January 2018

The scary thing is, many boys would probably keep using the toothbrush.

How to be stress-free and anxiety-free in 2018. Something I’ve researched for many years, so in case it’s of any use. (There are other dimensions to it as well.) Nearly all the approaches that work with stress and anxiety use the same insight. The secret that can make you completely immune to both stress and anxiety is knowing that there are TWO feelings of stress, and TWO feelings of anxiety. People mix them up, and it’s then they feel stress, and anxiety. The first feeling is the most well known. Your body generates adrenalin mostly, to help you cope with challenging situations. That’s a perfectly healthy process, you get the same rush when you go on a rollercoaster or if you have to run for the bus, or if you have a challenging situation at work. The second feeling is much less recognised, and is the one that is responsible for us ‘feeling stressed/anxious’. This is the feelings you have ABOUT the first feelings. When you start to worry about the first feeling, about that adrenalin rush and the feelings it creates in your body. It’s that worrying that creates stress, and anxiety. The simple (but you may need practice) way out of all stress and anxiety is to work on the SECOND feelings, not the first. The first are healthy and normal. Enjoy that extra energy, use it, always remember it’s like you’re on a rollercoaster, your body is giving you more energy to help you through a situation. That can help you head-off the second feelings, of worry about the first feelings. Or to put it another way, anxiety and stress are the fear of fear. The fear (2nd feeling) of the feelings of fear (1st feeling). Lose the 2nd fear, and everything looks after itself.

I remember and miss the days when the checkout had somebody to tally up the price, and then a separate person to pack your shopping for you into those nice big brown paper bags. That was service. Used to love the sound of the old mechanical tills as well. (Thanks to Bathurst Memories for the pic.)

There’s a familiar face Nige.

Kelso High School was a unique school. The buildings were beautiful, light everywhere, central courtyards with gardens, everything carpeted, long ramps everywhere as well as stairs, it had its own cinema and photographic studio, subject areas were broken into distinct ‘units’ in the building that each looked out onto the courtyards and outside, with funky signage on the walls, lots of colour. Etc. Then it burned to the ground, a real tragedy. And it was replaced with something much cheaper. And the even greater tragedy was that schools in Australia in the past 20 years have been gutted, KHS became one of the ‘publics’ that took all of the rest, the kids whose parents couldn’t afford private. When I studied there it didn’t matter what school you went to, all of them were considered valid and excellent. Then a few decades of outright attack on public schools, and a massive shift in funding to privates, has given us a two-tiered education system, and the results show it, we’re racing to the bottom of the international league tables. Schooling became a social status thing, rather than an education thing. We all lost.

Happy Birthday :)

There's a popular view that people get paid what they're worth. So doctors, teachers, nurses, bankers etc. are all apparently paid according to how much each of them is worth, to society. Thank you Real Housewives for disproving this idea, once and for all.

First crocs are back in, now this. I'm at the cutting edge of fashion.

What does this meter read, in kWh? Winners will be offered jobs as meter readers, to replace the innumerates currently employed.

I thought this was going to be an article about teenagers.

It's not just schools that need to stop fundraising. This lady gets it, fundraising is an epidemic, often being used to fill gaps in services caused by government cuts. My parents always said it wasn't the parents who worked hardest for schools (or their kids) who got any recognition anyway. It was teacher's kids, and kids of pushy parents. I looked at the website of my old school yesterday and even the awards that are given to ex-graduates are dominated by ex-teachers' children, and the now grown up children of the same pushy parents.

Bradman used to say that professionalising cricket would destroy it. Money corrupts. Huge truckloads of money corrupt absolutely. It's hard to find a sport now that isn't run by bookies and cheats. Every night I watch the BBL, and it's a bit of fun, but at the same time it's the prostitution of a game.

Happy birthday Ang!

Billy Joel wrote ‘The Stranger’ after a painful breakup. He realised the person he thought was closest to him in the world was actually a stranger to him. (Pure Proust.) You can never really know a person. And they can never really know you. Not because people lie but because to *really* know somebody, you would have to be them. Social media seems like a movement in the other direction, towards more ‘sharing’ of who we are, but I think it’s actually a shift in the other direction. We curate our online selves, social media is a fantastic accelerant for the masks we show others. Which is why many never feel lonelier and sadder than when they’re online. Not a reason to get rid of online or social media either. Some of the greatest inventions ever. We just have to understand what we’re doing.

Let's replace one celebrity president with another one. I think who sits in the top chair is not the problem, nor the answer.

