September 2022

This is the KIA EV6. Mid-sized family electric car. Drive one of these next to a Porsche or Ferrari at the traffic lights, or any muscle car, and it’ll smoke them, you can watch them in the rear-view mirror as you drive away. Good luck buying one, like all electrics and hybrids right now, huge waiting lists. Remember the previous government said Australians didn’t want electric cars? That was them speaking out of their fossil fuel industry sponsored arses, as they did for most things. What KIA has done in the past decade should be a lesson for us. Superb engineering and design, they went from being a new Korean car maker with a cheap vibe, to making some of the best cars in the world. With unlimited kilometre warranties. On a family budget.

Happy Birthday :) 21!

Thanks to @[1112555254:2048:Dan] for this one. You have to watch if you want a real-world demonstration of everything I've been saying about electric cars. 'Smoked'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eGhjhx8O9M

I'm a bit amazed by the hostility to renewables in Lithgow. It's going to need every tiny bit of help it can get, when Piper and the coal mines close.

John Birmingham, Australian novelist, at his brilliant, witty best. About the Stage 3 tax cuts.

I love as the season shifts, and the mornings become lighter, and you wake and get up with the sun again. One of the main reasons I hate daylight saving, my body is shifting into Spring mode, loving that feeling of thawing from the winter. A month from today working people and kids will be forced to get up in the dark again. All that gentle thawing transition to more light and more warmth as you wake up, rewound to winter, overnight. The body is in total confusion. The focus is always on that extra hour at the end of the day, and never on how it fucks up the morning, and your body with it.

Radio interview with a medical researcher confirmed again for me the genius of my friend David Gorman. The topic was back pain, the famous ‘bad back’. And how every method and technique that’s been tried to treat back pain has been a failure, in terms of long-term cures. Core strength, bed rest, getting your back ‘cracked’ by a chiro, spinal fusions etc. - all don’t work, and in fact make the problem worse over time. What works? Asking the person to just go about their normal activity again, gently, until the back rights itself. Because your back, as David would say, isn’t a thing. It’s part of an entire integrated organism.

Yes.

Australian taxpayers gave Qantas over $2.5 billion during Covid lockdowns. Qantas used the money to sack thousands of staff. Meantime the CEO bought an enormous mansion on Sydney Harbour, and still pockets annual remuneration of over $20 million, while the airline lies in ruins. The two fellas on the left represent the politics that allows this. The country was ransacked for the past 30 years.

Robert Coombes! I should have put something on.

She, and all other tennis players, are not within light years of Margaret Court’s record. Margaret Court is the GOAT, by a country mile.

Another genius bit of engineering, powerline adapters. Some people will have seen these, they allow you to use the wiring in your house to also transmit broadband to any room that has a powerpoint. You just plug it in, and it does the rest.

Happy birthday :)

Happy birthday :)

I remember being in awe of the Saturn V rocket as a kid. The rocket that took humans to the moon (I never found out why they called a moon rocket a Saturn rocket). Here’s a bit of trivia. It generated the same amount of power as 85 Hoover Dams. It takes a lot of power to get free of the planet and make it to the moon.

Yes, everybody is tired of Covid. They’ve ‘moved on’ (i.e. got bored and ignored it). Think of it this way. When was the last time we, as a society, chose to deliberately INCREASE the amount of death in the community? I don’t think it’s ever been done before. And yet it’s being done under the false equivalence that ‘people die all the time’. Of course they do, but we’re deliberately INCREASING deaths. Not just accepting death as natural.

I do a long commute, about 120km round trip per day. So I tried an experiment. One week I did the whole week in manual control of the car. The next I used cruise control for most of the driving. The result? I used 20% less fuel when using cruise control. If I had adaptive cruise control in my car, the saving would have been even greater. Machines drive and fly much better than humans, in most situations. It’s why when you fly somewhere, 98% of the time you’re in the air, a computer is flying the plane.

Seems a pretty innocent thing? The Future Leaders Program was pitched to the previous PM by the Governor General. The same Governor General who signed off in secret on that same PM taking on multiple ministries for himself.

The health advice that was ignored in the dropping of 7-day isolation to 5. In this case for Victoria, but most State CHOs would have advised the same. There’s also a critical thing here that is never discussed, the waning of immunity. The already terrible infection and death numbers we have are entirely reliant upon a current level of immunity. That wanes quickly, and we have no backup, as Brett Sutton points out.

They even oriented the roof northwards. Planned, years ago, when they built.

Somebody at work asked me the other day why I still wear a mask. It’s a tiring conversation now. But this is just one reason why, below.

Thanks, Alex.

