January 2023

Jessica Wildfire, writing about ‘The Kraken’, XBB1.5, the latest worrying Covid variant.

Amelia Earhart, smashing fashion out of the park. Did you say a relative, Alex Watts?

One of the holy grails of medicine is a genuinely effective and safe drug for obesity. We may have arrived, with Semaglutide and Tirzepatide. Not developed for weight loss but instead for management of diabetes, their weight-loss effects are astounding. Don’t be too excited yet though, because these won’t be easy to access for some time. Already in Oz the Semaglutide stock has been shut down, to protect access for diabetics. Which is nonsense, because there are several other drugs for their purposes that can foot the bill easily. The other thing that amuses me with this research is how they always emphasise that ‘lifestyle changes’ are needed for permanent weight control. As if obesity is a result of a bad lifestyle. I know many obese people, and their lifestyles are the same as the skinny people sitting next to them. It’s fat-shaming. I will guarantee you the real cause of obesity is nothing about lifestyle, that it will eventually be shown to be caused by microbes.

Me learning the guitar, aged about 15 or 16.

This shows a common problem - anterior pelvic tilt, where a person’s bum starts to edge backwards, causing additional curvature in the base of their lower back. Usually caused by bad ‘posture’, often sitting in chairs for long periods in your life. The hip muscles at the front and spinal muscle at the back become tight to maintain your uprightness, while your bum (glutes) and abdominal muscles go a bit flaccid, as they’re not really doing anything. One of the most common causes of what we funnily call ‘a bad back’. If you go to a physiotherapist with this problem, 9 times out of 10 you’ll probably be given stretching exercises to loosen those tight hip flexors and tight spinal muscles. And strengething exercises for your abnominals and glutes. Stretch and strengthen, the mainstays of many physical therapies. The problem is, those muscles became tight and flaccid for a reason, and stretching and strengthening doesn’t do a thing to fix it. The reason? Your body is out of balance, what we (incorrectly) call bad posture. That tightening and floppiness is a response to the loss of balance. If you restore that balance, in this case by shifting your body slightly so that you’re not leaning either forward or back as you sit or stand, but just allowing yourself to be upright over your support from the chair or ground, all the tightness and weakness will disappear.

I’m looking forward to watching the Test match from tomorrow. The weather forecast suggests I might need a plan B, for the entire 5 days.

File this one away so that when XBB1.5 (‘The Kraken’) eventually filters through the multiple layers of meaningless rubbish on the daily news, it won’t be unexpected. A variant now smashing the US and elsewhere, and is already here in Oz. Potentially very nasty, evading any immunity (vaccine or ‘natural’), and also making you very sick. Like a love child of Delta and Omicron, but taking the worst of both and combining them in one variant, x10.

4 hail storms in one afternoon?

Queen wrote this song to take the piss out of the Sex Pistols. It makes the Sex Pistols sound like The Wiggles. I saw them live this same year, you can get a sense of them in their full glory in this clip. What a band. Nobody touches them, live they blew everybody off the stage.

Cost of living. Had a few days on the coast. Figured out when we got back that petrol would have cost us over $200 for the trip, if we hadn’t moved to hybrid vehicles last year. It cost us less than half of that.

The next 5-10 years are going to be brutal for Australia’s energy. We invested our own money here at home to offset some of the risks of that, by installing solar and a battery. That will not only save us money and pay for itself easily, but also means we should have uninterrupted supply even if the updates to the grid described here can’t be completed in time (which is quite likely). Those who still cheer on coal-fired electricity need to understand really fast that it’s closing down fast, and we have no say in it. We don’t own nearly all of it. And the offshore companies that do are not charities, and will close them as soon as they’re losing money. That process is already well underway, and accelerating.

The number of people who lost weight during the year, and then found it all again at Christmas. A joyous miracle.

Strep and meningococcal. As overseas. Peoples’ immune systems shot by Covid.

Jenni, Kerrie, any family connection?

I love engineering and technology. But you won’t get me in a helicopter. Too many moving parts, great in theory but far too little margin in the risk sense.

Coal, oil and gas are all forms of solar energy. All are dead animals and plants, who got their energy directly from the sun, via photosynthesis. But concentrated over millions of years, which is why they have such a huge energy density. We’ve burned all of that energy in the space of only a few hundred years, we’re time-eaters. What’s remarkable about engineering today is that renewable energy technologies can match the same amount of energy, in real-time. No need to wait a few million years to accumulate it. And no pollution or noise, and no need to dig anything up. It’s available everywhere, to everybody.

Does your life have a purpose? It’s the sort of question that is easily ignored when you’re young, but can gradually gnaw away at everybody as they age. What’s the point of it all? ’Having a good time’ seems a common purpose now, but that’s like drug addiction, there are only so many ‘highs’, and they need to be more and more extreme to satisfy you. I studied philosophy. It’s easy to mock philosophy, in an age where these sorts of questions aren’t asked much. But ultimately the more you ignore them, the more they come back to bite you.

Happy Birthday!

One of the less known impacts of Covid infection is aging. It causes cells to age much more quickly. Laura Miers had a mild case of Covid, before developing Long Covid. She’s now had to change her identity picture in systems and on her licence 5 times in the past 2 years, because the face recognition software stopped recognising her. With Albo, who knows if it’s just make-up and hair dye in play here. But he had Covid twice in 2022, and doesn’t sound well even now.

