old man emu

Before the election, I was proposing that the young voters would have a big impact on the results. I thought that they would be supporting the Party which had the strongest policies regarding environmental matters, both locally and globally. That would have suggested that the Greens would increase their numbers in the Lower House. Now we know how the Greens did, I must admit that my thought was incorrect. It would appear that the Young People were either seeking the security of a Party that had many of their interests in common, or else, they were turning away from Parties that had little interest in the Young People. Perhaps, too, they saw the Greens as being incapable of mounting a strong voice against either of the other two main sides.

In Sydney there are a lot of vacant public houses which are deteriorating due to lack of maintenance. It is quite clear that this lack of maintenance is due to a lack of sufficient funding. There are also many areas where the houses in the early public housing estates were built on quarter acre blocks. The houses are small and look like a pimple on a bum. Each of these blocks could carry at least four town house types dwellings. The current tenants could possibly be placed in temporary accommodation while the new dwellings were constructed and then returned to the same community. However , the problem is not land and construction material. It is the taxpayer dollars to do it. And, I suppose the political will to seem like a government is favouring one part of the community over others.

I glanced at the window of a Gilgandra real estate agent today. There were several houses for sale priced in the $360,000 range. Cheap enough compared to Sydney, but a bit over the top for a small farming town 60 km from its nearest reginal city.

Because we forgot, or were in nappies in he early 1980s.

You can't blame Keating for that recession. A Treasurer he had to react to the global situation, and as I have posted elsewhere, the rot set in when the World Monetary Fund agreed to base exchange rates on the US dollar, then Nixon banned Americans from owning gold as investments.

It is not often that US commentators say anything about the smaller countries like Australia. However, publicity is now being given to the result of our recent election with a bit of an emphasis on comparing Albo and Dutton. Much is being made of Dutton's earlier MAGA mania, and his lauding of Trump and his policies and how that was a big factor in Dutton's defeat.

He looks great for a bloke who died in 1991

Have you ever considered the meaning of the opposites of some words? There are some words that we use that are constructed by adding a prefix to a word, but then we stop using the word that the prefix was added to. For example, look at the word "impeccable". This word, meaning "not capable of sin," was created from French impeccable (15c.) or directly from Late Latin impeccabilis "not liable to sin," from the assimilated form of in- "not" + peccare "to sin". So if you remove the "in-", you get "peccable", which must mean "capable of sin". Have you ever heard of that word?

If there is one good thing that came out of COVID it was work-from-home. As Litespeed says, it has changed the lives of very many from a "work to live" existence. I wonder, though, what percentage of the workforce can actually take advantage of working from home. I would say that the vast majority of the workforce cannot, due to the jobs they have, from Uber drivers to international airline pilots. Think of the teachers, childcare workers, retail workers. The list is extensive.

And there's research into the creation of the 51st State, if that matters.

There are four States of Matter. Plasma is a state of matter characterized by charged particles, often described as the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid, and gas.

Isn't amazing that four Liberal Prime Ministers or Party leaders lost their seats in general elections in the past 25 years? Turnbull resigned his seat, and in the by-election the Party lost it.

I was gob smacked too. A Labor landslide and Dutton ousted from his seat. Unfortunately the ABC is imply showing total Coalition seats. I'd like to know the spilt between Libs and Nationals. Perhpas we could have a little proud Leader of the Opposition.

Do you think that the Cost-of-Living crisis is something that just suddenly arose from nowhere? That sort of thinking is simply a reliance on short term memory. I watched the following video and it made me think that the current economic situation actually began to develop about fifty years ago. Once again it was the USA which caused the problem.

Well. That was an effort. I didn't have to wait in line for very long, but working out how to record my vote was very difficult due to the number of candidates to select from. I had to mark 10 boxes to complete a valid vote for the Lower House. Numbering the major Parties' candidates was easy, but trying to sort the wheat from the chaff amongst the rest was made difficult because I knew nothing of their alliances or policies. Then I had to attack the Senate ballot paper. Once again, the major Parties were easy to indicate, but then there were all sorts of other groups whose alliances or policies I had never learned of. I simply had to interpret the name of each group to see which ones would get a tick and which ones would miss out. If the Legalise Marijuana party gets in, I'll be stoned.

Aye! There's the rub! once you've tooled up. As it says in the quoted article, there are just about no tool and die makers in the USA, or for that matter in Australia, who could make the tools and dies needed to produce the modern products consumers have been convinced that they need.

Actually the electorate is named in honour of Henry Parkes who is called the Father of Federation. The name was applied to a Sydney electorate from 1901 to 1964, then used for the 1984 election. The name was applied to its current electorate in 2022. The town of Parkes was part of the colonial expansion of the early 19th century, originally founded in 1853 as the settlement Currajong, named for the abundance of kurrajong trees in the local area by the settlers, but was then known as Bushman's (from the local mine named Bushman's Lead). In August 1873, Henry Parkes (later Sir Henry) visited the area and in December 1873 the town was officially renamed Parkes in his honour. (Sir Henry Parkes is recognised as having played an instrumental role in the federation of Australia.) The town's most well-known claim to fame is as the site of the "The Dish", the radio telescope that received the images of the USA invading the Moon in 1969. (What were you dong on that day?) Some others might thing that a better claim is that it is the home of a branch of HARS, the aviation museum.

Another very good explanation from Jerry.👍 What is clear is that the residents have two choices, spend a heap on briefing a legal eagle, with a 50-50 chance of wining/losing, or just pay the bill and cut their losses. This is just another example of people whose expertise in the financial world is not as great as the other party to the deal. Caveat emptor might be the thing to say, but how many of us know the warning signs when entering into big purchasing contracts?

My electorate, Parkes, is the largest in the State with an area of 393,000 sq km and 110,000 electors. Whoever wins this seat can expect to make a motza from the travel allowance.

It is hard to identify what is highest on the list of concerns of young people, since there are so many things they are told about. I'm thinking that what is on their list is not necessarily on the list of the political Parties.

Any report of stupidity coming out of the USA is more likely to be believable than not.

The controversy over the radiation effects of mobile phones came up 20-odd years ago. Experience seems to have discounted the idea of harmful effects. (I have no independent reference for that comment.) Notice that Kennedy referred to high EMR exposure. It is reasonable to say that anything taken in high doses is harmful. Moderation in all things.

I think that this election is being influenced by two things: the Trump effect and the arrival of the younger generation at the polling booths. We have just gone through all the carrying on from the US election and we are suffering from the results. That must surely cause our voters to develop a deeper distrust of politicians. The pork-barreling that has gone on, plus the realisation that no Party can fix the economic situation add to this distrust. The younger generation must worry about the security of their future, both in terms of employment which feeds into the housing problem. There is also the concern over the threat of war in so many places. I don't think that any Party has looked very far into the future in order to develop anything more than quick fix policies.

Tik-Tok, Facebook and Twitter to name three more.

There's no such thing as a fee lunch.