May 2023

Spot on. Both the gas and housing industries say the problem with energy, and houses, is 'supply'. Of course they're going to say that, it means them being able to sell more of what they offer. The problem isn't supply, we have plenty of houses, and gas. It's that a small number of people hoard all of the gas, and the housing.

This iceberg in Conception Bay (yep, it's a real place) in Newfoundland is attracting attention. The photographer lives in Dildo, Newfoundland (also a real place). Every detail of this story appears to be legitimate.

I'm not young, so no special pleading here. But the old better start making some effort to understand what's being done to young people. It's outrageous, and disgraceful.

One of the many advantages of semi-autonomous driving in cars is that they could be programmed to never allow driving like this.

Fun little tidbit in this story. The Tesla app allowed Kyrgios not just to track the stolen car, but also to slow it down.

Why battery software is as important as battery hardware. The home battery did this while we all slept last night, monitoring the weather and charging the battery to capacity from the grid, in case the severe winds forecast cause blackouts. If any blackouts lasted all day, it won’t matter, as the battery will re-charge from the solar when the sun is up.

I continue to share Covid things because nothing has changed, including the fantasy that it’s over. This research was for healthy people under 40, not people in aged care homes. Covid is a vascular disease, not a lung disease. It can attack your veins and arteries, anywhere, long after you’ve ‘recovered’ from even a mild infection. It’s why the number of deaths from strokes and heart attacks has skyrocketed, even in young people. And the effect gets worse over time, not better, it seems. The reason people won’t take this seriously is because humans act socially, not scientifically or even politically. They will do what they see everybody else doing. Violating that social behaviour is worse than death to them, to be the ‘odd one out’. Politicians know this, that if they stopped mandating things like masks, social conformity would quickly get rid of them. A mandate is a social tool, to give permission to go against the crowd. Not a political tool.

Nurses don’t think the pandemic is over. They take the brunt of the lives we choose to live, ignoring Covid. Like teachers, leaving in droves, with nobody to replace them. I saw a great rallying cry at one of the UK nurses strikes. Something like ‘if you think we’ll just give up and go away, you haven’t seen how long we can go without a pee’.

Driving a manual has been synonymous with driving enjoyment and skill for so long that I think it was forgotten there's only one reason cars had gears in the first place. Because their engines are gutless. They have no torque at low revs. Manuals will disappear completely. As will automatics. There will be no gears at all.

This is the greatest engine ever built. The Mercedes turbo-hybrid F1. The battery is on the right. Normal combustion engines run at a thermal efficiency (how much fuel energy they convert into movement) of 29%, max, road cars closer to 20%. This engine has a thermal efficiency of over 50%, it’s a massive engineering achievement. Mercedes were asked about where engine development will go from here: “Do you see a future for internal combustion engines which aren’t hybrids? No. I think there’s a beautiful partnership between high voltage hybrid systems and internal combustion engines, where they can help each other.” One of the highlights of my day is driving a hybrid 120km in a return trip to work. Not just because it cut my fuel bill so massively, but because of the incredible performance of the hybrid engine. Effortless power on demand, no gears, ‘drive-by-wire’ technology where the combustion engine and battery just create energy, which computers then transmit to the wheels through a hybrid transmission, precisely as you need it. Pure driving joy. I love to smoke petrols at red lights, listening to them revving the guts out of their engines in short bursts of acceleration with each gear change, trying to get to peak torque and power. While the hybrid creates maximum torque and power totally smoothly, at every speed, as they disappear behind me.

Good on LHS for being active here. And a wake-up for those who continue to act as if this thing is all over.

I posted before how the epidemic of heart disease in the 20th century is likely to have been caused by earlier infections, not diet. The Spanish Flu one likely culprit. Research now showing Parkinson’s Disease may be another disease that came from those infections. This is the appallingly stupid danger of infecting the entire population, multiple times, with Covid. Infection is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a body. Some Parkinsons patients for example have antibodies to common cold viruses in their cerebrospinal fluid. The common cold, something we laugh away as a sniffle.

Happy Birthday! 50 draws near :)

The older I get, the less driven I am by social life, 'living my best life', all the stuff that gets equated with having a good life. The things that drive me, that I'm passionate about, are understanding things, and using that understanding to solve problems. If you're not treading on toes in your 50s to break things that hold society back, you're not doing your job as a human being, in my way of thinking. Nothing is more interesting or fun. A phrase I've always hated is 'overthinking things', nearly always from people who never think about anything. You should have a degree of authority, knowledge and experience in your 50s that it's your duty to put to work. The young are too inexperienced and anxious to make waves. If 50-year olds aren't questioning and uprooting stupidity, we're all doomed. It's their job. And again, nothing is more enjoyable and challenging than tackling big problems, learning what causes them, and trying to fix them. Travel, parties, gigs - mostly boring for me now. That's a teenager's world. I don't want to be a teenager, in my 50s. I'm like a farmer who never leaves the land, or an artist who works until they're too old to keep going. That's what getting older and using your maturity used to be about.