Hey @[621123725:2048:Adam], LNP were blocking it then, and they're still blocking it now. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/just-not-good-policy-senate-stand-off-looms-over-electric-vehicle-tax-cut-20220906-p5bftj.html

Last night Insight discussed people who have been married multiple times, and asked people what they'd learned from their mistakes. What struck me is that every person in that room believed marriage and relationships are about taking person A and person B, and creating a person C, their marriage/relationship, that is some amalgam of A and B. I think relationships would be better and last a lot longer if we just let person A and person B, stay as person A and person B. That's what attracted them to each other. It's C that becomes a horrible state of co-dependency. Your spouse should be mysterious to you every day of your life, it's what attracted you to them in the first place.

When governments genuinely want individuals to manage things, like their choice of bank or energy retailer, they give them online tools with lots of information to help them compare the best deals. With Covid they gradually strip away all information away. They don't want Covid managed. They want it forgotten. The last vaccines we have will lose efficacy well before Christmas. There's nothing in reserve.

There’s a border collie over the back fence who will chase drops of water sprayed into the air with a hose. Not a breed if you want a quiet life, limitless enthusiasm :)

In the pandemic Australia has sacked over 40,000 of the smart people who do this sort of work. Meantime TAFE will again be free, to fund the desperate shortage of tradies, a shortage that’s mostly an already bloated housing sector churning out homes nobody can afford to live in. Taxpayers as always funding a parasitic lobby group, that won’t even pay for its own training. We’re an old society that is miles away from even replacing itself with new babies. If we don’t get smart, fast, it’s over for us.

Reading about how the Colorado river system is on the brink of collapse in the US, with 70% of its water usage being agricultural irrigation, made me think of how precision fermentation and other new food creation technologies may be all that saves us. You can see it entering the mainstream in various places, in fast food chains for example. This is manufactured meat, often using animal cells as a starter. People still have very old-fashioned ideas about what that means, as if that means it's unhealthy or 'processed'. In fact with the new technologies you'll get the same or better flavour, and it'll be much better for you too. And potentially we'll be able to retire huge amounts of our farmland.

Happy Birthday Rach!

Like I say, a wonder of engineering. We’ve got used to them in Australia as air conditioners, but they’re even more important as heaters. Nothing else reaches even 100% efficiency, these can get up to 1000% efficient.

I’ve never been comfortable with children driving cars, children having children, or children drinking alcohol. Makes me sound old-fashioned, but actually it’s just that I was a teacher too, and saw firsthand how society no longer prioritises children, in anything. It’s just spent 2 years deliberately infecting them with a lethal virus. It disgusts me.

I’m a fan of the monarchy. What I think is so important about it is two things mostly, one being that it’s a form of government that puts custom and tradition at the heart of what we do. Institutions. The second being that I think we need spectacle and regal splendour in our lives, of some form. (People know I’m a Freddie Mercury fan, that was his actual project, to offer people that.) Magnificence. We can pretend those things aren’t important, but then people will reinvent them with pop stars and social media influencers and their bling lifestyles instead. We don’t want societies run by those people. Look at the alternative to monarchy we have now in politics. Populism. It’s society as a high school, where only what’s popular gets done. The whole world gets reinvented with every 24-hour media cycle, public policy gets replaced with what’s ‘trending’. Monarchy to me is one of those things you can reject in your youth, and then come back to with a bit more life experience of age, as you look at the alternatives.

I've seen more than one doctor suggest Covid may have brought her life to a faster end. Her health has been in rapid decline since she had Covid.

On the after-effects of Covid, as the article says, the deaths months after infection aren't being counted as caused by Covid. The staggering stat for me is that death rates for those of working age, 18-64, are up 40% in the US. It's hard to find anybody who even cares. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/07/true-number-covid-deaths-us-likely-undercounted-experts

75 years ago this week, unions invented the weekend. Before that time people worked 6-day weeks, often 10 hours per day, with only the Sabbath free. One employer group at the time described the weekend as an ‘unnecessary and dangerous experiment’.

“For now, though, even vaccinated, boosted, and previously infected people aren’t immune to Long COVID. Any infection could lead to lingering complications, which underscores the importance of limiting exposure to the virus as much as possible.”

Covid is a disaster. But it’s only the support act. Terrible, terrible things, that we’re ignoring. Ignoring them won’t make them go away.

Happy birthday :)

Multiply these percentages by the fact we’re infecting every child, deliberately, and you get a sense of the crime we’re all turning a blind eye to.

Australian data. That’s thousands and thousands of lost years of life. Across a wide range of ages.

The energy needed to boil a litre of water would also lift a 50kg person 683 metres in the air.

Here's a way to think about Queens and Kings, in the time of Covid and climate change. The Queen reigned for 70 years, and we know almost nothing about her, as a person. Nothing about her personal opinions or beliefs. She performed an institutional role, defined collectively. Now imagine if our political leaders today did the same. Performed the role required of them for example by our public health acts, for Covid. Or performed the roles required of them by our environmental legislation, for climate change. Performed their institutional roles, like the Queen. We'd have no climate change emergency, and no Covid emergency. Instead though we get public policy driven entirely by their own, individual political beliefs and opinions. That's not progress, sorry.

