monkeysarefun

Sadly, many countries can now say that. The "NHS is the Envy Of The World!!" claim is a bit tattered due to either wilful vandalism or incompetence. Which is a massive shame - The Whitlam government in the 1970's created our national system of free universal healthcare based upon it and gave us Medicare, back when the NHS was a system to aspire to and one to copy.

We do seem to have a lot of Medical Centres here. It seems like every time something gets torn down a fence goes up around the site and a "Medical Centre Opening Soon" sign goes up on it. They invariably include a pathology lab plus an X-ray clinic and usually a pharmacy, so you can see a GP, give blood , go down the hall for an Xray and get all the results back then go off to get your script filled all in half an hour or so. Most "bulk-bill" which means that for each consultation they claim the mandated standard fee from the government but don't charge the patient anything additional, so they are effectively an NHS style "free" system except that you can see your doctor of choice, go to any medical centre you like and book an appointment online to any one that takes your fancy. Heightened costs like rent, wages etc however means an increasing number now charge the patient the "Gap" fee, ie the difference between the government mandated medicare allowance and what the medical centre estimates the actual cost to be, which can be in the $40 to $60 range, but its still possible to shop around for one that bulk-bills without too much of a problem. Personally I've never paid to see a doctor. In a practical sense of how it all works, , if I wanted to see a doctor tomorrow I could phone my regular doctor, assuming I'd found one I liked and had stuck with, or I could log into several apps that'll let me search for an available appointment in any medical centre or GP practice in the area, and in addition they give you a biographical rundown on every doctor that the search returned, along with any speciality they had so if for instance I had a pain in my left elbow, I could search for left elbow specialists and book an appointment directly with them. We have the choice of whether or not to allow our medical records to be loaded onto a national database, and if we do that then we can chop and change doctors and the new one has access to all our previous records. I pay private health insurance which is a cost that annoys me but if I didn't pay it I'd have to pay pretty much the equivalent in extra tax each year and in return I get a few extra benefits like immediate surgery if required in a private fancypants hospital with the surgeon of my choice (increasingly an ex-NHS escapee!) , dental and optical subsidies plustrendy quirks like discounted yoga sessions , cheap running shoes and so on. We sure do have a lot of medical centres though!

Horses don't' just "fall" on you You make it sound like they do it by accident....

UV sensitive resin has had a huge kick-along over the last 5 or so years with the advent of Resin 3D printers. I got my first resin 3D printer in 2017 and the resins back then were very brittle - to the point that if I dropped a print on a hard surface it'd shatter. 7 years and (eight 3D printers!) later its a different world. Now you can get resins that once cured, can be drilled and machined in a lathe, others that are as flexible as rubber. You can get dental resins and temperature tolerant casting resins for reproducing jewellery. On top of that the detail that they can reproduce is insane. Thats mainly due to the increased performance of printers - my first one had a 2K LCD screen, my current one (as well as the even later one currently on order...) has a 12K screen, but there is a 14K one out there now, but the resin too has to be able to match the performance of the latest printers so development there has also been rapid. Basically resin printers work by sending a burst of UV light into the resin one layer at a time, and the smallest detail they can reproduce is one pixel, so the smaller the pixel size the finer the detail they can reproduce. 12K LCD screens have much smaller pixels than the original 2K LCD screens, so just as a 12K telly (when they release one!) shows more detail than a 2K screen, the printed detail possible on a printer with a 12K screen vs a 2K one is much greater. Heres a piece I produced for a certain ER here, Drawn up in Blender, I was very pleased with how much tiny detail came out. This was printed in "ABS-like" resin, and its properties when it comes to flexibility and hardness etc would be about the equivalent of say the plastic of an Airfix kit.

Platypus venom is not toxic, it was developed as a fighting weapon when male platypi get stuck into each other in a fight over a girl one, but it is apparently extremely painful - top 10 in this list at least. https://www.treehugger.com/creatures-that-deliver-the-most-painful-stings-and-bites-4869305#:~:text=Bullet Ant&text=The bullet ant has the,the most painful sting%2C period. In addition, Morphine is completely ineffective against it, so as the doctors say here - "You'll just havta put up with it, mate!"

They are venomous so I wouldn't want to be threatened with one! No, seriously, they actually are.....

See also the reaction to MAGA VP hopeful Kristi Noems revelations about her dog punishment method in her recent book!

Sounds like a good excuse to get a laser cutter.

