September 2023

Fewer than 5% of Australians tow anything - a trailer or caravan/camper trailer or boat. And yet so much of the EV narrative is around range, and range is mostly an issue for people who tow. Which relatively speaking is hardly anybody, a tiny niche market. Maybe 95% of the sneering smart-arses on social media about EVs though come from this tiny towing community. Range is a funny issue. The reason there aren't enough long-distance fast-chargers (yet) for this tiny part of the community is that the previous government actively blocked installing them for 10 years. Not a limitation of EVs, the limitations of a dickhead government. Also when petrol and diesel cars were first introduced, for years there were no service stations at all, and nobody said 'see? Horses are superior'. Much higher capacity batteries too are imminent. (As I posted yesterday, you can also carry a petrol or diesel generator with you and only a very small amount of fuel. You only need 5-10L of fuel to fully charge an EV, compared to 50-150L to fill a petrol or diesel tow vehicle.) Good balanced piece by an active tower, on towing and range. As he says: "So the range is one EV towing problem. Are there any others? Well, no. Range aside, I can’t think of any way in which an EV is not superior, and significantly so compared to an ICE vehicle for towing."

The worst possible, most brainless thing to be happening here. The roads will become a killing field. One of these flew past me yesterday on my way home, doing about 20-30 over the speed limit. 3 tonnes of metal, the size was ridiculous. It'd pulverise any sane family car in a collision and all the people in it. But it's not a 'thinking of others' car, it's a 'get out of my way' arsehole kinda car. Petrol versions drink up to 20L/100km. Monkey-see, monkey-do, imitation and status, people will buy them because other people are buying them. We never leave high school now.

A journalist this morning aggressively interrogating the engineering head of the Snowy 2.0 project, about their stuck tunnelling machine. "So just to clarify, how far in is it now?" "It's about 180m in." "So it was 150m in, and now it's 180m in." "Yeh, of that order, yes." "So it's only moved 15 kilometres." "Err, it's only moved a few tens of metres."

Father’s Day this weekend. There is no harder or more important job than parenting. We idolise celebrities and explorers and rock and sports stars and rich business people. None of that comes close to being as important as raising the next generation. Parents and teachers are what make civilisation and keep it from falling over. Most of our societies no longer have many kids, and the ones we do have we fail to educate well. We disrespect teachers, we underfund schools, we force kids to get infected with lethal viruses. Our young are in underpaid jobs, and can’t afford homes, while carrying vast debts for education that is actually provided to help society. But the cost is borne mostly by them. Everything we do as a culture points to it being fundamentally broken and focused on the wrong things. If your culture isn’t focused on raising the next generation, it’s a dead and toxic culture. Ours is more interested in recreational travel, gigs, sport, eating out, gambling and drinking than it is in kids. It’s an adolescent ‘good time’ culture. Compulsory fun, you have to demonstrate your fun life on social media to be a true member. My passion is leaving the world a better place than I found it. Tough questions, hard questions. That’s what’s fun for me, the challenge of chewing on big problems, thinking them through, helping to solve them. If adults don’t do this, nobody will, we can’t just keep kicking those cans down the road to the next generations, ignoring them in our recreational fun lives. Our jobs won’t fix them either, they’ll mostly just make other people rich.

I have the semi-autonomous functionality turned on in our car for nearly all the driving I do. You’d be mad not to. Many drivers I see out there on the roads aren’t safe, I’d much rather those cars were driving more than the idiots behind the wheels. Humans vastly over-rate their abilities. Just as they don’t let pilots fly planes much or train drivers do much of the train driving, even though both are highly skilled. It’s not about skill, it’s about not being as good as a machine at being relentlessly on-task.

Billie has Long Covid.

If you want to understand why so many local councils are raising rates, have a look at the data here. And Google ‘vertical fiscal imbalance’. Social media as always will mostly be your worst possible guide. (My views on topics related to my work are never those of my employer, and are shared here amongst friends, not publicly.)

The Snowy Mountains Scheme was a dominant force in building post-war Australia, socially. It brought over 65,000 Europeans and their cultures here, which changed Australian life fundamentally. And the engineering was revolutionary. But there are some other facts about the Scheme worth noting. It wasn’t really an electricity generation scheme. It was one of Australia’s perpetual fantasy schemes of ‘turning water inland’. It took the entire flow of the Snowy and redirected it to the Murray-Darling basin. The electricty was a side-effect, to help divert that water. It didn’t work. The Murray-Darling basin is still a train wreck. Supply of water creates demand for water, just as supply of roads creates traffic. At the same time the amount of electricty produced by the scheme is tiny. Snowy 2.0 is shaping up to be a similar engineering white elephant.

