June 2023

If you sit like this as many do, you will over time get tight hips, neck, shoulders and torso. If you go to a physio, they will give you stretching exercises for each of those areas, and maybe tell you your ‘core’ needs strengthening. None of that will work. We are a whole body, in everything we do. This person is out of balance, forwards. They slouch over the computer, but still want to see the screen ahead of them (B), so their head gets pulled back, straining the muscles in the neck and torso (C and D) to do it. Their hips are strained because their body mass is shifted back towards A, so those muscles are holding that mass in place. It’s one complete pattern. All of that tightening is the body holding itself in this out-of-balance position. To fix it you have to shift all of it, at once. The body needs to rotate forwards at the hips (A), which will automatically bring B, C and D into effortless uprightness. The chair will then push that upper body upwards, automatically and continuously. Ergonomics people will sometimes suggest instead that you take this slumped posture, and pull yourself upright. ‘Sit up straight’. That magnifies the strain and tension by orders of magnitude. Allowing the whole body to rotate forward from the hips instead will also activate the ‘core’ muscles that some think are weak. They’re not weak, they’re just not turned on.

This story reminded me of the car crash story, were parents were crowdfunding for cash the same day the kids died. A married couple expressing disappointment that the cash gifts from wedding guests didn’t cover the cost of their wedding. I mean, come on. What a pathetic teenage world we’re living in.

I was watching The Drum yesterday, and something about this person, Sandy Chong, didn’t seem quite right. (She’s the CEO of the Australian Hairdressing Council.) Her skin didn’t look real, just a featureless area of bland colour, smoothed out. And so checking another image of her, that turned out to be true. She’s using a live filter on her image, on the TV. To me this is seriously bad. It’s rampant for still shots on social media of course. But the fact it’s now just normal life, even on a serious national current affairs show, says something pretty alarming about our culture. This is what social media is doing to us, even our bodies and images of them are now being shaped directly by what’s ‘trending’.

Happy Birthday :)

Happy Birthday, Anthony!

A study has found significant brain inflammation is common a year after even mild Covid infection. I post a lot about the longer-term chronic impact of infections. Polio had it too, as you can see. MS is glandular fever. Shingles is chickenpox. Heart disease possibly influenza. Cervical cancer is HPV. HIV is mild in people who catch it. Etc. The sickness people get right now which might feel like a cold or a flu is very likely just Chapter 1 of a lifetime of possibly lethal chronic illness. Take precautions. Agitate for stopping infections. The words below are from a senior US doctor.

Mind-blowing. A new car every 30 seconds, and aiming for 15 seconds. Really worth a watch, to see the phenomenal engineering going on.

Happy Birthday :)

These are some of the symptoms of lymphophenia, a disorder where your blood doesn’t have enough white blood cells to fight off infections. Sometimes seen with diseases that attack the immune system, like diabetes, and HIV. And now seen in many who have had Covid. I hear about a lot of ‘strange infections’ now, and infections that won’t resolve. If you’re experiencing that too and have had Covid, this is very possibly what’s going on.

The difference adding a fan to your room can make to heating and cooling costs. Heating here as an example. A heater at floor level without a fan, in the image with all the red. Notice the heat accumulating at the top of the room, mostly where people sitting there won’t feel it. And significantly hot air too, up to 28 degrees, and the heater keeps churning it out because its thermostat says it’s still cool at ground level, where it is. Second image that is mostly green is with a ceiling fan on, in reverse (winter) mode. A nice even temperature throughout the whole room. Uses less than half of the energy as the room without a fan. I use a circulating (vortex) fan rather than a ceiling fan, to circulate air throughout the room. But a ceiling fan on reverse is fine.

Hands up if you knew another 64 died from Covid this week, in NSW? SIXTY-FOUR PEOPLE. Over 2600 dead this year in Australia. It’s like Monopoly money, nobody cares.

Despite the language used, Covid doesn’t infect in ‘waves’. It’s not like Russia and Ukraine, marshalling troops for the next surge. Humans spread Covid. We are the waves. Waves go down when we take precautions, and go up when we don’t. That’s literally all that happens. If you think this will just stop by itself, ponder that smallpox followed this pattern for well over 3000 years.

This is a quick Twitter thread, out of the UK. It will give you an insight into the breathtaking deception going on, with Covid. The outright lying to the public, and massive suppression of data, and the public also lying to itself. The same is happening here. I mention Covid stats to people at work, and see the deep discomfort it causes. People know the whole ‘back to happy normal life’ thing is a total sham. They’re living it in their damaged bodies.

Extra Covid stories from me right now, because there’s another surge in cases, brought about by another surge of couldn’t give a fuck by just about everybody. I’m not sure if 1 in 20 brings people comfort, if they understood the health system they’d know it’s pretty much game over, in terms of ongoing load on it. And lifelong disease and shortened lifespans for the huge number of new diabetes sufferers. And we’re still infecting people, over and over, so this number will get even worse.

The whole article is full of errors. For example Rowan says batteries are full of ‘rare earth elements’. There are no rare earths in batteries. Only in motors, and even some of those now don’t use them. And who cares anyway? We didn’t before.

The Project quoting research that says there are 1300 photos of a child on social media by the time they’re 13. Sharenting. France about to ban it.

One in an ever-growing line of people who social media presume to pass judgment on (for or against) before a case even goes to trial. This is why we have the law, to consider evidence. Not peoples’ opinions.

While politicians, industry spin doctors and economists drone on and on about housing ‘supply’ being the problem, a property developer finally tells us the truth. Everybody was just too greedy, and that greed is now destroying the industry. Higher returns led to higher prices, everywhere, including all the way along the supply chains. Leading to the ridiculous situation that the same industry saying the problem is lack of supply has builders going broke at record speed.

