March 2023

Solar energy is now already the largest source of electricity in Australia. And it's growing faster than ever. Most of the energy powering your home is coming from the panels you see on other peoples' houses and from solar farms, not from power stations. Want the best investment for your money? Installing solar will give you a minimum 10% return per YEAR, and easily over 20% in many situations. Try getting that anywhere else. Great for cash flow too, if you need a loan to get solar, you might pay off $10/week, and make $30/week in saved electricity. You're $20/week ahead.

The revolution happening right under our noses. And has been for years. You wouldn't know it listening to social media or the news.

If you were feeling sorry for anybody with $3 million in super, here's the breakdown of their MONTHLY income, for life, if they were to retire today: Age 62: $18,962 Age 65: $19,910 Age 70: $21,461

Anyone?

I’ve never watched MAFS, but is it: - they actually marry strangers at the start - then do everything they can to get them to cheat on each other immediately, and - film the jealous reactions? Is that the whole show?

The longer term chronic impacts of Covid are well underway. We can’t positive think our way out of them, or define them away. The definition of a pandemic is based on number of infections, not severe disease or hospitalisations or deaths, as politicians say. Until we stop the tsunami of infections, we’ll never leave the pandemic. And societies can’t survive living in a pandemic, no matter how much they may be ‘’over it’. Like reality gives a shit about how we feel.

🤔

Lovely exponential curve. Not even the pandemic slowed the momentum much. You can be on the wrong side of this history, it'll just mean costing you a lot of money and pride. And think about the benefits: - no more engine noise - cars with a lot more grunt - cities with clean air - Australia is $50 billion a year richer - Australia is never reliant upon anybody else for energy, again - every house becomes its own service station - virtually zero servicing needed on your car - your car will last years longer - upgrading your car will be mostly just downloading new software - cars will be a massive battery storage supply for the whole country. And for the range anxiety types, just remember the average Australian car travels less than 40km per day.

Range is a concept that makes sense for petrol and diesel vehicles, they were designed to have longer range not just for longer trips, but because we didn't want people having to go to the service station every day. Service stations cost billions to build and maintain, and then decommission. There are only 7000 service stations in Australia, for 20 million vehicles. And most people travel less than 40km per day. For an EV, you don't even need a service station. You can charge every day, at home. It's a top-up rather than a fill-up model. For longer trips, there will be EV charging stations, but what many don't know is that there are nearly half as many of those already in Australia as we have petrol stations. Over 3000. And unlike petrol stations, most people won't need them, for everyday driving. So we'll need a lot less of them.

Even the Americans are seeing it. The 'range' issue is just another distraction, absolute nonsense. It makes the cars heavier and much more expensive as well.

Paul Toole, the member for novelty cheques. Not even a business case for this fantasy, in true Nationals pork-barrelling style. It won’t happen in our lifetimes, it seems pretty certain.

The range of a horse and cart was way beyond what the cars and trucks that replaced them could offer. Unpacking the slogans and spin that now dominate our lives, nobody said ‘I can’t buy a car, what about the range?’ back then. Here’s a fun fact about cars. The fuel efficiency of cars hasn’t changed in over a century. 20 to 30 miles per gallon, in the old measure, is standard for a petrol car today, and was in the 1920s as well. (For those interested in the engineering it’s called the Carnot limit, the maximum efficiency of any internal combustion engine is 37%. Most don’t get above 20%.) An EV easily does more than 100 miles per gallon, if you convert to energy used. A petrol or diesel achieves its range by taking a fuel source with a huge amount of energy, and then converting only 20% of it to actual motion. 80% of that energy goes out the exhaust, as pollution. It’s criminally wasteful. Over 11,000 Australians also die every year breathing that pollution in.

Still a goodie.

Torque vectoring is sophisticated engineering that varies the amount of torque (turning force) going to the wheels of a car, depending on conditions. This means the car gets optimum grip and drive, because unlike a standard car where the power or torque is applied to the front or rear axle, and then you just have to hope the wheels will have enough grip to meet the conditions you’re driving in, with torque vectoring each wheel can be powered a precise amount to meet the exact conditions it’s facing. (Each wheel in any car will have entirely different forces acting on it, even doing something basic like going around a corner.) AWD cars are an outcome of this technology, modulating the torque to each wheel according to its current condition on the road. 4WD is a much less sophisticated thing that just drives all 4 wheels simultaneously. This is another way though that EVs will change driving enormously. Torque vectoring on an EV is about 10,000 times faster than on an AWD. Instant response to conditions, because you don’t have to modulate the power through a drivetrain and clutch. This produces insane amounts of grip and stability. You’ll be able to corner faster than ever before, and with more safety and stability to boot. Off-road driving will be revolutionised, because all 4 wheels can be independently torque vectored, and 10,000 times faster than any AWD. In fact the distinction between on-road and off-road driving will probably disappear. All EVs can be masters at both.

This is the $3.6 billion Tesla gigafactory in Nevada. This is a post about why I post about electric cars. It’s not just because I like them (though I do, I think people will wonder in a few years why we ever drove anything else). Tesla is not only the fastest growing car company in the world, it’s the fastest growing company of all time. The why is what this post is about. This factory makes batteries, and trucks. Largely as a result of this factory, Tesla is going to be able to make batteries that cost about 30% of what its competitors spend. It may destroy all of their competition, the battery is easily the most expensive part of an EV. Some analysts think even the largest car companies in the world like Toyota may collapse and cease to exist. EV growth hit a tipping point and fully electric vehicles made up 33% of all new car sales in Germany and the UK last year, up from less than 10% in both markets just 2 years earlier. Many industry analysts project countries being full EV by 2031. That’s less than a decade away. Every other major car manufacturer is scrambling to try to go electric. But they’ve left it very late, and Tesla is laps ahead of them. The reason Tesla is making astronomical amounts of money is really simple. They looked at the world a few years ago and said ‘hey, everything will go electric’. It was a no-brainer. And they built the technology to match that. The other car companies thought they could hang on with petrol and diesel. It may destroy them, they’re so far behind now. It takes huge investment and work to re-tool the car industry. I’ll post the specific economics of this argument in other posts. 20-30 years of denying climate change is likely going to destroy some of our biggest companies, and with them a big chunk of their national economies. A slaughter they could easily have avoided, except for lazy, dumb thinking.