Since installing solar in December last year, we’ve used $2166 of electricity. We’ve paid $0 (we’re hundreds in credit). That’s with 6 extra heat pumps for winter heating of the entire house.

John doesn’t spend time on social media reading conspiracy fairy tales.

Don’t listen to the people who deny climate change. They’re the kids who ate the copper sulphate in science.

This is my favourite method of storing electricity. A gravity battery. Surplus renewable energy in the daytime is used to lift very heavy blocks to the top of the tower. Then as the sun goes down they’re lowered slowly, and drive a generator, generating electricity. (There are lots of different ways to do this.) Hugely efficient, simple in an engineering sense and therefore incredibly reliable. You can also use huge flywheeels to do the same.

Anna is a Bathurst girl. Covid damages the immune system, which then makes people, including kids, much more vulnerable to other infections like strep. There’s been a big surge of dangerous strep infections in kids worldwide, because we deliberately infected them with Covid. We still are.

I still recommend every Australian (and every human) read this book. It provides firsthand accounts from the first European settlers of Australia of what they found when they got here. What they found was the greatest wonder in all of human history, read the book if you don’t believe it. It’s nothing like the Australia we see today, our ‘bush’ is 235 years of possibly terminal damage to pre-1788 Australia. Aboriginal Australians engineered an entire continent, it’s the greatest achievement of all humanity. We have no idea how they did it, it’s impossibly complex, but Gammage has superb insight into parts of that puzzle. Here’s what they achieved. They managed to find a way to both use the land to sustain them, with food and water and shelter, while *at the same time* enriching that land for everything else that lives here. We can’t do that, again we have no idea how. It’s much, much harder than any of our ‘modern’ technologies and science can understand. No other culture ever figured it out and maintained it for tens of thousands of years. If you think they were just ’hunter-gatherers’, ‘living off the land’, read the book. The land looked completely different then, and the only change has been them no longer managing it. When you don’t engineer the landscape, it erupts into massive fireballs, the rivers clog and dry up, and the soil blows and washes into the ocean. It’s direct proof they engineered Australia, they weren’t just living in it like survivalists.

Driving is changing fundamentally. No longer will it be isolated people behind the wheel, with their lapses of attention, deliberate ignoring of road conditions and rules, falling asleep etc. No other mass transport system has ever tolerated so much individual discretion, because it's not only dangerous, it destroys traffic flow. People are focused only on the tiny space around their own vehicle.

People who constantly chop-and-change lanes are 6 times more likely to have an accident, and in almost every case don't get where they're going any faster. The gaps they swerve into are also the main thing that keeps traffic flowing, so they destroy traffic flow as well. https://practicalmotoring.com.au/car-advice/myth-busting-constantly-changing-lanes-get-faster/

People who constantly chop-and-change lanes are 6 times more likely to have an accident, and in almost every case don't get where they're going any faster. The gaps they swerve into are also the main thing that keeps traffic flowing, so they destroy traffic flow as well. Another example of why the individual driver is the worst person to be in charge of most driving. Roads are collective spaces.

Not every person who votes No will be like this. But every person like this will vote No.

Next time you're queued at the lights, watch what happens when they go green. The cars will move off one at a time, from the front, each one waiting for the one ahead to move first. This isn't necessary, technically all cars could move off at the same time. (Car racing does this.) But this is why traffic jams happen, more generally, individual drivers respond only to their immediate surroundings, rather than to the wider conditions. There would be multiple ways to network cars to stop this from happening. Those ways are all coming.

The cheapest energy in the world by a mile is Australian rooftop solar. It’s so cheap that even if power stations (coal, nuclear) made energy for nothing, it would still cost more than rooftop solar. You pay nothing (you make money), your retailer gets to sell your excess at a 200-300% markup, and the grid doesn’t have to support you in peak times if you have a battery. Everybody wins.

Coal, oil and gas are all distilled sunlight. The world is boiling because we burned millions of years of distilled sunlight, in under 300 years.