The Hungry Jacks Double Whopper with cheese is the best burger in Australia. Says me. At less than half the price of a boutique burger at a hipster cafe or bar.

The Owen Magnetic Tourer. Probably the world's first hybrid vehicle. 1915. The technology lost without trace after that for more than a century, replaced by absolute rubbish petrol and diesel cars. Now hybrids are back. The greatest drivetrains ever made. Tragic that we wasted a century because of Rockefeller's cheap oil.

These 3 trucks are slugging it out in the big pickup category in the US. The RAM 1500 and Chevy Silverado are already on sale in Australia, and Toyota is contemplating selling the Tundra here as well to sit above the Hilux in their range. The RAM is a 5.7 litre V8, the Chevrolet a 6.7 litre V8, and the Toyota a V6 hybrid. Here are the power torque stats for the 3 cars: RAM 1500 - 291kW/556Nm Chevrolet - 313kW/624Nm Toyota - 325kW/790Nm The hybrid V6 easily the most powerful car, in a tug of war it would pull either of the others down the road. The fuel consumption is 11.7L/100km for the hybrid, and 20L/100km for the two V8s. Thr hybrid uses half the fuel, with way more power and torque. That’s the genius of them. (I also think all of these trucks are ridiculous, lethal penis extension machines that shouldn’t be allowed on the road.)

This is what the people who argue there isn’t an intergenerational problem pay no attention to at all. The massive costs now to maintain an ageing population. At the same time as that older population pays almost no tax, and holds most of the country’s wealth. The retired rarely paid tax, but what’s changed is that they never before now held most of the country’s wealth. At the turn of the century, only 20 years ago, there were 6.5 working people for every person who wasn’t (mostly the retired). Now we've got 4 working people for every retired person. In 20 years time, there’ll be 2.5 people who are working for every retired person. At the same time these workers can either not even afford a house, or are paying off unsustainable mortgages. Their wages haven’t gone up in well over a decade. Their HECS debts if they went to uni are skyrocketing because they’re indexed to inflation. They’ll have to pay for climate change action, after decades of inaction by older generations. The whole thing will collapse without dramatic change.

There's a fun story about the Toyota Tundra hybrid in the US, which explains why we've been so slow to see hybrid utes here in Oz. Unlike the V8 competition gas guzzlers there, the Tundra makes almost no noise. (While kicking their butts with power and torque, using half the fuel.) A bit like the F1 cars now that replaced the old V8s in racing. To make it attractive to many of the people who drive these cars, Toyota had to add pretend engine noise *inside* the cabin, so the driver feels like they're driving a 'grunt' car. It's played through speakers. The dominance of utes in Oz has nothing to do with people needing utes to do any work. It's a status thing, a 'grunt' thing, an image. Some people need utes obviously, but the majority of utes sold rarely do any ute work at all. That's why we haven't seen a hybrid ute here yet, because it might upset the 'grunt' image. I posted here before, even a Rav4 hybrid, a 'girl's car', has more grunt than its Hilux stablemate. It's totally divorced from any reality, hybrids are the most powerful (across the whole rev and speed range) and sophisticated engines you can buy.

Another busload dead this week. Let's all party like it's 2018.

"...you had to pretend to be authentic once a day, instead of being comfortably inauthentic on an app like Instagram." Line of the day :)

This stuff, people. It matters. I mean, what else matters, next to this stuff? Why won't anybody talk about it, call it out?

Almost done now. Blown away by these, it’s less than -4 outside right now and still haven’t needed to put the heater on, room is about the same temperature as when we went to bed last night. The glass is Viridian Lightbridge, 4mm for each pane with a 16mm Argon gap, which is the optimum gap for insulation, for both heat/cold and sound. Using uPVC frames, the best framing material for insulation, maintenance and I think also appearance. I saw online yesterday these are the same windows used by The Block renovations.

A big win for towns like Lithgow. Have to get the skates on, fast.

Our front door faces south, so that entryway has always been a bit dark. We decided to replace the door with a double-glazed window door, at the same time as the windows. You can see how solid the uPVC frames are from this shot, the windows are about the same thickness. Even better, closing either activates 5 locking points around the whole frame (a couple in shot), so they’re much more secure than traditional doors and windows, which have only a single locking point near the handle. You’d need a bulldozer to break it open. The glass is also toughened glass.