Some of the details. Toyota may not survive, which is huge. It’s the biggest carmaker in the world, together with VW. German car makers are scrambling to go electric now to avoid the same fate. The transformation underway is much bigger than many realise.

Interested what people make of Nick Coatsworth and Greg Dore’s views here. They’re views I’ve heard a lot in this pandemic.

This is the first time in my memory that schools have closed in anticipation of a possible fire emergency. Must be a doozy of a weather event coming today.

The Tesla Model 3 is already significantly cheaper than owning a Toyota Corolla, over 5 years of ownership. (It has next to zero maintenance costs, and electricity is much, much cheaper than petrol or diesel.) The Corolla is one of the lowest cost of ownership cars in the world. But it's going to get even worse for traditional manufacturers, because the massive drop in battery prices Tesla is creating with its new gigfactory will feed into its new 3rd generation vehicle platform. See the 'next gen' bar below. Economics and engineering. Always follow the money.

And again, the people with actual skin in the game - the car companies - know. Read this to find out about the amazing innovation going on, in multiple dimensions. “Taking the skin off the Model Y, it was truly a work of art” said one Toyota executive. “It’s unbelievable”.

I am a broken record on this, but the changes happening are so interesting and so in contrast to the public discussion, I think it's amazing. Just look at that line. If you're a standard car maker, this is when you go out and buy the adult nappies.

I guess the 'let's manage for risk' people know their stuff.

Oops.

Got my second and final shingles shot today. The most painful thing about the whole experience was the cost, about $600 for two shots. But it’s a great investment. People have probably seen the research I’ve posted suggesting infections are the cause of nearly all of our worst diseases, including cancers and heart disease. Varicella Zoster Virus (VZV) - the chickenpox virus, that causes shingles too - is now thought to activate herpes simplex virus (HSV) in brain cells, from earlier in life. Which in turn is thought to possibly be a major cause of Alzheimers Disease. And shingles is also a heavy cause of heart attacks and strokes (as is influenza, why I always get a flu shot). You won’t even know you have many of these infections, you won’t feel sick. The virus lives in reservoirs inside you, sometimes for years, before activating again and creating these major diseases. One of the reasons I’ve been horrified for the past 3+ years that we’re deliberately populating every body in Australia and even the world, with SARS-Cov-2. Multiple times. The fact you might have a ‘mild’ illness is irrelevant. You’re letting the virus live inside you, likely for the rest of your life. We have no idea yet just how dangerous that will turn out to be.

The best way to save with health insurance is to not have it. Or just keep the extras, for dental and optical work. If we all decided to do that, tens of billions of dollars would be freed up again to spend on actual health care. The private health insurance industry is in terminal decline, because its product is rubbish, and will always be rubbish. It doesn’t ‘take the pressure off public hospitals’ either, as the spin always goes.

More power to the actuaries, who yesterday called BS on our euphoric ‘post-Covid’ 2022, the year of mass slaughter in Australia. We’re sleepwalking into an abyss.

There’s a genuine risk of stagflation this year. Like the worst of all possible worlds. High prices, high unemployment, nobody buys anything. It happened in the 1970s, when Big Oil formed a cartel to drive oil prices through the roof. (You can see their fingerprints are all over most things that are bad for us right now.) But it’s worse this time, because we’re also carrying astronomical levels of personal and government debt. And we’re in a pandemic. Positive thinking (i.e. no thinking, let’s be teenagers for the rest of our lives of fun times) won’t fix one piece of that disaster-puzzle. Be ready, get your debt levels down, avoid Covid, trim your energy and transport and groceries costs, try to make sure you have a secure job.

"The RBA is attempting to curb price growth by reducing the capacity of households to purchase goods and services, reducing demand and making it harder for businesses to hike prices more." Really worth reading that twice. We'll stop businesses raising prices, which is what's causing inflation, by bankrupting all of their customers, so the customers can't afford to buy anything. People who do economics degrees believe this stuff. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?

The 'NSW Government’s Stronger Country Communities program' is a vote-buying slush fund, as most grant schemes are. Government first strips essential funding, then hands it back in much smaller novelty cheques precisely targeted at marginal electorates and towns. Lithgow is the most marginal town in the Calare electorate, so gets a fair bit of slush.

This is a very useful, practical article (ignore the ‘Error’, the link works) that explains what a 10kW solar system can run in your home. 10 is large, many have less than that, but because the cost of panels has plummeted in recent years people are installing bigger systems. (Ours is 11.78kW.) You’ll pay it off in 3 to 5 years, at most (and you can get it on an interest-free loan anyway from installers.) And then have several decades of it making you money. It’s always better to go as large as you can afford, because it’s more expensive to add more capacity later. And with EVs becoming the dominant car form in the next few years, you can use the excess to charge your car as well.

FB is such a bizarre place. From it I know a lot about what my friends are doing. But I know almost nothing about what they’re thinking or feeling, about anything. I know a lot about what people are doing in their lives, but almost nothing about why. Nothing about what they think about the challenges in their life, facing themselves and society more generally. It’s like a novel or TV show where the characters are introduced, and then everything else is just a description of what they do every day. Not even any dialogue, the actors have no lines. I’m often told by people that they fear revealing their thoughts to others. Is that really true?

