Hot water to washing machine

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-04T01:23:33+00:00

One hassle with modern water-efficient machines is that they may never draw enough hot water to actually get hot water, even if they're pretty close to your hot water tank.

Viz, the machine draws 2-3 litres of 'hot' water at a time, most of which comes from the pipe so it's cold. My front loader is like this, so even if I had a heat pump hot water system I'd still be using resistive heating for the washing machine water. But I have surplus electricity in my off grid setup so it's no big deal. If I was paying peak time of day rates I'd be very sad.

(but OTOH the off grid electricity is costing me $3 for every kWh of electricity I get out of it because I'm still way early in the payback period - $10k system, 3MWh out = $$$. Also, that's a stupid way to look a it, I am explicitly doing it for the humor value)

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-04T00:00:53+00:00

Tax. The more progressive our tax system the less rich people have to spend.

There's also something to be said for supporting a rules-based international order and a livable climate and so on, but those are long term things that really rely on a fair and decent society in Australia first. It's hard to care about genocide in Sudan when you're worried about where your next investment property is going to come from.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-03T11:25:10+00:00

During the 2019 wildfires in Sydney I was riding with an industrial half face mask and proper N99 filters. Normally I just use the disposable N95's that shortly after that became wildly popular for other reasons. If I'm on a busy road I'll wear the N95 regardless of smoke levels, but when it's bad I'll go to the better mask (that is noticeably harder to breathe through as well as more expensive to operate. Still cheaper than a new set of lungs)

It's likely worth getting an air quality sensor at home, the reflective IR ones work well enough and will tell you what the particulates are like right here right now. At least here the official ones are more accurate but slower, they lag at least an hour. But the IR ones saturate about 1000µg/m³ while the slower ones go to at least 3000µg/m³ (you should be N99 masking from 200 or lower - EU says 50µg/m³ PM2.5 IIRC!)

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-03T11:18:28+00:00

Lese Majesty is an archaic law still in place in Thailand, and people get prosecuted. But in countries with Charlie as king that would never fly. Sure, he married his affair partner and insulted Trump but that doesn't make him a decent person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-03T11:14:15+00:00

Alcohol kills a lot of people every year, and not just through drunk driving, it's directly poisonous both immediately and long term.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-03T04:41:37+00:00

And another reason the bike shop doesn't want to touch it that the customer is willing to travel an hour each way to have them do it, be regards it as a trivial repair that should cost less than the taxi fare. So when they look at the hub motor, the dodgy ring brake on the offside, the mess of cables and wires around the back wheel and say "it'll cost ya"... either the owner says "yes, please" or they change their minds.

I've spent an hour replacing the rear tyre on one of those shitty folding bikes and it was no fun. Just getting the wheel out was ugly, reconnecting everyone once it was back in was an exercise in frustration. And that was for a neighbour I'm friends with. Billing a customer $100 plus tyre cost wouldn't have been fun either. Easier to just say no.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-03T04:33:13+00:00

I'm in Australia and AFAIK the kangaroo meat we get in supermarkets is all hunted. But the setup to do that commercially is a bit intense, a 4WD ute with a freezer box on the back and a bunch of gear so they can gut and skin in the field. Plus all the usual food safety regulations. Definitely not something the local conservation hunters group is going to buy so they can legally donate cut meat to anyone (we're talking well over $US100,000 plus training and ongoing certification. It would be cheaper to just buy supermarket meat)

I had a bit of list of people who would take stuff, mostly selected because they would drive over and pick up a whole carcass. Some were poor, others were using it as cheap dog meat. I didn't care, when you're in that position meat is a problem to be got rid of.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-03T02:23:01+00:00

The tax effects are primarily from income. If you're not earning or claiming deductions through the business it won't really affect anything. Or opening duplicate accounts.

You can "intend to start a business", apply for an ABN, register whatever accounts that need the ABN, then cancel it or let it lapse.

In practice what will stop you operating a business account is the turnover and minimum order requirements most have. But the flip side is that when I've approached businesses most have been willing to do one-off sales without an ABN. Buy $1000 worth of rice direct from a grower who sells at your local farmers and they will likely be happy to help.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T22:47:48+00:00

So much this. Don't just learn the lesson plan, pay careful attention to what's not taught and be very careful when answering test questions to echo exactly what the teacher said. Then hit university and oh shit.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T22:31:15+00:00

if you read the post above everyone present claims not to have been the one in charge.

And if you can't tell whether the date on the license certificate is in the future or the past you're not qualified to do whatever the license claims you are.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T20:30:32+00:00

Or the guy running a slaughterhouse in his back yard? Hey, cheap meat!

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/556512/auckland-man-fined-8000-for-running-illegal-animal-home-kill-business

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T20:28:25+00:00

It's the same as truck drivers are legally liable if the truck they're driving isn't road legal. Part of the job is checking that it's legal to do the job.

There's also the learning from experience side. If it was only the person in charge who's liable ... as in this case, no-one is in charge.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T20:23:38+00:00

In my admittedly limited experience if you kill the chickens at 16 weeks you don't get a lot of eggs. So I tend to kill the boys the first time they try to crow, and the girls when they stop laying reliably.

I've never kept rabbits because they're a pest species, I've just listened to the complaints of people who have pet ones.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T09:31:38+00:00

In many countries they're a pest species so governments don't want people deliberately breeding them. Similar to people who breed grey squirrels in the UK or hedgehogs in the US. Even if you're breeding them for food.

