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Just now, KillaKukumba said:

It's true, plastic rakes and spades should never have been invented.

 

*groan* 

In all seriousness though it has always been my experience that the first point of failure even on a $20 plastic rake is the wooden handle. They just snap in half. I had one break on me the very first time I used it a few years ago. So no more wooden handled rakes for me. Not that I spend much time raking leaves, I'm generally content to just let them blow wherever they wanna go. Figure these old trees were here longer than me so they can drop their leaves wherever they like.

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I've never used a plastic rake, probably has something to do with never needing/wanting to rake leaves. The only rakes I ever had were for the garden and plastic rakes just don't cut it with dirt. We made rakes in metalwork at school when I was about 15, it's one of the most used tools I ever made. It's had a few handles over the years bit still as straight as it was when it was made.

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2 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Are you the Constant Gardener Doc?

Nope. I haven't watched it, but probably not really my sort of movie.

And in the real world, I do what I gotta do, and I do enjoy it more now I have more time. And - like running - it gives me a space to listen to metal via headphones. 

Another great music listening experience that I can sometimes take up is wandering through an art gallery on my own with headphones on. Magic.

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On 7/8/2022 at 11:15 PM, KillaKukumba said:

General rule of thumb, if you've been unceremoniously removed, told to fuck off, kicked out or stabbed in the back by your own team as most of our recent PM's have, it's not because you're the world's best leader.

What is more baffling is that there is a market for ex-PM speakers. Many years ago when my firm used to hold annual conferences we did have after dinner speakers. One was an ex-Tory MP who admittedly was quite funny and another was Sir Ranulph Fiennes who was a narcissistic adventurer.  And they cost about £10k I think. You hear about Tony Blair and other cvnts making 10x that.  Just sounds like a dumb waste of money. You could probably hire Metallica for less than that.

On 7/9/2022 at 6:15 PM, Dead1 said:

I am actually very much pro feminism.  True equality still hasn't been achieved (eg glass ceiling, women being far more numerous victims of domestic violence etc).

True dat. With daughters as our only children you basically have no choice but to embrace equality with open arms. Every movie should have an Ellen Ripley strong female role-model.

But, to your general issues...sounds like the gin is the problem.

 

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12 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

What is more baffling is that there is a market for ex-PM speakers. Many years ago when my firm used to hold annual conferences we did have after dinner speakers. One was an ex-Tory MP who admittedly was quite funny and another was Sir Ranulph Fiennes who was a narcissistic adventurer.  And they cost about £10k I think. You hear about Tony Blair and other cvnts making 10x that.  Just sounds like a dumb waste of money. You could probably hire Metallica for less than that.

 

Yeah I agree, it's a weird situation. One of our ex-PM's was a millionaire business man before he became a politician (inherited Daddy's money). He ran one of our biggest internet companies from the mid 90's and was at the forefront of a lot of things. Then he got into power and basically fucked our entire internet system. He was more liked by the opposition than he was members of his own party and for that reason many people who didn't vote for him forgave him for his uselessness. Then he gets knifed in the back and is out of work. He's still a millionaire, he still gets a government pension for life, free flights and free healthy care and now he travels around the world getting paid to bitch and moan about how hard done by he was. He does talk about business, but it's still a big whine-fest about him not being treated fairly as a PM.

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1 hour ago, KillaKukumba said:

Then he got into power and basically fucked our entire internet system.

Weak (didn't stand up to the right wing bullies in his party), useless (well, he didn't achieve anything useful) POS. Whenever I have internet issues I blame him and I am right to do so. And there are other things I could say about him but I don't want to talk politics here and also some of it could be libellous (even if true).

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TBF it wasn't only him that fucked it, he was just the figurehead of a very ugly ship. He cops a lot of the blame for being leader, but he also cops it because he did take Ozemail from almost nothing to a world leading company. But in fairness he didn't require technical knowledge for that, just business sense. Both parties in this country are responsible for how badly screwed the internet is/was. Labor fucked things up just as badly and even if they'd remained in power our internet would still be in the same state it is now despite their bragging.

 

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1 hour ago, Thatguy said:

Weak (didn't stand up to the right wing bullies in his party), useless (well, he didn't achieve anything useful) POS. Whenever I have internet issues I blame him and I am right to do so. And there are other things I could say about him but I don't want to talk politics here and also some of it could be libellous (even if true).