For Covid, we’re all that happy chicken.

Circus Oz was one of the best shows I've ever seen, of any kind. So grateful they're back, check them out if they're anywhere near you.

I use Tesla as an example for EVs, because they’re the world leaders. What they’re doing is remarkable in all sorts of ways we never hear about. For example a few years ago, they hired an ex-LEGO executive to head up their new Nevada gigafactory operations. There’s a very smart reason for that. LEGO is actually incredibly precise, within fractions of a millimetre, otherwise it wouldn’t work. And LEGO makes billions of parts every year, in automated factories. That takes enormously precise engineering. That’s the skills they hired the LEGO executive to bring to Tesla. But more than that, they way they build their cars tries to minimise the number of parts, because every part has to fit with absolute precision with every other. So they combine as many parts of the car into a single piece as possible. A modular appraoch (just like LEGO). And just like Apple do with laptops, creating a single formed/molded ‘unibody’ rather than assembling from lots of different parts. And it goes even further. They build the gigafactories themselves, using the same modular ideas. They can build a gigafactory in under 11 months. You can struggle to get a family home built in that time.

I said to my female colleagues "thank goodness yesterday is over, we can have 364 days of ignoring women again." (I have to duck when they throw things.) But the serious point to it is that we make symbolic gestures in response to chronic problems. "I Stand with Ukraine" also comes to mind. I'm not aware of that having made the slightest difference to a single thing happening in Ukraine. We don't have the first clue how to bring about real change any more.

Regional areas are expected to need another 11,000 GPs in the next decade. 50,000 teachers are also expected to leave teaching in the next TWO years. Try finding a tradie to do anything without waiting months. This day was always going to come, in an ageing population that funds those same aged people to a level that they are now the wealthiest age group in the community. That's unprecedented in history, that retired people are the richest people in a society. That money is money that should have been going towards education and training, and basic public services. Argue the point all you like, the social collapse is happening right in front of us. Show us where all these doctors and teachers are hidden.

The story of our increased life expectancy in modern times that isn't told as often. Nearly all of it is stopping children dying. If you got to adulthood in the past, you lived to almost the same old age as we do today. We'rte not living that much longer than we ever have, we've just stopped children dying. Particularly worth noting in a time when we're reversed the public health process that brought this about, by now deliberately infecting all of our children, repeatedly, with a pandemic virus.

Mazda’s MX-60 is a classy new hybrid. It’s also the most powerful car Mazda has ever built, showing again that the image of EVs and hybrids as somehow lower in ‘grunt’ is just ignorance. Almost twice the power of a BT-50.

Australia looks a better team with Smith as captain. More experience and cunning than Cummins. As for them breaking the world record for attendance at a Test match at this stadium, most of the seats are empty. Thanks T-20.

Two of Australia’s most popular cars. The Toyota RAV4 hybrid, and the Toyota Hilux. Get the Hilux for the bloke because of extra ‘grunt’ (scratch balls), and the hybrid for the missus. But *drum roll*…the RAV4 hybrid is more powerful than the Hilux.

The ultimate test of power (including towing) in a petrol/diesel vs a hybrid or EV, is to put the same vehicle up against itself. Want to guess who wins?

Had to take back roads home tonight, because of an accident on the highway. The way the car ate up those roads reminded me why hybrids are the ultimate car for driving, though they’re mostly seen as ways to save fuel. The torque curves for an engine show where maximum engine performance happens, which depends on revs. Red and blue graph typical petrol car. At low revs (i.e. from a standing start), very low power and torque. Whereas for an electric motor (green) torque is maximum right from 0 rpm, from stopped. Why EVs annihilate petrols/diesels in 0-100 times. But electric motor torque starts to drop away at higher revs (due to a back-emf), see the green line dropping. And this is why hybrids rock, because they use the EV torque at lower revs, and then blend the petrol engine in at higher revs to access that higher torque. Then the two feed into each other, the electric supplementing the petrol and vice versa. It makes the drive amazing, you’re in the peak power band the whole time, at every speed. Sports car makers like Porsche make their supercars hybrid for this reason. I talk about them a lot because my sense is the dominant perception of hybrids is as granny cars, good on fuel consumption but a bit puny. But nothing else drives like them, if you want maximum power at every moment. They’re monsters. None of that whining up through each gear to try to stay in the peak power band. You’re in it the whole time. And as a brilliant bonus, you’ll need hardly any fuel.

Good to see government funding new EV charging points in towns, including Lithgow. But we should electrify the whole town, everything. It would make it the cheapest place to live in NSW. We’re already a town with a long history with electricity. And a town at real risk of collapse, without something to market itself with.

It’s not about ‘greenies’. It’s about $$, and engineering. Why would anybody deliberately choose to spend thousands of dollars per year when they don’t need to?

Supercars may have a problem here. The racing worked best when drivers were driving highly modified versions of cars ordinary Australians drive. Hardly any Australians want to drive American muscle cars. Including nearly every Supercars driver they interviewed today. The cars are an oven, tiny cabins, super hot. An even bigger problem for Supercars may be that Chevrolet by all reports wants to discontinue the Camaro competely, from 2024. And replace it with (have a guess)…an EV.

“Recently, General Motors made news by announcing the retirement of the Chevrolet Camaro. Hoping to go all-electric by model year 2035, the manufacturer is in the midst of a huge company-wide transition toward electric vehicles.”

Trangie has no petrol or diesel. But it’s on the electricity grid. Simple solution staring right at us here, which not one person mentioned.

