February 2023

To get a sense of how little maintenance is required for EVs, have a look at Tesla's maintenance summary page for its vehicles.

The battery in a Tesla car will last for between 500,000 and 800,000km. That's between 3-5 times more kms than the average Australian drives a car before upgrading. 30-50 years of motoring. It's just finishing development on a battery that will do twice that. 1.7 million kms. If you haven't been able to watch the Guy Martin documentary yet, in it he tries to get one of these modern EV car batteries to catch fire. Can't do it, even with a blowtorch as a last resort.

Teachers can probably relate to this. How you help, and then you just need to keep helping.

Just so people know the Hannibal Lecter origins of Associate Professor @[727240290:2048:Dannielle].

If you're buying your Year 7 kid a Macbook Pro, you're not only wasting thousands of dollars, you're perpetuating the ridiculous status games you went through at school yourself. The Macbook Air is far and away enough for any kid at school.

Well now.

A very important discussion to have with your school. A lot of this is simple and also cheap, but isn't being done.

Australians invented mass batteries for huge storage over 40 years ago. Batteries themselves were invented over 200 years ago. Watch for an explosion of innovation now in this area, suppressed for so long.

I don’t pay much attention to song lyrics. When I heard Tom Jones’ Delilah was being banned from Welsh rugby games, I thought hmm, steady on. Then I read the lyrics. “At break of day when that man drove away, I was waiting I crossed the street to her house and she opened the door She stood there laughing I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more.”

Hey petrol heads. Shell says 56 billion thank you’s. Go electric.

Toyota does this so well. And it won’t cost you $5,000 extra like it will in a Tesla right now. My Toyota still drives me to and from work every day, for most of the trip. Safer, and saves me fuel too.

Happy Birthday!

Covid spreads to these busloads who die every week, via our work and social lives. Our social life enables these deaths. I'm yet to see more than a handful of people who give the tiniest fuck. Apparently being at home is so boring that it's better to kill 3 busloads of people every week, to relieve the tedium.

My suggestion is we infect the few teachers remaining multiple times every year with Covid, that should help.

As night follows day, up the next wave we go. You’ll have heard people say Covid will become ‘endemic’. Covid is an epidemic disease, infecting in repeated waves. It will never become endemic (a flat line rather than peaks and troughs), that’s just another lie. If you want a sense of how long this nonsense can go on, smallpox was an ongoing epidemic for centuries.

Who'd have thought. https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2023/02/01/gas-electric-australia/?utm_campaign=Dollars%20%26%20Sense%20-%2020230203&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Adestra

Tesla get a lot of attention with electric cars, for good reason. They saw what was coming and went hard, early. Look at those stats, who would bother with an old combustion clunker? This car would beat a Formula 1 car from a standing start, and it weighs nearly 3 times as much. Staggering, just imagine hitting 100km/h in 2 seconds. Their real genius though is to make cars like software. If you buy a Tesla, it’s continuously updated over the air, via software updates. New features added all the time. The underlying technology, the electric motors, haven’t changed a lot in years, because they were simple and perfect to begin with. So you can just keep adding more functionality instead, via software.

Henry Ford is famous for having said that his customers could have any colour they liked for their Model Ts, so long as it was black. There was a reason for that. Firstly Model Ts began in a range of colours, but when he built the factory to mass-produce them the greatest logjam was the painting. He could assemble the cars in about 12 hours. But it took days or even weeks for the multiple coats of paint to be applied and to dry. He had thousands of drying cars sitting in warehouses. Restricting the paint to one colour sped this up a little, but also he used tar in the paint, which was hard to make anything except black.

Up watching the start of the 12-hour. I’ve wondered in recent years if the track could be improved by adding more corners to the lower sections. The Chase really improved Conrod Straight. The bottom part of the track is very ‘boxy’, in racing terms, just straights and 90-degree corners. Though it does provide overtaking opportunities.

What’s interesting about this song is that it starts with the chorus.

This one factory churns out enough large battery storage every year to replace more than 7 power stations the size of Mt Piper. (Mt Piper powers nearly 1.5 million homes in NSW.) We need to remember too that the time these batteries will be used, mostly at night, are the times those traditional power stations have to scale right back, because people are in bed. So we’ll need much fewer of these than people might think. ‘When the sun doesn’t shine’ is when we don’t actually need much power.

Happy Birthday Peter :)

Still genius.