77 dead in the past week in NSW. You’re not likely to see that reported anywhere.

Today is Elvis Presley’s 88th birthday.

Costs a minimum half as much as a diesel to run, with more power. And electric semis can have a battery swapped out in 4 minutes, about a third of the time of refuelling with diesel. Even John Deere is shifting to full electric tractors in only 3 years. Game over, unless you know of businesses who like spending more than twice as much for fuel and maintenance as they need to. Always follow the money.

The most important fact about human behaviour is that humans imitate one another. Social conformity is the basis of all society. It starts from birth, continues through school, and into adult life. This is an obvious and confronting example. But the more subtle examples are even more interesting. For example, when picking your kids up from school, watch how often the parents who formed tight little cliques at school themselves, are still in those cliques as adults. And how their own kids repeat the same behaviour.

This is funny, in a tragic sort of way. A device that allows energy companies to shut down a person’s solar system completely, if the State has too much solar power going into the grid. Remember 10-20 years of politicians telling us all that what we need is more supply of electricty? More ‘baseload power’? Australia has so much free energy coming off peoples’ rooftops, it needs to implement these measures on some days to stop the grid falling over from too MUCH power. Queensland is introducing these now. Once $20 billion of new power lines is built to distribute this mountain of energy, it won’t be necessary - work that should have been done over the past decade. Another reason we got a battery here at home with the panels, our power still comes from the panels even if the connection to the grid is shut-off. No talk of NSW doing this though, at this stage, but anything is possible in the next 5-10 years.

🤦‍♂️

Work colleague has tonsillitis. Australia desperately short of antibiotics to treat it (she had Covid last year). Global shortages, driven by infecting the whole world like it was a fun thing to do. No end to the shortages for months, don’t get sick. 2023 will be the year where the longer-term impact of infecting the entire country may start to play out.

We got the whole family vaccinated for flu last year. Nobody caught Covid until Kell right at the end of the year. Given flu shots are also showing strong impact against heart diseases as well, I can’t think of a better thing you could treat yourself to each year. Get every vaccine you qualify for, for every disease.

That reliable baseload power again.

Happy birthday Mia :)

This is astonishing. Millions of kg of Australian tomatoes come from this plant in South Australia, which grows them using sunshine and seawater. There are so many remarkable things happening, which are obscured by tired political debates deliberately designed to make these wonders invisible to ordinary people. Watch, you won’t regret it.

Tesla say they’re very close to releasing full self-driving. The important thing here isn’t fully autonomous driving, it’s that the push for it is delivering amazing driver-assistance technologies, even if it’s not 100% self-driving. Cars you can buy today already will steer, brake and accelerate for you, dodge pedestrians, read speed limit signs, etc. It’s all already happening. And we’ll all be much safer for it, human drivers are no match for machines in the basics of driving.

The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is also called The Doomsday Glacier, because of the dire implications of it melting. It’s about the size of the UK. One of the icebergs (B22a) which has been holding the glacier in place, stopping it collapsing and sliding into the sea, has now broken free. And all the other systems holding the glacier in place are collapsing at the same time. If Thwaites Glacier now collapses as well, it could release the West Antarctic ice sheet into the sea. If that happens global seal levels would rise by 3m. That would destroy all coastal cities. This is also happening much, much faster than previously predicted.

1892. A 1,341 year old Sequoia was felled by two men in the Pacific Northwest of the US. It took them 13 days to saw it down, the saw is on proud display in the photo. It was about 100 metres tall. You can understand their pride. But at the same time, the loss of something priceless.

My version of ’positivity’ is attacking the problems that threaten all of us, like grown-ups should. Not ‘living my best life’ ignoring all of those problems. None of that ‘you do you’ bullshit, sorry. You do we, and I’ll do we, and everybody will be much happier. Just as context for these posts. With this one, do everything you can to avoid infection again this year. Your life may depend on it, and the lives of the people you could infect.

Memories of watching Laurel and Hardy.

Life in permanent high school, Part 347. Rock star dies: “Vale rock star, such a tragic loss.” 77 people die in a week from Covid: “Here’s a pic of us all at the beach!”

Running: - 4 air conditioners - clothes dryer - 3 fridges (2 in the shed usually reserved for Christmas, but left on now). Costing nothing. So much left, could power half the street.

NSW desperately needs a change in March. This man is the main driver in the collapse of Australia’s public health defence against Covid as well.

Tonsillitis and conjunctivitis doing the rounds at work. Jeff Beck died of meningitis. Damaged immune systems is a possible or even likely factor. I feel like we’re about to pay for all of the Covid infection we allowed in 2022.

🤔 Also hearing about a lot of cystitis around.

I’m thinking of setting up a separate group focused just on Covid information and updates. I get the feeling it’s not something most of my friends on FB enjoy discussing, so this way they could avoid it. Would be interested if this alternative is of interest to at least some.

This is if you use grid power. Way, way less than paying for petrol or diesel. Plus you get more power and torque, total silence (it’s bliss), and almost zero maintenance. Electric cars will do a million miles without breaking a sweat. If you charge from your own solar, the cost is zero.

One of my hobbies is making ice cream. I use dextrose (which is just glucose) instead of ordinary table sugar, to avoid the fructose which is really bad for you. You can buy dextrose in supermarkets or brewing shops, it’s used a lot in brewing. It means the ice cream doesn’t have the negative health effects ordinary ice cream has, including being fattening. Delicious. One of the interesting things about social media is that people will use it as evidence of the life you’re living. I’m the opposite, almost nothing of the life I live makes it onto social media. Peoples’ thoughts are a much better way to get close to them, as people, but you find almost none of that on FB. Social media is 99% posturing, how people want to be perceived by others. It’s being at school, forever.

