Isn’t that magnificent? I wish I could claim credit but I don’t know who the photographer was. I’ve done a reverse image search in Google and nothing comes up.

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The news has just broken a couple of hours ago – the Treasury has said, Oops, we made a miscalculation – the total cost of the Jobkeeper and Jobseeker allowances that the government has been promoting is not $130bn, as we’ve been told for the past two months, it’s only $70bn!

Now, the government have been telling us steadily that they can’t extend these allowances to migrant workers here on work visas, and they won’t allow tertiary education staff to claim them either, although they won’t say why. And the arts. Actors, dancers, anyone on short contracts doesn’t qualify presumably due to cost.

So now there’s no excuse. The government must extend these allowances to the backpackers, migrant workers, arts people and tertiary education staff. After all, if they could spend $130bn, they have $60bn extra they didn’t know about to do it now.

I love Anthony Albanese’s comment today, that the error in the government’s figures about the amount being spent on Jobkeeper/Jobseeker is so big it can be seen from space! Good one.

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My Bali-expat friend sent me this today. It’s a recent shot – either today or yesterday:

Credit: Rio Helmi

It’s Gunung Agung, the volcano in Bali. Ain’t that beautiful? Great shot.

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I reckon this is beautiful too:

What an elegant drawing. I admire it and the draftsman who did it.

It’s the circuit diagram of a Sony portable radio/CD player I used to own. I’d forgotten I had it. I remember I bought it in Singapore in the first few years of the 2000s and it was a beautifully elegant design (I thought). But within a couple of years it developed a fault and after attempting a repair, I realised it used such specialised components that I couldn’t do it. I just had to dump it. That’s the trouble with modern (post 2000) electronics – it’s full of special integrated circuits that you can’t buy except from the maker, and they generally won’t supply.

This is the issue called Right to Repair. It’s been driven by farmers who spend $1m or so on huge harvesters, usually made in USA, then when the software/computer control goes wrong, the country service guys find they can’t get information or replacement software from the manufacturers. Likewise these big LCD and OLED TVs – they’re pretty reliable but they do go wrong and you won’t find any suburban servicemen any more, it has to go back to Sydney or Timbuctoo at your expense. Even if a serviceman tried to offer service for them, they would find they would not be able to get service information or parts from the big makers.

Their reasoning is that a small time service operation would probably bugger things up and that would reflect back on the maker.

But the European Union has said “Not so fast. We’re not going to allow this, it’s restraint of trade” so they’ve brought in legislation (in Europe) called Right to Repair. They mandate that manufacturers will have to keep spares and give out service information, just as car manufacturers do. I don’t know whether this will extend to Australia.

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I’ve had the battery charger connected to the Honda battery for nearly five days now and it still ain’t working. I think I’m out of luck there. I’ll have to spend the money for a new battery.

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I’ve just found out – the new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator is due for release on 28 May, only a week away. It’s supposed to be really something, worth buying just for the pleasure of taking simulated flights all over the world, without needing to do any piloting. All the scenery is from real aerial photos, just like Google Earth. I’ll be buying it.

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Likewise, I’m a user of Trainz Railroad Simulator. It, too, is based on real scenery from rail tracks all over the world. I haven’t used it recently but I intend to.