If you never saw The Moodys (or the earlier "A Moody Christmas" - best to start with that one so you get the back story), you have to check it out. One of the most brilliant pieces of TV ever made in Australia, or anywhere. Hilarious. @[100005310498024:2048:Jordan Sharp]. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/moodys/

The idea of ‘the big picture’ is a fallacy. Why do we think that the real meaning of something isn’t in the details? And why are those details ‘small’?

They could re-make Friends for the 21st Century, I'm sure it would do as well again. It's probably not a coincidence that at about the time Friends was originally popular, young people started to move away from more serious, 'settled-down' types of relationships, in work and life, and moved towards friendship as a model. (In work, it was a shift away from the idea of a vocation, towards a constant surfing between jobs as the whim takes you.) Not because the TV show caused this - it more reflected a real shift underway. There are many people who went on gap years after high school at around that time, and are still on them. In the show the Friends end up moving on, to those more settled lives, mostly. But that's not what everybody does now, there are plenty who use friendship as a model for all of life. I don't think that's healthy, it reflects a fear of commitment, to adult life and its problems. Friendship is a quite empty thing in many ways, it can't replace more settled and serious relationships. You don't learn all life needs to teach you if you stop at the friendship stage.

Lots to agree with in the letter, and also in the criticism of it. I’m never comfortable with public lynching as a substitute for due process. I know the same sort of nuts who use free speech to support hate speech are also rallying around due process, on this topic. But the presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial - you don’t mess with those principles. That aspect of #metoo has bothered me. I also worry we’re lumping all sorts of quite different behaviours under the one banner here, as the letter says.

The Big and the Small, Part 2. A crowd, a public, flocks of birds, staff in an organisation. Large groups. A common way to explain these groups or crowds is that the individuals in the crowd each do their bit, and then you add up all these individual bits and what you end up with is a group, acting in some way. The individuals are the small bits, and the crowd is the big outcome - the people or animals are like LEGO blocks, added together to give you a whole. The ‘big picture’ is only at the crowd level. But in reality this isn’t how groups or crowds work. Every single one of the individuals involved has a ‘whole’ view of the entire situation. They all have their own big picture, and use it to guide their actions. When they come together as a group, what happens is that they each decide, using their own big picture, how to act, and what compromises to make with others. The group you end up with is that constant process of negotiation and compromise between all the big pictures. The people or animals are not ‘bits’ that add up, it’s the wrong metaphor. The big picture is everywhere, at every point or level. (I don’t need a link to Python’s “yes, we are all individuals”, they misunderstood crowds too, seeing them as made up of dumb separate bits.)

If you're one of the Greer-haters, it's worth actually hearing her speak, particularly in a context like this where it's just a one-on-one exchange. One of our finest minds, so refreshing to hear thought rather than just outrage.

Brand new bus. Packed full of all of my friends.

The Big and the Small Part 3. (Look away now Nell, save your sanity.) Rank these in order of size. A shoe. The Coca Cola Company. Mozart’s 5th symphony. Home and Away. A piece of string.

Australia spent $30 billion on credit cards in December. That's about $1250 for every man, woman and child. Ouch. Here's Australia's credit card debt clock, showing how much is owed in total, and how much per card holder, on average (over $4000 per card, more ouch.) https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/borrowing-and-credit/credit-cards/credit-card-debt-clock

I'm going to need to consult with my medical friends. @[1240225973:2048:Nell]? http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women-childbirth-do-wrong-midwife-push-slow-alternative-positions-medway-foundation-trust-kent-a7698801.html

Bullies are pathetic losers.

One of your holiday places I think @[783412914:2048:Kyle]? Its become a bit of a must-go place. “During the Christmas holidays the quiet village - about 180km south of Sydney - transforms into one giant car park.” No doubt the ‘experience’ tourists will ferret out another quiet hamlet now, to spread the virus further.

Good on young people, they don’t always get good press. (One possible explanation for why they’re drinking less and having less sex is that they’re too busy staring at their phones, but whatever works 😉 ) Interesting that they note the decline in ‘dating’ as well, they don’t see it as a positive behaviour. I never dated at school, was too shy, but it also seemed a bit of a waste of time too. Anybody else have thoughts on dating?

The #metoo movement is starting to focus attention not just on assault and abuse, but also on the ways men and women understand desire and seduction. A really complicated area. The ‘bad boy’ phenomenon. Obviously many men over-sexualise their understanding of women, but on the flip side, why do some women like that bad boy? And not just bad, but the man who will ‘look after’ or even control them? The Heathcliff, the ‘strong man’, the guy who gets more desirable the more he treats you badly? And how often are guys like this rewarded by ‘getting the girl’, the same guys who are much more likely to commit the sorts of harassment and assault that’s the target of the #metoo movement?