A quick Covid guide. 'Mild, like a cold or flu' - moron. 'We have to live with it' - moron. 'Getting it will build your immunity' - moron. 'We'll reach herd immunity' - moron. 'Your immune system gets stronger with infection' - moron. 'Vaccines hurt you' - fuckwit, and moron. 'Covid is all hysteria' - moron. 'Lockdowns did the real damage' - moron. 'Missing school does more damage to kids than Covid' - fuckwit, and moron.

Consultant cardiologist and Long Covid researcher.

If you'd asked this question to any generation of retired people in history, before today, they'd have laughed and asked what medication you'd forgotten to take. Socially and culturally, the retired being the richest segment of the population is an abomination. Just one more thing that I doubt is given any thought at all, how profoundly wrong this is.

Remember Tupperware parties? The brilliant idea that to break down resistance to people buying things, the smartest way is to get your own friends to flog them to you. This is the secret to understanding all society and politics, I think. Facts are part of a social group. People use them as one mechanism to maintain the unity of the group. For example what I call ‘petrolheads’ aren’t actually mostly interested in petrol. They’re interested in not being ‘Greenies’ who believe in things like EVs. It’s all social. Covid is exactly the same. To believe this or that about it is to identify with a particular social grouping. People will be guided by their own friends much more than by science or anything else. But it also means the only pathway to change a disastrous situation is to challenge those social ties. I take that risk, by constantly talking about Covid. I sense most people have ‘moved on’, it’s like farting in the collective elevator, to even mention it. But unless we do mention it with each other, the insanity will continue. Groups of friends are what bind societies together, that’s all politics really is.

Happy birthday! You don't list your age, maybe the calculator broke.

Happy birthday :)

Where do you reckon society has all of its money squirreled away?

From the Orange paper. A pharmacist saying lockdowns made us more vulnerable to diseases, because we weren't getting sick as much. (Technically called the 'immunity debt' hypothesis.) The thing is, it's scientific nonsense. There is no such thing as immunity debt. Political spin doctors invented it. Even some trained medical professionals believe it, because the spin was done well.

Australia needs to build 10,000km of new power lines, preferably by 2030. That’s a phenomenal amount of work to do.

“We must act now, the baby boomers are coming," she said. "Within a decade, our nation will have, for the first time in history, more people aged over 65 than under 18.” Australia will be one giant aged care facility, like all developed nations. Also the demographic holding nearly all of the nation’s wealth. They’re going to have to pay more, and they’re not going to like it. In the meantime the anti-immigration folk are going to have to explain who is going to care for all of the wrinklies, while keeping everything else running in society at the same time.

No Arctic sea ice in summer, within a decade. I don’t think many understand the monumental thing this is. That sea ice and snow reflects a staggering amount of heat back into space, about 60% of what falls onto it. Without it that heat will be absorbed by the ocean, a colossal injection of new heat to a planet that is already cooking.

And here it all is in a nutshell. The entire world and its catastrophes is nothing more than a dramatic backdrop for selfies.

Death certificates are often signed by junior doctors. They're under extreme political pressure to continue to deny the reality of Covid, and suppress statistics about it.

https://youtu.be/p2rCtaBBdwE Watch this. The worm is turning. The greatest crime in modern Australian history, which we're still in the middle of, gradually unravelling.

I wonder what the resort uses gas for. Electricity could be used for anything that they might need gas for right now.

Those who oppose renewable energy say that there will be an enormous amount of waste from used solar panels. Of course they never tell you any numbers (they don't know any, it's just a slogan). So here they are. Column 1 and 2 are annual amounts of solar panel waste per person between now and 2050, to meet our net zero targets. (You'll have to squint, and you still won't see it.) Column 3 is the annual amount of solar panel waste per person (in kg) in Oz, at the 2050 net zero target. Column 4 is the kilograms of all waste per person the average Australian produces annually, right now. Column 5 is the number of kg of carbon waste each Australian produces every year, right now. I think it's all pretty obvious, but do say if the anti-renewables slogans are still persuasive. Columns 1-3 will of course also make column 5 more or less disappear.

Some may have seen in the news yesterday that Covid is now known to fuse and therefore destroy brain cells. Here it is captured in video. By all means keep believing the people who tell you it's a mild sniffle. Their brain cells are probably fused already.

Today's Covid update that governments don't want you to see. 81 dead in NSW this week. 64 last week. A whole large hospital full of sick Covid patients. If it was me, I'd put a mask on. But you may like your brain cells fused, who am I to judge. The other day somebody accused me of Covid scaremongering. I prefer to think adults who don't find these sorts of weekly deaths a disaster and something to talk about must have fused brain cells. Or they're just bastards.

One of the engineering wonders Tesla has introduced into car making is the use of die casting to create whole sections of vehicles in one quick press. Until now carmakers assembled vehicles a piece at a time, using robots or people. Tesla increasingly creates the entire chassis in one or two presses. Massive die casting machines are used, called Giga Presses, up to 9000 tonnes. Not only does it make it super fast to create a vehicle (they're aiming to roll one off the line every 15 seconds, right now it's 30), but the far fewer moving parts makes the vehicle much more reliable and strong. Obviously the fewer moving parts, the fewer ways they can break or come apart.

People mostly consider cost-recovery when deciding on a home battery. This is just one other reason I went for one. Stability of home supply, even in blackouts. (If you have solar but no battery, your system won't work in a blackout.) The grid will be under enormous stress, for the next 5-10 years.

The speed of development of the Covid vaccines was one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time. Normally it takes 10 years to develop any successful vaccine. They did it in 1. How? They used AI. AI is already doing things that are almost unbelievable.