Happy birthday Rosie :)

Covid, using Freddie as a guide. Freddie in 1984, and in 1991, immediately before his death. Medical experts suggest Freddie probably caught HIV in 1982, which corresponds also with a flu-like illness he had in that year. Until 1986-7, he looked completely normal. I’ve posted before that HIV takes 8-10 years to turn into AIDS and kill people. His illness matches that almost exactly, had a mild flu, then years of nothing. Then his entire body collapsed in a handful of years, about 9 years later. In those 9 years HIV, which took up residence in his organs, gradually destroyed his immune system. This is one of the theories scientists studying Covid have about how it works. It’s often mild because its mechanism is to suppress the immune system enough to allow it to set up reservoirs in your body, in multiple organs. It’s actually a bad sign that people don’t get very sick, it means their immune system has been sidelined (its job is to fight the virus, and that should make you feel sick). Vaccines will also help you have mild symptoms, by fighting the virus. But the real danger there is that (as some researchers think) they may actually be helping the virus form those reservoirs, by taming your immune response to prevent severe illness (the people who die of Covid die because their own immune system sets off a storm of inflammation). Once the reservoirs are there, the virus may then use the next few years to gradually destroy your immune system. This is happening scarily faster with Covid, than HIV/AIDS, we’re already seeing mass illness with other infections, from immune damage. Avoid infection, I only bother with this shit because I care about people. Wear a mask. Avoid crowds and unventilated rooms. As one senior researcher said, and pardon the language but it’s a measure of how worried they are - this virus is a ’cunt’.

Vale 112 people in NSW last week, who had their last Christmas in 2022.

Genius innovators in agriculture have called enough on this sort of landscape vandalism. Not least because nobody makes any money out of it, long-term. They’re shifting most of our food production to massive greenhouses, utilising vertical space and desalinated and recycled water. It’s also a great business model, because it means crops are not dependent on weather, and pests are easily controlled. The picture-perfect truss tomatoes you can see in supermarkets now come from those greenhouses.

For those interested in the shift to indoor farming (it will blow your mind), Landline did a nice story on it. With increasing climate disruption, it may be all that keeps food on tables. It definitely keeps farmers solvent. Also called ‘vertical farming’, you can see astonishing examples of it on YouTube too. It returns vast areas of land back for other uses as well, land that has been unviable for agriculture for decades already.

Happy birthday Brenda :)

I enjoy watching people posting about electric cars to social media, because it always prompts a pile-on from Flat Earth fossil fuel fans. Always the same idiot grinning emojis, with comments like ‘hope it won’t catch fire!’, and ‘be ready to push it home when the battery goes flat!’. Took one of the hybrids to the servo this morning, for refuelling, It went to the Central Coast last week, drove around there for several days, and then home again. Then it’s driven around Lithgow all week since. About 1000km of motoring. How much fuel did it need to fill it again? 30 litres. I smiled at the big SUV and ute re-fuellers there, well into the triple digits and still pumping. 🤣

For the fossil fuel Flat-Earthers. The chance of a petrol car catching fire is about 1.5%. An EV’s chance of catching fire is 0.03%. 50 times lower risk.

6 times. One to ponder for those who believe catching Covid to stop catching Covid is a good idea. Catching Covid gives you no meaningful immunity. It’s a virus that attacks the immune system.

If you work in any of these jobs (you can add cafes, supermarkets, child care centres and funeral homes to the list, they’re under (o) in the regulations), then if you catch Covid, under NSW law you are automatically assumed to have caught it at work, for the purpose of workers compensation. You don’t have to prove it, it’s an automatic thing under law. The employer has to prove you DIDN’T catch it at work. Most people don’t know this. They also don’t know that the NSW Government has been trying since 2021 to have this clause removed from the Workers Compensation Act. Don’t vote in March because the ALP or Nats or LNP are your favourite team. Vote to save lives.

Happy birthday!

This is the side of solar that is less spoken about. Every person you see with solar panels on their roof is a mini power station. They’re providing some of the electricity you use, and they used their own money to generate it, by paying for their solar panels. In the first 2 weeks of January, we’ve exported enough electricity back to the grid to power several other houses. Solar owners get paid a feed-in tariff for this export, but it’s small now. For example you pay 20-30c/kWh to buy electricty off the grid, and solar owners get about 5-10c/kWh for the electricty they export. A big gap. You wouldn’t expect them to get the same as what everybody else pays as a retail price, that price takes into account a whole lot of grid maintenance and other costs, but it’s still a significant discrepancy. The electricty retailers that pay these tariffs to solar owners are getting super-cheap electricty to sell on at much higher rates. They’d love to buy more, but the grid isn’t ready to distribute it where it needs to go, because of 20 years of inaction by federal and State governments. The low feed-in tariffs are actually a supply management device, to try to reduce the amount of solar coming into the system, because the grid isn’t there to deal with it. As I’ve posted about a few times, Australia is sitting on a mountain of super-cheap energy, that it can’t use. 10 years of complete nonsense about ‘baseload power’ and ‘supply’. Supply has never been the issue, we have OODLES of electricty. Distribution is the problem, and ultimately government (that did nothing to build the distribution) is the problem.