I have the pattern to make this little dragon, somewhere, if anybody is looking for a school holiday activity ;)

One of the things that isn’t widely known about China is how innovative it is with governance. The outside world thinks of China as a big communist totalitarian State, but within China there’s more experimentation with governance than probably anywhere else in the world. Air pollution is one example. Air quality in China was appalling, and still isn’t great, but they’ve made big progress on it in the last 1-2 years. And also they’re making huge progress towards addressing their carbon emissions. Contrast that with India (picture), where air quality is often super toxic, and no progress is made beyond a bit of annual social media outrage. Compare it with the West too, where how we’re governed is obviously in a bit of crisis.

Peoples’ desires are always much more complex than the ideas and rules we try to invent to contain them. It doesn’t make every desire good, but at the same time we tend to be puritanical with rules, as if desires were very easily understood. “I find a strong, loving male figure controlling me a huge turn on,” she says. “When I’m with my Daddy (partner), I’m submissive, but there is safety in that. He can punish me, but I know it’s for my own good. When I watch daddy porn I’m turned on by the control.”

Margaret Atwood, I think making the important point that many social movements like #metoo end up as squabbles between people within the movement, and the real issue gets lost. (I don’t agree with her that moderates are in the middle. There is no middle between extremes.) “In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.”

We would look at this pic and see that the most complex and evolved life is living in the village, in the valley. Michel Serres reverses that entirely. “Animals, trees and stones...Reckon now the progressive ages of the inhabitants and components of the Earth. When awareness vanishes in the hearts of animals, and movement stops, time retraces its steps from fauna to flora, from animals to plants, and from plants to cold rocks. As people get older, some acquire no more than the memory of their old age, spanning back no more than a century; others add the memory of their readings, which may take them back some thousands of years; but those who know how to be quiet, and who are able to stop and watch and study animals, trees and stones, go back billions of years, to acquire the ultimate truth, the truth which made animals lose their speech, plants their movement, and rocks their life activity. Thus, since the origins of time, cliffs, mountains and lakes have watched - unmoving, silent and inert - the portion of earth where they came to a stop; then trees stopped moving and took root there; and animals fell silent, lost in ecstasy. All old, like me, and struck motionless before the beauty of the world. Now, by dint of contemplation, silence and immobility, these inhabitants of the world are now what compose its beauty, the last truth. When my life finally comes to an end, when I finally lay aside my pen for all time, setting aside burning desire, and speech, and standing upright, and all sign of life, then and only then will I enter into the beauty of this world, to augment it."

$40,000 a mile! And imagine the glare. (Video is fun to watch though.) Plant trees, shade is a much better and cheaper idea. Will help clean the air too, and create more rain.

So...how long before we’re all saved from the ‘efficiency’ of the private sector? Nearly $7 billion dollars of your tax money every year goes to prop up this corrupt joke. And another premium hike for 2018. Got another $200 to spare, everybody?

Every year Australia Day is a bit of a puzzle for me. As a kid nobody in the community really spoke about Australia Day. It was a day off, that’s all, the people who tried to whip some patriotism into us were considered a bit like door-knockers; ignore them and they’d eventually go away. The latest survey in Australia suggests that actually not much as changed, except that those who do love a bit of flag waving are maybe more vocal now than they were then. For example: - only a third of Australians have a clue what the date of January 26 even means. Nearly half have no idea what the First Fleet even was - more than half of Australians don’t give a toss what date the national day is - nearly three-quarters of Australians have no idea that Australia Day hasn’t always been celebrated on January 26 anyway, that only started nationally in 1994 (probably why I don’t remember any fuss as a kid) So being Australian seems to mean not really giving a toss. And that’s our national character, and one to be genuinely proud of, most other countries fight over national identity. But modern Australia was just a dumping ground for the people England didn’t want. A detention camp, in paradise. Once the English semi-pissed off, we just got used to the paradise bit.

Peas in a pod.

More thoughts about Australia Day. Maybe it should be called ‘Coast Day’. We landed on the shores here, and never really left them. The overwhelming majority of Australians live on the coast, it’s almost like they can’t bear the thought of having anything much to do at all with the vast rest of the country. And the favourite past-time of these coastal dwelllers? Travel, ‘getting away’. Australia is barely inhabited. Physically and emotionally. I see patriotism for example as a desperate, emotional attempt to find meaning in a place we never really came to terms with.

Nobody knew thermocouples like Kenneth.

