This Aeroflot DC-3 popped up on the Google LIFE photo archive a few years ago….can’t find the url now but saved the pic….taken by Mark Kauffman in Finland ca. 1948 (I think)….it’s either a pre-war civilian DC-3, RH door, Twin Wasp engines and presumably supplied through the Fokker sales agency or a Lend-Lease C-47 with a RH passenger door added?

Given the A-20s size, I’d guess it was some sort of VIP aircraft…(they did have VIPS in the “classless” state, didn’t they? 🙂 🙂 )

The entire post-war Soviet of U.S.- UK lend lease types is an interesting one.

I’ve recently read in a French book where US-built C-47s were preferred over the locally made units and were in service with the military until the 60s, and a recent article in The Aeroplane said some B-25s were used well into the 50s.

I’d hope that with the change in regimes (if not attitude) that more details of western types would be forthcoming.

Stealth technology?:)

A question….Assuming the sub-prime mortgage collapse had happened when Mrs Thatcher was in power how would she have dealt with the collapse of Northern Rock and the others in the UK….would they have been bailed out or left to collapse and what would have been the consequences?

Actually since the deregulation of the financial sector and the growth of independent financial advisers things did change radically in the mortgage application arena with mortgage brokers filling the forms out for potential buyers so saying ‘No one forces you to borrow’ is naive….do you suggest that young married couples apply to their local authority for a council flat/ 🙂

Re 453 & 454

No one forces you to borrow. You have to ask for it. You have to go into a bank or some lending facility, sit down, fill out some forms, tell a few ahem, ‘porkies’, and then they give you piles of cash. That is the way it used to be done. No one twisted your arm. You weren’t blackmailed or ‘bulldozed’. You did it willingly. Of your own free will. No coercion. Do you get the picture?

It is then entirely your responsibility. Like a visit to Tesco for a loaf of bread. Your choice. No one pressures you. You choose the make and type. YOUR BLEEDIN’ RESPONSIBILITY ! Not the bankers. They’ve made a facility available to you in the pious hope – or not, that you will use said facility in a responsible and grown up fashion. After all, you’re now adult and making your own decisions – aren’t you?

So, when it all goes ‘#its’ up, whom do we blame? Eh! Let’s see now……..

Re 454

My cat has a much better grasp of economics than me. It’s just yours that he can’t understand.

I meant in your head without using pencil and paper as an aid…. it was based on there being 960 farthings in £1….you broke your £sd price into 2-shilling chunks (each £ 0.1) then sixpenny chunks (each £0.025) then the residual pence (d) were counted as 1d=£0.004 , 2d=£0.008, 3d=£0.012, 4d=£0.017 5d=£0.021.
You’re right there weren’t desktop electronic calculators till about 1968? but there were weird hand cranked or electromechanical adding machines before that (not sure what their limits were)

:confused:

What other way was there?

Calculators were still a good few years off, and abacus had sort of fallen out of use.

I can still do it automatically. 4/10d for a gallon of petrol would be easy to convert if we hadn’t gone and brought in litres to disguise the steepness of the price rises (24p give or take)

Moggy

Of course we used to do weird base 12 and 20 arithmetic with the old pound shillings and pence currency and not bat an eyelid :)…there was even a way of converting £sd into decimal pounds by mental arithmetic

Yep … I found that somewhere late last night … Google was my friend. Sort of.

That said, I don’t “get” it, proper like, just yet. There may be a delay before it sinks in. Or I may just get on with my life.

I’m old enough to have missed the introduction of bases in School Maths and (I think) its contemporary the Initial Teaching Alphabet , introduced in the Seventies? I met a young school teacher in the 1990s who’d come through both (and survived:))
. I didn;t realise ‘bases’ had survived in Maths but I suspect the ITA was deeply harmful.

Smithy,

Thanks very much for that. I think I’m a bit wiser! Two more questions: What age range is this method aimed at? Does its use have a special application not available to ‘standard’ methods of computation ?

I’m looking at “Mathematics, The Basic Skills” Fourth edition, Llewellyn & Greer, and cannot find any reference.