As my friend Henry Madison says, you can see what the ‘economy’ actually is in times like right now. First we infected the entire country, repeatedly, to save ‘the economy’. Rather than ask business to pay for the WHS that they’re already legally required to have in place. Now we ‘fix’ inflation, which is businesses putting up prices, not by regulating prices (business), but by bankrupting customers so that they can’t pay the prices. Notice the winner in both cases? Business. The economy is a fake concept invented to prioritise the interests of the most elite members of society.

Bathurst is glorious right now, with all the rain it feels more like Spring than summer.

From Canada. Like the UK, our future.

What a load of steaming bull turds. The fantasy that all we need is a 'market', consumer choice, to drive prices down. That rubbish is what has been driving prices UP, for years. I've used all of the energy comparison websites a lot, all they'll give you is a list of similarly expensive providers to go with. Notice the bit in here about 'developing habits' too. It's what conservatives call 'nudge' theory. Spend millions of public money funding propaganda campaigns to shift public behaviour towards free market fantasies. So a $250 bribe now, to force you to look at these websites and get used to using them. They actually have taxpayer-funded 'nudge units', I kid you not. Kick this bunch of morons out. The same ones who use this same idiot theory to run a pandemic i.e. the personal choice pandemic. Like you can choose whether to catch Covid or not.

The average Australian now pays around $5000 per year, per car, on fuel. If they buy an EV, their fuel costs will be about 10-20% of that. That’s a saving of about $20,000 over a 5-year span, a rough time a person keeps a car. For those who think EVs are expensive (mostly caused by government policy, which is changing), remember to subtract $20,000 from the price when comparing. Then subtract annual maintenance costs too, which for an EV are nearly zero.

Forget the politics, do the sums. Go electric, even in stages. I notice the same people who opposed all progress on energy for the past 20 years are now trying a new argument, that going electric is too expensive, a rich person’s hobby. Rubbish. We’re now about $200 per week better off after installing solar, and switching to hybrid vehicles. You can get solar with an interest-free loan, no money upfront at all. Most solar systems pay for themselves inside 5 years, leaving you with a huge ROI. Later this year we’ll likely add another battery to the system, to use even more of the free energy available. But it’ll look like the picture, an ordinary electric hot water heater. 20-30% of your energy bill is hot water. It’ll pay for itself in about a year. Free hot water. Cutting gas off from the house entirely, including the daily supply charge. Then over a 5-10 year lifespan, we’ll cut even more costs by shifting to full-EVs, and charging them whenever possible from home solar. Almost free motoring.

I doubt Tony Abbott knows how to boil an egg. 'Genuine science', hilarious. Notice he's using the new strategy I talked about, pretending to be a champion for the poor. Thankfully the basic engineering and economics of electrification will sweep all of these pig ignorant blowhards into a long-deserved oblivion.

More new EV models. 600km range (enough for about 3 weeks of motoring for the average Oz driver), costs about $36 to 'fill'. Estimated launch price here around $70,000. You'll save at least $20,000-$25,000 in fuel over 5 years owning one of these, and have nearly zero maintenance costs, which effectively makes the car cost less than $50,000. (It will also smoke whatever car you're currently driving.) One of the reasons EV prices have been higher in Oz is that we've had no vehicle emissions standards (one of only 2 countries in the world, the other is Russia). It's meant world car manufacturers have dumped all of their rubbish on us, the cars no other country would take because they have vehicle emissions standards. That's being fixed now, which will drive EV prices down even further. It's also made Australian fuel some of the lowest quality in the world, because it didn't have to meet any emissions standards. Why our fuel seemed so cheap, relative to other options like EVs. It's a con.

Jafari said every electric vehicle in Australia is sold out, and that they’re “often sold out within hours of being made available to the Australian market”. “Demand far outstrips supply, Australians are lined up ready to buy electric vehicles,” he said.

It’s so exhausting for societies, countering the relentless propaganda put into circulation by those who do very well out of the status quo. Another common bit of spin is that we can’t shift to EVs because there aren’t enough of the minerals and other materials to create all of the batteries. It’s another lie, and already factored into the engineering of the shift. Keep in mind that the vested interests who come up with this constant diet of propaganda have spent centuries extracting way more of every possible resource than was sustainable, without blinking an eye. It’s self-serving crap. If you’re somebody who gets this information from YouTube and other social media and online sources, just stop it. You’re being played like puppets, suckered into being the ones who ‘really know’ what’s going on by laughable conspiracy theories.