Annabel Crabb has the gift of explaining what stinks in an argument with only a few, witty words. On this topic, when you strip away the hypocrisy of the critics, what’s left in plain view is the clear dislike of women. “The weird thing about having a baby as a female elected representative is that it is — historically speaking — an offence only rivalled in seriousness by the offence of not having one.” “The only criticism that lingers is the one about how a mother's undivided attention is the most important thing for a child (an argument that is advanced near-uninterruptedly by certain authorities, and relieved only by periods of arguing — in instances of lesbian or single motherhood — that what the kid REALLY needs is a father).”

Call me old-fashioned (it’s about the only time me and fashion are in the same sentence), but tennis was better in the days before the first pump. It’s like watching robotic ball machines, far too much focus, not enough poise. Nobody looks like they’re having much fun.

Apple have been asked to look at ways to make their devices less addictive. But I think we’re looking at this backwards, it’s not the technology (technology isn’t a thing). Why are people so glued to screens? My guess is in the images below. These are the things that have been found to make people live longer. You’ll notice by far the most powerful thing is social connection, more than even stopping smoking. We’re intrinsically social beings, and our devices have made it easier to be 24/7 social. But there’s a paradox here too. People see screens as less connected than hanging out with friends and family, without screens, but in fact screen time is orders of magnitude more connected than ordinary face to face time. You’re connected in real time to potentially the entire globe. That’s what makes it so addictive to our (social) selves. The person staring at their phone while you’re hanging out with them isn’t being anti-social, they’re being hyper-social. They’re hanging out with hundreds of people at once. Loneliness is our greatest killer. Ditching the screens won’t fix that, because people are also using the screens to try to fix it. We need LESS social time, half the planet is sitting in our lounge rooms with us every day. And the essence of social life is comparison, which is another toxic driver of unhappiness. We need less loneliness, but screens are one of the only lifelines a lot of lonely people have. Before they had phones or iPads, they had TVs which ran all day and night, to feel connected. And just having more face to face time won’t fix things, as the other graphic shows, because there are lots of types of loneliness that have nothing to do with whether you’re in the same space or not, people can feel even more alone when socialising. ‘Integration’ and ‘close’ relationships is key, as you can see in the graphic, we need to understand those. But it isn’t screens taking that away, I suspect it’s much more the destruction of the old institutional frameworks of society, like the church and meaningful well-paid work, that is doing the damage.

Why isn’t Australia Day January 1? And why aren’t there two spinners in the Australian one-day team?

I heard a joke once that said a bogan is somebody whose life is defined by the use of petrol. I didn’t realise there are whole websites on the topic. (Some very funny stuff on this site, I hadn’t realised @[100001374621876:2048:Kato] and maybe even @[783412914:2048:Manning] are bogans, until now.) “While his father may have gotten his bogan on by leaving a beach strewn with empty tinnies and Winfield butts, and pissing in clear sight of nearby families, today’s bogan takes beach-based obnoxiousness to new levels with the introduction of the jet ski. Not only can today’s bogan show off his appalling trailer-reversing technique (extra bogan points if a petrol-powered device comes with its own trailer,) but upon firing it up, he can shower those nearby with oil-smeared water and black smoke, and crucially, emit a noise so obscenely loud it aurally bludgeons the entire coastline into a hasty retreat. Thus he achieves the holy trinity of bogan – air pollution, water pollution and sound pollution.”

This site is the funniest, smartest take on Straya, it’s like Barry Humphries and Edna upgraded for 2018. Perfect reading leading up to Straya Day. “...the slower mobile data speeds and smaller data caps of three years ago meant that the bogan was generally limited to merely posting a photo of itself planking on Facebook. But the arrival of 4G has allowed the bogan’s creativity to flourish. It’s not simply about consuming the beverage, the twenty seconds of footage is also a thrilling platform for a talent/stupidity contest. Can the bogan think of something fucking idiotic to do before/during/after having a drink? Yes it can.”

How long could you sit alone with yourself, in silence? To me this is a test of how well developed and mature a person is.

The train strike interests me, to see how people respond. The government in this case has been trying to create an impression in the public mind that recent chaos on the trains is due to lazy drivers calling in sick. As always in modern idiot management, when things go wrong, screw your staff first, ask questions second. When the facts show there was less sick leave than average. The real cause is likely the enormous change that was made to the timetables, which was always going to have teething problems. This is the only way working people ever get justice. To fight. We’ve lost the stomach for that fight and too easily fall on the side of ‘peace and harmony’, or at best empty protest. Unions or other types of organised working people really are the way back to peace and harmony in our societies. People voted for Trump and Brexit because nobody was looking out for them, in the way unions used to. It really is as simple as that. If you think the freedoms and good lives we have came from good will in the past, rather than from actual muscle and fight, that’s worse than delusional.