It’s hard to put a finger on what’s unique about Lithgow, in Australia. I’ll likely never leave. I think that it’s the transplanting of a British industrial village, into the Australian landscape. The picture below is Yorkshire, of a typical British industrial village, scattered throughout the UK. In the same sort of valley location Lithgow is found in, for the same reason, because the geography is the reason for the town existing. Coal is in the hills, the town is in the valleys. It’s even the same people, at its birth Lithgow imported miners who directly or indirectly came from these British industrial village towns. They brought the culture with them, and it’s that culture that’s very hard to define, to people who don’t live here. It’s like nothing else in any town or city in Australia that I know of. There are other industrial towns, but none that I can think of that also copy the geography of the British industrial valley towns. Even the original buildings copy those of the British industrial villages. The village form of life is (to me) the greatest invention of Western societies. It’s not really rural or urban, it’s everything all at the same time. It’s a community that has had to balance all of that, plus the landscape, at the same time. You’re as much a part of the valley as you are of the community, they’re all the same thing.

When the entire valley was flooded to create water for a coal-powered power station, and a whopping concrete dam wall was constructed to do it, nobody said boo. Calling the BS on this.

More Australians died of Covid in 2022 than died in the Spanish Flu Pandemic here in 1918-19. The Spanish Flu was the worst pandemic since The Black Plague. Back to work today. Will be the only person in a mask again. Already heard that people are suffering ‘mysterious’ illnesses at work, like tonsillitis and conjunctivitis. Mysterious my arse. This is year 4 of this shit.

I look at the holiday photos and social events people post to FB, where nobody is taking any precautions against Covid infection. And two things jump out at me. 1) So many seem to think only of risk to themselves, and not of the risk they present to the entire community by allowing Covid to continue to spread, by their actions. People don't think that even if they get a 'mild' case, spreading it to others can kill them or leave them with lifelong disability. 2) I remember HIV, where people were actually charged for knowingly risking the spread of the virus through unprotected sex. Even as recently as 2013 this was still being done, see the news story. And yet so much of the community is out there every weekend and holidays, blatantly refusing to do a single thing to stop the spread of Covid. I think we need to look hard in the mirror at what we've become. About 8000 people have died of HIV in Australia in the past 40 years. We killed more than twice as many with Covid in 2022 alone.

I hadn’t heard of materials science and engineering before I started university. But it’s what I studied. It’s one of the most astonishing areas of research in the world, and the forefront of all engineering and technological progress. I recommend it to anybody.

Portugal achieved this in only a handful of years. For comparison, that price is about 0.6 cents per kWh. In Australia that price is currently 30c per kWh. We’re paying 50 times more for electricity. This is what will drive brutal change to electricity here, basic dollars and cents. Existing generators will go broke even faster than we think.

The phrase ‘range anxiety’ for EVs. Petrol and diesel cars don’t have great range. They have thousands of service stations. Filled daily by huge fuel tankers travelling back and forth from the refinery (actually now back and forth from the ports, because we ship 90% of the fuel in from overseas, already refined). When these are replaced by electric charging stations, you won’t need the trucks. Or the refineries. Or just plug it in at home, there’ll be millions of service stations. Anybody got a petrol or diesel bowser at home? And the $50 billion+ we spend buying the fuel from overseas every year? It’ll stay right here at home, rather than making Texans and Arabs rich.

I turn 55 this year. About a decade ago I remember a flurry of colleagues retiring at 55, with gold-plated super schemes. The schemes where you retired at 55 at your final salary, for life. Those schemes were quickly shut down for younger generations. It was a good example of intergenerational injustice, a topic people resist talking about. The great scandal of those schemes was, they were never funded. Not by the people who held them, and not by government or business. In the end emergency funding had to be found. That’s what ‘The Future Fund’ is. Public money is used to pay out the extraordinarily generous super entitlements. Rather than the entitlements themselves being pared back, as has happened already with super for younger Australians. Vote-buying. It was called a ‘Sovereign Wealth Fund’ to hide its real purpose, when you read the guff said about the Fund it sounds like they’re saving for Australia’s future. They’re saving to pay out these ridiculous super schemes. And have a look at how much. Well north of $200 billion. Remember that, as our infrastructure continues to collapse and peoples’ earnings continue to go backwards. Government could find barely $30 million to fund Covid measures in schools. On top of this many of these same people have tax cuts targeted at them in coming years worth another $120 billion+. That’s what you call intergenerational theft.

I think the graphs are clear enough to not have to explain them. This is what a lethal vascular disease does. Most would have had 'mild' infections.

Chefs increasingly agree with me, nothing beats an induction cooktop. You can even buy an excellent portable one for less than $100, if money is tight, we did that for a few years before upgrading the kitchen. The portables can then be used to cook anywhere. I won't burn gas inside the house now, it's methane, the combustion gases and solids it produces are nasty, and not flued at all. Plus induction cooks faster and more precisely, you get amazing and as good as instant temperature control. Add a solar system and you also cook for free, gas prices just gone up again! And so easy to clean, compared to a gas cooktop.

Apparently the Bells Line of Road connects Richmond, to Bell.