In a world where our collective memory rarely lasts longer than a day, replacing all custom and tradition with what’s ‘trending’ on social media, I think we should pay close attention to the coronation. I’m no monarchist, or republican either, those are dumb sides in the team sports that have replaced understanding. I’m passionate about the continuity of societies. The thing any objective watching of the coronation shows is that none of it, not one bit, was ‘personal’. The King and Queen were bit players in traditions, symbolism and rites going back centuries. I know barely one person who knows one thing about any of those things. The people in these roles have no lives, they’re entirely servants, to the traditions. As Queen Elizabeth 2 often said. Social continuity could be done some other way too, some way that respects custom and traditions. But we don’t have another way, right now. Give me a constitutional system based on thousands of years of accumulated wisdom over a politics driven by social media trends, any day. The music alone at this event was those centuries singing directly to us, unmatchable by any alternative you could dream up.

There’s nothing to rival a huge church organ, full choir and herald trumpets. It shakes the ground if you’re there. Makes all other music sound trivial. Hair stands up on every part of your body. Gotta play it loud to approximate being there. You don’t have to be religious to feel it.

Tragic, but maybe the only interesting thing Masterchef has ever aired.

Think I may have posted this before. It’s from Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlin’s book ‘On Kings’, published shortly before both of their passings. They were leading anthropologists. Both thought monarchies were the inescapable form of human governance, and even when we think we’ve removed them they’re still there, just using different names. The bit I’ve highlighted is a real slap in the face to the impossible idea of ‘the people’ being in charge of a society.

Speed picking has given guitarists tremendous freedom to move around the fretboard. It does remind me though of something George Bernard Shaw once said in his work as a music writer. Shaw said all instruments should be really easy to play, so that people didn’t mistake virtuosity for being a good musician.

Happy Birthday Ed! A very respectable age!

In the 1950s and 1960s, the US was seriously contemplating using nuclear bombs as earth-moving equipment. This was the crater from one of the tests they did, so huge it's now listed as a national monument. The explosion also sent a plume of radioactive fallout 16,000 feet in the air, which then rained down on Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Illinois. The idea was shelved not long afterwards.

Kell put us on to this one. Best show I've seen in a while. Brilliant writing and acting, Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer (married in real life) wrote and directed it. Hilarious and insightful. Brammall has been in some of the best shows not only of recent years, but of all time, I reckon. A genius comic actor, but also in more serious roles. Not sure if you've ever met up with him Jenni or Kerrie, but I'm a fan.

For my AT friends I guess mostly. The head will naturally go forward and up, if that's where your attention is. One of the reasons I parted ways with AT, which talks about psycho-physical unities, but then focuses mostly on the physical. Directing body parts is the absolute antithesis of any sort of unity.

I shared recently how Multiple Sclerosis is now known to be caused by long-term (chronic) infection with Epstein Barr virus, the virus that causes glandular fever. Now they’ve discovered the chronic infection that likely causes Parkinson’s DIsease. Chronic infection is almost certainly the cause of nearly all of our chronic diseases, including the biggies like heart disease and strokes. Not diet or genes. Worth thinking about that if you’re letting yourself get repeated infections with Covid. That acute phase, where you get sick for a week or so, is just the front door opening to the virus. It can then live inside you for years, before striking. Just as HIV did, with AIDS.

The CWA is having a big conference in Bathurst right now. At lunch time many of them descend on the local shops for lunch. I saw a big group of them in a bakery. Imagine being a bakery owner, faced with a big group of CWA ladies, world experts in baking. The pressure.

Never seen or heard of one of these before. Thanks, @[1025558373:2048:Alex].

Four Corners talked about AI last night, including the increasing use of AI companions. I remember discussing this here years ago, and many being appalled at the idea. But I think life is more complex than our morality often allows it to be. There are a LOT of very lonely people out there, who get genuine meaning from even just conversation with an AI bot. I also think we overstate the richness and complexity of human interaction and conversation. A lot of ‘normal’ relationships follow very predictable patterns, including in conversation. An AI bot is going to have a lot more to talk about with you, than many people you might meet. It’s also a prejudice against machines, which are not zero sum games at all, they behave in ways that is very often much more unpredictable than any human, even for the people who make them. A senior Google engineer working on AI recently resigned for saying he thought the AI he’d been working on was genuinely sentient. He built the thing, and he was astonished and surprised at what it came out with. The world has meanings, not all just put there by humans.

Formula 1 is planning something pretty amazing, even if you’re not into car racing. They’re taking their current hybrids (best engines in the world, I may have mentioned, once or twice). But they’re making them even more powerful and efficient, and here’s the biggie - developing a renewable liquid fuel to power them, instead of petrol. Part of that design brief is to make these fuels in a way that they’ll also be able to be used for ordinary cars (a ‘drop-in fuel’, meaning able to be just dropped into existing cars). This could make hybrids genuine rivals for EVs, into the future, as cars wouldn’t need large batteries. Plus hybrids have the best driving performance of any type of car. Will see how it pans out.