We bought these. Wanted a dryer that could do 10kg, and now they’re 9 and 10-star efficiency, which is amazing. The engineering is so beautifully done, to me this is a more interesting and exciting thing than any holiday or gig. That may sound weird in the teenworld we now live in, but I remember Hans Rosling calling the washing machine humanity’s greatest ever invention. The latest version of humanity’s greatest ever invention to me is infinitely more interesting than any sort of tourism or night out.

What was that bang, Lithgow people?

I know a few Trump supporters, and I’d ask them why other political candidates don’t have followers like the ones below.

I sometimes sit and watch the washing machine and the dryer, to see how the AI works that’s built into them. One example is something I’m sure many have in their machines too, the machine weighs each load, and automatically determines the amount of laundry liquid and water to use. But a thing I found nifty is spinning the wash, which on older machines can get unbalanced. The machine starts a slow spin, and measures how balanced the load is. If it’s unbalanced, it will stop, then spin slowly in the other direction, to re-balance the load. It’ll keep doing that over and over, slowly and changing spin direction constantly, until the load is balanced. Only then will it speed up for the full spin cycle. This stuff is cool. I love clever.

-6.2 outside this morning in Lithgow. Happy to see that the new windows really work, it was 20 degrees warmer inside, with no heating on. 20 degrees is some difference.

Back to Everest. These two images sum up tourism for me. Who suffers to allow us to get our selfies in remote lands? The people in remote lands.

The reading material in the toilet at Trump’s house is something else.

People have been plundering warship wrecks from WW2. You’ll never guess why. They’re after the rarest metal in the world. It’s actually just steel, but a special type of steel, it’s called ‘low background steel’. Making steel uses a lot of oxygen, they ‘blast’ the furnaces with air (why they’re called blast furnaces, funnily enough). But from 1945 onwards, the US and Russia in particular started doing thousands of open-air nuclear explosions. So any steel made post-1945 has radioactive air particles included in the steel. This doesn’t matter for most uses, but for some, like building radiation detectors, it’s crucial that the steel is radiation-free. That’s why the wrecks are being plundered, for steel made before nuclear tests began. The level of radioactive particles now in the air from those tests is almost zero, so it’s not clear this plundering actually needs to happen.

Another bit of anti-EV spin is that they lose range in extreme cold and heat. The spin often says this is due to battery performance. It’s actually because people use heating or cooling in the car. And EV manufacturers have shifted to using heat pumps in the cars for heating and cooling, to help address this. Also, most of the trips people make in their cars every day never go within cooee of the car’s maximum range, so it’s irrelevant to just about everybody. The average Australian for example drives 43km per day. And also most of the time temperatures we drive in are nowhere near these extremes of hot and cold.

It turns out the thrilling daily sharing of what we’re all doing, our trips, gigs, restaurant dinners and selfies, isn’t fixing this. Who’d have thought.

Oops. Canadian boreal forests burst into flame in the past week, with temperatures 10-15 degrees above average there. Tipping points being reached. Tipping points mean points of no return.

What AI is doing. Freddie Mercury singing the Beatles’ Yesterday, in a duet with Michael Jackson. Of course it never happened when they were alive, and I think it would be better if the creator had a better idea how to phrase the singing, but this stuff is evolving super fast. I always wished Mercury had done an album of standards, in the Buble vein. And a Christmas album. He still might.

There’s a story in the news today about the backlash against businesses who no longer accept cash. In my experience the people who want to use cash for everything usually harbour trauma through families from the Great Depression. Or they’re businesses who want to avoid paying GST (which robs all of us). But here’s another reason to avoid cash - it’s filthy. Everything from drugs to fecal bacteria on it, and who would be surprised? It moves through so many (unwashed) hands.

The ocean has had enough of absorbing the colossal amount of heat caused by pollution we keep pumping into the atmosphere. It’s hidden the extent of that pollution for decades. Not any more. It’s full.

A senior doctor friend tells me some major hospitals are currently nearly at code black i.e. not functioning. The whole thing is a farce, but again, nobody cares or does anything. 10 people die in a bus crash and we do our usual teenage thoughts and prayers. 8 times that many died of Covid last week in NSW.

Happy birthday :)

TB now too. People sick with everything, because their immune systems are under assault from Covid infections. Covid damages the immune system. They 'recover' from Covid and then every other bacterium and virus piles on, taking advantage of the immune system damage. And then they get Covid again. Rinse and repeat, potentially taking years off your lifespan each time.

Staggering that with the magnitude of the apocalypse facing us, some still choose to believe fantasies about continuing to burn oil, gas and coal. Or they pay no attention to any of this at all, and think 'having a good time' is some sort of grown-up response, and anybody else is just being 'negative'.

T.Ryan Gregory is one of the strongest international scientific voices speaking out at the public health disaster we’re still inside. Read this long list of lies that he debunks, that are in common use in Australia too. (As always, posted to help keep people alive and healthy. Politicians do not in any way have your backs.)

Make it about the money. If you can find another investment that gives you a 20% return per YEAR, for the next 20-25 years, go for it. I bet you won’t find one. An investment that gives you a 20% return on your money, and insulates you from energy instability to boot. It’s a no-brainer.

Happy 21st!

70% of French electricity comes from nuclear power. They’re in trouble now, because nuclear power uses a LOT of water. And with climate change water is drying up there. The Loire ran completely dry in places this year. For the first time in nearly 50 years France became a net importer of energy. The nuclear power stations are also ageing, and need replacement, half were shut down at times in 2022. It costs a fortune to build a single nuclear power station, tens of billions of dollars. It can also take decades. Australia is a much drier country than France. Some suggest nuclear is our future here. That’s because they’re morons. You can knock up a full solar power station in 6 months for a tiny fraction of the cost. You don’t need a drop of water.