Pieter is one of Australia’s most elite doctors. Even other doctors speak in hushed tones about him. He doesn’t often offer a view, so when he does, it’s worth listening to. This one is such an important point. The spin that deliberately confuses the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ (kids getting dirty is good for them because they build up resistance to bugs - true) with deliberately infecting them with lethal disease pathogens, which have no relationship AT ALL with the good bugs they get playing in the dirt. Up to 30% of children it’s thought will get long-term health impacts of Covid infection. That’s just based on current thinking, I suspect it’ll be much higher. We’re willingly infecting every single child in the country. An entire generation. We’re infecting the entire country, EVERY generation. Over and over. Some have been infected 6 times already. It’s criminal insanity.

John Farnham’s fame hides the phenomenal one-off his voice is. You never hear even a fraction of what it can do in his popular hits. Listen to this English professional singer react to a track of Farnham doing Led Zeppelin at a sound check. Just about any other singer in the world would need to rest their voice for a week to recover, and they wouldn’t hit the notes anyway. This is Farnham mucking around *before* a full-length show. Listen to the full track on YouTube.

When I started in the workforce, I was a bit in awe of people in their 50s. They were the ones who knew how stuff worked, who had an authority about them because of their long experience. They were often the calm ones who had seen it all before, and ignored a lot of the work politics and just got on with fixing things. People looked up to them, for guidance. That’s inevitable, because people in their 50s are people at the peak of a career. Maximum ability and experience. Often having raised families too, so a lot of life experience under their belts. They run societies, you’ll notice most leaders in politics are in their 50s too. Right now that’s Gen X, the generation least spoken about. The generation trying to fix decades of lifestyle politics. It’s also why I probably seem a bit boring. In your 50s, I think your passion really should be dealing with the problems of the world. Not drinking, or travelling, or having a good time, or gigs and bands - those are the passions of adolescents. Not that you shouldn’t still enjoy those things, but it doesn’t sit right with me that they can be the centre of your life, in your 50s. The most ‘positive’ and exciting thing IS dealing with the world’s problems. It’s not ‘negativity’. It’s being a grown up. Solving big problems is sexy. How did this shift happen? I posted about it a few times. High school culture became our culture. Not an analogy, it actually happened. Which is why grown-up life now so often resembles adolescent life.

*duck for cover* I don’t find anything Tim Minchin does very interesting. Might need to hear and see a bit more. He was praising Richard Dawkins the other day, erk.

They won’t build the tunnels, it’s just election spin. And the poor machines, I don’t think they’re boring.

131 dead this week, all those lovely Christmas parties. At least people went out with a cracker and some pudding.

What the science of alcohol tells us is that no amount of alcohol is good for you, and in fact even tiny amounts are bad. But of course the alcohol industry is one of the country’s big political donors. What interests me is that the young are increasingly rejecting alcohol. Breweries like BOAGS are closing because the demand is falling.

Name something these 3 have in common: 1. The Davos World Economic Forum, in Switzerland 2. NSW parliament in Sydney 3. Parliament at Westminster in the UK. Anybody? Each has spent millions making the buildings safe from Covid infection, including expensive air ventilation and filtration. The same people who tell you and me to 'live with the virus'. They mean live with it in the way animals in the farmyard or people in third world countries are supposed to live with disease. They have no intention of living with it themselves.

In Australia, somebody is dying of Covid every 27 minutes.

This is the sort of anti-electric story you’ll see on social media all the time. Written in a way to make people laugh and slam their fist on the table. Like all of the stories, it’s fake. Deliberately written to try to stall the transition. You’d think after decades of complete fantasies about ‘baseload power’, and ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’, people might be a bit less gullible. Alas.

Glorious Flat-Earthers in the comments.

Ours are down about 200%. The energy company is paying *us*. These changes brought in by government will help prices not go up much further from their current very high levels, but they won’t bring them down. Only the shift to renewables will do that, and it will take several years. But you can do it yourself, and it takes one day.

Skipped the ’watch with free Covid’ sessions at the cinema and finally saw this yesterday. Great fun movie, amazing flight scenes. A few things: 1) the mission at the centre of the movie is a copy of the destruction of the Death Star mission in Star Wars, flying fighters through tight channels to hit a tiny target at the other end. And hey, it worked there, so if you’re on a good thing… 2) it’s a typical Jerry Bruckheimer production. Lots of stylised Pepsi commercial-type shots, with the underlying Stars and Stripes and God Bless America framing (we mock the North Koreans and Chinese for State propaganda, the US just privatised it), and 3) who rides a motorcycle without a helmet in 2023? Why I used the trailer thumbnail. Part of that same Bruckheimer schtick, a good American ignores the guv’ment and regulation. The usual libertarian wank. A ‘maverick’. Art tells you most things about a culture. That same libertarian rubbish is what’s feeding the freedumb frenzy right now, worldwide.

Loved our Pathfinder. Best family car on the market when we bought it (price was a steal, sub-$40,000 for a 7-seater), and it did 7 years with us without skipping a beat. Nissan do beautiful V6s, which is why they haven’t changed it in the new model. But I also think that’s what will ruin this new version’s chances of really taking off, no electric or even hybrid option. Crazy. Nissan know how to make EVs, they’ve had one on the books for several years.

The German Health Minister one of the few honest politicians left in the world. Saying what I’ve been sharing here for a while, that Covid infection is possibly leading to incurable long-term damage to the immune system. Like AIDS.

There’ll be a reckoning one day, on trans theory. There’s only just so much BS that can be kept aloft indefinitely.