I see quite a few people refer to John Campbell’s videos on YouTube when minimising the dangers of Covid. Campbell is an ex-nurse. If you look at Campbell’s bank balance, you can see what’s really going on. Like all the Covid minimisers, there’s big money in posting bullshit on YouTube and then monetising the likes. It’s the same business model all the climate denial stuff online uses, post utter nonsense but targeted to attract a large number of likes. Then monetise the likes. Most of it is posted by people who don’t even believe the stuff they’re posting, it’s purely about money.

Happy Birthday Nige! How's the planning for early returement?

People would say over and over that house prices wouldn’t crash in Australia. They said the same about Bitcoin. And magic beans. Between 800,000 and 1.3 million Australians are currently sitting on a fixed rate mortgage that will expire this year. Carnage.

'House prices always go up long-term'. Just to add to a discussion elsewhere. They don't. The only time they do is when they become a Ponzi scheme, driven by enormous personal debt. Then the whole lot explodes. Like every speculative market in the history of the world. You can't beat the exponential curve.

This should be interesting.

I love Douglas Adams’ observation, sharing the same idea as Steve Jobs, that if you’re calling something ‘technology’, you’ve already failed. It should just be something that works without anybody even noticing.

What I said all through this wave turned out to be 100% true. Including that National Cabinet and the CMO were flat-out lying to us. To me it’s important to close the loop on the things I say here, because maybe people think i exaggerate and make things up. 4 million infected, 2600 dead. In 3 months. If you’re an employer and your negligent actions lead to the death of one employee, you’ll go to jail. Same if you’re driving and kill somebody. 4 million infected over Christmas. 2600 dead. Neither the Minister or CMO will suffer any consequences, nor will National Cabinet.

Another corporate ‘team building’ exercise. The people who run and order these are on 6-figure salaries. Indistinguishable from a preschool classroom.

My honours year in engineering was research on these superconductors. Great that they’re now at least at liquid nitrogen temperature. You don’t need to replace the whole grid with them, just key sections. Engineers could save the world, if we could just get the politicians out of the way. The longest-lasting empire in history was the Romans. And what was the centre of their empire? Engineering. This is much more than just about building stuff, engineering is a social thing as much as a technical thing. Many of the most successful companies in world history were run by engineers. It’s a way of organising people, as much as building things. Google is run by engineers. Apple too. Dyson. General Electric (which came out of Thomas Edison’s work), Rolls Royce, Tesla. Etc.

Happy Birthday :)

In the eternal battle of who feels too hot and who feels too cold in the workplace, you have to default to making the people who feel too hot more comfortable. The people who feel too cold have a range of easy measures to use to feel warmer, like dressing more warmly. Those who feel too hot have nothing. In my experience this is the opposite to the decision made in most offices. The 'too cold' crowd make the loudest noise and are the most intolerant of discomfort.

The dog v cat person thing. I like both animals. But from working in local government, I can say there are 100 complaints about dogs for every complaint about a cat. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a complaint about a cat. Everybody loves THEIR dog. They're not often as keen on the one next door or over the road. It's all very territorial, dog-ness. The dogs are, the owners are.

The people who scour YouTube and other online forums looking for reasons to deny the emergency of climate change need to spend a day with the road crews in local councils. Humans have zero chance of surviving dramatic changes to the climate, it’s not just the big picture stuff like global cities underwater. Right now nobody can afford to do even basic roadwork. I don’t think most have any idea of the scale of the disaster happening out there, already now.

While societies collapse under the weight of multiplying disasters, meantime the thing that exercises the minds of the latest generation of kiddults is the apparently outrageous assertion by JK Rowling that only biological women menstruate. Meantime trans-‘women’ wander through girls’ changing rooms in the UK with their dicks out, in front of young girls. The tide will turn on this bullshit. If society survives long enough. Trans-theory is one of the first examples of how social media bypasses all of our existing institutions, allowing compete fantasies to shape every part of our lives without even the most basic tests of reality.