Happy birthday!

Things are happening. Mt Piper mentioned too. The debates about all of this are just hot air. In real life companies are falling over themselves to shift to renewables, not least because they'll make more money.

Great piece on some of the engineering behind the electricity grid. And how the shift to renewables, batteries and inverters, EVs and a range of other technologies is making the grid much more resilient, sustainable and efficient. No more 'single points of failure'. Plus no need to spin tonnes of metal at 50 Hz to maintain grid frequency. And more.

A plug for the Tesla battery, they've done a superb job with it and much of the genius of it is in the in-built AI. For example, if you have an electricity plan that is time-of-use, where you pay different rates for peak, off peak and shoulder, you enter those details into the battery software on your phone. You also enter whatever feed-in tariff you're paid for exporting electricity back to the grid. The battery then calculates, in real-time every day, how to minimise your power bill by a combination of solar and grid charging. It even checks weather forecasts for the coming day to decide whether you'd be better off charging overnight at off-peak rates, if there's a rainy day forecast. It analyses your daily usage patterns to add into these algorithms, with the overall outcome of minimising how much you end up paying for electricity.

UK Glamour has better health advice than the NSW Government.

Graham is a consultant radiologist. Please avoid being infected by Covid. The acute ‘I’m sick’ phase is possibly a doorway to a lifetime of chronic disease. A much shorter lifetime.

Happy Friday everybody! How are your masks and ventilation today?

So cricketing fans - which 2 fast bowlers to elect from Boland, Starc, Hazlewood? Hazlewood and Boland are classic Alderman/McGrath-style bowlers, for English conditions. But Starc on a good day has the capacity to produce the unplayable ball, if batsmen are settled on a good batting pitch, which these will be apparently to promote the 'Bazball' (slog) new English method.

John Birmingham's description of Trump as the 'Tangerine Mussolini' will take some beating. Also his note that Trump has been indicted more times than he's been elected.

The 4-day week is hopefully coming. There are no downsides, except for bone idle stupid managers promoted to their position for reasons that have nothing to do with competence in managing anything.

I’d encourage everybody to take precautions against SIM porting and SIM swapping. Porting: hackers port your phone number to a different Telco, so they can then set up a mobile phone in your name and take your number. They can then potentially access all of your accounts, including your bank, as well as you losing all of the personal data on your phone. Due to new precautions Australia set up to prevent this, where your Telco now sends a 4-digit code to your phone before porting, hackers will now also try SIM swapping. This is them contacting your Telco and pretending to be you, asking for a replacement SIM. This is very hard to stop. In both porting and swapping, they use personal information about you, either stolen through hacks or freely available on peoples’ social media accounts. One reason I don’t share much personal information on social media. For example your birthday and address should never be clearly visible on social media. Birthday messages should be restricted to friends-only groups. The SIM protect website set up by an Australian academic (see linked site) gives good tips to protect yourself. https://www.simprotect.org.au

You have to mine 5000 tonnes of ore to produce one gold bar. That’s a pile of dirt the size of the Empire State Building. We’re pretty casual about how we use it.

I have a passion for glass. It’s magic, invisible as air, but solid. And as a materials scientist knowing about it was my initial training. There’s a secret about glass, next paragraph. The thing about glass is, it’s mostly sand. Silicon. And silicon is central to life throughout history. Right now it’s not only what creates the screen you’re possibly reading this through, but the chips that run your device are also made of silicon. Sand. It’s one of the oldest and newest technologies we have, at the same time. The secret about glass is that nobody really understands how it works. It’s beautifully clear and smooth, but its structure really isn’t. It’s a mess. We’ve been making glass for thousands of years, but to this day nobody really understands how it works. It’s not really a solid or a liqud, it’s a category of its own. Glass. Silicon is also what solar panels are made out of. Sand. Turned into electricity, by sunlight. That’s miraculous. It’s also what the data in your broadband travels through, tiny fibres of glass wire. Fibre optics. You may be looking at this screen through lenses - glasses - like me. Also silicon/sand. Lenses revealed the distant universe and the microscopic world. Using melted sand. Silicon is the second most abundant element in our solid materials, after oxygen. An incredibly smart thing to centre your new economy on. Unlike filthy fossil fuels dug and sucked out of old bogs. The time for dumb is over.

The only part of the renewables shift the Flat Earthers tend to support is Snowy 2.0. Using the Snowy scheme as a big pumped hydro battery. The problem is, it’s a disaster. A typical example of private sector firms making billions, given fat contracts by populist politicians trying to buy votes (and often donations, from the private sector companies). The private sector promised Malcolm Turnbull they’d build Snowy 2.0 for $2 billion, and it would begin operating in 2021. The cost is now $6 billion, and climbing, and the scheme won’t operate (if finished, which is still not guaranteed) until 2028, at the earliest. Private sector efficiency at work, they’ve pocketed much of the blowout, paid for by you and me. Here’s a quote from economist Mike Casson, who studied the massive railway building projects in Victorian England, by the private sector at the time. Nothing has changed. “There is a conflict between politicians, seeking popularity and prioritising schemes and, because that is what the people want, rather than the rational calm and calculated approach of the civil servants. I think today we see something of the same.”

