At times it is important for a government to book up stuff on its credit card and go into deficit. An example is the money spent so far on those AUKUS submarines. They are said to be things we need. I suppose the money the government allocates to disaster relief is spending on credit it the disaster is greater than what was expected. On the other hand, failure to spend by cutting back allocations to existing needs will bring a budget into surplus (windfall income excepted) So the decision voters must make is which Party is making the best use of its income. Is the Party spending for the future, or does it want to horde income for some future undescribed need.

It is possible to put an interpretation on Trump's tweet that it was a good time to buy as being a call to not panic sell, but to keep buying to maintain the value of the market. That is a good thing for the leader of a country to urge. Such an interpretation is very kind towards Trump. While it is a possibility, I doubt its probability, given our opinion of the man. The only way to prove illegal activity by Trump would be through the discovery of tape recordings, a la Nixon. But I doubt if there is much record keeping of private conversations involving Trump.

One Party is promising a tax rebate to be paid to middle-income earners in 2026. The rebate is supposed to ease cost of living. Those middle-income earners are going to incur a lot of cost of living expenses between May 2025 and July 2026. How will a promise ease the pain of reality? The promise is simply pie in the sky. Nomad is correct. Australia, and one could probably say most Western nations, have never thought beyond the next election. It's amazing that political parties whose biggest contributors and advisors are business owners do not seem to understand that for business success one has to take a long term view, and not chase short term windfalls. If political parties did that, then a country might develop a sustainable economy and eventually prosperity might trickle down to the lowest levels. Socialist or Capitalist, any Party that set out a number of long term goals, and refused to be diverted from the path towards them, would be likely to maintain power for many years. We did have the Menzies years where there was economic development to a degree, but that was dependent on maintaining a colonial attitude whereby wealth came from the export of primary products to Britain. Once Britain joined the EEC that source of income began to dry up and Australia had to seek other markets. But since manufacturing capability, which was boosted by wartime production, had diminished, Australia had nothing of greater value to trade. There has never been a real push to do anything to value add to our primary production.

And now the tariff on computers, mobile phones etc. have been drastically reduced because they are mainly made in China and Apple would lose heaps.

I see that 98% of the persons eligible to enroll to vote have done so. I know that some people will say that enrolling is succumbing to pressure, but at least we have freely given every person who is eligible to vote the right to do so as they please, be it casting a valid vote or not. What I have come to realise is that my generation no longer has the majority. It is my children and their children who now have the say in the direction into the future the society my generation and earlier ones created will travel.

As much as I hate saying it, I think I could develop a defence of "plausible deniability" that his tweet about its being a good time to buy was not market manipulation but a call for people to hold steady and trust the market to recover because he was going to make America great again. However, I am also cynical enough to believe he was into market manipulation for the benefit of billionaires. As for insider trading, how far removed must someone be from a public company to not be considered an insider? It's easy to determine for a single company, but when it might involve the complete share board, how far away must one be?

I disagree., While the sentence on its own makes sense if read as "Are you as bored as I am", or "Am I as bored as you are", they imply different things. The first form implies a question posed by another person. The second implies a question from "me". As for me, able I was ere I saw Elba.

That's where the vocabulary of the layman and the specialist collide. I see no problem with using a tern derived from the observation of common things, in this case the shape of an egg, in non-technical situations, and the use of the specifically defined term in technical situations. Context is important. Do you kick a ball or a sphere across a sports oval, or depending on your preferred game, an ellipsoid?

I wonder if the leaders of US industry and military are trying to find some legal way to put an end to Trump's chaos. There are no true grounds for impeachment that have been uncovered. Even the application of Breaker Morant's "Rule 303" is unlikely to alter the administration's course very much. Vance would simply be the puppet of the faceless men who came up with Project 2025. Although less that 50% of people polled approved of Trump, the percentage who disapproved was almost the same. You could say that of those who had an opinion, there is no clear division of opinion. If is approval rate fell to below 40%, then that would be significant.