Next stage here at home of driving energy costs down will be replacement of all windows and doors with double-glazed uPVC versions. The windows in Australian homes have traditionally been rubbish, though at least most new builds now have double-glazing. Great not just for controlling heat and cold, but also sound, blocking 80% of noise. uPVC is a fantastic material too, much better insulator than metal frames, also better than wood, and require zero maintenance. Modern double-glazing is also much more secure, with the thick glass, and 5-fold locking mechanism on every window and door. Can also tilt them open.

70% of the average family’s energy bill is the fuel they put in their car. Petrol or diesel. You can see here that even if you use existing grid power, and switched to an EV or hybrid, your fuel costs for cars would be cut in half. Move to renewables and you cut the bills by two-thirds. That’s thousands of your dollars that you get to keep, every single year. (Note: this is when petrol was $1.42 a litre. It’s obviously much higher now. So the savings are even greater, to switch to electric.)

Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles and Mardi Gras. I still won’t do social events because the pandemic isn’t over. It not only isn’t over, it’s killing 20,000 people a year in Australia. More than 2500 dead in 2023 already. The infection you pass on to somebody else might end their life. We’re all responsible for these deaths, and for the chronic disability some are suffering as well.

Most countries have the same problems right now. Big jumps in cost of living, the need to reduce emissions. The problem is the solution. Dramatically reducing household energy use goes a long way towards fixing both problems. And it’s not inflationary, to make that investment. Smart governments would be subsidising this shift, right now. It would only take a handful of years. Everybody wins, and the savings would continue for decades. (Note: again these numbers were done when petrol was much cheaper, in reality many families are spending much more this amount per year just on petrol or diesel alone.)

Two previously very close friends ended up blocked by me on FB, because they were off with the ivermectin fairies. Deep into dark conspiracies of all kinds in fact, anti-vax, Fauci is the devil etc. Clinically paranoid. There’s more of that in the people around you than you may suspect.

Working for local government is a bit of a hiding to nothing thing. Everybody almost universally hates it, and treats you with contempt. The pay is some of the worst in the job market. And there’s no funding, to do anything, so the only way to try to keep basics running like water, sewer and local roads is to raise rates. The graph explains why. Vertical fiscal imbalance. The federal government historically gets nearly all of the taxing powers, for a variety of reasons that made sense at the time. But State and local governments now provide most of the services people use. And as you can see, they have no money. The feds are sitting on a mountain of it. What do they do with it? They give it away to mates in tax cuts. And buy nuclear submarines.

Just over two more weeks of getting up in total darkness, so some people can have barbecues after work.

Missed this when it first came out. It's a corker. Set in a small town, some of the people buried in the local cemetery suddenly crawl out of their graves and come back to life, good as new. From various times in history. Not just a supernatural thriller, though there is some of that. A lot of the gripping tension is the interaction with people in the community who knew them, discovering buried secrets, and everybody wondering what the hell is going on.

We can put people on the moon. But we can't do this one basic thing. A joke.

I wouldn't advise anybody to train as a number 6. They're going to need some in the transition, and some EV technicians, but it's a dead-end otherwise. California for example (twice as big an economy as Australia) is projecting 32,000 motor mechanics will lose their jobs there between now and 2040.

Happy birthday James :)

One of my interests well before Covid too, people probably remember. Clean air, which would also fix Covid. One of the greatest sources of this pollution in NSW, alongside cars and trucks? It’s in the article - wood heaters.

‘Keep my family out of it’ the Premier said the other day, when his brother was being investigated for shonky dealings. But a lovely puff-piece from the Peter Costello chaired Nine media? Of course.

Happy Birthday!

Australian data. A 2.5 tonne hybrid on average uses even less fuel (significantly less) than a motorbike. And unlike any other type of vehicle, you'll get maximum power across the whole rev range. The average petrol or diesel, when you convert their fuel to energy rather than litres, carries between 600 and 1000 kWh of energy, per tank. To do the same range, an electric motor uses 50-60 kWh of energy. Using energy as the metric, EVs have 10-20 times the range of a petrol or diesel.

That’s a pretty good bet.

In America legislation has been drafted to get rid of Daylight Savings. Both sides support it. As scientists say, the best thing is to return to permanent standard time, not permanent summer time (those are the two options when getting rid of the twice-yearly clock changes). Let’s listen to them, just for once. They understand what damage this is doing. If you get sick you listen to your doctor. “It is time to stop changing our clocks in the spring and fall, but making daylight saving time permanent is the wrong choice,” said AASM President Jennifer Martin. “The science is clear: Restoring permanent, year-round standard time is the best option for our health and well-being.”

Paul Keating made the excellent point today that countries are always conquered only in land wars. I don’t think there’s an exception. The idea the Chinese could sail an enormous armada of troops over 8000km of ocean to take over Australia is ridiculous. They’d be seen weeks in advance. Planes and missiles would sink the lot of them. The submarines are only being seen as missile launch platforms for the US in the Indo-Pacific, not for protection of Australia. And we’re planning to spend $368 billion of Australian money, to fund this handful of American missile platforms. Like throwing toothpicks at a mountain, as Keating also said.

This is *with* wholesale price caps. Those are only in place for a limited time.

Watch this space. Musk is a wally, but his company isn’t. They’re planning to decimate the traditional car industry. And those traditional makers will only have themselves to blame. Any fool knew EVs were the future, 30 years ago.

Beautiful Lithgow, as an example. There are over 10,000 households in Lithgow. Pretty much all of them own at least one vehicle, many own 2 or more. Average fuel price for a year is about $5000 per vehicle. That means Lithgow alone is spending 50-100 million dollars per YEAR, just on petrol and diesel. If the town were to electrify, including its vehicles, that money would stay in town. Right now it ends up in Texas and the Middle East. Imagine what Lithgow could do with an extra 50-100 million dollars per year. EVERY SINGLE YEAR, not just a one-off windfall. You want to see what sucks the lifeblood out of communities? Look in your driveway.