Happy birthday! Beautiful day for it.

Happy birthday sir :)

While I'm talking about energy...

This astronaut is ‘floating in space’. (Actually they’re falling at high speed, but the experience is the same as floating.) Where we get terribly mixed up is assuming ‘space’ starts outside the atmosphere. But you’re in space right now, reading this. You have air around you, but the gravity on you is almost exactly the same as on this astronaut. You too are floating. (Not flying, which people often mix up with floating.) That pressure you feel under your feet or bum is not your weight. You can’t feel your own weight, it’s physically impossible. It’s you, floating human, having the Earth constantly pushing UP underneath you. The ‘ground reaction force’ in physics terms. Your weight presses on the ground, and the ground responds by pressing right back up into you, with an equal but opposite force. Try it. Stop going around all day assuming you have to hold yourself up against some force called gravity. It’s an illusion. Feel yourself like this astronaut, floating in space but having that ground constantly pushing up underneath you. It will change your life.

Those who say coal and oil are cheaper energy always leave out the part about the Australian taxpayer subsidising those industries to the tune of over $11 billion per year. Even with those subsidies they're still way more expensive than renewables are now. I live in a coal mining town. It really needs to be looked after in the transition, which will be brutal, and much faster than it expects. All driven by economics, not Greenies. Fossil fuel assets are stranded assets. Just as you shouldn't buy a new petrol or diesel car now if you expect a decent trade-in for it in a few years' time.

The deadliest month of the pandemic to date in Australia was the one just past, August. About 2000 people died, 500 per week. You wouldn't know it. And that's the plan. During this same month National Cabinet voted to remove daily Covid reporting.

More than a third of working age people in the UK now have long-term illness due to Covid. I sit here every day speechless that people watch their own societies crumble and burn around them, and say nothing. But in fairness, they're not told. It's the world's greatest ever propaganda operation. 17 million people in Europe alone are suffering from Long Covid. It will destroy what's left of our health systems, just for starters.

Covid sickness in workplaces is costing Australia over $800 million per day.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1569303059544608770

Pretending Covid is over may dramatically shorten your lifespan. Vaccinated or not.

If you lower the speed limit on busy roads, traffic as a whole flows much faster. Going slower actually makes you go faster. Speed limits are mostly designed to smooth the flow of traffic. My experience on the road suggests almost nobody understands this, I think they're the most ignored rules we have. People either too fast or too slow, and all they're achieving is creating traffic jams. Again why I think the car is an absolutely useless type of mass transport. No other mass transport method allows so much individual discretion. It can't work, ever. https://www.sydney.edu.au/business/news-and-events/news/2018/12/21/does-slower-driving-make-us-go-faster-.html

Watching the Souths vs Roosters game last week, it made me think that the ridiculous number of high tackles and deliberate head shots should be a WHS issue. NRL players are employees, and individually sin-binning people who take cheap head shots isn't going to fix anything. Their employers have WHS responsibility to stop this happening. If they don't think so, I'm sure lawyers are going to feast on them in years to come.

Think it’s the medals weighing down that left hand side.

A friend (not pictured) had shingles which infected her scalp and eye. I think it's worth remembering that the more accurate name for shingles should be 'living with chickenpox'. It's the result of chickenpox infection earlier in life, often deliberately done in the way people are deliberately infected with Covid now. It can take decades for the secondary disease to strike. Shingles can cause years of terrible pain, and also blindness. All infection is serious disease, and often not until years later. Even the flus we're so casual about are one of the most likely causes of heart disease. And I've posted before that only recently it's been discovered that multiple sclerosis is caused by glandular fever infection earlier in life.

Public schools often don't understand public messaging. Take Bathurst High, which proudly displays signs saying 'Safe, Respectful, Learners'. I'd bet most people when reading that will think 'hmm, they've had problems with safety, the kids are disrespectful, and nobody is learning anything'.

Because the NSW Government is more likely to open a casino than give you Covid information, here are the two key documents if you have Covid or somebody close to you does. Some of this information may save your life. If you test positive: https://www.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/noindex/2022-09/Factsheet_Testing_positive_to_COVID_19_9_Sept_2022.pdf If you're a close contact of somebody who tests positive: https://www.nsw.gov.au/covid-19/management/household-contacts

Mozart's sister's words. Aren't siblings grand.

“The glacier itself contains enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 60 centimetres. But it also acts as a buffer, holding back a large part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. If that is released, it will raise sea levels by several metres.” Staggering how much ice is there. And staggering how close to total catastrophe we are, and we’re so relaxed.

“Wisdom sits in places”. Western Apache saying.

Many parts of Lithgow are now eligible for a free upgrade to fibre all the way to your home (FTTP). You’ll need to sign up with a retailer to a high-speed plan to qualify, and keep that high-speed plan for at least 12 months.

Happy birthday :)

Happy birthday!