Beautiful drone shot from the ABC, showing a dingo patrolling the dingo fence. Worth reading the article, how the landscape on the dingo’s side of the fence is much richer and healthier than the barren wasteland of the sheep grazing land on the other side. The Americans discovered the huge impact on the landscape when you return apex predators to them too. One of the reasons cats have caused so much damage to wildlife, is this fencing out of the dingos, who would previously eat them. They also eat foxes. And just about all attacks on sheep are not ‘wild local dogs’. It’s dingos, some still get through. Domestic dogs don’t have the capacity to live in the wild.

Yep. And there isn't a Plan(et) B. Ignore everybody who doesn't believe in climate change being an emergency. There isn't time to engage in their silly debating points, which are drafted by comms teams in fossil fuel companies, and then broadcast 24/7 on social media as propaganda. Usually they sucker people with honeypot dark conspiracy theories.

If you already own an old-style hot water heater (a 'resistive' one that heats the water like a jug does), the government will pay for it to be upgraded to a fancy heat pump version, worth thousands of dollars. Example below. Will cost you just over $30 in total.

Same workplace I shared the other day (doing jigsaws). Today's team-building exercise is making rice paper rolls.

I’m somebody who loves to try new chip flavours. This one will test me.

Drove the new M8 yesterday. It was very pleasant, freeway driving all the way from Penrith to the Eastern suburbs. The thing with these mega road projects though is that they ignore that what creates traffic is roads. The bigger the road, the bigger the traffic. Supply creates demand. The same thing happens with dams and water. Building bigger dams (more supply) creates a greater demand for water. It’s worse than a zero sum game. The gains are always temporary.

Come and work in childcare. We’ll pay you less than a kid working at Maccas, let you get Covid 4 times a year, and throw in some other bonus viruses if you sign up now. People do know society is falling apart right in front of them, right? They have eyes?

Happy Birthday Belly!

Australian cricketers today are multi-millionaires. We’d have been better off sending the local under-8s to India this week. The ground was also almost empty, which is staggering for India. The whole sport now driven by IPL dollars, which is making the players rich, destroying the public support for anything except bash-cricket, and swamping us in far too many pointless and boring games.

A brilliant idea. The current idea is ‘business is charging far too high prices, so we need to bankrupt ordinary Australians so that they can’t afford to pay those prices, and business will then drop them.’ (That is literally what they’re doing, it’s crazy stupid.) Instead, just change the level of compulsory super to increase it in inflationary times, and decrease it when there’s little or no inflation.

Isn’t the economy grand.

2-month old baby rescued in Turkey. Was buried for over 5 full days. Melt.

So many Australians are either already in dire financial trouble, or are about to be. All because of a handful of absolutely ridiculous ideas, which Ian Verrender exposes here. Ideas which people with a modern training in economics think are common sense. The ideas are batshit crazy.

The disaster that people won’t speak about. Look at the collapse in student attendance in schools, driven by mass infection and illness from Covid. Only 42% of Australian kids were at school for more than 90% of the time, in Term 1 2022. That 90% figure is one educational researchers use to assess whether absences are damaging your education, it’s thought that being away more than 10% of the time is when that damage happens. Absences starting to snowball again already now, in 2023. Something has to be done, we can’t keep infecting an entire generation and their teachers, over and over, with a lethal virus. And don’t think it can’t get worse, in the UK when this happened, they used punitive measures to force kids and teachers to come to school while sick. There are already mumblings about doing that here. This is also what’s driving Covid into the community, so we can’t control it. It’s in all of our interests that this idiocy stops, because these infections eventually reach all of us. Some of us will become chronically sick, perhaps for the rest of our life. Some of us will die.

Oil companies are laughing at us. Rolling in oceans of money, while they send petrol prices north of $2/litre. There’s only one way to stop them. Go electric.

In South Korea, some stores package their bananas in varying degrees of ripeness, so that one becomes ripe each day, rather than half or more of them going brown and soft before you get to them.

Nearly 3 times as many Australians died from Covid in 2022, as died at Gallipoli.

There have been over 1000 people in hospital with Covid in Australia every day since December 27, 2021. Health care workers are probably nodding. We're using them as slaves to (we think) keep an economy running. An economy is just people. Make them sick, you have no economy.

The ridiculous tax on electric vehicles will be fought in the High Court starting this week. At a time when Australia and the world desperately need to shift to this technology, taxing it is, as the headline says, one of the most stupid policies imaginable. It always was a populist grab for the petrol head vote.