A trick people use is to suggest that going electric will take some enormous amount of minerals (which they imply either don't exist, or will cover the world in mines). Lithium is one of the key elements mentioned. Australia supplies about half the world's lithium, and should be able to make a fortune from it. Here's the basic fact that is never mentioned by the doubters (because they don't know it). The world needs about 2 million tonnes of Lithium per year. That sounds huge, but to put it in perspective, the world mines over 2 BILLION tonnes of coal each year. In Australia, we shift 5 to 8 BILLION tonnes of waste rock every year, just to get to the coal. Once coal mining is shut down, that leaves a hugely lower impact on the environment from lithium mining. And on top of that, unlike coal, lithium can be recycled from batteries. We won't need to mine millions of tonnes of it every year. The Tesla factories for example already include battery recycling as part of their process.

Recent engineering studies have realised something about our transition to full renewables. The grid as a whole only needs 12 hours of storage for us to go 100% renewables. To do that you install 150% of your usual energy needs, as wind and solar. Not 100%. That extra 50% removes the need for any long-term storage at all, of over 12 hours. (Adding extra solar and wind is very cheap.) It also means you have a huge amount (that extra 50%) of basically free extra energy to use, in sunny weather. How’s free sound, as an energy price?

Because of renewables, gas consumption to make electricity last year was 30% lower than it was just 5 years previously. In the next 4 years it's projected to fall up to another 66%. It's not a debate, it's engineering and economics. It's already happening, nobody is waiting for the debaters to reach a conclusion.

This will help with the tourism.

I’m convinced most high blood pressure is a combination of two things. The inability to measure it without involving the person being measured. And bad breathing. Bad breathing raises blood pressure. Most people breathe badly. How to breathe well? Stop trying to do it. Breathing is perfectly fluid and deep and measured, if you leave it alone. But we constantly interfere with the free flow of breath, by interfering with our bodies in general. We ‘hold’ our breath. Really that holding it in a vice is the tightening of our whole bodies, which are out of balance with gravity, and so muscles grip to keep you from falling over. The illusion that we’re constantly pulled down by gravity (gravity pushes you up, it doesn’t pull you down) causes us to try to hold ourselves up, and to make effort to do things, all day, every day. It tightens our entire bodies. And raises our blood pressure.

Police officer expressing solidarity with Nazi protestors in Victoria today.

The Lithgow Show fireworks are spectacular. Fireworks at regional shows are so much bigger and better than they were in my childhood.

Origin’s new scheme to try to get people to use less electricty in peak times. This behavioural approach has been missing in Australia, so good on them. If you use less electricity in those peak times, you get bonuses and rewards. Money for jam for us, we don’t use grid power at all, at any time of day or night. Maybe we will a bit in winter, will see.

On Thursday we set a new record in NSW. 7600MW of power was generated by renewables alone, in the mid-afternoon. On Thursday about 60% of the State’s total power was provided by renewables. That’s the majority of power used by NSW. Most of it came from ordinary rooftop solar, on people’s houses, feeding back into the grid.

Some call Queenslanders dumb rednecks. But hey, no Daylight Saving. And now this.

In the week of nuclear subs. A few years’ old now. They even got the amount almost exactly right, $400 billion. https://youtu.be/MTCqXlDjx18

I still remember when dual-cabs were invented, we had a few growing up. The thing about them, which I remember my dad talking about (as a builder) is that they’re not good utes. Trays are small and too deep for a lot of things. But they’re also not great passenger cars, they’re sprung as utes and cabin space isn’t great or very comfortable. They’re like the worst of both worlds. There are maybe only two cars in the top 10 that are good family cars. The big dual cabs and 4WDs in particular are also making roads less safe, they’re much more dangerous in collisions. Our car sales weren’t always like this, family cars used to dominate, year after year. Image and status have maybe taken over from functionality.

We’re destroying younger generations. Their health, their wealth. Our birth rate is so low we’re not even replacing ourselves. It’s difficult to get older generations (of which I’m one, only one year off being a boomer) interested in this. They won’t acknowledge this situation, to do anything about it. The whole of Australian life has been hollowed out, read the details in this article, we’re a quarry for rich foreign mining and energy companies. The piddling royalties we get are vacuumed up by older generations. We don’t build things, we make fake money by bidding up prices on houses. Mines make money, but most of it goes offshore, and the industry employs effectively nobody at a national level. We import nearly all of our energy, making Texans and Arabs rich.

Fiji shows how out of touch we are with the climate disaster underway. No debates there about climate change, they’ve already had to move 6 entire villages, to avoid the rising sea. Another 42 villages are listed to move in the next 5-10 years. Meantime we drive our gas guzzlers, fly on multiple recreational trips every year, and obstruct the desperately needed transition to renewable energy, repeating mindless slogans engineered to turn our brains off.

I re-post this occasionally because it doesn’t seem widely known. If you don’t like the taste of chlorine (often it’s chloramine used now, it lasts longer) in tap water, there’s a very fast and cheap solution. Crush half a tablet of Vitamin C into a benchtop water container like this one, when filling it. The vitamin C removes the chorine and chloramine instantly, giving you beautiful-tasting water. I’m a huge fan of chlorine and chloramine in water, you want that stuff in there as the water makes its way through the pipes, to kill any nasties. This is the fastest and cheapest way to remove it again for drinking. We use half a crushed tablet per 10 litres of water, you need hardly any.