The same people who mock this sort of sacred ritual would replace it with having a few beers. I’ve been to weddings where people were on the beers even during the service. If you drop the prejudices though, everything about this, the rituals, the symbols, the colours, the glorious choral arrangement, the psalm, speaks of thousands of years of human lives, of suffering and the wisdom that came from it, compressed into a moment. Gives me goosebumps.

Happy birthday :)

The world is going to need lots and lots of electrical engineers and electricians. Great jobs to suggest to kids. Just gotta pay them properly, a problem across most of the workforce.

“…my eye fell on a news story about an unresolved murder; a torso of an African boy had been found in the Thames and, after several years of forensic research, they had been able to track down the region of Africa from which he had come. They had analysed the build-up of minerals in his bones, accumulated in minuscule quantities from the water he drank and the food he ate. It was powerful material evidence of how we are, literally, made by place. This sense of place is not just a product of imagination and memory, it is also physical; the elements of the land, its rocks, earth and water, are measured in our bones.” — The Plot: A Biography of My Father's English Acre by Madeleine Bunting

The real heroes of saving Earth from asteroid impact won’t be a bunch of Hollywood oil riggers led by Bruce Willis. It’ll be scientists and engineers. Superb, breathtaking work.

Food waste has always seemed a bit strange to me. We almost never throw any food away, it probably helps having hungry teenagers. But even if it was just the two of us, I can’t imagine buying too much food and then having to throw it away. Maybe this is a symptom of a lack of basic ‘home science’ skills, with the increasing outsourcing of food to restaurants, cafes and take-always?

A land tax of only 0.1% would wipe out the $500 billion debt we incurred fighting Covid. Who resists it? The people who own most land. Who owns most land? The wealthy. Who are the wealthy? Overwhelmingly the boomers (and yes this doesn’t mean all boomers are wealthy, but then if they don’t own lots of land they’re not impacted.) The big demographic shift is underway worldwide now. Millennials and Gen X now have the majority, and policies favouring older generations will likely now start to fall away, like massive tax concessions to those who own land, and resistance to electrification of the economy to beat climate change. It’s been a long time coming.

Happy birthday :)

The old ceremonies of mourning around the Royal death are like the Queen herself. Us in service to something older, bigger and more mysterious than our own beloved personalities. You don't have to be a monarchist to recognise it. Andrew Sullivan says it beautifully: "Every feeling we have is bound to be expressed. Self-revelation, transparency, authenticity — these are our values. The idea that we are firstly humans with duties to others that will require and demand the suppression of our own needs and feelings seems archaic. Elizabeth kept it alive simply by example. With her death, it’s hard not to fear that so much she exemplified — restraint, duty, grace, reticence, persistence — are disappearing from the world. As long as she was there, they were at the center of an idea of Britishness that helped define the culture at its best. Perhaps the most famous woman in the world, she remained a sphinx, hard to decipher, impossible to label. She was not particularly beautiful or dashing or inspiring. She said nothing surprising. She was simply the Queen. She showed up. She got on with it. She was there. She was always there."

This is the full piece by Andrew Sullivan, which I recommend to everybody. Irrelevant whether you're a monarchist or not, the themes here transcend how they're actually embodied in practice. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/an-icon-not-an-idol-71f

Huge news. This gas field is enormous, 10 years ago it was a licence to make billions. Now our 2nd biggest energy company is pulling out without even starting it. Just as other companies sold coal-powered power stations even under the previous government. They're using the money for renewables instead, because they're so much cheaper and faster to build and run. Fossil fuel business is terminal. I wouldn't even buy a petrol or diesel car now if I ever hoped to get a cent on a trade-in when it gets older. Nobody will want them, except a tiny handful of collectors. I think it will be that fast, only a handful of years. Demand for electric cars is enormous, they can't keep up the supply.

Peter is a climate scientist with NASA. That ‘too big to put into words’ should scare the absolute crap out of us. But it won’t, until it’s much too late, and we’re collectively incinerated and drowned. It’s probably already too late. No amount of ridiculous ‘positivity’ will fix it, reality doesn’t give a shit what mood we’re in. A sane positivity would be positive action to try to save what we can, which may not be much.

I’ve posted a lot about ongoing damage to the immune system from Covid infection, from reading the research papers and talking to the scientists doing that research. It’s now entering mainstream stories, like this one. Covid is nothing like a cold or the flu, it’s much more like HIV. It gets deep into the immune system and re-wires it. It should be avoided at all costs, catching it repeatedly doesn’t make you immune to it, it just gives it more chances to re-wire your immune system, and eventually kill you.

Happy birthday! Are you cheating and having more than one a year? Sure doesn't seem like a year!

Karen is an actuary, looking at Covid data from Singapore in this case. Like I post about, the 'acute' infection phase - when you 'have Covid' - is rarely what's dangerous. Just as when you're first infected with HIV, you may not even know, it's usually incredibly mild.

