August 2023

I love how the Anglo world (us, the US, UK) picks fights with China. The Chinese could quite easily say 'fine, off you go then, and make all the things we make for you'. Game over, in very quick time.

I'm not sure how either rugby code is going to survive CTE now so much is known about it. People can say they want to play on regardless, but the lawyers and insurers will have a very different idea. Players here and overseas already suing the governing bodies, the lawyers will shut the lot down if that continues, at all levels of the games. AFL the same. Wally is in trouble here, extensive damage.

We’ve reached the tipping points.

Living this right now, saving huge money. It’s a bit sad that people not only refuse to engage with very basic facts here, but are happy to pay tens of thousands out of their own pockets to support their dumb team.

I didn’t know that AGL originally stood for ‘Australian Gas Light Company’. No Greenies here. Stating the obvious, we should have banned new gas installations to homes years ago, it’s unbelievably stupid that we didn’t. The only people who don’t agree are either in the gas industry, or are being paid by them. Worth remembering that ‘fracking’, how we get all gas now, is already an admission that our easy gas reserves are long gone.

Staggering numbers of people actually think democracy IS popularity, which shows how much we've already lost. Trump thinks his popularity can overrule all law and due process. Hitler and Mussolini thought that too. One ended up shooting himself in the head, the other was strung up in a public square.

Australians are overwhelmingly huddled in a handful of cities on the coast. As far away from confronting the reality of the country they live in as possible. Got a great example of this yesterday, Paul McCartney is touring this year. He expressed an interest in playing some regional shows. What 'regional' locations did the promoter organise for him? Newcastle and the Gold Coast. How's that for regional. Wouldn't want to stray more than 20 m from the beach. The same promoter who organised Elton for Bathurst. Didn't even occur to them to try Bathurst again, checked with them today.

Sometimes when people say ordinary folk can’t afford things like solar panels, induction cooktops and electric cars, I scroll through what the same ordinary people pay for second-hand caravans, to tow behind their Hiluxes.

We only need services like these because we privatised energy in Australia, a monumentally stupid thing to do. But given that's what we have, this is an excellent service, it'll assess your every bill and let you know if you can switch to a cheaper option with another provider. Fairly small annual fee, you'll save more (likely much more) than the service costs.

This is the infectious disease research team at the Kirby Institute, UNSW. Notice they’re all wearing masks, if they’re in the same room. Who should you trust, these people, who study viruses for a living? Or politicians? Amazingly, most people trust the politicians. A politician would sell your grandmother’s butt-crack as a bicycle stand, if there was a vote in it. 

Interesting experience yesterday. Now the fans have all gone from the room we were drying, we left the heating on in there all day, just a small 2.5 kW reverse-cycle unit. Ventilation guy said warmth and humidity about 40% is optimum for drying any moisture that's left. What we weren't expecting was that this actually heated the whole house to a toasty warm. And it stayed that warm pretty much all night, even though it got to -4 overnight. (Turned the heater off before bed). Normally we'd turn on reverse-cycle units in other parts of the house as well, but we didn't need to yesterday. It'd be interesting to see whether leaving a single heater on all day would be a more efficient strategy for us than using multiple units at the end of the day. The single unit uses less than 1kW when running. I wonder if some of the heat got stored in the thick walls. It definitely keeps moisture levels down, just raising temperature decreases humidity, even if the amount of moisture in the air is unchanged. This is a debating topic in the UK apparently, whether to leave a heater on low all day or just when you're there. Generally it will be less efficient to leave it running all day, because houses leak heat. But with the new windows and double-brick walls, it's an open question in ours. The same may also apply for cooling in a hot summer.

32 years since Freddie died, amazing. I don't think it's well enough understood what a tragedy his passing was. Not just because he was so young and we lost so much music that never got to be written or performed, but because as a person he faced marginalisation his whole life, as an immigrant to Britain, and then as a gay man at a time when it was still very dangerous to declare that. And he created this phenomenal personality to bust through all of that. 'Freddie Mercury' was a character, like Chaplin's Little Tramp. It wasn't the man himself. It was much more than about music, it was his genius way to get revenge on the world for excluding him. All of his songs were about that battle. And then, having succeeded, he contracts a horrible disease and dies a horrible death, at only 45. Like reality gave him a final 'know your place, boy'. Those close to him say he died gracefully. But I'm sure part of that was also that he still felt a shame at being gay and not fully accepted even by his own family. (Bohemian Rhapsody is almost certainly a song about his mother rejecting his sexuality.) Those were very different times to now. I suspect he died as he lived, feeling unloved and unwanted for who he really was, despite the adulation he achieved. The adulation made his life-project even harder, because he never knew who was genuinely interested in him, the man, and who only wanted to know him as Freddie Mercury, the star.

There are two notable things about this gravesite. Trivia buffs may know without Googling?

That’d be a jet vapour trail?

I had no idea this show was still running.

This is George Michael as a kid. I watched the Wham movie (excellent), and it resonated with the post I did about Freddie Mercury yesterday. Like Mercury, Michael was a social outsider all through his life. You can see it in the photo, it was Andrew Ridgeley who rescued him at school. His entire career, and the docu-movie makes it explicit, was less about music for him than it was about making a space in the world where he could be accepted. This is what Michael, Mercury and also stars like Elton John did. Being gay and often social outsiders on top of that, they created larger-than-life characters with their huge talent that smashed through the social barriers, to give them a place in the world. For Michael and Mercury, that also proved to be fatal. Living that pretend life of stardom killed them. Elton John has said he’s only still alive because he was very lucky. Underneath the fake smiling veneers of social lives, society is brutal. Lethally brutal, social media has enormously magnified the damage, now that intense social jostling for status of high school continues into old age. Without international fame Michael, Mercury and Elton would never have been accepted in society. It took that level of superstardom to break through the social barriers. And for two of them, again it also killed them. These are tragic stories, hidden by fame.

Have a listen to Professor Kevin Anderson (short, promise it’s eye-opening), a professor of energy and climate change, talk about how action for climate change is really only an ‘incremental’ change for most of us. The people who resist it most are those who do most of the emitting, 10-30% of the population. They’ve spent billions trying to convince the rest of us action will destroy our lives. It’s a con. (I also like him because he’s part of a group of scientists calling out the ridiculous amount of flying and travel this 10-30% of the population do.)

