Bruce Tuncks

The very best time to be born was during the war, at about 1940. Jobs a -plenty when you were about the age to want one.

My personal thing has been "war babies", ( 1939 to 1945) and "baby boomers ( 1945 to 1950 ) then Generation X etc (I lost interest )

Didja hear about the diggers who had only 3 complaints about the yanks? !. They were overpaid. 2. They were over-sexed. 3. They were over here.

I would like the claims for Poland being much freer from crime than Sweden (because they banned moslem immigration and Sweden didn't.) to be critically examined.

I'm in the middle of trying to remove bing from windows/firefox/google that I normally use. Its bloody hard.

I reckon I'm only here cos of breaker morant. My grandfather was one of those undisciplined australian troops who would have been killed by the poms.

U are quite right nev. Only the yanks were so rich as to look down on the practise

I gotta tell this story for Jerry. In England, this old lady went to her local to get her regular bottle of sherry. The new young girl refused to sell to her without "proof of age" in case they would get convicted for selling to the underaged.Now the old lady (who was over 80), had neither a driving license nor a passport. The manager backed up the girl, and the old lady went home bereft. I reckon the wokes have gone too far.

It sure will be interesting to see what happens in Pakistan.

One thing that Trump ( and Putin ) has taught us is that democracy is a very fragile thing. On one side, we have people who complain about the judiciary and their decisions to allow rapists to run free, and on the other hand, we have those who like to exercise power and wish to make their tenure last longer. Even here in Australia, we have frightening things happen along these lines. I reckon that the average adult person has actually very little time for democracy as an ideal, and would trade their freedoms for a bit more money if they could. The one thing that is a good sign is that even the worst dictators have sham "elections" where they win by the such ridiculous margins that the rigged nature of the election is embarrassingly obvious.

The opposite to a near cu is a far cu of course

AND... whats the opposite of a near cu? ( I reckon Nev will know this )

Well they should not give him the job of answering the phone for general met office queries. I just got the number from the net.

Then there is an Australian Jabiru for about half that.

I agree OME. If they want reparations, let them be billed for all the largess they have reaped over the last 200 years.

Spenaroo, I looked up "democracy in Sierra Leone and it is not a nice place... female mutilation, police bashing the opposition, etc. I guess it is as close as blacks can come to a democratic country?

Spacy, cyanide is natural too. So is salt.

Nope sorry red

All the stuff in this debate is good in that it illustrates well how true democracy is impossible or at least very difficult to achieve. BUT there is a big gulf between what we have here and what they have in Russia. ( In Russia, many contributors to this debate would be jailed ). Personally, I like how the Swiss have lots more referenda than we do. I want to see the public decide on things like the sugar tax, and I reckon the fact that we are not given the chance to have a say weakens our claim to democracy, but again I say that most of the world is far worse. To what extent should the oligarchs among us be able to shout out their messages and influence fools? I can think of ways to slow this down, as I am sure most contributors to this forum could do too.

I hate the idea of changing whitefeller things to black names. Sydney, for example, is a whitefeller thing . It was built entirely without black help. Uluru, on the other hand, is ok to change as it was not constructed by whites. Mind you, it is white tourists who make the place a money-generator, but this is not changed by the name.

Is there a third world country that is democratic? I reckon that even if there is one, it would be rendered small numerically by the dictatorships. ( AND there would need to be women's rights and an independent judiciary to be a proper democracy ).

And practise... the first times I used a ladder to get on the roof of a house I was building were terrifying, but in time I got used to it. BUT remember harry schnieder? He survived being a german soldier in WW2 but nearly died when he fell off a ladder.

There sure is a good case to be made that teaching critical thinking is useful. Jerry Atrick has made a good case for this. Unfortunately, the problem of what to do with those who enrolled but don't have the ability to think critically has stopped this. There are some vocations which require any degree to get into.... police for example. This is because they have found that you can otherwise employ an illiterate. In the 1960's, the requirement was for "passing year 9 " and I personally think that they have kept a fairly level bar. Yep, I reckon that a degree these days is about equal to a year 9 pass way back then.

It was MUCH harder to get an apprenticeship in the 1990's and correctly so... The apprenticeship was a much better meal-ticket.

Your memory will depend on how old you are. I was the last of the civil engineers who were in great demand in the 1960's. They were lucky to get taxi-driving jobs in the 1990's. Only medical graduates have hung on in recent years. Tertiary places succumbed to managerialism and this caused standards to drop badly. The new directors were mainly concerned with the money the institution got from selling degrees. There was a scandal when Flinders University was caught giving 2 week " courses" in english to chinese students. They of course learned nothing in those 2 weeks, but I bet the subsequent lecturers all got into trouble if they failed them.