Australia’s oldest man, who exercised every day and lived without smoking, drinking or gambling, has died at the age of 110, after contracting Covid-19. I'm sure the government would either say he should have been locked up at home, safe, or that he'd had a good innings.

It'd be interesting to know what proportion of people exercising is them thinking it's their way to take and keep weight off, while not changing anything else in their thinking and lives. It never works, it can't work, but the exercise industry encourages the lie. Not one Joule of exercise is needed to stop people gaining weight.

These beauties have been electric almost from the start. Electric motor in each wheel. Massive torque, from 0 km/h. Remember that idiot PM we voted out saying electrics wouldn't tow your boat?

I’ve been quite surprised how many people I know trade in cryptocurrency. It’s a scam, get out now while you can, everything you’re told about it being a pathway to wealth is bullshit. The other fascinating thing about it is that it’s an *enormous* user (and waster) of energy. Bitcoin for example uses more energy than Argentina, a country of 45 million people.

This is probably the world’s best car, the Mercedes EQS. All electric, but what’s interesting about reviews for this car is industry journalists now saying they won’t qualify a car as ‘luxury’ unless it’s electric. The total silence, the staggering performance because of maximum torque from zero km/h, the absence of any gear changes to cause even a slight bump. Reviewers quite commonly say now, for electric cars at every part of the price spectrum, that they don’t want to return them when their review is done. I’ll stick with my prediction that in only a handful of years we’ll wonder why the hell we didn’t make this shift decades ago. Electric motors were around a century before petrol and diesel clunkers were even thought of. And who wants to pay over $100 a week for fuel when an electric will do the same miles for about $5, and will embarrass even a performance petrol or diesel in acceleration?

Cars fascinate me so much because in many ways they’re the centre of what we call our economy. And as this and so many other industry analyses say, you wouldn’t want to be spending much on a petrol or diesel car now, you will struggle to get any money back on it. Add fuel costs and the fact an electric car will easily do a million miles, and it’s game over.

Telephones seem a good example of just how fast change can happen. This was a telephone when I was growing up. Any non-local call was timed and cost a lot of money. The latest prediction I saw today says they won’t even exist (as landlines) within 15 years. And I can now call family on the other side of the world on a mobile, pretty much for free and untimed. And public phone boxes now give you free calls. Smart people did this. Geeks, nerds. Let them run the world.

This has been one of my pandemic projects, though it started well before the pandemic. Electrifying the household. It’s nearly 100% done. Solar panels will go up before Christmas. Ditched gas space heating over 5 years ago, which saved us a fortune in heating. Got rid of gas cooking (induction electric is so much better anyway). Moved to a hybrid car, and will replace the second car with full electric in the next few years as they become more available and prices come down. Notice the current projections, 3.8 million electric cars in Oz by 2030. I reckon it’ll be even faster. Cost of fuel will drive that as much as anything else.

We always follow the UK. They’ve announced the end of the pandemic about 7 times. Australia has just been saying the same. How many cycles of this bullshit are we up for?

If there is a meaning to life, it’s pretty simple I think. Raise the next generation. If you don’t have kids, do everything you can to help society raise them. No civilisation that makes raising the next generation a low priority ever survives. We infect the tiny number of kids we have with lethal viruses and say it’s good for them, and refuse to fund education, which we see as childcare so we can all work to pay off astronomical debts and go on annual OS trips. We make basics of life like housing unaffordable to them. Raising the next generation also completes your development as an adult, you learn as much if not more than the kids do, by doing it. It teaches you humility and service and duty, amongst so many other things that are now in critically short supply. We have nations of kiddults living an extended adolescence instead, always bored and looking for new stimulation and distraction.

Happy Birthday :)

Seems the President of the AMA at least has had enough. What would medical people know, pfft.

Mine diving in Germany. Lithgow has some flooded mines, might be a new tourist attraction.

Because we mistake weather for climate, every cooler shift like we’re experiencing now in the East can make us think global warming is overstated. But yesterday was actually the hottest ever recorded day in Australia, prior to the Spring equinox.

I'm sure the 'Snooze for 30 days button' is used a lot for my posts. But I have to say if you post photos of your current holiday, it's 30 days in my FB cooler, as Wilhelm Klink would say. If the point of your holiday was to be able to say to everybody else 'look at my amazing holiday', Photoshop is a much cheaper option for you.

There are ongoing trials in the UK and elsewhere on a 4-day working week, The Project had a story on it last night too. I think it's about bloody time, and this is also an important point about why it's giving workers back only part of the time they've lost.