One aspect of cost of living that isn’t spoken about as much is financial illiteracy. Many people in their 40s and 50s still manage their money the way they did when they were 17. Using my favourite example again, of cars. On average people in NSW spend $43,000 on a new car. They keep that car for 6 years, on average. But the cost of a car goes well beyond the day you buy it, you have to factor in the costs of fuel, maintenance etc. Fuel will cost on average about $5000 a year (more in regional areas). Add an average $500 a year on maintenance, and at the end of its 6-year life with the owner its total cost is already nearly $80,000. About double what the owner paid for it originally. It’s a bit like those who say they make a motza buying and selling houses, and leave out the hundreds of thousands in interest repayments to the bank, and maintenance and renovation costs. Ultimately, and it’s not always a popular message, the real route to long-term wealth is always saving. Not investment. Individuals saving, society saving. Investment (in the big ROI sense) is based on exponential growth functions that aren’t sustainable. Even basic compound interest on a bank account is exponential growth.

The federal government heavily subsidises the use of diesel fuel. The public money it spends on doing that could buy 125,000 Australians a free Tesla EV every year.

When a commercial plane flies, it occupies an area in space. But it also occupies an envelope of time. A schedule. This spaces planes out to allow them all to fly as quickly and as safely as possible. This is a key function of speed limits on roads too. A speed limit isn’t just there for safety, it’s designed to spread cars out, so they won’t all bunch up and form traffic jams. ‘Jamitons’ (read the article), they’re fascinating. The thing that frustrates me most on the roads is that so many won’t follow the speed limit. Always either too fast or too slow. Both types of driver create traffic jams, by closing up gaps and this then cascades to other cars. As the article says, the increasing use of automation in driving will help fix this, individual human drivers are too stupid to do it.

A variation on people not following speed limits, is people speeding up when overtaking lanes start, to stop people passing them. Just incredibly stupid and annoying behaviour. And HUGE numbers of people do it, despite the huge numbers also saying they find it annoying, which suggests to me a pandemic of lack of self-awareness. It's some sort of pathetic ego thing, that you can't let anybody overtake you. A woman in a Mercedes this morning did this to me. I was overtaking her, with cruise control on (so she was below the speed limit), and then suddenly she swerved in front of me to prevent me overtaking her, which is even worse than the people who just speed up. I shifted to the left lane to continue overtaking her, and she sped up and blasted the horn. Roads and cars are the stupidest places in our socieites.

🤔

Approaching the time when the fake prosperity of the last 30 years will be exposed for exactly what it was. A bubble created by astronomical amounts of personal debt. It’s what kept people voting for the politicians who were actually destroying society, stripping away every collective protection and investment.

It took decades for public health to make inroads against smoking. Big Tobacco has now reversed a lot of those gains in only a handful of years, with vaping. At epidemic levels in the young, exactly the demographic they were targeting.

Nissan has come up with a new type of very interesting hybrid. Instead of the petrol and electric motors working together, the petrol motor only functions as a generator for the electric motors and battery. This gives people an EV driving experience, because only the electric motors are driving the wheels. Toyota does this a bit with its hybrids as well, the petrol engine sometimes acts as a generator too. And the electric motors also sometimes drive the wheels by themselves. But it also drives the two motors together (so well that most of the time you don't notice). Nissan wanted people to have a full EV driving-type experience, so has used a different approach. (Testing suggests the Toyotas are still more efficient.)

If you've had a bad day, it could have been much worse.

People never worry about range with petrol and diesel cars, because we have service stations in most places. But check this: - there are 7000 service stations in Australia - Australia has over 20 million vehicles - that's almost 2900 vehicles for every service station - I've never queued behind 2899 vehicles to get fuel - i.e. we need far fewer 'stations' of any kind than we might think. Somehow those other 2800+ people manage to coordinate their weekly fuel use without all arriving at a service station at the same time. Now, check this: - the average Oz car travels less than 40 km per day - EVs use 0.2 kW per km - that's 8kW of charging per day, if you topped up daily - 8kw is easily charged from a home power point (cost about $2.40) - there are over 10 million homes in Oz. So 7000 petrol stations, versus 10 million service stations for EVs. Already. Without them having to build a single charging station. To finish with the cost of cleaning up petrol stations coming to the end of their lives, even without EVs. Currently estimated at nearly $7 billion. This isn't rocket science.

Here’s a tip. Not catching Covid gives even better protection.