TSMC stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The most important company in the world. Semiconductors are chips, the chips used in all our devices now. Not just computers, our cars, TVs, vacuum cleaners, phones - pretty much everything. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without these semiconductors, the world we know would stop. We felt a bit of that last year, the reason you couldn’t buy a new car was because there weren’t enough chips. These chips are the most advanced technology humans have ever produced. They’re almost impossibly hard to make, and the processes behind the most advanced chips are top secret. The Chinese have ramped up their production of semiconductors, but they don’t know how to make the most advanced chips. Joe Biden recently legislated to protect these secrets even further, as most of the intellectual discovery work had its origins in the US. (Trump was too stupid to even understand what’s at stake.) It’s difficult to exaggerate the genius behind their invention. The science of these chips is quantum science, the physical reality of what happens inside these chips in your phone and other devices is a long way from the reality we think we know. Time actually travels backwards on some parts of these chips, I’m not making that up. You’re using a time machine, reading this right now. This is why China and the US are in constant war mode over Taiwan. Not the reasons given in the news. The US will never allow Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing to fall into Chinese hands.

The sea temperatures around Europe 🤔 I feel for them, they actually try, with climate change. The countries that don’t (including us) are boiling them alive.

It's time Australia and the world dumped the 'pub test' and replaced it with the smart test. Society will never progress if the only thing that can be done is what people pissed off their tits can understand. Here's a good example. This machine is literally miraculous, the genius needed to build it almost defies belief. It's an EUV photo-lithography machine, that creates the circuits on silicon chips. It does it by altering the surface of the chip one atom at a time, with an extreme-UV laser. To generate the EUV light, it uses molten tin, which it fires lasers at to create the UV. That extreme UV light is then captured by a series of mirrors that are so smooth that if you made them the size of Australia, the biggest bump on the mirror would be less than half a millimetre high. Mind-boggling precision, but then the machine is moving individual *atoms*. I see little to no respect for the sort of expertise that does stuff like this, not least because few even know about it. Without this machine nearly every single modern comfort you enjoy would cease to exist, overnight. If you asked for a vote at the pub on it, I'm sure it would be voted down in favour of another round of drinks, and a football stadium. Incidentally if you wanted to buy this machine, which wouldn't be allowed, it's top secret, but just as a fun if...it would cost you over $200 million. It's one of humanity's greatest achievements, that most people have never heard of, because the pub test is the benchmark we use.

Take that, Robbie, said Covid. (See what I did there?) Long Covid is a stupid term. Everybody who gets Covid will possibly have it in their bodies, for life. Like those who get chickenpox. What it does there we're beginning to find out. It's not pretty. Some don't survive.

Not entirely clear why Pat Cummins chose to bowl himself non-stop from the beginning of play today, being belted all over the ground, over after over. With the two best bowlers not even given the ball.

Yep. Listened to research on benzene emissions from gas cooking and heating yesterday. Terrible stuff, carcinogenic. Found in every room of the house, with people who own gas cookers. Ventilation made little difference. Australia connected 70,000 *new* gas lines to homes in 2021, complete madness. Electrifying households is the secret sauce to beat cost of living and climate change.

Got notification from our electricity retailer yesterday of big price jumps on 1 July. Though they’re also raising the feed-in tariff for solar, which is interesting and nice. I suspect they’re doing very well out of home solar right now, providing them with a lot of much cheaper electricity to sell to others. Thankfully the price rise will have zero impact on us, as we don’t pay for any electricity, no matter the price. This is yesterday’s numbers as an example. We use some grid power in the mornings for heating, if it’s been a cold night and we’ve heated from the battery the night before. (Teenagers sitting up later can do that.) Sometimes we don’t even need that. But we exported a lot more (enough to power another household), and are also carrying a big surplus still from Spring and Summer, which will pay any small bills, including the daily connection charge. This also on the back of us adding electric heating to every single room in the house, something we didn’t have before. So we’re doing a lot more heating, but the cost to us is zero.

For the cricketing fans, what do you make of ‘Bazball’, the new English approach to test cricket? I think it’s marketing spin. Indistinguishable from the style of cricket the Australians under Taylor and Waugh played. (And earlier under the Chappells, Bradman etc.) Also how the West Indians played in the 1980s. What’s different today is that the stock of quality bowlers has collapsed. So they have a higher run rate than earlier eras of attacking cricket, because the bowlers they’re facing are pretty sub-par. One-day and T20 cricket have been undermining bowling for years, people just want to see sixes. Mark Taylor last night, I think our smartest and best modern captain, made the point any smart captain would make. That the best response to an attacking batting style is an attacking bowling style. Dig it in short, make it harder for batsmen to have a good length for T20-style bashing. And have a bloody good spinner, as we do. The West Indians did that in the 1980s, I still remember Dean Jones trying to ‘Bazball’ Michael Holding, and Holding almost sitting him on his arse the very next ball with a look of contempt. But you need skilled bowlers, which we have, because bad short bowling is even juicier for T20-style bashing than good length bowling. And as an aside, Ponting always has been an unimaginative dullard. The monotonous drone from the commentary box, a humourless plod. A great batsman and fielder, but no cricketing brain. We lost a couple of Ashes series under him due to unimaginative captaincy.

Smart words from Finn Peacock again here. Note that the system in this common scenario would pay for itself in under 3 years. And that you win on cash flow too, by doing this you have more money each week, not just when the system has paid for itself. “Assuming you own a roof that is not shaded, to do nothing would actually cost you more – let me explain,” he said. NSW HOMEOWNERS EXAMPLE NSW SCENARIO: Your current electricity bills are $500 per quarter in NSW without solar. You then install 6.6 kW of solar (around 20 panels), which would cost you approximately $5000. RESULT: Your bills would go from $500 per quarter to receiving an average credit of $65 per quarter. FUNDS ARE TIGHT?: Rather than dipping into your savings to pay for this system, especially when things are so uncertain, you could secure a low rate green loan that has a payback as little as $71 per month (over seven years). Installers will also offer interest-free finance. When you combine your bill credit with the cost of the loan, there is still a whopping $352 saving per quarter when compared to a home without solar.