Australia's head of State should be...Australia. As it is for Aboriginal Australians. Not a person, the land itself. That's very difficult to do, because for us land is an inert thing, a 'resource'. But it's the cradle of all of our lives, and the only thing protecting us from the cold oblivion of space. https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/royals/waleed-aly-calls-for-indigenous-elder-to-replace-king-charles/news-story/01cff2b96037418bb01db1b0986c2c99

Saw this one being built on Grand Designs and it was a great example of why architecture never makes much headway with ordinary people. 2 years over schedule and $800,000 over budget, the owners ended up selling it (it seems because they went broke) about 6 months after they moved in. The owner was also the builder and they ran out of money 6 months into the build, thus the long delays to finish it. Neither builder or architect seemed to have a clue about how to meet a deadline or stay within a budget. And much as I enjoy the show, every disaster like this is described as a triumph. Fools and their money.

This is the Vogtle nuclear power station in Georgia, USA. The only nuclear power plant the US currently has under construction. For those drunk on the hopium of nuclear power slogans from politicians, here's fun facts about this only remaining nuke plant the US is bothering to build. It's years behind schedule. It's initial cost of $21 billion (yes, billion) has now blown out to over $42 billion. For ONE nuclear plant generating about as much power as Mt Piper near Lithgow, which cost $2 billion. And the fuel not only isn't free, it's hugely expensive. Then you have to dispose of the waste for thousands of years. The US already generates more power using renewables than it does with nuclear. The time of dumb is ending.

“The EV future will be revolutionary, and it's a revolution car people will want to be a part of.” This is World Car of the Year, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, full electric. While Tesla gets most of the EV attention, at the end of the day they’re American and American cars are generally rubbish. Teslas are a lot better than they used to be, but the big rival car makers know how to make much better cars, and the Ioniq 5 is a much better car. Nobody who reviews it wants to give it back.

Australian dams are overflowing, dams in the US are dry (as ours were only a handful of years ago, and will be again). The problem with dams I think is that they remove water from the landscape itself, and treat it like a tank of fuel in a car, to be released as we need it somewhere else, usually a long way away. Water becomes a resource, rather than an active part of the landscape. Alternating flood and drought (way too much and not enough water) is the result.

Crocodile Dundee is like the Frank Sinatra or Elvis of the Australian landscape. The whitefella substitute for the culture we didn’t understand and mostly destroyed. Elvis and Frank mined black music heavily, and became our way into it that felt less threatening. There’s a whole macho subculture of the Australian ’outback’ now, where taming it with 4WDs and pretending we’re getting ‘back to nature’ there tries to fill the void we’ve felt since we arrived on the continent, and realised we didn’t really know how it all worked. The outback is a whitefella myth. Aboriginal Australians lived everywhere, including anywhere you are right now. It’s the bits of Australia most of us don’t live in, that we forced Aboriginal Australians to retreat to, that’s all. As the Aboriginal writer Alexis Wright puts it so well (and note the concept of ‘home’, which I post about a lot - we have no understanding of that concept now, we see it as an address, where we launch our travels from in search of what we can’t find at home any more): “For Aboriginal people, the term outback is an alien concept that implies that someone is a long way from home, and home is somewhere else,” she writes. “We see our country as our home whether it is in the desert, the forest or by the sea. The whole continent is our homeland and the foundation of our wellbeing, and our belonging.”

Somebody defined the economy as ‘driving to a regional town to have coffee, to see if it’s different to the coffee at your local coffee shop’.

No amount of botox is gonna fix this one.

I described AFL to a Melbourne friend as ‘a bunch of Myer models scrambling around on the ground trying to pick up a ball.’ She asked if ‘Rugby League is that game where you throw the ball backwards to try to go forwards.’ Maybe a draw. Might look at bits of this today, I see the telecast has begun next to the big muddy river Melburnians think is some sort of Sydney Harbour.

Sydney was robbed, I counted a few thousand knock-ons from Geelong, and even more offsides. Actually I tried to watch it, but kicking seems about the only skill in the game. I watched Bargain Hunt instead.

Lithgow is being left high and dry by having political representation at all 3 - local, State and federal - levels by a party that denies this emergency is even happening. That party’s own core constituency, farmers, is screaming at them to do something. It’s falling on deaf ears, the party was bought by Gina Reinhart years ago and became a fossil fuel puppet. Some mines in Lithgow are already closed, and one of the power stations. When the rest go (and they will, much faster than we think, the foreign companies who own them will shed them as stranded assets), there’s not much to fall back on.

The moment a human leaves the ground it becomes obvious that the gravity we talk about when they’re on the ground is a myth. This dancer has temporarily freed herself from the Earth beneath her. But when she’s on the ground, she’s not being pulled down. That pulling stops the second she reaches the ground. And when the Earth *is* pulling her down, like in this photo, she’s completely weightless, floating in mid-air. She’s always weightless, it’s just that on the ground the Earth constantly pushes up under her feet, changing what (weightless) movements she can do.

Politicians say ‘people are tired of Covid’. It’s not clear why, hardly anybody I know is doing anything about it at all. People are maybe tired of it still being here, but that’s because governments and businesses are doing nothing to make it go away. We’re grown ups, pretend is a game for children. Pretending Covid is over won’t make it go away.