Happy Birthday :)

Reading more sites discussing EVs. One of the most common questions always seems to be ‘how much does it cost to replace the battery?’ It’s an easy one. Zero. Batteries are warranted for well past the usual lifetime of the vehicle. These aren’t battery-operated toys where you have to replace the batteries.

More Flat Earth hilarity in the comments. They took lead out of petrol because it was giving people brain damage. But I think just burning the stuff, and diesel, makes people stupid.

The 120-hour driver training for young people now is very interesting, and says a lot about what 'good driving' is. Car enthusiasts will always tell you good driving is something like race car driving - fast, picking the apex of a corner, knowing how to negotiate skids and slides etc. Also often the people who want to replace all road laws with 'driving to the conditions', by which they mean using public roads as their race tracks. Good driving is almost nothing about any of that. Driving is a collective act of negotiating the road with millions of other drivers, of varying abilities and with all sorts of unpredictable factors. It's about paying attention, about a sort of calm assessment of every situation and driving to create the best outcome for everybody on that road, not just yourself. On modern roads, with modern cars and using the speed limits designed into the roads, most of that advanced driver training rubbish is irrelevant. It's not a car race. That's why they shifted to a 'graduated' driver training model, to the 120 hours. To force young learners to have to spend a lot of time with an adult in the car, to hopefully shape the *attitude* to driving much more than the mechanics of it, which don't take that long for anybody to master. George Monbiot captured elements of this in his brilliant piece about how cars make societies nasty places. How they encourage anti-social behaviour in multiple ways. https://www.monbiot.com/2005/12/20/the-anti-social-bastards-in-our-midst/

How about a big awww for this baby’s response to dad’s reading?

I love revving up the revheads. Revheads wrote this piece, even better. Internal combustion engines are hopeless, always have been. Most progress in recent decades has been insignificant, as the article says. You can't polish a turd. https://www.whichcar.com.au/opinion/opinion-the-internal-combustion-engine-is-doomed

I am provocative on this, but as an engineer I’m a bit tired of the rubbish. Just look at the difference in efficiencies here. If you put $100 of petrol or diesel in your car, $80-$90 of it goes straight out the exhaust pipe as heat, not into moving the wheels. You may as well roll the notes and smoke them. An electric vehicle uses 80-91% of the energy you put in with electricity to move the wheels. Nearly every cent you put in as fuel (electricity) ends up as energy to actually move the car. Petrol/diesel in fact is so inefficient, you can run your EV using a petrol-powered generator, and still be more efficient than a standard petrol car. It’s actually one way hybrids work.

This is such a powerful show. I get tired of American shows because so many of them rely upon some artifice that seems cool at first, but within a series or two the disconnect between the artifice and everyday life means the whole thing becomes ludicrous just to try to keep the show running. (Lucifer, anyone?) Something I really love about Happy Valley is that it finally has a strong female lead character who isn’t simultaneously struggling with a personal life that is completely out of control. For some reason writers always make female characters hopeless human beings. Not this one, tough and resilient. Like most mothers, actually. And many women in management. James Norton is so sinister too. In a real-life way, not the confected adolescent fantasies that seem to drive most US shows.

Satoshi is a doctor friend from Sydney. On the frontline of treating Covid patients, for the whole pandemic. We need to listen to people like him.

Pick the most popular guy at the sleepover.

Inflation soaring, electricity prices a big contributor. If you pay for electricity. https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2023/01/25/inflation-2023-power/?utm_campaign=News%20Alert%20-%2020230125&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Adestra

"Most of what passes for mental health advice involves suppressing negative emotions and pretending to be happy for the sake of others. Those of us who refuse to play along are labelled “negative” and identified as a threat. In reality, the forced positivity and magical thinking we encounter on a daily basis is terrible for our mental health. It leads to poor decision-making, and it often results in a chronic state of fragility. The more someone engages in it, the more dependent they become on living in their bubble." Jessica WIldfire

Anyone? Anyone?

Excess mortality is the number of deaths above the usual average in a given year. For the first two years of the pandemic, ours actually went negative i.e. we were healthier than we’d ever been. Now it’s 15% higher than average. Dan (immunologist working for NSW Health) explains just how bad that is. We’re in la-la land, and schools are about to go back to drive more waves of infection into the community.

Just put fuel in the hybrid again. It weighs over 2 tonnes. Fuel economy on this tank was 5.8L/100km. A non-hybrid would be 10-13L/100km. Saves us over $100 in fuel costs, per tank.

Watching the men’s hockey world cup. One of the publicity pages I read said Australia is ranked 4th in the world? I think we’ve been number 1 for years.

Happy Birthday Chels!!

Another way to look at the future of vehicles is to compare actual energy use, per km. While it takes the same energy to move the same mass the same distance, what that leaves out is efficiency of conversion of the energy into movement. EVs win hands-down. They’re 500% more efficient at converting the energy from their fuel (electricity) into movement of the vehicle. Most (up to 90% or even more) of the energy petrol or diesel vehicles have in their fuel is burned and goes straight out the exhaust, adding nothing to the movement of the vehicle at all. This is true even if the EV is charged by electricty from coal-fired power stations.

One of the coolest electric motors people own right now, is the ‘digital’ motor in a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Dyson needed powerful and small (see pic of James Dyson comparing the size of a traditional household electric motor, and the Dyson ones) electric motors, so invented their own. These things can spin at more than 125,000 rpm. It’s also a great example of how much time we lost in the past 2 centuries pursuing useless alternative motor technologies. The year the concept behind the Dyson motor was first patented? 1838.