It’s hot out there today. Got 4 air conditioners and a dishwasher running. Cost = 0. In fact making money, back to the grid. Battery charged ready for more free power tonight.

How what you hear is shaped by what you read at the same time. Try it.

If you watch a person walk from ground level, you almost certainly won’t notice it happens by our bodies being a twisted, spiral pair of muscular sheets, running the full length of our bodies. When you look at somebody walking from above though (or running), you can clearly see how each step is the body twisting from one side to the other. And because nearly all of us use one side (left or right) more than the other, the twisting ends up more heavily focused on that side of our bodies. That creates tension in our bodies, they tighten up. Because the twist is uneven, from one side to other other. Even in sitting or standing it’s this twisted pair of sheets that supports us. So all the ‘bad backs’ and other tensions and stiff bodies we try to fix with stretching, are really just unbalanced twisting. We need to de-twist, de-rotate, to fix them. The *whole* body, not parts here and there. Laying in a semi-supine position allows the body to de-rotate, to unwind. 15-20 minutes of that per day or even more, and you’ll notice profound changes.

Sting in Sydney this week (I didn’t go). He sounds his 71 years, this is a really flat rendition of that song. Almost embarrassing.

Life is a high school (not an analogy). If you think back to where each person (including yourself) sat in the social hierarchy of school, track just how often people retain this same status throughout the rest of their lives. Outsiders usually remain outsiders. Queen Bees and Prom Kings usually stay that in their jobs and adult social lives. Followers remain followers, bullies stay bullies. More than anything else in school, that’s what you learn. The social structure, and how the different roles ar expected to interact with each other. None of it is explicit teaching, but it’s the dominant thing learned in schools. We then take that and use it to build adult life too. It’s almost impossible to escape it. Try observing your work and adult life more generally through that filter, nothing will ever look the same again.

Paul Keating introduced mainstream super to Australia, because he saw it as a way to transform who holds wealth in our society, towards working people. So far it’s working. Super is the greatest financial nest egg we have, and it’s held largely by ordinary people. A first in history. Which is why the LNP hate it with a passion, and let people raid it earlier in the pandemic, a disgraceful act. It’s not ‘our money’ (as they like to say), it’s mostly funds from our employers and the taxpayer (through massive tax concessions), to go towards our retirements. Allowing people to use it to live and to buy goods and homes is a complete bastardisation of the whole idea, designed to destroy it. Brought to you by the moral-free bastards we voted out.

The theories I agree with, that suggest most of our chronic diseases are actually caused by infections, continue to grow in strength. Be vaccinated for everything you qualify for a vaccine for. Including an annual flu shot. And shingles. And every Covid shot you qualify for. The same research shows that being vaccinated for one disease can help you against multiple others. I posted before the dramatic data showing the reduction in heart disease and heart attacks in people who get an annual flu shot.

This current obsession that kids are almost invulnerable to disease is less than a century old. Before that most kids died before even reaching adolescence. Be a person who speaks out about us now reversing this, to deliberately infect kids, over and over, with a novel virus. We should be utterly ashamed.

Saw a small amount of Q&A last night, with the LNP spokesperson rabbiting the slogan ‘it’s your money’, about super. It’s your money in the same way the aged pension is your money. Yours when you reach a legislated age, 60+. Not yours before that. Most of it is actually invested by your employer, and concessionally taxed by the taxpayer. In no way at all is it ‘your money’, before retirement age.

I feel people would eat more vegetables if we were as creative with them as Asian cuisine is.

All following the exact timeline I often post about here. We have more than a decade of criminal inaction to catch up on. If that work had been done we’d all be looking at huge drops in energy prices by now. Home solar and battery is a type of insurance policy against the coming disruption.

Getting my 5th Covid shot tomorrow. Was amazed that some people haven’t even had a 3rd. If you’re unsure, this graph may help.

Where the idiot UK government goes, we follow. They’re desperately short of workers there, first due to the stupidity of Brexit, and then Covid. The idiots assumed older workers had just retired, and had slogans ready to go to get them back to work: ‘get off the golf course.’ Except there are fewer retirements than before the pandemic. Hardly anybody can afford to retire in the UK under these clowns. What they found left them ‘gobsmacked’ (because they’re idiots, I may have mentioned). Over 350,000 of those older workers are now too sick to work again. Living with the virus, this is where it leads. Societies falling apart.

The Rocks, Sydney. 123 years ago.