I strongly advise you ignore everything economists and politicians say about inflation and general economic problems right now, and watch this instead. It will also be much more entertaining. Modern economics is a political strategy, not a field of study. As is the idea we live ‘in an economy’.

Thousands of experts in this area, have been saying the same thing for years. Disaster is imminent. Don’t listen to anybody who tells you otherwise, they’re a moron and standing in the way of salvaging anything from this train wreck. The time for pleasantries is over, this is an emergency, that we may not survive. If it offends you to be called a moron, stop being a moron. Problem solved.

Happy birthday to you :)

As a kid I remember wondering, why can cars do speeds that are more than twice the actual speed limit? Isn't that a waste of energy and engineering? And the answer is - yep. But they had to do it for a reason that isn't often spoken about. The torque in a petrol car is so hopeless at low revs, they have to vastly over-compensate for it by increasing the engine power hugely, so that people have any sort of acceptable acceleration at all. Meaning you also end up with top speeds that are more than twice what you actually need. Combustion engines are absolutely rubbish technology.

This is the only way to make a combustion engine a useful thing. Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive, a marvel of engineering. Using this, the power used by the driver is completely decoupled from the power source (mechanical or electrical), so that both motors can run in their optimum power ranges. There are 4 clutches, and the vehicle can operate anywhere on a continuum from full electric to full petrol, or any mix of the two. The system blends the two power sources for optimum power and efficiency, at every speed. Why hybrids are the best fun cars to drive, as well as being super-efficient. You get peak torque and power at every point of your driving. To make it even more efficient, they use an Atkinson Cycle petrol engine, which is high efficiency but low torque. The hybrid car doesn't need a high torque petrol engine, because it has the electric motors for that, which smash combustion engines out of the park for torque at low speeds.

Ths graph shows the cost required to extract fossil fuels, compared to the energy we get out of them. By 2024 25% of the energy we get from those fuels will be needed just to extract them. By 2050 that climbs to 50% - half of the energy we extract will be needed just to do the extraction. An exponential death spiral.

The Victorian neo-Nazis all went out and bought coordinated cute uniforms. They look like a male netball team. No lederhosen in sight.

The IPA is in our Central West communities right now, trying to drum up hysteria with mind-numbingly stupid propaganda. A really nasty, disgusting organisation.

The annual federal budget is like a religious ritual, in ‘the economy’. (Which doesn’t exist.) All that guff about balancing the books, and surpluses, and government debt. All nonsense, comparing a country to a household. It’s been a key way conservative politics has hidden its politics for decades, pretending it can’t do more to help the rest of us, because ‘the budget’ would be damaged.

I was 1 when humans landed on the moon. The thing that interests me much more about it now is how society has changed, since then. Look at the pictures of that day in 1969, people gathered around the handful of TV sets available, even in shop windows, to watch the moon landing. Society was collectively transfixed by the magnitude of what was being done, I think we’ve completely forgotten just how exciting and unprecedented it felt. Fast-forward to today. What major social projects excite us in this way? I can’t think of any. 70 years of replacing that whole idea of society aiming for collectively amazing things, with an ‘economy’, has broken it. Now we’re focused on ‘living our best (individual) lives’. And building our jobs and careers, again all individually-focused, inside that bloody economy. Middle-aged people, who should be leading the projects that excite humanity, are still obsessed with their favourite bands, and gigs, like teenagers. Imagine again the ‘moonshots’ we could aim for. Free energy, clean air and water for everybody, a 4-day (or even less) working week, beautifying our towns and cities, amazing schools and hospitals, etc. None of that is allowed, by the economy and its dreary budgets. It says it’s interested in those things, but it’s spin, all of them have gone backwards at rapid pace, in the past 70 years.

Volkswagen, the world’s largest car maker, is investing $200 billion in its electric vehicle strategy. This is one of its electric and hybrid factories. It wants 20% of its vehicles sold globally to be electric, by 2025. That’s less than 2 years away. Follow the money. Not the bullshit.

NASA climate scientist. He shoulda posted pics of himself on holidays. Then people would care.

Current projections (I think it will go even faster) say that half of cars bought will be electric, by 2030. Less than 7 years away. In Germany, the projection is 40% of sales by 2025, two years away. Here’s the current deadlines major manufacturers have set for themselves to end all petrol and diesel models. Note some of these big brands own lots of smaller brands as well. Jaguar Land Rover (2025) Volvo (2030) Mazda (2030) Ford in Europe (2030) Nissan (early 2030s) GM (2035) Daimler (2039) Honda (2040)

Shale Oil was mined near Lithgow for about 10 years, from 1940-1950. Shale oil is known as ‘tight’ oil in the oil industry, tough to extract and usually uneconomic. The extraction process uses a now famous method - ‘fracking’. For the past 10-20 years, world oil prices have been kept lower by the US reactivating its oil shale industry. The thing with oil shale though is that the wells quickly run dry, as happened at Glen Davis, and is now happening in the US, where production is about to fall off a cliff. The reason fracking has become such a big news item is that the oil and gas industry has been forced to use it, because all the easy resources are now gone. As I posted the other day, by 2050 half the energy extracted from these wells will be needed, just to do the extraction. The industry is in terminal decline.

Happy Birthday! Celebrate with a day of work ;)

One of the many objections to EVs that people throw up is that they can't work in more remote parts of Australia. In fact, as the Americans show here, they make even more sense there than in the cities. They save even more money than city EVs, in both fuel and maintenance. And many more people are on the electricity grid than have quick access to a petrol station, and some towns have no petrol or diesel already. And costs for those are often exorbitant, in remote areas. People are often suggesting there are no chargers out there. But they're thinking like petrol and diesel drivers. Most EVs are charged at home. For the handful of places that have petrol stations, you just need to add some chargers, not very many, for people travelling through. People already travel across the entire continent, with EVs.