Saw this in Bathurst. Was not aware Mary had this as a sideline, I’m sure Jesus said some pretty unkind things about moneylenders.

That some NRL players wear headgear interests me. Not sure if they think it protects them from the brain damage many players are now experiencing (it doesn’t), but even if so it shows real grit to go against the crowd and wear one. Like people who still mask for Covid, resisting the great dumb wave of peer pressure not to. Imagine going through life like you’re still at school, too afraid to do something different to what everybody else is doing.

Again, I know, boring compared to some clip of some gig you’re way too old to be attending. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

I’m pretty critical of gigs. To explain why. As a teenager and young adult, I was passionate about them, found them thrilling. Now they mostly bore me. Partly because they haven’t evolved a lot, they’re still using a lot of the theatrical innovations of the 1970s, just with better gear. But it’s a social and cultural thing as well, because to me they may be the best indicator of a massive shift, in my own lifetime. Rock/pop gigs are for teenagers. That’s who they were invented for. My parents didn’t go to gigs, and I’d have found it ridiculous if they did. They grew out of them. It’s adolescent culture, adolescent territory. I don’t think we notice that even one generation ago, adults didn’t much go to gigs. They came from a cultural moment where there were clear separations between adolescent and adult life. That separation is now mostly gone. I think about how weird it is, that everybody from age 12 to 85 now goes to gigs, regularly. It’s not so much the gigs that are the problem, it’s the loss of separation between adolescent and adult life. I post about that a lot, how high school/adolescent culture became all culture. Societies now think in adolescent ways, in everything they do, because their entire culture was re-made as a giant high school. (Also as somebody who’s always been passionate about music, becoming an adult for me is also about putting it in the proper place in your life. Which isn’t at the centre.)

Another way to see the shift in culture. U2. A fantastic band. Still active, so much so that they’ve been the highest-earning musicians in the world 5 times this century. Bono is worth $700 million. Let’s add some reality back here. They began in 1976, about 50 years ago. The equivalent of them still headlining gigs and being the highest earning musicians in the world in my day, as a teenager, would have been Fred Astaire headlining festivals and topping the charts. I can promise you, he wasn’t. Most people my age had never heard of him, let alone listened to him or watched him. Many of our parents hadn’t either, he was *their* parents’ generation.

I hadn’t realised the pub with $25 hamburgers also has single pork chops, for $42.

One for my Alexander and other bodywork friends.

Music was always my greatest passion, and the thing I was best at. But have posted before how I listen to it less than I used to. It nearly always leaves me feeling a bit unsatisfied now. Like it’s pointing at a something I can’t quite reach. I think the African fans at the netball world cup are showing that thing. Cultures that integrated music into everyday life, they turn even the jobs and work of everyday life (and watching sport) into song and dance. The melodies and rhythms of Western music became separated from that everyday activity, not integrated. The closest link back to that integration is concepts like ‘groove’.

Happy Birthday 🎉🎂🎈

Happy birthday 🎂🎈🎈

Claims we’re ‘living with Covid’ are all bullshit. Good example here of the music industry. Lots happens behind the scenes to try to keep shows on the road. Often it fails, and even where tours go ahead most lose big money. On top of that tours spread Covid widely through every community they visit, they’re a public health train wreck. The same public health damage is done at every level of the industry, from local pub gigs to international tours.

Both climate change and Covid smashed this mass event. We carry on as if life is normal. In reality it’s falling apart, I don’t know a single important industry that’s not in serious trouble.

“But I am just not getting better.” Covid after-effects, immune system damaged, can’t fight off disease. A bit like HIV. You don’t have a head cold for weeks. This is what we’re seeing everywhere who chose to ‘live with the virus’. Truly the most lethally stupid thing we have ever done.

You really should watch this. The outrageous story (that some of us have lived firsthand) of the privatisation of the pubic service, through outsourcing to the big 4 consulting firms. More than 15,000 public servants have been sacked since Tony Abbott was PM, and these organisations have rushed into the breach, hired by the politicians who did the sacking. They love consultants because unlike the public service, politicians can just tell them what they want them to say. You might think this is a dry topic. But this impacts every area of your life. For example Australia’s Covid strategy didn’t come from the Department of Health. It was outsourced to a private consultancy. I don’t think you’d need to be a genius to figure out why.

I didn’t watch the soccer, I find it a bit boring. Did watch the netball this week though. World champions for the 12th time. Doesn’t get the recognition it deserves, phenomenal success. Easily our most successful sporting team, and has been for 60 years. Interestingly our team and individual sports greatest ever sportspeople are both female. Netball for teams, Heather McKay for individual. (And that includes Bradman, her record surpasses his.) McKay is recognised even less than the netball.

Broome. Please don’t now go to Broome.

I think a major difference between men and women is that you can go through life as a man almost completely ignoring that you're a biological creature. You could just as well be a robot, your biology rarely gets your attention. Whereas being a woman seems intrinsically biological at least every month, plus growing and giving birth to children, hormonal fluctuations etc. It feels like women are therefore more attuned to the biological reality of being a human. Only sickness breaks the spell, for men, which is maybe why they often don't respond well to sickness. They have almost no experience at dealing with the realities of being biological.

🤔

The new weight loss drugs are amazingly effective. Semaglutide (called wegovy here, also sometimes Ozempic or Rybelsus) is the most famous, and really does seem to do miraculous things. There’s some resistance from those who think fat people just eat the wrong things and don’t exercise. (The gym industry promotes those messages constantly.) Exercise is hopeless for weight loss, diet not a lot better. Obesity is likely a microbe thing, impacting insulin regulation. These drugs target the biochemistry of metabolism, and that key insulin mechanism. Expect to see them more widely used, obesity is a medical condition, not people being lazy or gluttonous.

Love the boat in this pic, taking at least 3 charging spots. Imagine parking your EV and boat in a petrol station, in front of 3 bowsers. The fact it has a cutesy name, ‘ICE-blocking’, tells you it’s a scheme hatched somewhere on social media by people who think paying Arabians and Texans $50 billion for oil every year gives them freedom, or something.

Trudeau's head is too big for his body. But I maybe say that because Kell would probably have the same face as Kate, if she met him.