$2 billion for green hydrogen in last night's budget. Hydrogen is a dead-end for Australia I think. With our vast renewable energy resources of sunshine and wind, and spare land, we're crazy to invest too much in hydrogen. It takes huge amounts of energy to make, energy that could be used directly to do things like create steel for export, from renewables. It's a last-gasp from the fossil fuel industry. Also the thing climate deniers back for one simple reason - it isn't solar or wind or batteries. They wouldn't know a thing about any of these technologies, it just gives them something to oppose those other technologies with, in their social media arguments.

This is Lake Eyre, our biggest inland lake (when full) and the third largest salt lake in the world. My father in law always says they should flood it with seawater. For years this sort of idea was tarnished by the loon schemes like the Bradfiled scheme, of turning the rivers inland. But with a climate emergency, the flooding of salt lakes worldwide is back in the engineering thought bubble. Because these lakes are below sea level (Lake Eyre is 15 metres below), a pipeline from the sea to the lake would flow naturally under gravity. That could then be used to generate hydroelectricity. The filled lake would generate all sorts of life in the area, as it does when the lake fills from rivers to the north when they flood. More of a saltwater environment, but that salt could also be extracted for a whole range of uses, including in batteries. It would also generate significant rainfall, through evaporation. And at a time when ocean levels are rising worldwide, there'd be no shortage of water from the main ocean to continuously refill it. It would help moderate that sea level rise, particularly if they do this worldwide with other salt lakes. It may be the sort of bold idea whose time has come.

The fossil fuel companies won again, in the budget. They’ve been milking Australia dry for 30 years.

The overwhelming, defining feature of Australia and other developed countries in 2023? They’re OLD. And getting even older, fast. Like giant aged care homes. And you can see it in the employment data. But it gets worse, because we’ve run out of young workers. People get upset about higher immigration. But who do they think will do the work in Australia? It won’t do itself.

In the UK, who we follow in everything, the country is so broken that they’re talking about using kids as doctors, without training. Nothing to talk about here? Apart from the trip or restaurant you did last, fascinating I’m sure.

heh, just look at this. The time we wasted in Australia in the past 30 years listening to morons.

I remember asking this here once. What’s your purpose in life? The dominant purpose today seems to be ’living your best life’. Which when you unwrap it seems to mostly reduce to ‘having a good time’ and ‘being happy’. Unfortunately, a recipe for social collapse and mental breakdown.

New Lithium-sulfur batteries look set to give EVs a range of 2000km, and a battery lifetime of 2 million km. What ya got, petrolheads? Bring it :) https://youtu.be/Pgmk183Vans

Everybody I talk to who works in an essential industry says the situation is dire. Nobody can get staff, experienced staff they have are walking out the door, either fed up with the work or going somewhere else for a lot more money. Businesses are carrying huge lists of vacancies. Covid absolutely rampant, and then staff getting hit by waves of secondary infections, often really scary, nasty infections. Then being hit by Covid again, rinse and repeat. I sometimes think not enough people work in those essential areas, to see just how much everything is collapsing.

I commute for 90 minutes a day. As the article says, that’s 90 minutes I could have spent working. Working from home needs to be dramatically ramped up. Not possible for all jobs, but it is for many. The stumbling block is idiots promoted to management, who can barely manage people sitting right in front of them. Let alone remotely.

It’d be nice if Australian masculinity could define itself in any way at all that doesn’t involve petrol or diesel.

I’m fascinated by hybrid cars. The human body is also a hybrid. You have the energy generated by your metabolism, from what you eat. But that energy is hybridised with gravity, captured by the elasticity of your tissues. In fact most of what keeps you upright and moves you, is that elastic energy. To feel it, try this. Look at something some distance away. A person, a tree, whatever. Then, while still looking at it (don’t take your attention off it), move towards the thing you’re looking at. You’ll feel your body spring in that direction, releasing you into movement.

Having crippled our Covid response, the morons on social media are back to attacking meteorologists, about climate change. Social media was invented by Americans to implement their political views of how societies work, from the ‘bottom up’. That’s not how societies work, so all it means is mobilising millions of morons who can barely boil an egg. We’re living in the wreckage.

Eurovision is really bad. My memories have always been people tune in because its bad?

My mother said she’d be appalled if I posted twee crap about Mother’s Day to FB. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree 😉 I should say Mothers’ Day is a particularly special day for our family, because I was born on it. Identical twins on Mothers’ day, quite a present for mum. What appalled her is people sharing all of their personal details and lives online, she thinks it’s vulgar.

Dogs and seals descend from a common ancestor. Their eating habits give it away.