Venice’s canals have run dry for the second time in 3 years. We know why, we just don’t want to admit it.

This is the profile picture of a senior manager, seen on Linkedin. (Some people here may know him, I won’t identify him.) It caught my eye because while digitally altering your face is now rife, with filters on social media, it’s the first time I’ve seen it so blatantly used in a full work environment, for public consumption. Something is happening to us, and I don’t think we’re paying attention.

I don’t like over-ripe fruit. I like fruit to be firm, even crunchy (like a good crunchy pear). Eating a super-ripe piece that dribbles down your chin - gross. The same for bananas, once they start to get really ripe and soft, yuk. I like them just on the cusp of ripeness, still a bit firm. And yellow peaches at that same firm ripeness are heaven. Who refrigerates bananas? I find (the South Korean example I posted the other day) that you buy a bunch and by the time you get to the second half of it the banana is soft and mushy and gross. So now I refrigerate one half of every bunch I buy, if the shop only has bananas of similar ripeness. It makes the skin go brown or black, but the fruit stays firm. (Some people refrigerate in containers without the skin for that reason.) Over-ripe fruit is also chock full of sugar. Fruits in our history were generally much lower in sugar than what we eat now. Crab apples, some may remember.

I'm not a spelling or grammar Nazi. But I can't stand this one any more. It's LIGHTNING. Which may cause lightening.

Hybrid update, our Kluger. Latest fuel consumption figure is 4.8L/100km. For a 2.3 tonne 7-seater car. That's with majority highway driving (Lithgow-Bathurst), which is actually less efficient with a hybrid because you need to use the petrol engine component more. So even lower, for the in-town bits, sometimes sub-3s. And the highway is a very hilly road, so the figure would be even better for flatter terrain. Beautiful engineering. (For the petrol heads, the hybrid and the V6 Klugers have almost identical power output. And the hybrid easily out-torques any V6, with the electric motors front and back.)

Even FOX News in the US would struggle to match this rousing patriotism from a Russian MP, singing the praises of Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles. (And I can’t help it, sub-titlers - there’s no such word as ‘hinderance’, though I guess you’re at least using your phonics.)

Maybe we could all give up Covid for Lent?

20 today. A force of nature, then and now.

Australia will be a laggard on this, like it has been on just about everything else for the last 30 years.

The Bathurst begonias are stunning again this year. I know pretty much nothing about begonias, not a flower I’ve ever had much to do with.

45 dead from Covid this week in NSW. Two were under 9 years of age. *crickets*

The share of Australians in 2019-20 with a super fund above $2m was just 0.5% – 79,540 people. That 0.5% make up 12% of all superannuation funds held. They’re using it for tax evasion.

In the UK, there’s now a national shortage of fresh vegetables. The minister in charge has told those complaining to ‘work harder’. Because we’re all paid in vegetables. No, we just elect them.

Latest Lithgow-Bathurst drive in the big hybrid Kluger - 4.7L/100km. I mention it again because one interesting geographic fact that takes many in both Bathurst and Lithgow by surprise is that Lithgow is about 300m higher in elevation than Bathurst. And you can see it directly in your fuel consumption, downhill on the way to work for me, and uphill on the way home. So 4.7L/100km on the way to Bathurst, about 5.7L/100km on the way home. It's Bathurst that's in a 'hole', not Lithgow.

The Rolling Stones still tour regularly. But they haven't recorded an album in 18 years. Elton John of course is constantly on the road, though his last album was 7 years ago. Genesis did a tour in the last couple of years. They haven't recorded an album in 26 years. Fleetwood Mac - 20 years. At the same time many of these acts are selling their back catalogues for hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a big gravy train fed by ego and money. People blame streaming for making young acts struggle. I think we can see who's vacuuming up most of the music customer dollars. As that generation is doing in all walks of life.

More than 11,000 people die each year in Australia from diseases caused by the breathing in of vehicle exhaust emissions. And yet people still cheer on crap petrol and diesel technology, which not only kills them, but bankrupts them at the bowser. Money that nearly all ends up overseas, in the pockets of Texans and Arabs.

This is the problem I've posted about a lot. We have oodles of 'supply'. We just can't get it anywhere, because we didn't build new transmission lines in the past 10-20 years. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/24/australian-renewable-energy-struggles-to-hit-grid-with-one-solar-farm-wasting-half-its-yearly-output