Say No More

 

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The problem with the net has nothing to do with ingenuity, we've got more than enough of that, it's about governments not spending money on proper infrastructure. But it's successive governments since the late 90's not one mob, or even one party. The trouble is we've got telcos who claim to cover 98% of the population and that sounds great but something like 95% of our population is in city areas and urban fringes, so it's not as great as it sounds. We've got major black spots in both wireless and fibre infrastructure, we've got areas that can't even get broadband internet or mobile phone reception and we've got places that can't even get dial up internet. But that's okay because the major telcos claim they service 98% of the population. When called on it they then make claims about how Australia is a big country and regional areas can't expect city like infrastructure. However they fail to ignore that hundreds of internet and mobile black spots are actually in the city and the urban fringes.

We suffered for a long time because we only had one government owned telco, then when they introduced more telcos (pre internet) they promised more competition. Then they privatised the government telco and the private company pocketed millions in government dollars and restricted the infrastructure they agreed to share knowing full well that no other telco could survive without that infrastructure. So along came the internet and while other countries are looking at fibre to the home we were looking at copper connections that can stay connected for more than 20mins at a time. We're looking for connections that didn't cost $2 per minute to stay connected. In many parts of the country it was cheaper to ring those phone sex lines that charges $5 per minute than it was to connect to the internet. Then countries like China moved to a wireless system we started to 'research' broadband technologies.

By 2007 when we had a government that looked like they at least knew what computers where, we were at least 10 years behind the rest of the world. That government had big plans and wanted to spend up big with fibre to the home (for at least 98% of the country), expect they didn't understand the technology, they didn't understand how to implement it and it they had all these pie in the sky ideas that they knew the opposition would argue. But they did manage to convince many of the Australian public they knew what they were taking about because they used more tech terms than the previous government.

Then in 2013 we had the Prime Minister who claimed the internet was only an entertainment system and didn't require money spent on it so he scrapped the previous government's ideas. Then when he was knifed along came rich man who had previously run tech companies, he promised the world but knew he couldn't deliver so he cried that his own party was against him.

In those 30 odd years sure we've got fibre in most of the main cities and regional areas, but in most cases it's fibre to the node. Even in the cities nodes can be more than 1.6k from residents houses, (1.6k being about as far as fibre reliably carries data without another node), and while the backbone is fibre the last leg of the connection is shitty old copper. There isn't even a mandate across the country for all new development estates to have fibre connections.

So between aging technology, governments that don't understand and don't want to spend and vast country where things aren't always easy we rank 61 on the worlds list for internet speed. But we also have many areas where people  have constant drop outs, dial up speeds or no internet at all.

And for the record it didn't take an hour to write this post, it took 17 minutes, the rest of the time I've spent watching a 15min porn movie!!

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KK, great post.

 

Australia's attitude to any infrastructure is pretty slack.  Main Sydney-Melbourne highway wasn't even fully sealed until late 1960s.  It took 126 years to complete the Adelaide to Darwin transcontinental railway (planned in 1878, not completed until 2004!

None of the oil refineries or coal plants built in 1950s and 1960s (sometimes earlier) ever received a major upgrade or overhaul.  Now most of the refineries have closed and most refined petrol products are imported and a lot of coal plants are on last legs and suffering failures.

A few years ago an engineering review gave virtually all of Tasmania's infrastructure a D+ rating and commented the state was living off past investments made decades ago.

Here in Launceston population is growing yet they're actually closing down schools and community health centres.  Our sewerage and stormwater still mix during heavy rain which means human excrement is pumped into our rivers - 50% of the bacteria in the Tamar are from human faecal matter.  People have fallen into it and got really sick.

 

So little wonder the internet infrastructure programs ala NBN was a disaster.  I still can't get reception with Optus even in some urban/regional areas!

Australia's internet speed is 4th lowest in OECD (only Mexico, Greece and Turkey are worse),  It rates 68 out of 177 countries overall.  Even many third world countries have faster internet.

 

None of this will change - the government doesn't view infrastructure spending as unnecessary unless it's helping out a corporate donor.

 

 

Non-Australians should remember that Australia is the "lucky country" as described by Donald Horne in his 1964 book of the same name.

 

Quote

Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.

 

And nothing has changed in 58 years - in fact the political system has further eroded and the economy has become simplified to third world levels - as this Australian Financial Review article summed it up:  "Australia is rich, dumb and getting dumber."

 

https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/australia-is-rich-dumb-and-getting-dumber-20191007-p52y8i

 

Hence we can't have pretty things like good internet or efficient public transport or effective education (40+% of population is functionally illiterate) or equitable access to health.

Thus the lucky country lives on.