225,000 people have died of Covid in the US this year alone. Pretending the pandemic is over will do that.

Australian vehicles use about 40 olympic swimming pools of fuel every day. Over 90% of that fuel is imported. That’s almost a billion dollars per week, going offshore. When the vehicle fleet shifts to electric, all of that energy can be generated here at home, saving the country about $50 billion per year. Even better, that energy will be almost free, in perpetuity.

Teaching the kids to drive, and they sometimes ask about manual gearboxes, and whether they should learn how to drive them. I always say no, because when the national vehicle fleet transfers to electric in the next decade, cars won’t have any gears at all, manual or automatic. It’s about as important a mass skill now as knowing how to ride a horse.

I post about changes to energy because what’s really happening out there should amaze people. And help explain why I say the change will be fast and brutal, much much faster than people are thinking. Some examples: - Australia is installing renewables at the fastest rate per capita in the world. Nearly 10 times the world average. - the pipeline of large renewable projects ready to go is twice the capacity of our entire current electricity market - the battery storage projects underway total 23GW of capacity, nearly half the capacity of the entire grid - 3 million Australians already have solar panels, and they provide a quarter of all of our national power. In 4 years they’ll be able to provide nearly half, just on their own - all of our electricity will be able to provided regularly by renewables by 2025. That’s only 3 years away.

This to me is the greatest modern wonder. Your home is now connected directly to the entire world, in real-time. While we travel around the world thinking it broadens our minds (it narrows them), and thinking visiting somewhere somehow gives us a more ‘authentic’ experience of that place (it doesn’t), you can sit at home and have the world come to you instead, in much more meaningful ways. In virtual ways. And you in turn can impact back upon that world, it’s not a passive consumption thing. ‘Virtual’ has come to mean ‘not real’. That’s seriously wrong. Our entire culture is virtual, and always has been. I can go to the Bathurst 1000 and have an experience there that is unique, that’s true. But is it a truer, more authentic experience of the race? Nope. You see hardly any of what’s going on, trackside. They even add screens now to virtualise the event, to make more of it available, ‘live’, which is kinda amusing. Ditto at gigs, where people increasngly pay hundreds to sit in a sweaty stadium and stare at a screen, because the stage is too far away. You will understand, see and experience more of the world through the internet than you could ever possibly hope to, by travelling or ‘being there’. Watch tourists, drunk on the illusion of ‘being there’, actually spend huge amounts of their time desperately trying to capture the experience on their phones. Virtualising it. The true meaning of all experience is virtual. ‘Being there’ is an illusion, a powerful myth that drives our travel culture. A culture incapable of being anywhere, and accumulating sights thinking it will fill that void. To be somewhere, you have to virtualise it. And you don’t need to leave home to do that.

For the first 25 years of motoring in the UK, there were no petrol pumps. People had to buy fuel in 2-gallon cans from retailers, lug it home and fill the car. I mention this because often electric cars are criticised for taking longer to ‘fill’ than petrol cars. But it took decades for filling a petrol/disease vehicle to be a fast process. Fast chargers for electrics can already fully charge an electric car in 8 minutes, after only a handful of years of development. Also electrics are designed for continuous ‘top-up’ charging, rather than running them empty like a petrol or diesel car before filling. It continues to amaze me the excuses that are made to stick to a status quo that is costing people a fortune, making their air filthy to breathe and sending tens of billions of dollars offshore every year to oil producing countries, whose leaders drive cars made out of solid gold.

Thanks to Ed for this. The oceans are masking just how bad global warming is. They’ve absorbed over 90% of the extra heat we’ve produced by burning astronomical amounts of carbon-based fuels. The amount of heat they’ve absorbed is the equivalent of 5 Hiroshima atomic bombs exploding every SECOND, since 1990. That’s over 1 BILLION atomic bombs worth of heat. We’re already screwed, but there are signs the oceans have already lost the capacity to absorb more and are releasing this heat back into the atmosphere. We’ll be literally incinerated. Experts say even with urgent emergency action we’ll be lucky to survive. The past 30 years of climate blocking may be our extinction event, just as blocking Covid action is killing millions. It’s the same people doing it.

Happy Birthday!

Hmm, what to do? 🤔

I often talk about gravity, and how the Earth is pushing UP underneath you in everything you do, rather than you constantly falling down onto it. Here’s why I think people rarely notice this miracle. If asked to feel that pushing up, people will usually ‘go down’ to feel it. They’ll take their attention down to their feet or bum to feel that contact. And there’s the problem, it’s there in the description. They’re ‘going down’. Your entire body is focused in a downwards direction, which is what then makes that contact under your body feel like your ‘weight’ pressing down on the ground. You’re dropping your body with your attention, onto the ground. But if you don’t go down to feel that contact, if you stay UP in your activity in the world, and then feel it, you’ll feel something very different. Say you’re watching TV. Keep watching TV, and feel that contact under your bum come TO YOU, while you keep watching, ‘up’ in the world. Feel it at the same time as you watch TV, or whatever you’re doing. Then you’ll start to feel it for what it actually is, a constant, every second, pushing of this massive planet underneath you, holding you up all day and night, your entire life. It takes practice to make the shift, but nothing will change your life more. You are floating in space, like an astronaut, every day.