Two things weren’t common before the 20th century, and that tells us that we’ve probably been looking at them the wrong way. Those two things are heart disease, and obesity. Both rare before last century. We even link them, we say heart disease is often caused by obesity. Chronic infection is the likely major cause of heart disease. The Spanish Flu at the start of the 20th century one likely culprit. What about obesity? This one is interesting. It’s very likely driven by the use of antibiotics. We know feeding farm animals antibiotics fattens them up. Scientists call it gut dysbiosis, killing some microbes in your gut (antibiotics do that) unbalances the others. The timing is perfect, check the timeline of the introduction of antibiotics against the surge in obesity. The reason we’re all so casual about infection today is antibiotics, and vaccines. We think infection is a thing of the past. That’s a terrible mistake. Not only are the bugs now beating the antibiotics and vaccines, but neither antibiotics or vaccines control chronic infection, where the bugs set up permanent residency in your body and damage you for years. That’s the likely cause of most of our chronic diseases, including obesity, heart disease, cancers, MS, Parkinson’s and Alzheimers.

Happy birthday Sam!

Happy birthday sir.

Heh, he left out facing the wrong direction when parked, into the direction of traffic. A perfect 5.

Happy birthday! What a great month for a birthday.

Thanks @[801418628:2048:Nancy]!

Social media needs to be shut down. It’s destroying societies at an ever-accelerating rate. It’s also destroying peoples’ mental health, even when they think it’s good for them. Nothing is more toxic to your mental well-being than endless comparison. All of the posts about peoples’ happy and amazing lives wreaks havoc on peoples’ mental well-being, and the posts are just responses to other similar posts, in a competition. Meanwhile institutions that run society and keep us safe have been destroyed in only a handful of years, by these global platforms based on one metric only. Popularity. Likes. if you think this is all an exaggeration, remember Trump won the Presidency using Twitter, and then launched an assault on the US parliament, again through social media.

As always, the smirking emojis on these posts are petrolheads, with their superior knowledge of cars. The biggest car companies in the world with their century or more of experience know nothing, next to the smirking emojis.

Fantastic article on the most fundamental damage social media does. It completely distorts our understanding of what the public is.

Stewart said she wanted to show that people at her age can still look ‘great’. Like looking 81 is not great, and instead you need to spend thousands on plastic surgery and other cosmetic procedures so you look 40 or 50 instead.

Social media's assault on democracies continues. Mostly engineered by activist loons in the US, who organised and directed most of the 'Dictator Dan' rubbish in Victoria, for example, through social media. In Bathurst this week a councillor posted to social media criticism of anti-vax beliefs and activism. People who previously showed no interest in local government at all went off. I think people have no idea of the depth and extent of extremism out there, even amongst people you know, who have been brainwashed by bullshit on social media. It needs to be shut down if our societies are to survive.

One of the high schools in Orange is now remote learning for all students years 7-10, apparently. There are no staff available.

Gee you know I’m sure Covid was over. I remember schools closing all the time because of infectious disease as a kid and as a teacher. Pig’s arse. Only 20 years ago there would have been calls to jail people responsible for this. Now we’re too busy buying 50 varieties of coffee and taking selfies on our trips.

Looks like the Panthers shaved all of their mullets.

Stories in the news this morning about how Australia’s homes are hopelessly cold in winter, because they’re built for summer heat. And how that’s bad for peoples’ health, many homes averaging only 10 degrees celsius over winter. We converted all heating to reverse-cycle over 5 years ago and cut our heating bills by about 80%. Now with the bloody good windows in, this is the temperature outside this morning. The room where I am is the same temperature as when I went to bed last night, without putting the heating on. Together the two changes transformed the house completely. Add solar and heating is costing us nothing at all now. I know burning wood is how many avoid the heating costs. But it’s terribly polluting, especially in built-up areas. Really toxic smoke, especially if you throttle the fire back overnight, which creates even more smoke and more toxic chemicals in the smoke. Plus you have to source, split and chop wood, and the wood pile is a magnet for termites.

‘The private sector is more efficient’ is one of those myths that is believed only because it gets repeated so often. Have a look at how much MORE it costs to bring in the private sector (dark blue) to do the same work. The private sector is currently also running the housing market, where most young people can’t afford to own a home, the groceries business, where prices have doubled in many areas, and the energy system, where people can’t heat because then they can’t eat. And caused both the Great Depression and the GFC in 2008. You have to be some sort of stupid to think this isn’t inevitable when you replace a service model with a for-profit model, which is all the ‘private sector’ is.

My favourite of the new windows, big picture window at the front. Bigger than it looks in photos. A nice test that the windows work is that there’s zero condensation on them even on freezing mornings like today. The old windows were straight-out wet on mornings like today, which caused mould build-up at the base of the window.

The overwhelming majority of people who go to gyms quit inside 3 months. Mostly (I suspect) because people think a gym is a place to go to compensate for habits elsewhere in their lives, like with food. Many think they will lose weight (they won't, not in a lasting way). And it becomes just one more thing to do, in lives that are already busy.

One for those who say we just need more and bigger dams.