EVs again. Range is a biggie for many. The average EV even today has enough stored electricity in its battery to power the average Australian vehicle for two weeks. (Newer Teslas - 4 weeks.) And costs less than $20 to charge. And we can do this with it, when you’re done.

Monbiot has had Covid 3 times. Every time, he caught it from a school, via one of his children. Schools are back next week, and guess what government has done to make them safer for Covid? The same thing it did last year, and the year before. Nothing. Don’t think if you have no school-aged children that makes you safer. Schools will make sure the virus is driven deep into every corner of the community.

I gave up pretty much all alcohol years ago, for health reasons at the time (I was isolating possible causes of a heart arrhythmia). I still have the odd celebratory champagne for birthdays etc. Australians get drunk at twice the world average. We shouldn’t be proud of that, it’s really not good for us. And it’s only when you give up that you notice how boring our social lives can be, with booze. Nothing is more boring than people being drunk. Luckily the zero alcohol brewers are getting masterfully good at alternatives. I was impressed with this one, the taste indistinguishable from alcoholic beer. The wines are getting there too, and the spirits. Young people are increasingly drinking these zero alcohol alternatives. You get all of the taste, with none of the hangovers.

Don't you love how oil companies keep fuel prices high through the school holidays and on public holidays? And look at diesel, often people buy those to use less fuel, but the savings are easily wiped out by higher diesel prices. Are we sick of being screwed by Texans and Arabs yet? Most of that money you pay at the bowser goes offshore, over $50 billion per year. This is why we bought hybrids in the transition to full EVs. Currently saving over $5000 per year in fuel costs alone. Over the lifetime of the car, that will actually pay for the car. And electricity? Same price 365 days of the year.

Happy Birthday :)

We should be so proud. ‘Living with the virus’ so well that the funeral industry can’t keep up.

I don't engage much with the Australia Day debates, it's pretty much the same tired arguments every year. But one thing I always do remember, is that the people who arrived in 1788 mostly didn't want to be here. They were prisoners. They certainly didn't want to celebrate the British flag or the birth of the new British penal colony. And I felt that indifference growing up, as John Birmingham delightfully puts it here - Australia Day was always seen as the sort of 'last piss-up of the summer'. One of the things that I think has been uniquely Australian is the total indifference to nationalistic, flag-waving things that start wars overseas. We're a nation of survivors, dumped here by the Brits (who still hold us in contempt). A very healthy distrust of jingoism. I think that's shifting towards a more US-style patriotism now, sadly. Probably because our culture is saturated with American TV and film and social media.

Ski fields are the playground of many of the planet's greatest climate change deniers. Climate change found them. The French Alps, end-2021 on the left, end-2022 on the right.

The prissiness of tennis as a sport gives it a real dilemma now. Djokovic will end up easily the greatest male player of all time, in terms of results on court. Federer is retired, Nadal’s body is giving way. There’s nothing to stop him racking up slam after slam for several years now. But he’s not liked, and in tennis players have be a certain type to be liked - polite, well behaved etc. It’s mostly a rich person’s sport, only they can afford courts. They don’t approve of unruly behaviour. On the women’s side, nothing anybody says can change the fact that Margaret Court’s record is even more extraordinary than Djokovic’s. So the two greatest players of all time, on results, by a country mile (assuming Djokovic does carry on playing), are both players much of the sport and public hate.

Social media is destroying societies. It sounds a big claim, but only a handful of years ago Trump used it to mobilise an insurrection on the Capitol, in the world’s most famous democracy. But social media’s damage goes well beyond that, just one more example here in the article. What social media does is dramatically accelerate the transformation of societies into giant high schools. Whether it’s buying and selling, managing a pandemic or climate change, the transition to electric vehicles - or whatever. The platforms allow people to bypass all of our traditional institutional expertise. The most stupid, nastiest things can become the drivers of social activity. Just like in high school. It’s not an analogy. Social media is the transformation of the world into a permanent culture of adolescence.

Couldn’t recommend these guys more highly.

Guess who’s making a motza out of our high fuel prices? Go electric.

The industry is booming. The breweries involved are craftspeople, a lot more thought and science goes into these drinks. And non-alcoholic drinks can be up to 6 times less fattening. And they attract no excise because they’re alcohol-free, so while for now prices are on par with alcoholic equivalents because of the costs of the technology they use, as the industry gets to scale expect them to be a cheaper option too.

It’s a show, with a limited scope for what it can do, I know. But the trend it represents, of all of society becoming a giant high school, isn’t slowing. People well into middle-age still passionate about getting drunk, and their favourite bands. It should be embarrassing for those to be your passions, in middle age. But many don’t know anything else, because the adult culture they used to enter after high school has disappeared.

I like to give use-case examples for those who don’t have solar, so they can get a sense of it. Right now, still 2-3 hours from peak solar production. But with the clothes dryer, oven, dishwasher and air conditioner on, still using less than half of the current solar production. The rest charging the battery for tonight (usually completed before lunch), and going back to the grid, which earns us money.

Greg is one of Australia’s leading paediatricians. The same thing we’ve already seen happening in the US and UK with strep (children have died), now happening here. Covid did this, kids’ immune systems damaged, they’re sitting ducks. The damage may be permanent, for all of us.