Yep. Like I said. https://reneweconomy.com.au/electric-water-heaters-could-do-work-of-2-million-home-batteries-and-save-billions/

They're laughing at us. No doubt the justification is 'Australia needs a strong banking sector'. Or 'this is great for all of our super returns'. It needs ordinary Australians to have a roof over their heads and heating too. I don't see anybody shovelling money in that direction. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/aug/09/commonwealth-bank-posts-record-1016bn-profit-amid-rising-stress-for-borrowers

Many living in climate denial have put their faith in hydrogen, to avoid the bog obvious answer right in front of them, of solar and wind. (Actually what motivates them is that they just don’t want to agree with the people who advocate for solar and wind, it’s as petty as that. We never leave high school.) Hydrogen doesn’t stack up, in any way at all. It will have some uses, but never as a mass replacement for fossil fuels. It’s also highly explosive, and anything run by hydrogen has to take that into account. The wallies who go on about EVs catching fire should see what’s left of a hydrogen-powered car if it explodes.

Alan Kohler.

Nothing cuts through the bullshit of peoples' opinions faster than insurance (a big part of my current job). For example, you can believe climate change isn't a human-induced disaster, or that you can 'live with Covid'. Try getting insurance in either area right now. It'll either send you broke, or it won't be available at all. Premiums have gone up 24% in 4 years. The entire insurance industry may still collapse. All because we listen to bullshit.

'Living with the virus.'

I’ve been called a ‘germaphobe’ a few times in recent weeks. Because I still wear a mask. I couldn’t care less, the people who said it are like most people in this pandemic, dumb as a box of hammers. Covid isn’t ‘germs’ like you pick up in the backyard. It attacks every blood vessel in your body, in every organ, and also dismantles your immune system, as HIV does. People feel comforted because they have a ‘mild’ illness, which passes relatively quickly. HIV is mostly a mild illness too, when you catch it. It’s irrelevant, just the on-ramp for the virus. You won’t feel what the virus may be doing to your body over the next few years, while it’s taken residence inside you. Until it’s too late. You get to choose how long you survive by what you do right now. The heart disease epidemic in the 20th century (people rarely died of heart disease before the 20th century) is thought to be linked to the Spanish Flu at the start of that century. The millions who died of heart disease in that century were likely people who were carrying latent Spanish Flu in their bodies. Society is now too stupid to survive. I honestly believe that.

Again, you have to be some form of just bloody stupid to think nuclear energy is the answer to anything. Costs a fortune, takes decades to build, the small modular reactors they’re talking about here don’t even work, and nobody will want the nuclear waste in their area. It’s just a debating tactic, to create an argument to delay and distract from obvious answers.

Finally today having this sub-floor ducting removed. (Not a pic of our place.) Added like many homes, for gas central heating years ago. Blocked a lot of the sub-floor ventilation, leading to rising damp in one of the rooms. And restricted access to the whole space. Only Russell ever managed to reach the far ends of the sub-floor, and he’s a caver. Having the gas capped to that side of the house too, only instant gas hot water remains. It’ll be replaced with a heat pump in years to come, so we have free hot water too.

One of the most disturbing examples of the collapse of public health in Australia is seeing pregnant young women taking no Covid precautions at all. No masks, no avoiding large indoor crowds etc. I think most are vaccinated, and as the data shows below that provides some protection. But not complete protection, even with vaccination risk of stillbirth drops only 15%, and it has no impact on risk of miscarriage and fetal abnormalities. One friend had a stillbirth last year. Blames the vaccines 😳 Even more disturbingly, many say their GPs or OBS haven't mentioned Covid as a risk to them, nor asked them to take additional precautions. Of course they’ll be told to avoid soft cheeses, and all those other things. But not a lethal virus. Many stories of young women with attending health professionals not masking at birth either, or afterwards, posing for shots with babies.

Hands up whose school is doing any of this.

We've arrived. I do a lot of hours behind the wheel each week. Nothing I see has ever convinced me humans are better drivers than machines.

This is what all travel culture does. It’s just more visible here. Harila said she left her ‘cameraman’ to help. Like most travel it wasn’t about being there for her, it was about showing others she was there. Why this platform is flooded with boring travel photos. People pretend to like them because it gives them permission to humblebrag with their own.

Over 3,300 people died because of Covid in the first 4 months of this year, in Australia. That rate of death is still climbing, and is projected to be even higher in the next quarter. Thousands upon thousands of deaths. None of which would happen if we all stopped transmitting the virus to one another, in our social and work activity. Your ‘mild’ infection passes on to others, in exponential chains of transmission that end up in the bodies of those who die. You’re part of the highway that delivers Covid to them. And then the virus lives inside you anyway, and gets to work destroying your immune system. So the infection was never mild anyway.

Imaging from autopsies, showing Covid had taken up residence in the bone marrow of peoples’ skulls, and in the meninges. That’s what it does, your ‘mild’ illness is just the on-ramp. It uses your blood vessels and organs as a home.

‘America’s Newsroom’, see there in the back? I shouldn’t laugh because dumb is everywhere now, he’s not an exception. Visiting the home of Karl Marx, to see where he wrote Mein Kampf in 1838. Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in the 1920s.

Was out for my lunchtime walk this week, and saw an older person zip by on their mobility scooter. And it made me think, for a lot of the journeys even young and healthy adults do every day, something like this would be enough. A car is complete overkill. Sure cars are useful if you need to carry a lot of shopping, or passengers, or the weather is rubbish. But a lot of those problems were actually created BY cars. It was cars that shifted shops from walking distance from your home. Cars that made it normal to ferry the kids around everywhere all the time, meaning nothing ended up organised for them close to home. Cars shaped the way we designed our towns and cities, so that it then became almost impossible to function without them. The Italians and their scooters recognised this years ago. Ditto for Bali. Most of the things you can’t do without a car got done just fine, before we had cars. Cars changed how we built cities. Most urban design serves vehicles, not people.

“Deaths among young Americans documented in employee life insurance claims should alone set off alarms. Among working people 35 to 44 years old, a stunning 34% more died than expected in the last quarter of 2022, with above-average rates in other working-age groups, too.” Heh, ‘and it’s not Covid’. It is Covid, it’s the longer-term chronic impact of the virus living in the body, after the initial acute infection, which is often mild or even asymptomatic. That’s just the virus’ on-ramp. Like HIV. And now attacking blood vessels and organs, and the immune system. We’re infecting EVERYBODY with this. Over and over and over.