My favourite story of the day is Microsoft needing to urgently modify its new AI bot, because it was hitting on a married man. https://www.firstpost.com/world/microsoft-to-tweak-chatgpt-bing-after-it-falls-in-love-with-a-married-man-12180972.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The big con is that we stopped lockdowns. We did nothing of the sort. We privatised them. We went from locking down the virus to stop it spreading, to letting it spread and getting the infected to lock themselves down instead. At their own expense. We’re too stupid to survive.

This is the stuff I’m really struggling with. Social events, workplaces, restaurants, pubs - you name it. All with no Covid protections. I can’t live a life pretending the pandemic is over, and we can all just go back to living how we did before it. It’s not true, it’s killing lots of people, and giving lots of others likely lifelong chronic disease. Another nearly 200 dead last week. This isn’t the Australia I grew up in. Where the community would always rally for things that are important, even picking up litter. Will be taking a break from here again. Makes me too angry.

Many ask why I still wear a mask. Not one person has ever thought that it might be to protect others, as well as myself. Doesn’t even occur to them. That’s our culture now, orbiting ‘me’ in everything it does. Social media dramatically amplifies that shift. Turning entire societies into posturing, selfie-absorbed adolescents, too timid to question or challenge anything for fear of standing out from the crowd.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday Simon!

I mean, life is busy, with all the cruises and holidays and restaurants and gigs.

Even with today's technology, an EV's battery will last 20 years. Most people get rid of their petrols or diesels in a much shorter time than that.

Michael is a professor at the University of Oxford. I was very glad he shared this, and not stories about his social life, about which let's face it, who gives a fuck.

As always I share Covid things not to be a scaremonger or because I'm obsessed, but because you will rarely see any of it, anywhere else. Politicians have deliberately suppressed the information. I also only share from the most reputable minds in the world on these topics, who are furious at what's going on.

The reason given for not vaccinating young kids in Australia is that Covid is mostly mild in them. Two things to say about that. Firstly the *acute* infection with Covid may be mild, as it is for many adults i.e. the few weeks they feel sick. But long-term chronic effects can be crippling, or even lethal. Secondly if we'd used this same bullshit logic 70 years ago, we would never have vaccinated all children against polio. Polio was mild in the vast majority of kids who caught it, see the stats below. We vaccinated everybody, to protect everybody. Now we don't give a shit and it's each to their own.

Meanwhile in the US (my friends there can give more details), some States are on a book-banning purge. Thousands of books being removed from local and school libraries, with threat of jail for librarians if forbidden books are found. Forbidden books include those about African American achievement in anything, like aviation.

If you have Covid and knowingly mix in public with others without taking precautions, you’re committing a crime under the NSW Public Heath Act. Punishable with a large fine, and 6 months in prison. (Covid is a category 2, 3 & 4 condition.)

James Brown was a giant. He more or less single-handedly invented funk. And has there ever been a better dancer?

Reports of Australia entering its 5th Covid wave. Lots of infection out there, be careful. Also, counting is an early childhood skill not mastered by some journalists.

Social media. Making us all dumber, every single day. (The dispensing machines are for tampons.)

Written around the time he was running Robodebt. And yes, it is that Stuart Robert.

Happy birthday to you :)

The US Embassy in Australia, doing the Nutbush for Tina, but also because they acknowledge it as an ‘Australian national dance’.

Here’s a wake-up for Gen X. This NRL campaign seems not forever go. Tina was our age (53) when it was done. She’s just died at 83.

Have posted a bit about why materials science and engineering is the source of most of our modern wonders (I am a materials scientist and engineer, so I would say that, but it’s also true). Here’s another wonderful example. A material that blocks sound, but not air or light.

Bathurst paper this morning, the national petrolhead capital! Petrolheads will be coughing up their Fruit Loops. EV sales have tripled again in Australia this year, from last year. My hybrid was singing this morning, eating up the kms. Used about 2L of fuel to get to Bathurst, from Lithgow. Just a reminder the highest performance cars in the world are hybrids.

I track usage, exports and total costs for us at home. So far running at $0 cost for electricity every day, and it's been as cold as -7 overnights. And still carrying a big surplus from the warmer months with their longer days, as backup.

I often post about how most of our chronic diseases (cancer, heart disease, MS etc.) are probably caused by chronic infections i.e. getting infected in younger life and the pathogen then living in your body for years, even decades, before becoming chronic illness. Another confirmation of that theory just published, showing that women in particular who get a shingles vaccination are dramatically less likely to develop Alzheimer's Disease. This means all of those 'mild' and 'harmless' chickenpox infections generations had inflicted upon them have likely done enormous damage to peoples' health, and we're still dealing with it. Now just imagine what infecting the entire population, MULTIPLE TIMES, with Covid might cause as chronic disease, in years to come.

Drool.