Very few people I know still wear masks or pay any attention to Covid, amazingly putting their health, that of their families and friends in the hands of politicians, who they wouldn’t trust normally to buy them a bag of mixed lollies. I only persist here in the hope it helps save some people. I read the research every day, I talk to the scientists and doctors, these aren’t my opinions. I know most feel they may have had their Covid now, like a cold, and now it’s done and if they keep getting it oh well, it’s just like another cold. To go back to shingles as an example. I had chickenpox over 50 years ago. I could develop shingles at any time. For more than 50 years that virus has lain dormant in my body, waiting for another opportunity. This is exactly how Covid works too, any infections you get now may not make you really sick, now. HIV the same. The people who caught HIV were dead within a decade. At the time it was often so mild many didn’t even know they had it. Covid shows every sign of being at *least* as dangerous as HIV.

What is peoples' answer to this? Lots of talk always about the 'vulnerable' to Covid (really all of us, but let's run with it to indulge the stupidity). How are 'the vulnerable' (hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them in Australia alone) supposed to live now, with Covid absolutely rampant, everywhere, and nothing done to stop it?

I’m sure I’ve said a lot that this will be a brutal shift, much faster than people realise. How about 10 years faster?

The fossil fuel industry globally is subsidised by taxpayers to the tune of nearly $6 trillion dollars per year. The industry is so staggeringly inefficient that only these subsidies have ever allowed it to stay afloat. It also uses a lot of its money to fund propaganda to make people believe the exact opposite of everything I just typed.

Have mentioned buying a Kluger hybrid and discovering by accident it's also a self-driving car. I do a daily round-trip commute of over 120 km. So in the past week I tested the self-driving technology. With me of course alert and monitoring it, ready to take control if needed (hands on the wheel but letting it steer), it's driven me to and from work every day. It did all of the driving, including monitoring traffic and slowing or stopping where needed, steering etc. All of it. It even spotted traffic in heavy rain before I could. Remarkable engineering, like autopilot on a plane because it's not designed to replace the driver, just make them a lot safer. It never sleeps, never gets distracted, never misjudges a distance. And it saves me even more fuel, because it's much smarter with throttle control than any human.

Because governments now suppress this information to once per week, here's this week, in NSW. 69 people died last week, if you missed that one. 82 this week. Worse than last week. On the same day the NSW Premier will almost certainly convince National Cabinet to remove all Covid isolation entirely. The deadliest month of the pandemic in Australia? Last month. We're pretending it's over. A national, lethal joke.

The UK removed Covid isolation rules. Which is what we're about to do here, it seems. We know it doesn't work and that it kills and maims lots of people. But we'll do it anyway, because dumb is what we do now, for everything.

National Cabinet did it today. People with Covid are now free to walk among us, whenever they like. Cabinet justified it by saying we have to stop treating Covid differently to other infectious diseases. But now we actually are. For starters, hands up if you can name any other infectious disease that infected 40,000 people this week in Australia, and killed 252?

Like our idiot National Cabinet, President Biden declared Covid over this month. As many people are dying every WEEK from Covid in the US as died in the 9/11 attacks.

Ask people what democracy is, and I bet nearly everyone will actually describe elections to you. Which is wrong, the two are not even close to being the same thing. We need to get rid of elections. Bear with me. Elections only began in the early 20th century. Democracy is not elections. They were designed to be a tiny part of democracy, a way for people to have a say in who their representive would be. But they’re like the fossil fuel of democracy, they’ve now taken over everything. That’s what populism means, all of democracy has now become a popularity contest. You couldn’t do any job including raising your kids using popularity as the mechanism. It’d be a disaster. But we now run our countries using it, which is why they’re falling to bits. Society has become a giant high school, where ‘likes’ are the currency. This is literally true, adult life is now adolescent life, and social media is how we bring high school culture into the adult world. Get rid of elections. There are all sorts of ways to do politics without them. Sortition, for example, how we select juries. Draw leaders by random lot. Let them have very short terms, then replace them with more random leaders. Let officials do the actual work of running the country and keeping the continuity, which is their job.

Happy birthday boy!

My boy is 17 today. The most beautiful, gentle soul. And smart. Gentle people are the gravity of the world. Gravity is by far the weakest of all of the forces. But it shapes the entire universe in the way the other forces can’t. It takes enormous strength and dexterity to be gentle, far more than what we usually call strength, which is always puny and pathetic macho bullshit. Anybody can smash with a hammer. Far fewer can gently navigate the complexity of life without being overwhelmed. It’s the strength of wide extent, in space and time. Happy birthday, love ya :)