As a kid growing up playing sport, would any coach have tolerated you crying after a game if you lost? Or tolerated over-excited celebration at winning? Remember the days of losers and winners calmly shaking hands after a game? Because it’s just a game? There are bad winners just as there are bad losers. You can sound a miserable bastard saying these things, but collective behaviour seems to be locked in immature reverse in so many ways. Maybe it’s having been a teacher, a parent and a coach, there’s no way I’d tolerate either of these behaviours in any of those areas.

Very proud of Molly, who’s about to finish uni with a near HD-average. A wise teacher said to me when I was at school that you can’t judge a kid’s true ability, until they leave school. School is about 90% social status games, and 10% education. Often the kids who win the awards at school have pushy parents, and/or intensive tutoring, and/or are the kids of teachers. I remember that from primary school, where somebody not even in the top 3 was given dux, it seemed because of a close friendship between their mother and the teacher. At uni or in a trade people lose much of that support network and have to show what they can do for themselves. That’s when the real talent shines.

"Australians now travel further throughout Australia than ever they did before, as tourists; in recreational vehicles of all kinds they penetrate into the remotest areas, driving thousands of kilometres to see funny-shaped rocks, taking photographs of the rocks and themselves with the rocks, to show the people back home. They are on safari in their own land, treating their birthplace as if it were an exotic, thrillingly foreign wilderness, travelling from well-appointed campsite or hotel to another campsite or hotel, an evening here and evening there on the best beaten of tracks. The people who stay longest in these remote places, and take jobs servicing the itinerant Australian tourist in Australia, are not indigenous, or native Australians, or even residents, but British backpackers." Germaine Greer. Quarterly Essay, Whitefella Jump Up.

Happy Birthday!

This is Ludwig Leichhardt. Famous explorer of Australia. Disappeared on his last expedition in 1848, nobody knows what happened to him. I remember learning about the explorers at school. What's most interesting for me is the idea we needed to 'explore' a country that had people in it for at least 60,000 years before we arrived. We could have just asked them. It'd be like a tourist coming to Lithgow and 'discovering' all the sights, without asking any of the locals. Some of these explorers died horrible, completely unnecessary deaths, while bemused Aboriginal Australians watched on in disbelief. We're still doing this. 'Exploring' and 'discovering' the country on our holidays. Somewhere we've now been more than 200 years. It doesn't strike people as bizarre. Our own birthplace just one more tourist destination, like Paris or Bali.

This is a rental house. In legal terms, a lease. Disgusting what the tenants have done, most would agree I'm sure. They'll lose their bond and could be charged. But here's a twist on leases, at a time the 'supply' of land is debated. Over 44% of the entire Australian continent is leased, to pastoralists. Meaning they don't own the land - we do. It's Crown Land. It's not freehold, like your house block. Many of these pastoralists are super-rich, and there are virtually no requirements on them to look after the land they lease at all. They clear vast areas of it by chains strung between bulldozers, and then move on. It's like soil mining, an extractive industry. Pastoralists are historically one of the most powerful political groups in Australia. Which is why they get away with it. Nobody questions it.

Every year the same dumb traditions play out. Would your backyard catch fire? No, because you maintain it. The reason we have huge bushfires is because we leave most of the country unoccupied, while we huddle on the coastal fringes. Even occupied areas don’t tend the landscape in any way. Only RFS volunteers venture into it, doing ‘hazard reduction’ burns. Our own landscape is a ‘hazard’ to us, how bizarre is that. Most of the country is so neglected it becomes a tangled mess of scrub, what we jingoistically call ‘the bush’. Even more perversely, another thing that maintains this tradition is that it’s become part of our jingoistic hero culture to fight the fires. You don’t become a hero preventing the fires happening, but you do if you put them out. Some firefighters even light the fires as secret arsonists, to fuel that heroic role. And much of what these volunteers do IS heroic. The point is that it shouldn’t need to be, every single year. All of this is too much part of our sacred myths of being Strayan to even discuss, you won’t be popular if you do.

I post a lot about Australia and the land, because I think there are some truths about this country that aren't well understood. Take the classic distinction between the city and the country. If you work your way through the history of all of the country towns, nearly always you'll find they exist at all because of mining (often the gold rush), or farming. And the farms were there to feed the cities. So really there is no such thing as 'the country', it's all outposts of the city. Most of these towns struggle to survive, and this is why. They only exist as outposts of the city, which can now often access the things these towns provided from somewhere else. The people who live in 'the country' have pretty much the same ways of life as people in the cities, just with more space and less traffic. It's not really a qualitatively different way of life, they're not more connected to the land, unless they're farming it, which means they're treating it like a mine anyway. Extracting meat and crops from the soil, much of which blows away in the dry. No meaningful interaction with the landscape itself, except as sight-seeing, recreational camping at best. The 'country' is really just the supply chain for the cities.

Hopeless, useless, like the LNP as well. Completely in the pocket of developers. The whole country is run by them, politicians line up to chant ‘supply’ like trained monkeys.

Most of the early settlers to Australia were from the UK. So here’s a mystery. The famous Australian accent doesn’t sound like *any* of the UK accents. Not even blended in some way. Know what it sounds just like? Aboriginal English. So much so that when a couple of Aboriginal guys mime a Carl Barron skit, you can be forgiven for thinking this is an Aboriginal comedian‘s routine. And it’s not just the accent, the ‘smart-arse’ behaviour that makes the skit funny is classic Aboriginal humour as well. This is the greatest untold story of Australia. Much of what we pride ourselves on as Australians, we got from Aboriginal Australians. The history says we settled here just over 200 years ago, and since then we created a new Australia, the Aboriginal one was left behind. We talk about ‘reconciliation’ with that old Australia, but we think it’s long gone. In reality the process was the other way around. That older Australia created us, it took that hybrid convict and British culture and shaped it like plasticine, into a hybrid that is much more strongly Aboriginal than it is British. And that process still has a long way to run, because as the landscape collapses, we‘re going to need to learn a helluva lot more from that old Australia, if we’re going to survive. It’s a little like we pretend Covid is over, just because we ignore it. It isn’t over, and we’ll need to respond to survive. It’s leading us, not the other way around. The same with Aboriginal Australia, people and landscape. We never left it behind, it’s still in the driving seat. We just don’t see it. It takes generations for these changes.

