Bruce Tuncks

Don't be a spoilsport nev. My alcohol intake is not the lowest ever. We have the farm full of no-good drinking rellies and it is good fun.  I liked the story about the kids having a chook called jesus.

I agree willedoo. Maybe the republicans have made themselves unelectable....   i sure hope so.

Here's a bit of trivia for you ....   Q: in 1900, which 2 countries had the highest per-capita income in the world?

A: Argentina and Australia.

I think that if this is indeed correct, it is true because both countries had relatively small populations.

I'm going to a coronial court ( In Horsham or Ballarat) about these friends who were killed by a retard driving a truck near Murtoa about a year ago.

Any tips would be welcome. I want to know just how he was given a license, and I would like the coroner to find that he got given his too easily.

I would like to see much better testing of license applicants... This could be done with driving simulators, which is the only safe way that a kid suddenly appears in front of you, and the only way skidding on a wet road can be simulated safely. All candidates could get a score out of 100 say, and this would be objective.

The only downside I can think of would be that a different car to your normal one would be used in the simulator.

Kids would do well in the scores but would still drive stupidly on the real road, but oldies who reacted too slowly to be safe would be caught out.

Regarding Burma:   I was told that there was a pow camp there which the Australians wanted to attack to save many lives, ( before the Japanese killed everybody ) but the yanks ( McArthur) vetoed the idea...  I would like to know more if anybody has heard of this too.

I reckon it is true to say that the yanks were the first army in history to care for the lives of their own troops. You would think that Australia would have too, but this is not so I reckon. I would welcome discussion on this too.

Merry xmas to you too nomadpete.

The carrying capacity of the planet is way too vague a notion to use it for population control, even though I believe in the idea to the extent of supporting " Sustainable Population Australia" as a political party.

Spacy, please don't bump yourself off....  I like your posts too much

Of course we have less life in front of us than the young have. If a day of life is worth say $1000 dollars, then our old carcasses are not worth as much.

But it's not how we feel....  I reckon that my life is better now than before and I doubt that I would go back ( memory wiped) if I could...  well maybe to the start of retirement, but not before too much.

I was very lucky to retire young, and I reckon life has been wonderful ever since, and I actually had a good job!

I have half a recollection that suicide is common among educated oldies, and this is correct I reckon.....  in fact, suicide should be encouraged and enabled for oldies. They are completely different from youngies.

The only problem is how to stop impatient inheritors from bumping off the oldies who don't want to go.

I reckon that your life sure is worth less than those teens OME. Yet we value our old carcasses just the same...  silly huh. We should all be trying out for hitmen, on account of how we will die anyway soon enough.

My father-in-law was an aircraft armourer in the north of Australia in 1944 and 45. He was never sent  within 1000km of a live Japanese, but that didn't stop him from being a war hero.

My own father ran the Alice Springs power station on nightshift after trying to join the airforce. They had learned from WW1 that you didn't accept all the "volunteers" and then get the town drunk to run the power station.

My strong observation was that the father did more for the war effort than the father-in-law.

When I was at engineering school last century, the value of a life was $50,000. This was never explicitly stated but you could figure it out from how much extra you should spend on a road to save a life.

One of my fav discussion subjects is the value of a life to a ww1 general. I reckon it was much less than $50,000. In fact I reckon they had to lose a lot of soldiers every week to stop their logistics from failing.

OME, I sometimes watch " border security" on TV and it seems they are trying hard. But, with chemicals, you can't seem to have effective and safe at the same time.

With termite treatments these days, the current approved and safe chemicals don't seem to work.

I always thought that the life of a battery was well known and not a subject of lies.

Personally, I reckon you guys are weird.What could possibly be wrong with adding a small amount of fluoride?

I have studied the matter Nev and believe that the more sources an info thing has, the more likely it is to be true.

Just because ( say) a Murdoch site is unreliable with right-wing stuff, it does not mean that it should be always disbelieved.

I know a guy who thinks that the whole media is full of lies, and he seriously thinks Russia is the only country telling the truth.

Personally, I reckon he has descended into nonsense on account of not applying the same standards to Russian propaganda as he has to western propaganda.

I reckon lots of "studies" on how bad alcohol was were funded by the wowsers. But I have to agree how the alcohol industry is now big enough to fund its own "research".

Getting back to crops, the figure of importance is the root-zone salinity. This of course varies with the irrigation water salinity and the leaching fraction.

Nev, it is very difficult to ascribe an effect where the sample is small and the numbers are small too.

" Lower IQ" would be hard to measure and I would need lots more details to take it seriously...  But thanks for trying.

Please correct me if this is wrong... Seawater is 30,000ppm , the mixture of salts is largely NaCl but there are all sorts of other stuff. Sheep can drink 3000ppm salt water, and they are tough animals in this regard. Human blood is about 9000ppm which was likely the ocean figure when out ancestors left .

Crops.... a sensitive crop is french beans which don't like irrigation water more than 900ppm.

Don't feel bad, I just looked it up.

It's about half n half nomad.

The fluoride which becomes part of the teeth n bones is not excreted.

How could it make these things stronger otherwise?

My understanding was that fluoride was discovered by the fact that some kids in Australia just had good teeth...  I am open to argument about this nowadays.