OK: I’ll take your recommendation here, so thank you.

I’m not sure how quickly I’ll get to it: I have a queue — and work etc. keeps messing with that, as does attempting 50:50 between non-fiction and mind-clearing via fiction 🤷‍♂️

It is near the front of my fiction-queue though, FWIW 😃

You do you. If you want to live in fantasy-land I won’t stop you.

Sure, I am “somebody named Mike, on the internet”.

You don’t like what I say, so you don’t care if that is well-informed or not.

Not my problem to solve.

Because they aren’t nearly as secretive as we are here in Oz.

At this point, I’m back to selling you that bridge 🙄

Most of the money spent in Oz is loaded on to the general Defence budget, to make AUKUS look like it isn’t further blowing out its already huge costs (running anywhere between 25-50% over the $368B initially padded estimate).

On US & UK sources.

Thank you: I didn’t know it was there to look for so now I will look 😃

I am well aware of the F-35 program including its successes and failures (and its now-mostly-successful operation in the RAAF).

I’d suggest I’m better-placed to know about that than you are.

The AUKUS mess is a whole different thing. My guess is that I also more about that than you do.

I have a bridge to sell you 🙄

It’s a great deal, pay now and get no guarantees - just a payment plan.

You mean: the paying.

We are paying for USN Virginia-class subs *we* will never get, and UK AUKUS subs which will never be built. For the RN or the RAN.

We can have a defence force or an SSN fleet .. except: we’re on-track to have neither.

The Go-Gos too, I think.

Back in my Army Reserve days, one SSM insisted we have “hat, gat, bongos, and boots” with us, always. Almost obsessively.

After one pre-dawn stand-to, he was somewhat shocked to see us get out of our weapons pits with nothing but the above! 😳🤣

(This was a mixed unit.)

Twitter is back, baby!

Nice .. and tough 😬

… so you do, in fact, deserve all you get 🤣

So wonderful ❤️

It sounds to me as if a fine and useful interaction between theory and practice will be happening 👍👍👍

FWIW: all the “good-looking girls” I’ve known who didn’t think of themselves as ‘hot’ (no matter how lovely they were) and didn’t pursue ‘hotness’ as “a thing” are still age-appropriately fine-looking women.

The ones chasing (at least IMO) really never helped themselves. Rather the opposite, sadly.

You have to 🤣 — to stop yourself from going 🤬 .. 🙄

None of mine (that I know of) yet.

That ‘yet’ gets bigger. 😳

My Dad is 91 and when he gets together with his rough contemporaries (weekly) one of the 1st topics is “who has died just recently?” 😢

This is almost certainly more sensible and useful than it sounds at first guess 👍

No { culture = australian } parameter to the script, I guess 🙄

Who knows who programmed the bot, then put { accent = australian } into the parameter file while leaving the script unchanged 🤷‍♂️

Good call, from the sounds of it 👍

I’ve been there. You don’t want to but sometimes all the other choices are worse 🤷‍♂️

Made me pay attention, for sure! 😳

Especially to escape routes 🏃

In 5th yr I was at Dannelly Elementry School in Montgomery Alabama.

In the early 70s. During “bussing”.

I was (a) the new kid (b) demonstrably un-American.

The white kids had a free shot at me. I was the only white kid the black kids had a free shot at.

It was a long year. 😬

(Back to Oz after.)

B must have *really* deserved it 👍👏👏😂

I got my 1st robocall from ‘someone’ 🙄 announcing ‘themselves’ as “an AI assistant” today — including a very polite “thank you sir” as I told ‘her’ to FOAD. (A bit redundant: was never alive.)

Basically, a synthetic voice with all of the above ☝️

I figure its the equivalent of starting at uni, but without any of the benefits.
Info coming in at 100 miles an hour, not enough time to take notes, tests in 3 days, and you have to work too much to have the brainspace for study. Except its a narcissist thowing global tantrums for profit.

Jennifer, of course 😃

Oh ye of little faith 🤭