One of the reasons I went with a battery for us is this. I'm not confident the deadlines are going to be met, and if they're not, the whole electricity system in Australia is in serious trouble. 2-3 decades of total neglect coming home to roost. As with Covid, our politicians are too stupid and corrupted to do anything about it. You're on your own. "...coal plants supply about 60% of the country’s electricity needs but as much as two-thirds of the capacity could leave the grid by 2030." https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jun/20/australias-transition-away-from-fossil-fuels-not-fast-enough-as-wind-and-solar-investment-lags

Yep.

Have a look at the public health messaging they have in NZ. Our governments here in Australia won’t allow these facts to be publicised.

Two of my favourites, travel and social media. Most travel seems to be about saying ‘here’s me, at this cool place.’ It’s not really about being there, it’s about being there to show others back home that you’re there. Like the old imperial explorations, which were motivated entirely by what people brought back, we’re still children of empire and don’t even see it. Still conquering the world, now with cameras in phones. That destroys the places we visit even faster than colonial invasion.

It’s particularly pleasing that Australia beat the new ‘Bazball’ England, and most of the Australian team didn’t even play well. Imagine what they’d have done to them on a good day. Also, who needs one-day and T20 bash cricket? This is how the game should be played, with something for bat AND ball.

Brrr. Still not even in the same ballpark as Canadian or European cold, or even US cold in many places, I know. But cold feels colder in Australia mostly because of the crap quality of a lot of our housing. The Scotsman who installed our new windows said the whole reason he does this as a job is because when he moved here he’d never felt as cold in his life. Thankfully building codes are getting much stricter now.

Update. It got colder after the sun came up.

The real sub-text of Ashes cricket? You don't have to like cricket. It's a very deep fear by the English that the people they dumped in the penal colony are actually better than they are. History has proven that to be a yes, time and again.

The private sector does it again. None of that 'red tape' for them.

How's everybody today? Got the masks on?

Putting major transmission lines underground is ludicrous. Buy a battery, folks, we were already not within cooee of getting thousands of km of urgently needed new transmission built by 2030. Australia will be lucky to not be using candles for lighting again within a few years. We’re too stupid to survive.

Went to bed at half-time. Queensland tries off clear forward passes and knocks-ons was just one reason, I don’t think NSW was ever going to win regardless. The article captures it well, NSW were ‘disjointed’. Like I said after the first match, a great team will alway beat a team of great players. Why I still think NSW’s best chance would be just to give the Panthers the blue jerseys. You need a great team to win, in a team sport. They don’t even need to be great players, they just need to gel, as a team. Netball shows the same thing, the best team in the comp has the fewest star players, whereas Collingwood, who recruited lots of top netball stars with a big chequebook, has failed miserably.

Happy birthday :)

Happy birthday!

Australia has some of the worst petrol in the world. It's one of the reasons we're slower to move to EVs, because car manufacturers dump their rubbish on us. But look at the second graph. Improving emissions standards and shifting to EVs will be a bit more expensive at first, but the country would save enormous money in the medium term. And even more in the long term (not shown). It's the same maths as solar - you need to look at more than just immediate cost.

And then this one, an international laughing stock. Even countries *with* big existing car industries are wayyyy ahead of us. 20 years of philistines in government here has taken a country that should be the richest in the world, to the arse-end of that world.

More for the fans of the private sector. Also the thinking that's driving our Covid (non)-response. This CEO (Stockton Rush) is on the missing sub, experiencing the joys of the absence of 'red tape' as he runs out of air, while shitting and pissing as 4 others watch on.

This is from the official news for GPs. I don't make this stuff up. Warnings of a 'pandemic of cardiovascular disease', caused by Covid infection. Just as Spanish Flu likely caused the pandemic of heart disease we had in the 20th century. Only 40% of Australians caught Spanish Flu. 100% of Australians are expected to catch Covid, it's government policy. Tell me how this isn't a crime.

Australia's existing high capacity electricity transmission lines. You can see the problem we have, and why we need 10,000 km more. They don't link up. For example if Eastern Australia wants to use Western Australian solar after the sun goes down in the East, it will need to be connected to WA by high transmission lines. (And vice versa for WA in the mornings.) We could build more storage too. Australia plans to do both.

What’s happened since 2020 that could be causing this? 🤔

Australians are increasingly drawn to the outback. The idea actually makes no sense at all, what does ‘outback’ mean? What I think it means, and why I think Australians feel increasngly drawn to it, is everything we never understood about this country, pushed into the interior as we settled all the coastlines. That includes people, the outback is the only place in Australia we’re happy to leave to Aboriginal Australians. But we don’t get any closer to that mystery, because we tour the outback as tourists. Our ‘big laps’, like just moving through it will bring us closer to it. ‘I’ve been everywhere man’, remember that song? Like if we just keep accumulating more towns and sights, we’ll get to the heart of Australia. It won’t work.

How did the gas industry respond to the price caps the government put on it? It refused to create any new contracts for supply with local users, forcing them to buy from the international spot market, which is way more expensive. On top of that it got what it had always said it wanted, more gas exploration (‘supply’), which will actually drive prices even higher, as it will sell its cheapest gas on the expensive international market, leaving us again all buying from that market. And to crown this complete clusterfuck, the price of $12/gigajoule that is the ‘cap’ already represents windfall profits for the industry. They’re at least doubling their money. Australia has been hijacked by fossil fuel companies, who play us for the fools we are. We pay them over $50 billon a year for the worst petrol in the world, they own nearly all of our coal mines and pocket most of the profits from those, and here with gas they’re taking our natural resources and sucking them dry, with all the profits going offshore. And still Australians resist being a world energy superpower with our extraordinary renewable energy capacity. The fossil fuel companies should be run out of town, but instead gullible numpties soak up political propaganda from the fossil fuel lobby and actually help them effectively rape us. Like I say, we’re too stupid to survive.