That dip, the first in 70 years, should be treated as a national emergency. The 'living with the virus' dip. 'Just like the flu'. We had flu all the way along that line, it never caused a dip.

New windows underway. So damned sexy.

"I think it's very hard to leave a band, after a certain point. Because a band is like a teenage gang, it's like a street gang. You don't want to be in a street gang for the rest of your life, you can't mature, you can't explore...". Sting. I think the same applies to being a fan of bands, or any acts. Music can trap you in permanent adolescence, the teenage gang only exists in the context of its teenage audience. I don't remember my parents' generation talking about their favourite bands from their youth, into middle and old age. Or even going to see them at those older ages, none of them were still performing. Society has stalled, at adolescence.

No democracy sausages.

Like everybody else, I’ve travelled. But I’ve never, not once, really enjoyed it. Getting home was always the highlight of any trip. Of course there are things you can do on a trip that are fun, even wonderful, but it doesn’t take too many days (for me, anyway) to feel like what I am - a stranger, in somebody else’s place. Ungrounded. I look at the headlines leading into Easter and they’re all about the ‘stress’ of travel, which I think most people feel but simply deny. They may even lie to themselves about it. As a culture we’re not grounded, and we don’t even understand what that means any more. Our place is just an address to us.

This Haval piece does a good job describing the amazing best of all possible worlds of hybrids. Always thought of as just being about fuel efficiency, but actually the best type of car for performance too.

Newtown got it right.

I know people love discussing politics. On behalf of the 6000 people in NSW who died in 2022 because of the criminal incompetence of the outgoing Premier, good riddance. Anybody else would be in jail for the rest of their lives.

One for the ‘energy must be affordable and reliable’ folk. There have been blackouts in those months, didn’t even notice them. So there’s reliability. And Origin is paying us, we’re not paying them. So there’s affordable. I chuckle watching people pay thousands out of their own pockets every year, to defend slogans made out of hot air. The windows when done will slash another 30-40% off the energy we use in the house. It’s money for jam. A lot of the ‘cost of living’ is about how you live. Thousands to the energy retailer annually and thousands more every year to the Texans and Arabs for your petrol and diesel. Or your own energy system, great windows and a hybrid or EV. Choices. It cost us less to do than the average cost of renovating a kitchen and bathroom. If you’re also regularly eating $25 hamburgers and drinking $11 beers, and flying or cruising regularly to exotic locations to bother the locals, I’d say there’s more low hanging fruit there for picking. Frugality is actually about having more control over your own life. Our grandparents knew it.

Have been to Harvey Norman twice in two weeks to buy things. It was deserted, you could have heard a pin drop. I asked the salespeople how business was going, and they said terribly slow. The ‘economy’ is imploding. One of the main reasons I post about energy things so often, including electric cars, is that energy is one of ordinary peoples’ greatest costs. Nothing at all about ‘Greenies’, that has zero interest for me. It interests me as an engineer. Many are going to need every cent they can find. You don’t need to wait for governments to fix it, that will take years. You can do it inside 6 months. The changes won’t just pay for themselves, they’ll continue to make you money for decades.

Happy Birthday! I forget how old you are!

Happy Birthday :)

Why haven’t we had a 4-day work week for years already? Let’s do it.

Every 6 years the ABS analyses weekly household expenditures in Australia. One of the interesting facts to come out of it is that Australians spend as much or more on recreation and alcohol each week, as they do on groceries. They also spend more on their cars and transport every week, than on groceries. This data is now 6 years’ old, that number is now much higher again, fuel costs have more than doubled.

Look at the jump in transport costs for households, in the past 6 years. Nearly all of it the doubling of the price of fuel (see little bubble to the right). Over $20,000 per year, just to get around. That’s serious money.

Cars are a culture. And often a not very nice one. Look at car posts on FB, for example, of any kind (including about EVs), and you’ll always find that laughing emoji. When you open the comments, the people who post those emojis are nearly always snide, sneering petrolhead wankers. Driving is a fundamental shaper of modern societies, and its increasing intolerance and aggressiveness.

Really important article about the massive implosion of oil and gas underway. In the past 3 years, global supply has been saved by a huge push to frack in the US, their oil shale. 70% of new world supply came from those fracking wells. That supply is now already running out. There’s nothing to replace it. And prices are already $2/litre at the pump, *with* that extra US oil.

What people living in rural and remote areas do. A revolutionary game-changer for them, the most secure and cheapest energy supply they’ve ever had. Some have been doing this for over a decade.

Two messages. One, from the late James Lovelock, scientific genius, who helped NASA determine a way to detect life on other planets, and then used the ideas and technologies he developed to revolutionise climate science. “Enjoy life while you can.” He said this in 2008. Our time is nearly up, on his timetable. The other is from Saul Griffith, Australian engineer. Another genius, who knows the only way we might escape with our lives.

Trivia for those who still want to avoid Covid infection (aka people who want to live a long life). Air quality readings in take away shops with big extractor fans are often excellent. Any virus floating around in the air is being sucked up by the fans.

I know many who work in various bodywork and physical therapy disciplines. One overwhelming fact re-framed all of that, for me, as it can anybody who wants their body to function in extraordinary ways. Your body is already working at optimal coordination, or better it will be for any new activity, if you just let it be. Which means, if you feel pains and tensions and strains, it's not because you're not doing something right, like your posture or movement. It's because you're trying to do it at all. If you approach every tension or strain as an *interference* to an already perfect coordination, as the symptom of some 'trying to do' that you're up to, it will transform you. No need to try to get your functioning perfect - it already is. You're just misusing it. People can go for years, decades even, trying to *do* the right thing to get the right functioning. You can't escape that trap, because that perfect functioning is already happening. The strains and pains you're feeling are the perfect coordination OF you 'trying to fix your coordination'. It's a vicious, bottomless abyss. Flip it, and your default state will be just being in the world, perfectly coordinated. And then feeling any interference, from within that opened state.