The Voice debate is a good time to talk about being Australian I think, and what it means. Where the most modern civilisation in the world at the time collided with easily the most ancient. That collision did amazing things, most of which are ignored and/or misunderstood. That's why I'm posting so much about Australia right now.

Watch the first few minutes of last night's Bathurst Council meeting. This is happening in Councils everywhere. https://www.youtube.com/live/STvFqPF05-I?feature=share

*shrug* https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2023/aug/17/wish-you-werent-here-how-tourists-are-ruining-the-worlds-greatest-destinations

Vaccinations were the reason people seemed happy to throw all Covid caution to the wind. You need a Covid vaccination every 6 months to maintain any meaningful immunity. Even amongst oldest Australians, we can’t get 50% of people to bother. Mass suicide.

We have the history of Australia backwards. Take the conversation about the ‘Voice’ right now. Like all conversations about Aboriginal Australia, the starting point is the idea that post-1788 Australia, the European arrival, is the baseline. ‘Modern’ Australia. And we now have to find a way to recognise Aboriginal Australia in modern Australia, such as via a ’voice’ to our national (European-style) parliament. The actual history of modern Australia is the reverse of that. It’s the story of that European culture colliding with the world’s far and away most ancient culture and landscape. And failing, at every step. We’re so arrogant, we assume we’re the advanced civilisation here. But we don’t have a clue at all how to ‘drive’ this continent. And the longer we stay here, the more disastrous that not having a clue gets. The place is falling apart. Rivers ran dry years ago already. 4.4 BILLION tonnes of the little topsoil the continent had has been washed and blown into the ocean. The whole place erupts into fireballs now in the summer. Meantime most of the unique character of being Australian, from our accent to our way of living and seeing the world, has not one traceable link to any of that European culture we brought with us. We got it from the land and people we found here. They’ve been turning us Aboriginal far more than we’ve been making them Europeans. Think about that, we’re all being transformed by this place, and again we’re so arrogant we think it’s us who has to help Aboriginal Australia. Tens of thousands of years of history acts on us every day, via the land and the people who were in it. Forget all of our fancy (imported) technologies and machines. None of it will be any use to us without water and soil, and food. Every civilisation that’s ever collapsed thought its clever technologies would save it. They never do, because the much bigger relationship to the land is all that sustains societies in the longer term.

Lots of good sense here about housing, an area of Australian life with traditionally no sense at all. Anybody who tells you 'supply' is the issue is part of the problem. Note the important point that Councils approve far more buildings than are ever built. What needs to happen is what used to happen, governments need to build a lot more public housing. 'The market' never will, it devalues their other properties.

I have a long commute each day on regional roads. Each day I think about the total cowardice of the NSW Government, the only State government in Australia that doesn't use average speed safety cameras for cars, only for trucks. They're a brilliant idea, and plenty on the road I'm on every day would need to change their driving behaviour pretty profoundly if they started checking cars too. Which just shows how effective they'd be. They're already installed on the Bathurst-Lithgow road.

Canada. Hard at times not to see all of these videos as us watching the beginning of the end of the world.

There is only one answer to the housing and rental crisis. And it’s also simple. Governments need to become property developers again. They need to build and sell and rent lots of houses, at much lower rates than the ‘market’. Like they used to. That will drive prices down across the board. It will also be a great earner for government, not a cost. For those who say that will lower the value of existing homeowner’s homes, remember that’s what the plan about ‘more supply’ is supposed to do as well. Drive prices and rents down. Notice developers, landlords and homeowners never object to the ‘more supply’ idea, because they know it drives prices, rents (and their wealth) UP.

Happy Birthday 🎁🎉🎊

Happy Birthday 🎈🎈

(Covid causes erectile dysfunction. It attacks blood vessels.)

I don’t know if you can have a favourite disaster, but this is mine.

Brighton Swimming Club, 1863. 160 years ago. I wonder if the top hats and stovepipe hats are being worn ironically here, or whether it was expected to wear one’s hat for social reasons, except when in the water.

There’s a strange idea that EVs will only become viable when we replace all of our petrol stations with EV charging stations like this one. But there’s a huge flaw in that way of thinking. For petrol and diesel vehicles, a service station is required for ALL driving. But for EVs, nearly all the driving people do every week is easily powered by charging at home. Even just plugging the EV into an ordinary power point for one night will give you 90km of driving, enough for a whole week for many people. There are already around 3500 of these fast-charging stations in Australia, for people travelling away from home. That may not sound like a lot, but remember there are only 6500 petrol stations in the entire country, for over 20 million vehicles. And petrol and diesel vehicles need them to fuel every single trip, even locally. EVs only need charging stations when travelling away from home.

This is a very standard story most days now. The wholesale price of electricty is negative across the country. In other words, generators will pay retailers to use it - they’re not just giving it away, they’re paying retailers to take it. This is due to the massive surge in solar and wind power during the day. This costs coal-fired generators money, but it’s impossible to shut them down and start them up again quickly. So they wear the loss. Also why nobody is building new coal plants. You can see in the vertical column graph that Australia already gets about twice as much of its electricity during the day from renewables than from coal and gas. By far the largest (and still growing) source of electricity is rooftop solar (Distributed PV). For ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’ people, the country uses about half as much energy at night. Storage will fill that gap. Imagine your electricty price when the lot is renewables.

It’s about respect. There should be no debates on topics like climate change, or Covid. There are thousands of people highly trained to know what to do, for both. They can’t do it, because of millions obstructing their work with pig-ignorant bullshit they’ve picked up on social media mostly, and on pay-for-opinion sewers like SKY News, any of the Murdoch papers, or 2GB. Imagine these know-all blockers, if the rest of us arrived at *their* workplaces and told them how to do their jobs. They’d tell us to fuck off. So it’s beyond time we did the same for them, with climate change, and Covid. Tell them to fuck off, to shut up and stick to what they know. To have some respect for the expertise of others.