85 more dead since last week, in NSW. National total pending. Let's go to a gig/restaurant/party/trivia night/on a plane/anything else that says we couldn't care less.

I haven’t been to a conference in years, and don’t remember learning anything at any of them. Apparently this mass dancing thing is now common. Like being in pre school again. The icing on the cake with this one? It’s a conference of public health experts. In a pandemic.

The implosion of the Titan sub reminded me of air pressure. There’s a column of air 100km high resting on your body every day. If you hold your palm out as in the drawing, you have air from that column pressing down on your palm that weighs the same as 10 bowling balls. You don’t feel that weight because the air also presses up under your palm, with the same force. You can actually take that air under your palm away to some degree, using a good vacuum cleaner. Then you’ll start to feel the weight of that column of air. And if you’ve ever used a suction cup, you’ll have experienced that huge weight directly. There’s no budging those things unless you break the seal. Also why your vacuum cleaner works, they don’t ‘suck’, they remove air inside which makes the atmosphere *push* the dirt into the machine. The equivalent thing happens with gravity, which I post about sometimes. Standing or sitting on the Earth’s surface, you should actually feel no weight at all. The Earth pushes UP into you to exactly match the gravitational pull down. If you feel weight, it means you’re out of balance, that’s all. A lot of bodywork traditions play tricks with what they think is muscle tension to make people feel lighter. It’s not muscles, it’s gravity.

We probably won’t ever find out, but I’d have a bet that the bodies of the 5 men in the Titan are actually there, directly beneath where the sub imploded, on the ocean floor. Just as the debris they found was, as James Cameron predicted. At that depth I don’t think there are large currents, the lot would have dropped straight down like a stone after implosion. If the carbon fibre shell didn’t just disintegrate completely (and it’s an implosion, not explosion, so all the bits would have tended to move inwards, not outwards), then they’re a gelatinous thin film sandwiched between carbon fibre sheets, lying on the bottom. One reason we may never find out is that they don’t tend to report on human remains in sea wrecks. It creates resistance to that exploration with the public. For example they’re always very cagey about whether they found any bodies in the Titanic itself. One of the laws of the sea is that wrecks are a type of sacred tomb. Talking about bodies triggers debates around tomb raiding. Similarly they’ve never spoke openly about what happened to the 7 astronauts that were on the Challenger shuttle when it exploded in 1986. If you access the official reports though the crew capsule survived the explosion and was thrown thousands of feet through the air, into the ocean. That capsule was recovered, and the crushed astronauts inside it. The analysis suggested it had hit the water from a height of 9 miles, intact. And that at least some of the astronauts were alive when it did. Again, they don’t publicise this.

26% of air traffic controllers in the US right now are trainees.

The seas around the UK are choked by jellyfish at the moment. The reason? The ocean is like a bath, climate change has heated it to levels that make jellyfish thrive.

The Olgas, I just flew there in Apple Maps. Cost of AvGas = 0. I don’t usually succeed convincing people of the absurd ideas that run our travel cultures, but I’ll keep trying. Take Australia’s interior, it’s become a hot tourist destination, both domestically and for foreign tourists. Why is it so popular? It’s one of the few landscapes left on Earth mostly untouched by modern society. So, here’s the rub. It’s a popular place to travel to, to get the experience of a landscape relatively untouched by us. Except us travelling there means it’s no longer untouched, by us. So the thing we’re going there to experience is destroyed by us going there to experience it. There is no way to reconcile this hypocritical paradox at the heart of travel.

Another provocation, a genuine question, for the travellers among us. Venice. Completely overrun by tourists. So bad, that the locals are planning to move out. Some projections say there will be nobody living there by 2030. It will become a theme park, empty except for tourists. You can SEE Venice right now, on Apple or Google Maps, and in millions of other photos online. If you insist on ‘experiencing’ it instead, let’s unpack that. Say your friend has a partner you find highly desirable. Does that justify you ‘experiencing’ that partner, shagging them? Of course not. But that’s how we act as travellers, with places. We think our desire to experience them must be satisfied.

Latest estimate of people with Long Covid globally. 400 million.

The economic cost of Long Covid in the US is now at $3.7 trillion. Nearly 20% of total GDP.

Again, people should be in jail over this. Politicians. Over 600 dead and it struggles to even make the news. What an idiot society.

Every capital city in Australia except Canberra will be underwater.

Imagine a perfomer approaching 80 headlining Woodstock in the 1960s. An elderly person, old enough to be a great-grandparent. It would never have happened, it would have been seen as ridiculous. But here we are. I love Elton’s music and the man, that’s not the point. The point is a generation who will not grow up. The Peter Pan generation, who want to keep living the lives they lived as teenagers. Who sees Elton as an elderly man? That’s what he literally is.

*crickets*

Not old people. Young, working people. Of which we have an emergency shortage already. Maybe we could bump this up in the news, ahead of Taylor Swift tickets.

10-14 year olds now. Note 'excess deaths', many won't have Covid written on their death certificates, because nobody will have traced the link. But excess deaths shows the link. Covid causes many other conditions that lead to disability and death as well, including record numbers of cardiovascular deaths among young people now. Come on people, you've been lied to. When are you going to speak up? And wear a mask? And stop socialising in unprotected ways, to spread this virus to all of these people who end up sick and dead? How many ended up sick and dead because you didn't do any of that?