There’s a double-dip in demand for electricity every day in NSW. One at about 3.30-4 every morning, and one around 1pm. By far the biggest dip is that 1pm dip. The ’when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ stuff - we actually use by far the least amount of electricty when the sun is at its peak ever day. Quite strange, I suspect because households are the biggest users, and are at work, though not sure why it doesn’t just drop immediately then from about 9am, rather than gradually sliding down up to 1pm. And why 1pm? And why does it start climbing quickly from that time too? It’s still hours before many go home from work.

That's the first early departure Qantas has had in years.

A while back I posted about how precision fermentation will disrupt the food industry, possibly even removing the need for many farms. It's begun.

Bathurst in the 1930s. Right at that point where horses were being replaced by cars, and both were on the roads. The guy in the foreground with the horse and cart will be saying 'ha, look at those cars, always catching fire, and only a tin-full of range.'

Thousands of bowsers found to be short-measuring. When you charge at home, nobody can cheat you at the bowser.

I was taught this too at school, that the earliest paintings of Australia were fantasies, painters trying to make the bush look like England. But the story is much more interesting than that. This IS how Australia looked. The people who said these paintings were make-believe were comparing Australia as it is now with the paintings. Australia as it is now (what we call ‘the bush’) is the ruins of that early Australia. We trashed it. Like somebody’s garden left to get out of control, which is exactly what happened. It’s all in the Gammage book.

I feel that if there were a second coming of Jesus, most people would just want a selfie with him.

We need the climate deniers up at the ski fields to reassure folk that the snow has always disappeared during the ski season.

Your house as a power station. Imported 0.1 kWh (about 3 cents) from the grid (circled in red). Exported enough to power between 2 and 3 other homes. The 0.1 kW wasn’t even needed, what happened was likely during breakfast, with jug and toaster (very high electricty users) on at the same time as house heating and exceeeded the maximum 5kW at a time that the battery will deliver. So a tiny amount was drawn from the grid for those few seconds. And this is still early Spring, the numbers just keep going up from here as the days get longer and the sun higher in the sky. All money in the bank, literally, we can get the exports in cash if we want. It’s important to remember that by far your biggest earner here though is the electricty you don’t need to buy for your own use. Add that to the export and you’re literally a power station, and far more profitable than any big power station.

When Covid comes to call, and you don't realise because everybody told you it's over.

Social media decouples people so completely from reality that they do things like storm the parliament, and then wonder why they get 22 years in jail. Just wait until the people who let a pandemic rip end up on trial. https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/act-of-terrorism-proud-boys-enrique-tarrio-gets-record-22-years-for-capitol-riot-role-20230906-p5e2bf.html

The people and companies who sat on their hands and did nothing for 30 years against this end-of-civilisation scale threat will now increasingly try to alarm us all about how impossible it is to fix things in the small amount of time left. It's only a small amount of time because they did nothing for 30 years. Let them suffer. For example, if there isn't enough charging infrastructure for longer trips, it's because we spent 30 years not building any. Most car trips are short trips anyway, it's a storm in a tea cup by the fewer than 5% of motorists who do long trips regularly. Everything worth doing is hard, quit whining and just do it. This is humanity's greatest ever emergency, let's stop doing pretty much everything else and just focus on it.

Again I post this stuff because our Covid strategy is to ignore all of it. But only children think disasters stop when you ignore them.

And more 'living with the virus'. Are we tired of this BS yet? (Not my posts, though people are probably tired of those too.)

Happy Birthday!!

Like I said, we'll be an international laughing stock if the vote is No to something as innocuous as an advisory committee. The people who don't care also mostly don't care the planet is being incinerated, and that they're paying Texan and Arab billionaires more than $50 billion a year to fill up their SUVs and big utes.

No, we export the country itself, digging huge holes in the ground and loading it onto ships. We're a quarry.

What's going on with Brad Pitt's gait here?

If you have a Tesla (I don't, but am always tempted), you don't need to get your car serviced. If anything does go wrong, you just tap this in the app, and they either fix it over the internet (there are hardly any parts of an EV that can actually go mechanically wrong), or they'll send out a technician to where you live.

The battery does all of this automatically, it monitors the weather conditions. It will use grid power to charge too if needed in situations where it thinks supply could be interrupted and there isn’t sun available.

Yep.

Happy Birthday Rach :)

The average Australian household spends 5 times as much on alcohol, cigarettes, take away food, dining out, holidays and recreation than it does on local roads, water, sewer, waste, libraries, parks and museums. That's how teenagers budget. When I say society is now a high school and every age group acts like teenagers, it's not an analogy.