After WW2, fewer than half of Australians owned their own home. Menzies wanted to change that. He knew 'the market' wouldn't achieve it (it hadn't ever), so what did he do? He made the government build LOTS of public housing. By the time his term of office ended in 1966, home ownership rates had exploded to 72%. The 'great Australian dream' of home ownership came from government acting as a property developer. Which is what it needs to do again today. The market (a myth) will never do it. Cameron Murray explains Menzies' method: "Predominantly, this was through the purchase of housing commission dwellings and funding for state-run housing developers who sold only to first-home buyers at discounted prices. He didn’t rely on the market, nor think that up-zoning or fancy tax tricks would get high home ownership. He knew that governments had to operate on the supply side of the market and provide access to those homes below the market price. In those years, 15 per cent of new dwellings were built by public housing agencies. To translate that period to today’s numbers, 15 per cent of all new housing would be about 25,000 to 30,000 new public dwellings per year. Another boost of 20 percentage points in home ownership, like those post-war decades, would get us from 66 per cent to 86 per cent home ownership, near Singapore’s level, and take over two million households out of the rental market." For those who don't actually think and just back their team in everything, Menzies wasn't just a Liberal. He founded the entire Liberal Party. So this wasn't some 'Greenie' idea of the government building houses. The Liberals created public housing. It's what we need now to fix housing again.

For fellow Gen-Xers. Today's 80-year-olds were our age at the Sydney Olympics.

I hear this one a lot.

I’d be genuinely curious to know how many times people have had Covid. (That they know of anyway.)

We’re closer to 2050 than we are to 1990.

Gen X finished school 40 years after WW2. It’s now 40 years since they finished school.

Or…they lost a game of soccer. That’s what sport is, one team wins, the other loses. If you play sport ‘heartbroken’ when you lose, your mental health might get you to 30. 40 maybe, at best. I think social media has so magnified emotion that people have lost all perspective. Rampant sentimentality.

Today's maths problem. How many tanks at over $2/litre does it take for an anti-EV person to wince?

Honestly, read this graph. Tell me what you see.

I share all of this data because governments don't want people to talk about it. It's not a conspiracy, we've been lied to, blatantly and repeatedly. 'We have to learn to live with this virus' was an election slogan Scott Morrison came up with. It had no basis in science AT ALL. No society has EVER 'lived with' a pandemic, because it can't be done. They're the most lethal disaster for any society.

There are many more homes approved than are ever built. In the industry it’s called ‘land banking’, where developers get a lot of building approvals, and then don’t move to construction until they feel they’ll make the highest return. That includes by preventing construction, to keep supply low, driving prices up. And right now at the endpoint there, ‘choice to construct’, there are big shortages of both builders and supplies. In history the only way housing has ever been both widely available and affordable is when this entire process has been managed by governments. Just as they manage water (and have been forced to again in the Murray-Darling, after decades of pilfering by irrigators). And electricty, again notice prices are out of control there, because the industry was privatised. The private sector nearly always runs essential services inefficiently, and causes big increases in price and reduction of quality of service. It’s mostly economies of scale, only government is large enough to create them. It will also pass savings on to the public. Those who don’t believe this need to explain water, and electricity, and housing, clear empirical examples of what’s happened.

The collapse of the dollar is another thing driving petrol and diesel prices sky-high. We have to buy all of our petrol and diesel from overseas, and a falling dollar makes it massively more expensive. So tell me again why EVs, which we would power completely from our own homegrown energy, are a bad idea? They have more grunt, more torque, much faster acceleration. They run silently, and they don’t pollute the air. ‘Filling’ them costs only a fraction what petrol and diesel costs. They require virtually no maintenance or servicing, and at end of life can be almost completely recycled to make another EV. The metals and minerals needed to make them are abundant in Australia too, and would make us stinking rich. And $50 billion of our money every year would stay onshore, and not end up in the bank accounts of Texan and Arab oil billionaires.

Happy birthday!

Herzlichen Gluckwunsch zum Geburtstag Reinhard!

It's winter in South America. Temperatures. Brazil 41.3 Balsas 41.1 Carolina 40.8 Bom Jesus do Piaui 40.2 Sao Joao Piaui Peru 29.8 Machu Picchu (2400m elevation)

Why regional people are hugely disadvantaged when it comes to kids going to uni. Unless they have a uni close to home with a course their child wants to do, uni is going to cost them a fortune compared to metropolitan parents. The vast majority of uni students in Australia live in cities, and live at home when studying. That's easily a $20K saving, per year.

We’re all used to the idea of a ‘power station’. But already now, by far the greatest source of electricty used by Australians every day is the solar panels you see on ordinary homes and businesses. Not just by those buildings, but by what they export to the grid as well. Much more than twice the amount of electricity used in the grid every day comes from these panels, than from all coal and gas-fired power stations combined.

For my CSU friends, who know it’s not when health care workers train outside cities that they stay there. It’s when the students grow up in the regions, and train there. Very powerful interests in medicine refuse to listen.

Like most countries, Australia's peak electricity usage is at dinner time every night, around 6pm. About 10 gigawatts of electricity. To give some perspective for how many solar panels would be needed to generate that, if every household in Australia had only 1kW of solar panels, we would generate that much electricity. In reality a house with solar panels on average has 6-10 times as many panels as that, nobody would even bother with a 1kW system, it's tiny. So it's easy to cover the load, and that doesn't even include solar farms and panels on businesses. For use 'when the sun doesn't shine', for much of the rest of the day the system needs only a fraction of that energy, which can all be stored.

Companies are fighting for the opportunity to install solar farms and batteries. They know it's a licence to print money. Our area (Bathurst-Lithgow) is highly prized because it's near existing high-voltage transmission lines, from the old power stations. Makes it easy and cheap to export the electricity to the grid. Some of these projects are hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. And a common response? Local yokels with embarrassing made-up facts they get off social media, like how the panels will be too 'shiny' (no panel is shiny, it's a waste of the sunlight). And that this will wreck 'good agricultural land', land that's usually already highly degraded, and the panels will actually protect. It's often the first time stock and soil on this land has had shelter in generations. https://reneweconomy.com.au/location-location-battery-storage-projects-jostle-for-position-to-back-up-wind-and-solar/

One power station already gone, the other already planned to shut down. The coal mines will go with it. Lithgow is very well placed with the existing grid to provide renewable alternatives. There's not much appetite for it in the town. Without it there may not be much town.