A big study of over 640,000 people who had Covid. Showing the risk of developing autoimmune diseases as a result. The IRR column is the one to look at, I’ve converted to % risk below. So: - 43% greater risk of developing an autoimmune disorder - 23% greater risk of developing more than one disorder - 42% greater risk of rheumatoid arthritis - 55% greater risk of coeliac disease. etc. It’s a horror story. The BS of ‘living with’ Covid is coming home to roost. This is pre-vaccines, but remember vaccines don’t prevent infection. And we haven’t vaccinated younger children at all in Australia, so this data applies directly to them. For the vaccinated, the fact Covid so easily infects them as well suggests the same damage is likely being caused there.

Schooners to cost $12.

Having forced the public to buy their own tests, in a pandemic (!), governments now have a huge stockpile of RATs about to expire. I run out of words for the contempt I feel for the elected halfwits that run our countries.

I feel for teachers today. First day of term, and very wet. Wet isn’t good, in teaching.

You have to watch this show. (SBS has it streaming on demand.) Guy Martin is one of the UK’s leading petrol heads, ex-motorcycle racer. Lovely, funny guy. This doco is so entertaining, and shows him exploring the world of electric vehicles (not just cars, he also looks at bikes, buses, earthmoving equipment, supercars). And he works with others to turn an electric VW Beetle into a drag car to try to beat the quarter mile drag record. Everything I post about here with EVs is covered. How the first cars were mostly electric, until the Texans (there you go Scott ;)) discovered oil, and oil cost 3 cents per barrel. That shifted everything to combustion engines, even though they were rubbish by comparison. Martin admits several times how hopelessly complicated and noisy and clunky they are, and even builds an electric motor using a piece of copper wire and paper clip to show just how much simpler electric motors are. All the petrol heads he talks to and demonstrates EVs to in the show are blown away. Nothing comes close to them for instant speed and torque. His VW Beetle smokes a McLaren Supercar. The petrol heads still say they prefer their cars, but not because of performance (they get smashed), they just love the sound of them and the experience of driving them. Some people still prefer horses to cars, too, it becomes a hobby thing. He shows the only limiting factor is range, for long-range driving, because countries haven’t built enough charging stations yet. But for the first 20-25 years of combustion engines, there were no service stations. It will take much less than that to build charging stations. And the average Australian car travels less than 40km per day, so it’s already irrelevant for most people. They can charge that easily at home.

Village of Kullu, India, with the Himalayas as backdrop. I think we should all immediately travel there and trash it with our tourism.

For the third year in a row, the leading cause of death of police officers in the US? Covid.

You know what I'm going to say. Stop making Texans and Arabs rich. Go electric. Home-grown, Aussie energy.

Let's unpack this one (declaration - I worked at a nuclear power facility, as an engineer). - we would need over 15,000 new nuclear reactors to power the world - these reactors cost over $20 billion to build, EACH - there is still no safe way to dispose of nuclear waste, and there would be mountains more of it with 15,000+ new reactors - a major nuclear accident happens every 14,000 reactor-years of operation. With more than 15,000 new reactors, you would expect a major nuclear incident every month of the year - reserves of viable uranium would run out in under 5 years, with this many reactors - nuclear reactors use large amounts of rare minerals, building them would quickly exhaust world supply, and - it takes more than a decade to build even one nuclear reactor. Like Trump blabbering on about electric cars last week, let's no longer vote for imbeciles who turn practical problems of engineering into debating points for morons on social media.

Hydrogen-powered cars is another topic that generally has a ratio of 0% engineering, to 100% bullshit. It won't happen. Hydrogen may be used for larger industrial purposes, including jet planes. But for cars hydrogen is so much worse an option than battery-electric cars on every measure, that companies are not even looking at it. It's another topic that is all about debating points online, from staunch defenders of the status quo who try to find every way possible to prove that the obvious solution, is the wrong solution. Unfortunately the obvious solution is the obvious solution. It's already there. EVs. Car companies will tell you that.

Donald Trump Jr. Does ‘air quotes’ a lot, because everything is apparently a conspiracy. And only his mega-brain sees through it all.

The marriage of two of my most obvious favourite things. Engineers, and electric motors.

A lithium settling pond. Lithium (core component of rechargeable batteries) is in the yellow liquid.

Three catastrophes paradoxically gave us the peaceful and prosperous lives we’re used to. If you study history you’ll see that the era post-WW2 is unprecedented in human history, for its prosperity and peace. But why did that happen? It started in the mid-to-late 19th century. Big epidemic diseases like cholera were preventing societies from functioning. Then came the 20th century, and WW1. Right on the back of that came the Spanish Flu, a massively lethal pandemic. Then in the mid-20th century, WW2. Why did all of this lead to such peace and prosperity? Because the only thing that changed millennia of hierarchical society was these catastrophes. They were the only thing powerful enough to suspend the hierarchies that had dominated for centuries. First the epidemics of that late-19th century caused the creation of what we now call public health practice, to deal with plagues. Londoners were drowning in their own shit. Then WW1 and WW2 caused so much social damage, that societies invented social security systems. Public health and social security were the foundations of that post-WW2 golden age, where we all grew up. And what have those old hierarchies been doing, since about the 1970s? Trying to strip all of that away, to return us to the default state of the previous millennia. To remove ‘the public’, the very idea of ‘society’. They don’t even pretend they’re not doing that. if you want to know why we’re being asked to live with a pandemic, there’s your answer. To these hierarchies, we’re nothing but the peasants of the previous 20 centuries, who were always left to die.