If this had been electric vehicles, all the smirking petrolheads would be having a field day. Social media magnifies everything that’s stupid a hundredfold. For example an ordinary petrol car is 100 times more likely to catch fire, than an EV. But we’ve all seen the stories on social media about EVs catching fire. I even had to argue with an experienced insurance assessor about it, who was advising firms to take out extra insurance for fire if they got EVs in their fleets.

Good double-glazed (or triple-glazed) windows have Argon gas between the sheets of glass. The reason they do that is the high viscosity of Argon, relative to air (how ‘thick’ the gas is, how easy to stir or mix). Heat transfers through gases and liquids using convection currents, and the more viscous the gas or liquid is, the harder it is for these currents to form. If you’re having double or triple glazing installed, ask or look for Argon in the glass sheets.

Happy Birthday :)

A nice way to see the inefficiency of combustion engines is idling. An engine will easily do 1000 rpm while sitting at a red light, idling. The pistons in your engine are going up and down 17 times per *second*, while you sit there not even moving. But it gets even funnier, because technically the speed of that rotating crankshaft at 1000 rpm if translated directly to your wheels, would make you go about 120 km/h, if the transmission hadn’t decoupled the engine from the wheels when you stopped. But the car is just sitting there. The engine is competely gutless, at those revs. It has no power, even though the pistons are going up and down like mad, faster than your eye could track them. Why we need gears, like you do on a bike going up a hill. Try heading off from a red light in 3rd or 4th gear. The engine stalls, because it has nowhere near enough power to get you moving. Using an EV or hybrid though is entirely different. Electric motors give you maximum torque from 0 rpm. I sit at traffic lights listening to the cars around me idling, their cylinders flying up and down 17 times a second, chugging through fuel, and going nowhere. My car is competely silent, no motor is running. Then when the light goes green, the electric motors kick in and give me instant torque, pushing me back hard in my seat. While the cars around me rev like mad up through the gears, to get to the revs they need to produce any power. At the number of revs that gives combustion engines peak power, around 4000 rpm or above, if the crankshaft/pistons were connected to wheels directly, it would produce a speed of over 800 km/h. That’s how fast those pistons and crankshaft are spinning. But the engine is not producing anywhere near that much power, which is why you need a gearbox (transmission), to again stop you stalling, at those higher revs.

Happy Birthday Lily :)

I read things like this, and then look around me at how people are living as if nothing is happening, as disasters that could wipe out our entire civilisation carry on, with nothing being done. Covid the same. 20,000 Australians died of Covid last year, I don't think I saw more than 2 or 3 other people even mention it, here. I talk about these things because they're interesting, to me anyway. Not because they're positive or negative - they're neither of those things. They just are. Nobody is going to fix them for you. The 70 years after WW2 where we had nothing much but peace and prosperity is over. You will have to defend your life and that of your family in multiple ways. To be prepared. Much easier to do that now where the changes are just modifications of your lifestyle, rather than panic emergency action, as we saw in the last bushfires and floods. 'Living your best life' while ignoring these things means they will come and find you. You don't want that.

It's a shame Australia is increasingly moving towards the US in its culture, politics and tastes. Like the RAM. Americans (sorry my American friends) make almost universally rubbish cars. (We don't make any at all now, so you're better than us.) Huge clunking engines, and huge chassis that are super dangerous for everybody else on the road. A real 'fuck you' vehicle, libertarian politics sculpted in metal and oil. The fact easily the highest selling cars in Australia now are 'pickups' (as the US calls them) speaks volumes for the shift in Australian culture. Most of these cars aren't towing anything, or involved in any trade work. It's about an image. An American image.

In 2022, oil industry profits doubled to $219 billion. At the same time they hiked our fuel prices to $2 per litre, and they’re still there. And people fall over themselves to defend them, and drive the vehicles that keep them afloat. Not me.

This is how you lead. Enough of the bullshit.

I think Australia needs many more mines, and far fewer farms. This one though is using some of the water that Lithgow historically looked to in drought times, from the coal mines. Being piped all the way to Blayney. I think that’s a problem.

Paul Toole benefited from being in government for his time as member to date, showering his electorates with millions in novelty cheques, in true Nationals pork-barrelling style. It’s given him an aura of getting things done. Let’s see if that lasts, now the Nationals can no longer loot the State treasury.

I’m not sure if my posts are still being seen in the same way, this absolutely ludicrous platform put a restriction on my account because last year I posted a picture of Neville Chamberlain shaking Hitler’s hand, in a post about ‘appeasement’ and what it means. A serious historical topic, but this idiot platform uses algorithms and was triggered by the picture, competely out of context.

O dear. https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2023/03/30/supernormal-profits-network-largesse-pushing-up-electricity-prices-as-families-face-huge-squeeze/?utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020230331&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Adestra&lr_hash=

"More than three million households across Australia now own solar panels, with the time it takes for a 7 kilowatt (kw) system to pay for itself in lower power bills falling to a record low 3.4 years." The panels themselves are warranted for 20-25 years. More than two decades of pure profit, to you (remembering that profit is also the money you're no longer paying for electricity, not just what you get for selling back to the grid). And in that 3.4 year payoff period, your cash-flow will be better than it is now, you'll make more money from saved bills than you will paying off the system. Money for jam. Or keep paying thousands instead every year to support your favourite slogan, like 'when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow'. 🤪

thanks @[100030651427143:2048:Julia]