What a sweet guy.

David is an engineer who runs simulations of the national electricity grid to determine how many hours of storage we need in the grid for 100% renewables. He consistently finds it’s only about 5 hours.

The new Health Minister defends this by saying 'we've got to learn to live with Covid and return to normal.' You hear that a lot, it's a slogan, completely free of any actual information. In reality what's 'normal' for infectious diseases is not only masks, but also even isolating people who are sick. Try sending your kid to school with measles if you don't believe me. When I had whooping cough a few years back, there's no way work would have tolerated me being there. Several hundred people have died in Australia in this pandemic, from Covid they caught while they were in hospital. That's criminal negligence. And that's where these bastards will end up one day, in front of a judge. As Trump is right now.

Happy birthday!

In your own words, what does ‘we have to learn to live with Covid, to get back to normal’ mean?

Happy 60th!

When the pandemic hit, for whatever reason people and builders decided to build more houses than they had in more than a decade. The industry tried to respond, but is geared to do a certain number of new builds per year. It couldn’t cope.

Australia copies Americans with cars now. The F-150 Lightning, the fully electric mega-ute, has been a smash in the US. They had to upgrade the line to triple production. I think mega-utes are ridiculous cars, but this one at least shows the demand for EVs out there. And why EVs are so mind-blowing. The thing weighs 3 tonnes, and does 0-100 in 4.5 seconds. I think maybe 9 out of 10 people who oppose EVs have never driven one. Once people do, they never look back.

Posted about this one a while back. I think they have stock now. Fantastic car, incredible warranty. Has the petrol engine as hybrid for longer trips, and like other modern hybrids that engine is used together with the electric motors as a genuine hybrid drive, giving you maximum power across the whole rev band. (Like a F1 car.) It also charges the battery, as does the regenerative braking. Uses as little as 1.5 litres of fuel for every 100km, when driven as the petrol-electric hybrid. Uses no fuel at all if you do 84km of driving per day, or less, which is most of us. Battery will charge from a standard power point, overnight. You can use the car to power your home for days, if there’s a blackout, or to store surplus solar. It’ll run full 240V appliances for your camping too.

A fun climate change story. The Panama Canal was constructed as a short-cut between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The blue route. Before it existed, ships had to take the red route. But now, climate change-induced drought means the canal is barely operational. It doesn’t have enough water for its locks.

One of my favourite anti-EV tricks on the endless sewer of stupidity of social media, is to show an electric vehicle being towed, as proof they’re not practical. Here’s a petrol vehicle being towed. Petrol and diesel vehicles have been towed for over a century. So they obviously don’t work and aren’t practical.

A story of three photos. Of European genius and American swindling. Have posted before that the electric motor was invented over 100 years ago. By Michael Faraday, holding the glasses. The first workable cars were electric, like the one pictured made by General Electric. There were early attempts to make combustion engines, but they were inefficient, clunky, filthy and noisy. Nobody took them seriously, because they were so bad. So why did history end up only rediscovering electric vehicles, a clearly superior technology, more than a century later, spending 100 years building petrol and diesel engines? That’s the other picture, the fella with the moustache. John. D Rockefeller. Still the richest person in modern history. He made oil available, cheaply. That was the only reason the internal combustion engine was ever used. It was rubbish technology right from the start. It still is. But the oil was made cheap. It may be the decision that ends our civilisation. More than 100 times the combustion gases released by our huge bushfires in 2019 have been released into the atmosphere every year (on average), for the past 263 years, because of combustion engines.

Probably the main justification given for shovelling billions of dollars of public money into private health insurance is that it reduces waiting lists in public hospitals. Except it doesn’t. That was always a lie. The data proves it.

Happy Birthday 🎉🎊🎁

Happy Birthday!!🎂🎈

Diesel generators are used in some remote areas to charge EVs, pending the building of high-capacity chargers. EVs are so efficient that 100 litres of diesel can fully charge 10 EVs. That’s only enough diesel to fully fuel 1 diesel car.

Energy, and range. The reason petrol and diesel vehicles tend to have higher ranges is that the fuel they use has enormous energy density, as you can see. Every litre of the fuel contains enormous amounts of energy. By comparison a Li-ion battery has a very small energy density. But petrol and diesel engines waste up to 80% or more of that energy. It goes straight out the exhaust, as heat. They’re hopelessly inefficient, it’s like saying your TV remote lasts longer than everybody else’s, because you keep 2-dozen extra batteries in the lounge room to continuously switch out when it goes flat. Li-ion battery vehicles are now approaching the same range as petrols and diesels, with a MUCH smaller energy density fuel, because they’re vastly more efficient. 80-95% efficient. Petrol and diesel range is a trick. They waste the majority of the energy used. It’s also why petrols and diesels have gears, the engines are so inefficient at converting the fuel into movement, that they need to do it in stages - gears. Try moving off from a red light in 4th or 5th gear and see how far you get. The car will stall. It’s amusing to me that changing gears is such a fetish for drivers, the thing put in petrols and diesels to stop their puny engines stalling. EVs don’t have gears. They don’t need them, you get maximum power from 0 rpm. If you’ve never driven one, you won’t know just how breathtaking that power and acceleration is. And all without the ridiculous amounts of noise (more wasted energy) and moving parts, and crap spewing out the exhaust.

Dangerous, stupid times we live in. I skipped all of year 9 at school and barely noticed. This is about control.

Visual summary of my earlier long post. Engines need to be compared on energy used, not fuel used. A petrol or diesel with an 800km range? The same amount of energy will drive an EV over 3000km.

And another visual short-cut. The EV will also have more torque and acceleration, require nearly no maintenance, make no noise and emit no pollution.

5% is the 'tipping point' for any innovation after which it really takes off. I advise the anti-EV nuts to invest heavily in petrols and diesels right now, because the car companies aren't. Nothing like owning a stranded asset to prove a point, but I suspect we won't hear from the cookers then.

If ‘No’ wins in the upcoming referendum, Australia will be an international laughing stock. It’s looking like it may win too. Our history makes that unsurprising in many ways. I posted a while back about how what we call ‘the bush’ seems so empty of people. People travel there to be ‘at one with nature’. The reason it’s so empty? In the early 19th century, we organised hundreds of militia units, many of which included Aboriginal men forced to serve. These units rode through the countryside slaughtering Aboriginal men, women and children, so settlers could have their land, unchallenged. It was genocide. Some now won’t even vote Yes for a committee with no power to do anything. That’s our history in this place. Peter Dutton, the Champion of No, is a direct descendant of early pastoralists. It was pastoralists who perpetrated many of these atrocities.