This is more of the subtle politics that infects all of our lives now. Trying to paint solar power as a rich person’s way to escape skyrocketing power prices. There are internet-free loans that will pay for your entire solar system, which you will pay off in under 5 years in the money saved in not paying the high bills. For the genuinely poor there are also government schemes to go a long way to electrifying your whole lifestyle. Including upgrading to a heat pump hot water heater for under $50. This investment will also make you money at a rate of return that no other investment can provide, for decades. Solar is also much cheaper than buying extra cars for the family, or a boat, or even some holidays.

Posted about this a few weeks ago. The massive melt in Antarctica is creating enormous icebergs, that when melted then slow deep ocean currents. Those currents transport food and heat throughout the world’s oceans. To give a sense of the scale here, one of these icebergs is 650 cubic kilometres. That’s 650 cubes of ice, 1km long by 1km wide by 1km high. And that’s just one of many. Over 3 trillion tonnes of fresh water has been melted into the ocean in the past few decades. Those currents are also a main way that heat is transferred around the globe, without that circulation the Earth could enter another massive ice age, which would cover continents with ice a km or more thick. So paradoxically global warming causes ice melting, which might then cause the lot to freeze over. Nothing much survives that.

Enormous numbers of Australians are hugely under-vaccinated for Covid. Here’s how dangerous that is. The latest boosters, which are shot 4 or 5 for the smart ones still bothering to get them, have an effectiveness of only 24% after 4-6 months. You can imagine the protection those with only 2 or even 3 shots have from their vaccines i.e. basically zero.

This graph is so interesting, you can read so much of our current lives in it. Notice how older Australians (the red circle) share an information space (mostly TV) that creates for them a feeling of Australia as a shared, public experience. TV is connected to our other institutions, it’s regulated. So what you see there is both widely shared, and also tested by expertise. The blue circle is the tsunami already coming. Younger Australians get most of their news from social media. Completely unregulated, often shaped by very nasty people. This is why we saw such resistance to Covid action in this pandemic, political libertarians overseas used social media to weaponise younger Australians. This isn’t to say the old are better, or that TV is better. I rarely watch TV either, it’s mostly rubbish. I don’t watch TV news. But it’s at least a shared public space. Social media fractures that into thousands of non-communicating pieces, none of them connected to society’s expertise in any meaningful way. It’s a bullshit machine, a very dangerous one.

Priceless. Eventually dumb meets reality. Banging the anti-immigration drum has won many governments elections. But now their societies are full of old people with no young people to do the work. Checkmate.

Rockers in Bathurst would like this address.

I love old photos taken on glass. Bathurst, more than 100 years old I think.

More than half of the world’s lakes are drying up. This is a major lake in Turkey, in the news this morning because it’s completely disappeared. The cause? Some of it climate change. But much more, it’s dams. The things we love to build, and make bigger. Dams stop the flow of water into the world’s lakes. Most dams are built for irrigation, a grossly inefficient use of water. Our local dams here in the Central West the same, far and away the biggest users of that water are irrigating farmers.

At the moment it’s thought between 10-20% of people who get Covid will also get Long Covid. Or in simpler words, will end up with chronic disease, potentially lethal, or potentially lifelong if it doesn’t kill you. Chronic disease is conditions like heart disease, cancer, MS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimers etc. This data shows that if 10-20% of all Covid cases (yellow and grey lines) turn into Long Covid, and we keep infecting everybody repeatedly, EVERYBODY will end up with Long Covid. A public health catastrophe. Societies won’t survive.

Camp 4 on Mt Everest. Filth everywhere. Dead bodies strewn over the mountain too, not just here, and empty oxygen cylinders and other rubbish. 'Seeing the world' is a destructive activity, all tourism is. It's not there to be seen. Not a backdrop for our selfies.

The overwhelming majority of anti-vaccine and anti-Covid-action propaganda has been traced back to only 12 people posting to social media. 12, creating a worldwide public health disaster. You'd hope people who swallow this BS realise what dopes they are, manipulated by only 12 people.

It’s a pretty classy affair all around. Driving like fucking morons, 4 young people dead. Then some of the parents immediately crowdfund the tragedy for money.

When people meditate, they’re being ‘in the present moment’. The problem with this for me though, is that you can’t be anywhere else. I think much of the time peope mistake meditation for relaxation, which is why they do it. They want to relax. But relaxation is just a contrast experience to stress or tension. It’s not a thing in itself. You will quickly end up yo-yoing between feeling tense and feeling relaxed, if you go down that path. That yo-yo will never end. The thing is, you are already present to everything. You are already ‘whole’. Any attempt to try to be more present or be more whole, will just lead to you ‘trying to be present and whole’, using meditation or whatever other method. Again, that trying will never end, because it’s bootstrapping. If you just allow yourself to be open to the things in your life, and live freely, any ‘negative’ feelings or tensions you get will tell you, within that totally open free living, how to adjust. No need to withdraw from life at all, to meditate. In fact, the opposite. The more you dive IN to life, the faster you’ll learn. Even something as basic as a muscle tension will tell you how you’re out of balance, somewhere, and how to adjust to get back into balance, from *within* that totally free, open living. Or the modern scourge of anxiety. Plug that feeling back IN to an open and free life. The context of that living will dissolve the anxiety, automatically. Anxiety is a feeling decoupled from lived experience, that’s all.