“By making accusation – long after the event – equal guilt, and making inevitable mistakes by doing so, a groundswell of belated anger such as the present one must inevitably produce a result opposite to the one intended. Instead of righting past wrongs, it inadvertently commits new injustices and creates new victims among the very people it seeks to bring to justice. Due process, in which the accused is given a chance to answer the accusers, may be slow and can make mistakes. For would-be revolutionaries, it is no doubt deeply unexciting. It does, however, work more often than not. Its justice lasts longer, and has a better record, than that of the lynch mob.”

They’re doing stunning graphics for stats these days, check this out. I was in a serious car accident about 15 years ago and don’t know how I survived, luck more than anything. You always assume these things happen to other people, until they happen to you. I think cars are one of the best and worst things humankind has ever invented. They give you amazing freedom of movement, but they destroy the places we live in with roads and noise and pollution, and turn our suburbs into disconnected ghettos. We wonder why people feel disconnected in their lives, but cars enable this - no need for real community infrastructure where you live if you can just drive somewhere else to get it. And once everybody gets one, you get gridlock and the freedom of movement goes. And they kill. Thousands of us. Not because we can’t drive but because if you put everybody out on a road at speed with an extremely powerful machine, the law of averages will mean thousands of those people will likely die. I’m a fan of ‘self-driving’ cars not so much because it will mean better cars, but because it will mean options to reduce our need for cars full stop.

Is it childish to say I told you so?

One of the great mysteries. Really fun video describing it. (I have an idea why we do this.)

The end of cricket, exhibit 379. Who knew Ricky Ponting is worth $65 million? Probably bonuses for losing us 3 Ashes series before ‘retiring’ to T20.

Gabriel Tarde, predicting social media a century ahead of time. And in the process completely redefining economics as the science of passion and desire. Economics is fascinating when you realize it’s really about how people feel and what they desire, and not about boring as batshit supply and demand curves. “Conversation is eminently interesting to the economist. There is no economic relationship between men that is not first accompanied by an exchange of words, whether verbal, written, printed, telegraphed, or telephoned. Even when a traveler exchangers products with islanders whose language he does not know, these swaps only take place through the means of signs and gestures which are a silent form of language. In addition, how do these needs for production and consumption – for sale and purchase – which have just been mutually satisfied by a trade concluded thanks to conversation arise? Most often, thanks again to conversations, which had spread the idea of a new product to buy or to produce from one interlocutor to another, and, along with this idea, had spread trust in the qualities of the product or in its forthcoming output, and, finally, the desire to consume it or to manufacture it. If the public never conversed, the spreading of merchandise would almost always be a waste of time, and the hundred thousand advertising trumpets would sound in vain. If, for just one week, conversation ceased in Paris, it would show very quickly through the singular decrease in the number of sales in stores. There is no manager more powerful than consumption, nor, as a result, any factor more powerful – albeit indirect – in production than the chatter of individuals in their idle hours.”

Duh. You don’t muscle up and fight, you get screwed. This is the reward workers get for being nice to their bosses and not striking. Nothing, the bosses pocketed every cent of that increased productivity. Now imagine what will happen to that $65 billion in insane business tax cuts Turnbull and Morrison are desperate to bludgeon through. If you think the workers will see a cent of them, I have real fairies for sale, only $50 each.

Happy Birthday :)

This is very true, in fact vegetarian diets kill even more living things than meat-eating diets. It’s just that they’re not the easily seen, cuddly big macrofauna which vegetarians often campaign for. Life and death are two sides of one coin. I think some vegetarians at root actually fear death, they see death as opposed to life. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97836&page=1&cid=share_facebook_widget

Thoughts?

I don't think there's any need for a kid to have a phone during class time, or even between classes. if they need to contact home they can always go and ask to use the phone for that, in a break. But I also think we're too quick to moralise about screens. Imagine if instead the kids were all reading unrelated books all the time, in class, between classes etc. Would this be a bad thing? Why not?

Before the Lance Armstrong situation blew up, I couldn't watch professional cycling because it looked rotten to the core. It still does. Cricket maybe even more so. T20 is a creation of bookmakers. Players now rich beyond imagination. All the danger signs are there.

Are groups of people dumber than individuals? Actually, they’re smarter, which goes against what most of us would think. (This is very cool, and some people refuse to believe it.)