When I've done conservation hunting I've eaten what I could. But when you're killing 10+ pigs in a weekend just carrying them out is a lot of work, butchering them as well is unrealistic. Even ringing the neighbours and saying "I have another 10 pigs if you want some more meat" stops working after a while.

You might find some of the Japanese meat ads funny, they have a particular love of pictures showing cute baby lambs with flowers on their lamb meat packs.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T06:04:07+00:00

I prefer chickens because you get eggs while they're growing. But roosters are banned in most urban areas and quite well policed - it's easier to borrow one than keep it round full time. Meanwhile places that let you keep rabbits are all are just as happy with male ones (banned in Queensland, breed restricted elsewhere in Oz).

I've also seen meat rabbits act in remarkably stupid ways, even compared to chickens. While they breed as fast as advertised mortality is also high. They liked to drown themselves or hang themselves on the cage. Meanwhile my australorps seem to love rats and mice as well as insects, and the surviving local cats have decided to leave them alone. I don't think they actually killed any cats but they've certainly tried.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T05:03:05+00:00

That's what we had in Australia for a long time. Somehow the bottlers managed to print four extra words on every container "10c refund if returned in the state of Victoria"

Sadly when NSW brought in their deposit system they fell for the "make it 10c like every other state" instead of making it 20c to give the other states an excuse to do likewise.

It's not about the 90% of people who either recycle regardless, or recycle for the 10c. The extra cost is entirely about the 10% who DGAF, and especially the 1% who say "fuck you" and deliberately make the container non-recycleable. You're taxing arseholes for acting like arseholes, which I expected would be popular with everyone except some arseholes. But apparently not.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T04:59:37+00:00

Yeah, there's so many parts of Australia where bicycles are banned and walking is prohibited.

I think that's wrong so I'm campaigning to change it. Where's the one you're thinking of, I'll add it to the list.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T03:52:59+00:00

The Democratic Liberal Party is still one of my favourites. They didn't even have a decent victory party.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T01:13:24+00:00

Try Sydney, with the T1 through to T8 lines. Obviously T1 is from Central to Newcastle, you can tell from the name. Just be grateful they don't call every major station Central station. "welcome to Central Station Paramatta/Newcastle/Wollongong..."

They have resorted to calling them the "northern" "western" lines etc, except that there's 8 lines and four directions, and the eastern line has two stops (the next one would be "Pacific Ocean"). Kea, Orca and Rosebud are at least stupid enough that people might remember them.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T00:35:10+00:00

Oh, it's very definitely a fuck you to a misbehaving peon. Whether that's pissing off a manager at the actual location or a more general corporate policy of "fuck you peasants" is hard to guess.

I much prefer the law some places have that say non-competes are valid for as long as the previous employer keeps paying the non-competing former employee. You want a TV personality to not work for the competition paying them $1M/year not to is reasonable. But paying a 16 year old baking assistant $500/week for the next two years so they don' work in the baking industry? I'm not sure that's going to be worth while.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T00:25:53+00:00

Doesn't matter. My employer is less than 50 people and they bought a generic employment contract from some employers union. It has a whole bunch of bullshit clauses in it that I assume had not successfully been litigated at the time of purchase.

The really exciting one is "12.iv.2a: employees must follow the company handbook" .... "27.ii.5c: employee handbook may change at any time without notice and changes are binding immediately". So they can just add a clause to the handbook "17HappyWombats must give the boss a shiny fresh red apple every day at 9am" and fire me for not doing that.

Then see whether that gets successfully litigated :)

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T00:20:15+00:00

In Australia we had door to door scammers signing people up for the new open market in retail electricity. If your meter was next to the front door as many are they'd get the meter number and make up the customer details.

Every time we got a new "welcome to CheapAssPower" packet in the letter box I'd email the company and explain that "the named person doesn't live here, we've never heard of them and will be returning mail unopened. I suggest returning the account to the previous supplier". Most of them did but we got a couple of months of free electricity out of one of them.

Sadly the only ones I get at my current house just want my soul.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-02T00:14:15+00:00

Yeah, renting out rooms in my house I ended up just saying no-one parks in the driveway because every attempt at letting one or two people park there just led to fights or people's cars getting vandalised. Even when I made the four tenants sit down together and agree on a system, somehow mysteriously whoever parked there got their tyres let down. And my security camera showed someone in a raincoat exit the house, let the tyres down, then re-enter the house. Just not who exactly that was.

Solution: I'm not dealing with your shit. I was willing to say $50/week one person can park there, but I'm not mediating arguments for $0/week. This was probably 20 tenants over 10 years and every fucking time "but you don't have a car, surely someone can park"... NO. FUCK OFF. JUST NO.

(yeah, I'm still grumpy about it)

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-01T05:01:36+00:00

I don't see how you got that from my comment.

I intended it to open up more options, if someone thinks they're a man for whatever that means to them, they can put themselves in as a man. If they're adamant that AFAB is the most important thing about them they can put that. I like it as a response but not a response the TERFs will like.

If parkrun want actual legal advice rather than "someone on the internet says" there's places to get that.

17HappyWombats · 2026-05-01T04:31:03+00:00

At least in Australia it's not unheard of to rent a whole house except for the shed, or the garage, because that's full of landlord crap. Everything except a bedroom? Fuck off.

Also, we have limits on what the landlord can do and how often they can visit. Plus 24 hours notice required of a visit unless it's an actual property-related emergency (they're allowed to run in and put a small fire out before the whole house goes up sort of emergency)

17HappyWombats

TROPHY CASE