America’s most bloody war was one it fought against itself. The Civil War. Australia is actually the same, we just don’t learn that history. Far and away our most bloody war, that killed more Australians than all of our other wars combined, was the Frontier Wars during early settlement. Lest we Forget.

If somebody looks at your social media posts and says ‘don’t you have a life?’, I suggest asking them why they’re living their life on social media.

When bullshit hits the brick wall of reality. Any public person who's advocated letting kids catch Covid should make sure they have some money put aside for legal representation.

Some have 'range anxiety' about getting an EV. Apart from the fact nearly all Australians travel less than 40km per day, which is easily charged at home from a power point at the end of the day (like your phone), if you really are travelling somewhere remote, you can take a petrol or diesel generator with you. You'll only need about 5L of fuel to fully charge your EV, unlike the 50-150 litres of it you'll need in a petrol or diesel vehicle. In fact it makes an EV the ideal remote travelling vehicle, because you only need to carry tiny amounts of fuel to keep moving, even in places petrols and diesels struggle to go, because there aren't even traditional service stations. You're also much less likely to break down, and it's far safer than carrying hundreds of litres of reserve petrol or diesel.

Brilliant analysis of how we ended up in populist la-la land. Has nothing to do with Left or Right or any of that nonsense. The idea that societies are an 'economy' (a 'free market') has failed disastrously everywhere it's been tried. Rather than admit the idea is fantasy, the people who promote it blame the 'establishment', also called 'the elite'. It then progresses to vast conspiracies about how this supposed elite is blocking their efforts.

I wouldn’t wait for ‘urgent investment in generation’. Do it yourself, with solar panels, and a battery. AEMO even recognising that this may be a key way we can get out of the mess of total inaction for the past 20 years. It’ll give you power even if the grid fails.

‘Closing the gap’ for Aboriginal people. What we mean by that is a paternalistic attempt to have them ‘catch up’ with us. Us modern, ‘advanced’ Australians. But the gap is actually the other way around. Australia, the continent, is collapsing. And we did it, us ‘advanced’ Australians. And we don’t have a clue - not one idea - what to do about it. Most of us don’t even pay any attention to it, mostly huddled on the coast, or at best camping in the ‘great outdoors’. We think because we have ‘modern technology’, we’re more advanced, and we’ll technology our way out of it. We won’t, I’m an engineer and I love technology. But it’s simple stuff, next to doing things like keeping rivers running and ecosystems healthy. You can’t eat dirt. You can’t survive without water. All civilisations collapse in history when they stop being able to feed and water themselves. Aboriginal Australians found a way to make the landscape itself a central part of their culture. No other culture ever figured that out, or maintained it. 5000 years is about as well as any other civilisation managed. Aboriginal Australia is at least 60,000 years old. We have no idea how they did it, and they were doing it tens of thousands of years before Stonehenge, or the pyramids, right through to today. We’re so rednecked and stupid we think they were just hunter-gatherers, ‘living off the land’. Primitives. Bullshit. Some cultures may have tried that. They didn’t survive. What happened here over the past 100,000 years is the greatest mystery of all human existence. A genius that we don’t understand even the tiniest part of. That’s the ‘gap’ we need to close. Not getting Aboriginal Australians to imitate us, flying to Bali to get off our tits on booze, while taking selfies for the folk back home to say ‘here I am on holiday having the best time’.

My favourite type of consultant is one who brings a slide deck of about 50 slides, all densely packed with dot points of text. And who then reads all of the dot points to you, all day.

People with ‘people and culture’ in their job title in my experience rarely know anything about either.

Emily Dickinson.

If ‘just like the flu’ pressed your buttons, for Covid, here’s the rules for flu and schools, in NSW. None of this is being done for Covid, a much more dangerous disease. I know this likely bores and annoys people who think it’s over because they’re sick of it. Reality doesn’t give a shit what we want or believe.

This sort of innovation is happening everywhere. One of the most sad barriers to it expanding is community opposition, through lunatic ideas people get via social media. When I grew up most people paid no attention to things like energy generation at all. This is what social media has done, now as brilliant engineering firms line up to install extraordinary new renewables technology here, in just about every project a community group appears that opposes it with some batshit crazy bullshit they’ve picked up on social media. Electric cars the same. Somebody asked me why I post so often about EVs. It’s because cars are central to our culture in multiple ways, it’s not just about transport. They create our cities and shape how we think. And they’re the perfect example of how a change that should just happen because it’s the only thing that makes sense has to cut through an undergrowth of social media-generated bullshit.

This article was an excellent window again into the almost impossibly complex world that is the real Australia. And how we who think ourselves advanced because we can build cars and aeroplanes and computers, have not a clue how to deal with this much more complex stuff that keeps us alive. Aboriginal Australians did, life thrived here for tens of thousands of years under their management. No other culture has managed that. The ‘gap’ we need to close to survive is this one. Not to get Aboriginal Australians to be better European Australians. European Australia has been a catastrophe for this continent, on the measures that actually matter, longer term. We’re just tourists in our own land.

Much as I think these cars should be banned (you’re 47% more likely to die if your car is hit by one of these than by a regular car or ute), they at least have a full-electric option. With a range of over 800km.

Auto-obesity is a thing. The trend to drive tanks means huge numbers of models of cars now no longer fit in standard car parking spaces. These new huge cars are lethal to pedestrians and other vehicles. Not long ago Australia’s most popular car was the Toyota Corolla. Now it’s big utes. Utes most people who buy them don’t need. Utes also don’t need to be big, it’s a small penis thing.

Google's AI it's added to its office suite can: - generate images - write your emails for you - summarise long documents - create presentations that include text, graphs and images - can summarise what's happened in a meeting so far for those who come late, and - can attend meetings for you and take notes. Technology like this should help people move to a 4-day week of greater leisure. It probably won't though, employers will use it to sack staff and pocket the savings themselves. That's what they always do with innovation.

Living with the virus is going well.