The caption under the photo of the baby monkey - "The monkey torture community began life on youtube..." p!sses me off just as much. Try and upload a video to youtube that contains even a snatch of copyrighted music and you'll be prevented - I was trying to upload a 30 second video of Buttons the Budgie headbanging to Highway To Hell by ACDC but youtube blocked it on copyright grounds. . But - if you have a video of some baby monkey being lit with a cigarette lighter or whatever its "no f#**en' worries mate!" - just as long as you don't try adding a soundtrack of "Light My Fire" by the Doors. They are just as culpable in my book, the ar5eholes.

The best pork crackling I've ever had was on the Cook Islands, there was an eating place ("restaurant" is too grand!) on the beach where they cooked half a pig in the sand. If I ever go back to somewhere I've been before it'll be the Cook Islands - 5 stars!

Giving them away here at the moment, its the time in the season where Haas Avocadoes are making way for Shepard's so there's both kinds - 3 for a dollar (3 for 50p) equivalent in the fruit shop today. . Bursts the balloon of those "The only reason young people cant afford a house is because they are always buying avocado on toast" types.

What about Eta then - or did you leave here pre Rita the Eta Eater?! (Obscure 1980's Australian advertising reference - UK types can feel free to ignore!)

America prides itself on being the most desirable country in the world to live in, and thats born out by the stats - the US has a net gain in immigration from every country in the world................. except one. https://cf.datawrapper.de/dduui/2/ Thats because we have two unique things that makes everywhere else far less desirable for us in comparison: Australian Rules football and Chicken salt on our chips!

In reverse, in the movie "The Wolverine", the Yukon scenes were filmed at Picton NSW, a small town about 15 minutes drive from here. Fake snow and VFX did the rest!

Same here, but being @polybear it would definitely have been this story. Probably. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/cooking-and-eating-tarantula-spiders-cambodia/index.html

"Deadloch"? Its a great p!sstake on all those grim police procedurals. It was filmed in Tasmania.

Got to say, I'm not seeing a downside with that... No doubt foxes are very cute up there in Wind In The Willows Land but they have no place here: The 300 million native animals that foxes kill every year consists of: reptiles: foxes kill 88 million reptiles each year, and all are native. They've been recorded killing 108 different species – or 11% of all Australian reptile species – including the tjakura (great desert skink) and loggerhead turtle. ...... This research, the first to quantify the national impact of foxes on Australian wildlife, also compares the results to similar studies on cats. And we found foxes and cats collectively kill 2.6 billion mammals, birds and reptiles every year.

Even harder for those who lived in the area at the time - which both the British and Australian Governments declared was unoccupied - Japan wasn't the only country to have its residents killed by a nuclear weapon.

You need to clamp down on the reasons for that - mainly supplying vets with a ready supply of bodies! (Early AI from 1836 - included here solely for historical purposes)

That's pretty poor. My boss at work is ex-Army Sigs, he has hearing loss and a back issue that came on post service career but that he can trace back to incidents during his time in the army. Veterans Affairs have recently sent him on full-body MRI scans, a full audio examination and some weird test involving electrical impulses that sounds pretty painful, but they are coughing up the cost for all the tests and are giving hima lump sum payout in the high 5 figures, plus an extra 30% to his life-time military pension. My office until recently was across the corridor that had a SCIF so the door was a massive metal one, with metal fingers of Beryllium to aid electrical contact or something. One day some tradie tasked with something or other to do with the door decided for no apparent reason to remove the Beryllium fingers with an angle grinder. Once someone noticed what was going on we were all evacuated and were not allowed back downstairs until the dust monitoring was all clear. The Department of Defence came out and gave us something to sign that acknowledged our potential contact with Beryllium dust so if in the future we come down with symptoms that can be identified with Beryllium exposure we will get compensated.

Here after pre-med they go through asking you questions to confirm your name, address and then to confirm what knee or whatever they are going to operate on. I'm probably the 1,878,768,564,455th person to go "What! Don't yous know?? get me out of here!" thinking its a hilarious joke. With our influx of Brit nurses and surgeons though, surely one of them hasn't heard it before.

That's cos you live in the jungle! Old bushie lore here is if you see a goanna in the outback, don't startle it cos when startled they instinctively run up the tallest thing, which in the outback is probably you.

I used to work with an ex-RAAFie who'd spent his time in P3 Orions doing anti -sub patrols and search and rescues in the Great Southern Ocean. His retirement plan was to buy a boat and sail up the Eastern coast and around the Coral Sea, but he only wanted a pink one or a yellow one. He'd spent far too many hours combing stormy white-capped waves trying to spot a white -hulled yacht that had maydayed in a distress signal and if the worst came to the worst he wanted to make the RAAF's job easier.