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How dirty do washing machines get? I know it would be silly to expect a machine that takes the dirtiest of things and makes them clean not to collect some of that dirt and grime itself, but I've just spent the last 2 hours elbows deep in our machine trying to clean the bits self cleaning doesn't. The good thing is that all the bits that came out went back in, but all the nicks and scratches are not appreciated.

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Still better then spending an hour cleaning foodscraps from the sink because someone is too lazy to put them in the compost bin not even a meter away…

 

On my mind? That One of my guitars desperately needs new strings, and the other one probably needs to be looked at, even with brand-new leads I get a minute scratchy feedback if I move the guitar even slightly, and feedback that it’s way louder then the volume of my app is set to at the time.

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Last time we had a blockage in the pipes it took 8m of plumbers snake to find it and when I brought it out it was the weirdest, strangest smelling, gooiest, blob of something that I've ever seen. It was white and squishy, it had lumps in it made up of colours I'd never seen, there was hair stringing from it in clumps and the smell was the kind of smell that stings your nasal passage the second the two meet. It's truly remarkable what lives in pipes.

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On 7/13/2022 at 9:37 PM, KillaKukumba said:

Last time we had a blockage in the pipes it took 8m of plumbers snake to find it and when I brought it out it was the weirdest, strangest smelling, gooiest, blob of something that I've ever seen. It was white and squishy, it had lumps in it made up of colours I'd never seen, there was hair stringing from it in clumps and the smell was the kind of smell that stings your nasal passage the second the two meet. It's truly remarkable what lives in pipes.

Should have snapped a pic. Sounds like it would have made a great death metal album cover. 

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So, I finally got my covid cherry popped. Must have had it most of last week but only tested on Saturday because my wife was positive. I suspect I got it at the Gatecreeper gig last Sunday - even though I tried to keep my distance and did not lick anyone that night. 

Was never more than a bit of a sore throat which is exactly the same symptom as when I get any cold. I did have a really bad nights' sleep last Tuesday which would have been down to my body wondering what the fuck was going on. But I never felt ill, just tired.

Probably good timing to get it out of the way because they are predicting 40 degrees in the UK this week. A lot of people are going to die. 

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3 minutes ago, JonoBlade said:

So, I finally got my covid cherry popped. Must have had it most of last week but only tested on Saturday because my wife was positive. I suspect I got it at the Gatecreeper gig last Sunday - even though I tried to keep my distance and did not lick anyone that night. 

Was never more than a bit of a sore throat which is exactly the same symptom as when I get any cold. I did have a really bad nights' sleep last Tuesday which would have been down to my body wondering what the fuck was going on. But I never felt ill, just tired.

Probably good timing to get it out of the way because they are predicting 40 degrees in the UK this week. A lot of people are going to die. 

Lucky you didn’t get too sick from it mate, took me the best part of two weeks and it’s had a nasty lingering impact on my asthma. 40° in the UK? That must be Fahrenheit I can’t imagine Great Britain sweltering through temperatures which wouldn’t be out of place down here… Seriously try and stay cool if you can, I know the houses over there I built to trap heat since it’s normally so cold.

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23 minutes ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

Lucky you didn’t get too sick from it mate, took me the best part of two weeks and it’s had a nasty lingering impact on my asthma. 40° in the UK? That must be Fahrenheit I can’t imagine Great Britain sweltering through temperatures which wouldn’t be out of place down here… Seriously try and stay cool if you can, I know the houses over there I built to trap heat since it’s normally so cold.

Cheers bro. I can imagine it playing havoc with asthma. Hope you are on the mend.

No, that is 40 Celsius (40 F would be like almost freezing). I think most of Europe is on fire, but I don't really watch the news.

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They were just saying on the morning news the UK could be headed for it's hottest day on record tomorrow (could be today) with temps reaching 38C. Apparently people are putting foil on their windows to reflect the sun and try to keep some of the heat out of their houses. It sounds weird from our perspective, probably the same for many areas where those sort of temps and normal, but from what they're saying houses in the UK just haven't been made with such temps in mind.

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On 7/16/2022 at 10:20 PM, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I cannot give Holy Diver a 9.0 even when I factor in nostalgia. I mean everyone loves little Ronnie and Rainbow in the Dark was cool and all for '83 but it's really not "one of the greatest metal songs ever written" as their write-up asserts.

I cannot really disagree with the caveat I'd actually grab the remaster if that's freaking good for the single disc...but 5 disks or whatever it is-with 6 versions of Rainbow in the Dark-I don't think I'd even listen to all the versions-just one remaster would be fine.....

But anyway, I think if one has to have deluxe sets....this one, also on Pitchfork would be more to your liking-

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/candlemass-epicus-doomicus-metallicus/

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