More than half of Americans, the 'land of the free', still aren't buying it. I think many more than half of Australians aren't either. It's just that the whingers have the loudest voices, and politicians with no backbones listen to the loudest voices.

That word - 'collapse'. It's not just health that's collapsing. It also disgusts me that the main reason medical students don't go into general practice is that they can make more money as a specialist. Don't ever tell me doctors aren't focused on money. Big money. A GP crying poor is still being paid a shit load more than most of us. Ultimately we also just don't have enough young people in Australia, to do the work that needs doing. Nobody wants to face up to that.

A bit of trivia to add to this quote. Most say Covid is mild in children. In the US nearly 2000 children have died. More than 14,000 have been hospitalised. 245,000 children have lost one or both parents, to Covid. Again, I persist with all of this because we're in the middle of a disaster that hasn't stopped, and politicians have spun the public nothing but lethal lies. Parliament House in NSW had millions of dollars spent on upgrading its air con to 8 fresh air changes per hour, to protect pollies from Covid. You can see it's a case of 'do as we say, not as we do'.

There are no rich countries near the equator. And there’s one simple reason for that. Malaria. Most of the world’s mosquitoes live near the equator, and they’re the main way people catch malaria. 500 million people contract malaria every year. 500,000 of them die, most of them children. People who think the economy is a thing don’t understand much about the basics of life.

Anybody know what the major road works at Meadow Flat are about? Huge amount of dirt shifted.

Any of the passengers in this car could have said ‘whoa, slow down’. They didn’t because they didn’t want to look like killjoys. And so now they’re dead. This is exactly the psychology that is preventing people doing things like wearing masks and avoiding crowds, for Covid. They don’t want to be the odd one out. So it will also kill many of them, if not now, then in the future through chronic infection. That’s what’s at stake here. How badly do you want to keep acting like you’re in high school?

Preface: I like dogs. But I think the reason they're so enormously popular is one not often spoken about. I was thinking about it while watching Get Back, the Beatles film. The band were fighting, on the point of breaking up. Then they let Billy Preston join the sessions. Instant, total transformation. Everybody happy and productive again. The established social unit, the band, was dysfunctional. But introduce an outsider, and things flowed again, for a while anyway. This is what I think dogs do. Look at that family gathered around the dog. The dog becomes the glue that holds the unit together, independent of the interpersonal dynamics the humans have between themselves. Dog owners soooo often say how much they prefer dogs to humans. They let the cat (ha) out of the bag. In reality the slobbering adoration dogs give to humans, which would repel them if it was another human, is likely hierarchical deference more than love and affection. The unquestioning love and loyalty, again something they can never get from another human. Working for local government now, I'm struck by just how much social trouble *outside* the family unit dogs cause. The barking, in particular, but also attacks on non-family members. All part of the same pack behaviour, which we probably mistake for love and affection. Don't get me wrong, I think they are lovely animals. But that we project onto them things that aren't real, and use them to help manage our human interactions.

Because people who love to travel a lot are not generally very smart. It's what the article says, sue me ;)

Happy birthday :)

I’ve heard livelier crowds at a lawn bowls game than this Adelaide Origin crowd. What a stupid idea.

They should just put the Penrith team in the Blues jerseys, said it last year too. Where NSW looked good, it was the Penrith players. Where they looked bad, it was when those same Penrith players lacked their other regular Penrith players to link up with. A great team will always beat a team of great players.

This is a problem already solved by engineers, the business model is the stumbling block, carmakers need to step up. These stories excite the smirking emojis because they think it shows that EVs aren’t the future after all. You have to remember combustion engines have never once, in their over 100 years of life, taken the astronomical pollution THEY create seriously at all. It’s barely once been considered, in over 100 years. So we now have lethally filthy air in cities and towns, over 11,000 Australians die from vehicle exhaust pollution every year. And a planet being incinerated by combustion waste products in the atmosphere.

My workplace has been near-empty for weeks. People so, so sick. With Covid, and secondary infections, often caused by Covid (but nobody tells them that). There’s another big surge in Covid cases in Australia right now, but again nobody will tell you that. It’s a national wink-wink agreement to pretend everything is normal. Except it’s not. I’ve never seen the community this sick, it’s ridiculous. Public health is in free fall. I’m still waiting for people to call enough on the stupidity of it all, but they won’t. They don’t want to stand out from the crowd and break the wink-wink agreement to pretend it’s all over. Instead they’ll run out of sick leave and come to work sick, to accelerate the whole collapse even more.