'Should they still be playing at 80?' is the wrong question. They can do whatever they like. The right question is 'should people have the same passions at 80 as they had at 18?' You can say yes to that of course. But it's the end of the 'circle of life', where age brings new learning and new responsibilities.

Just one reason I avoid flying. I don't like hundreds of tonnes of metal in the air where the business model for flying them is offering the lowest possible price to travellers.

This stuff really works, I used to hate constantly dipping lights when driving at night. Have trialled this, and I no longer need to bother. Car does it for me, and then returns to high beam when safe.

Somebody asked me the other day how many varieties of Covid we now have. The last public mention of variants by politicians was really Omicron, last year. As you can see, Covid has been having a field day since. Politicians are not on your side, they're lying to you.

Everybody loves a pile-on, on local government. Some food for thought. In the past 25 years councils have had to assume a whole range of community services that nobody else would provide. They now offer up to 150 services, including aged care and childcare. The spending needed to take on these roles has quadrupled in those 25 years. The revenue to councils hasn’t budged at all, so they’re doing all of this work with the same revenue sources they had 25 years ago. Obviously those two trends are unsustainable. The response? Social media has led a pile-on, against these community bodies trying to keep communities together with string and bits of sticky tape. Vast conspiracy theories, defamatory abuse, the venom is amazing. I give up expecting people not to be righteously ignorant. But they can at least be decent.

Such a fascinating story that has very deep meanings if you unpack it. Our eucalypts are now fuelling catastrophic fires globally, including here. Eucalyptus got to be like this because of thousands of years of Aboriginal management, they used fire as their main method of engineering the landscape. This led to a favouring of species like the eucalyptus who need fire to regenerate. BUT (and it’s a huge but), Aborigines knew this, which is why they engineered the land to have these trees only sparsely. The ‘bush’ we sentimentalise and bushwalk and 4WD through is the disastrous mess we made of that managed landscape. We let it grow wild, and the eucalyptus went feral. That’s why the landscape explodes in massive fires, because we don’t live in it, we don’t manage it. We don’t have a clue how to even if we wanted to. So we have this binary culture that ether clears the lot for logging or grazing, with bulldozers and other heavy equipment, or fences it all off as ‘pristine nature’ in national parks. Both are an abomination. It’s a madonna-whore complex, for landscape.

If you’re somebody who gets a lot of information from social media, here’s something to think about. ‘Andy’ is a fake campaigning account that posts 24 hours a day. Most of these sorts of posts aren’t real people.

Swaps places with Toyota from year to year as the world’s biggest car maker. But what would they know next to some guy somebody saw on YouTube. The combustion engine was dead when it was invented in the 1870s (50 years after the electric motor). Rubbish technology, only 20% efficient, huge amounts of pollution, thousands of moving parts that break down constantly, noisy, difficult to recycle, heavy, puny without a gearbox, utterly dependent on a multi-trillion dollar network of oil wells and tankers and refineries to move a metre.

We attribute the feelings of love we feel for somebody, to that person. We think those feelings are caused by them. But they never are, and this applies to anything we love (an object, a band, a pair of shoes). We’re in love with our idea of that person, or band, or shoes. That’s what we love. Pepe Le Pew shows it well. Being ‘in love’ lasts until the idea we have of what we love is so out of whack with what it actually is, that it becomes a clash. That can take years, as people find mutual accomodations to each other, to avoid friction. We’re always alone, even when in love. Especially then. All those warm, yum feelings of ’being in love’ are our own projections. Doesn’t mean we can’t love. But love isn’t those feelings. You can’t define love, it’s usually mistaken for things like affection, a type of very strong affection. It isn’t that. It’s the sparks caused by the unbridgeable gap between two people, each of whom is a universe. Universes in collision. It’s the joy (and anger, and sadness, and confusion, and every other emotion and feeling) of that collision, every day. You need to have the right sort of differences, to love somebody. The wrong kind will mean those sparks burn, and the clash is toxic. The fewer differences you have with them the less likely you are to feel any sparks at all. It’s a tightrope. Being comfortable with somebody usually just means co-dependency, not love.