The double glazed windows of course are fantastic for dramatically cutting heat and cold transfer. But something we’re enjoying as much if not more is how much sound they cut out. 70-80% of outside noise. For example in the past few days we had near gale-forced winds at times. Didn’t even know it was happening, could lay in bed not hearing one thing. We also live near a fairly busy road, and now no longer hear it. The frames are so important with good glazing, a lot of heat and sound passes not through the glass, but through the frame. The uPVC frames are brilliant there, they have a 5-chambered set of spaces designed to block the transmission of heat and sound. Can see the chambers in the cutaway view below. It’s like being in a great library, a refuge from any noise outside.

Absolutely true.

New weapons against Covid are coming, like inhaled vaccines up to 5 times more powerful than the injected ones. These vaccines also target your upper respiratory tract, to help prevent transmission of the disease. The key thing is to avoid infection until these weapons arrive. Once the virus is inside you, it can set up reservoirs, and there may be nothing that can be done to remove them.

Those who thought there is such thing as an 'economy', separate to people, are finding out how stupid they are the hard way.

Backs up what I’ve posted here for a while. The next 5-10 years could be pretty nasty, with energy prices and grid stability. Invest in yourself and your home. It’s the best way you can spend money that will also make you money, cost should not scare people off. They spend a lot more on things like second or third cars, boats, entertainment and holidays, all of which just gobble up your money. And you’ll make 20% on your investment, try getting that anywhere else.

Once a person reaches a famous landmark, or meets a famous person, there’s a fascinating…nothing. Like people who have a crush on somebody for ages, then get together with them, and are confronted with the actual reality of the person for the first time. Often it ends badly (40% of marriages end in divorce). It’s an open question, what does ‘being there’ add to anything? Why do we NEED to travel, to ‘be there’? Do you think this woman found some magical essence of the Eiffel Tower, when she arrived? No, she took a selfie. Her focus remained her own social group, back home.

I don’t often talk about myself or my family here, because I still remember a time when that was the most boring thing a person could do. But because many seem to live their lives through social media now, and interpret my posts as my life, some counterbalancing maybe. The older I get, the more the only thing that really interests me is ideas, and using ideas to improve lives. That’s all that’s ever interested me, have never wanted a career (yawn), I just want to understand things. So I’ve always picked jobs that gave me room to think. The moment those jobs turned into implementing stupid things for unimaginative ambitious dullards, I left. What drives me is very simple things. Finding useful work, and doing it well. Work that needs doing, to improve all of our lives. Not entertainment or travel or partying or any of those things that for me are great when you’re a teenager, but become less interesting as the more interesting and complex world of adulthood arrives. I want something to think about and do, that’s much more exciting than passive entertainment. I don’t even go to gigs much now, even for artists I really like. The sound is nearly always crap, you can’t see, and everybody pretending it’s the most ‘amazing’ thing they’ve ever heard (teenagers say that a lot), even when the band is a pale imitation of past glories. I don’t want to be a teenager again. People in their 50s have a role. To raise the young, look after the old, and lead their workplaces. Not to be teenagers obsessed with bands and gigs and alcohol and travel and selfies. There’s real joy in embracing that social role a 50-something is supposed to play. To lead, to use your knowledge and experience, at your prime. And not to dramatise every challenge as some personal social media curated wailing. Again, that’s for teenagers. Those challenges are there to be fixed, I can’t think of a better reason to get up every day, than to leave the world a better place for everybody at the end of it, than the day before. To fix things that need fixing, it’s fun, rewarding. Not to take selfies over the wreckage. Not to ‘discover’ myself, if you’re doing that in your 50s, you really need to grow up fast.

We never learn, despite this now being objectively proved, people will cling to Gladys, because they 'like' her. The same way people cling to Trump, no matter what he does. Why I say we're a giant high school, popularity is the currency for all things.

Happy Birthday! You look great for 118.

Happy birthday :)

The ABC shared this video of a rail car imploding at 1 atmosphere (i.e. our everyday atmospheric pressure). Implosions are the opposite of explosions, they don’t throw things in every direction, they make everything come together into the tightest ball possible. Just look at how much air pressure you have on you every day, without it being inside you as well as outside, you’d collapse. The Titan sub had 375 atmospheres of pressure on it. That’s the equivalent of about 4 tonnes of pressure pressing in, from every direction. The debris they brought to the surface with human remains still inside matches exactly what I predicted earlier this week, just sayin’ ;)

Happy birthday! Still looking Sharp.

Almost got a century of deaths this week. And this is just NSW. But let's focus on Taylor Swift concerts, some 'positivity'.

The people who believed the bullshit about what a tremendous leader Gladys was have already moved on to some new bullshit. They won't face reality.

Remember all that political blah blah about how we couldn't go renewable, because China wasn't? China was. And how. We're pathetic. It's doing more than the rest of the world combined. Much more. https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/china-on-course-to-hit-wind-and-solar-power-target-five-years-ahead-of-time/ar-AA1dbGN8?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=c7d597fb78c847c08f159866fa3efdc1&ei=11&fbclid=IwAR17Qv1EBgfYRp0PBc8wgB09UJVuUdcXs2onc1bBnLhrYKmJr81bN0mSL7s

Today's trivia question. What could make you lose all sense of taste when you eat? (Hint: it's a type of brain damage.)

Tesla’s Cybertruck looks a bit like it was made in Minecraft. But the specs on this thing are something. Designed to be Tesla’s ute. The glass is armoured. It’ll do 0-100 in 2.9 seconds. It’ll be able to tow up to 7 tonnes. Range is expected to be over 800km.