Dreams don’t happen inside the brain. The brain is a lump of electrified meat, it’s incapable of holding images. It’s like trying to see the images inside a TV set. They’re not inside the TV set. The TV is just one part of a network of things, including the transmission medium (the air or streaming), and the broadcasting equipment. I once posted that death is just permanent dreaming, that life and death aren’t opposites. All the nonsense about ‘life after death’ assumes you either are, or you’re nothing. There’s no such thing as nothing (or no-thing). Imagine nothing - I bet you can’t. The best people seem to do is some form of blackness or void. But that’s not no-thing, that’s blackness, or a void. Not just word games. We have a (false) view that says that things either are, or they aren’t. Something, or nothing. Life or death. The real divide in life is between the virtual/possible, and the actual. Language is a good example. There are millions of things you could say, using the language. And only a tiny number of things you actually do say. Those millions of possible things are the virtual side of language. The things you do say are the actual side. This is what dreams are. The virtual part of our lives, where all things are possible. We know that’s true, we can dream anything. It’s not happening inside our heads, when we sleep we re-enter that virtual part of reality. When we die that’s where we ‘go’, to that eternal part of reality where all things are possible. Being ‘awake’ is actualising just a tiny number of those possibilities, in a finite way. Fascinatingly, some sleep scientists have been forced towards understanding this. They now suspect sleep is our default state, not being awake. That being awake is like an excursion for our eternal, virtual selves.

I strongly agree with this. I’m on social media because that’s where people are. But I think it’s destroying societies, and at great speed. And it’s not hard to understand why. Human communication and information has always in history been mediated by some form of institutional framework. A framework set up over generations, to test claims, to apply value filters etc. Social media strips all of that away and makes everything equivalent. The most stupid and vile things suddenly have a global home, completely decoupled from generations of expertise and experience.

Being in the middle of social media-driven protest campaigns is like living in this episode of The Simpsons. https://youtu.be/khxv_U4qLzg?si=88FL1EVMXq-_gpq0

Happy Birthday🎉🎊

Have been loving the NRL finals. But once you know about head injuries, watching it it’s very difficult to know how the code is going to survive. AFL the same. There is no answer to this problem, except not to play. Or to play touch. Multiple concussions in every single game.

And so castles made of sand Fall in the sea Eventually Jimi Hendrix

Greece has just had 3 years of rain, in 2 days. Scientists say new permanent lakes may have formed. The oceans are carrying astronomical amounts of extra heat energy. It has to go somewhere.

Australia lagging here, as in so many other areas. I’m sitting here right now with a temperature of nearly -5 outside, and I don’t even need a heater on, the temperature is about the same as when we went to bed last night. That’s the new windows at work. It’s also blissfully silent, that’s the windows too, they block huge amounts of sound. Yes these things cost money. But Australians spend lots more money on much less useful things, usually focused on recreation. Travel, caravans and camper trailers, ridiculously oversized cars, boats, dining out and take away food, booze, gambling, fuel for the boats and oversized cars, etc. It’s about priorities. High quality windows are also beautiful. (P.S. don’t waste money on triple glazing, the Australian climate doesn’t need it. Double glazing is perfect.)

You must read this. We’re going about things the wrong way, because we’re listening to business and industry. The Americans, thanks to Saul who helped write their revolutionary legislation, are smashing it out of the park. Because they targeted households, not business. We must electrify our households, fast, it’s our only way out. Read if you want to understand why.

Unpacking modern Oz culture. Households spend 400% more on recreation, than they do on their roads, water, waste, parks, libraries and museums.

One of Australia's most popular 'cars' (more like a tank). A friend was driving one last night back from Melbourne, and it broke down in the middle of nowhere. 5-hour wait for help. The tow truck driver that eventually came said 'we tow more of these than any other car'. They've had 150 years to make petrols and diesels reliable. They're better than they were, but nothing like a jet plane for example. Rubbish technology.

You might think this sounds like a lot, but it's nothing compared to what we spent on WW2. And the danger is far greater. It's also a third or less of what we're spending on a handful of submarines, and about half what the big tax cuts are due to cost. The US has made this scale of investment under Joe Biden, and its economy is now exploding in growth. The multiplier effect of this investment is up to 1000%, the private sector has responded to Biden's investment with trillions of dollars of their own. All of the renewable engineering firms in the world are trying to get a piece of that action.

Who wants to be eye-wateringly rich, like Saudi Arabia? (Hint: buying oil from them isn't the way to do it.)

Elon Musk became the richest person in the world in under 10 years, selling electric cars. Everybody knows this. Many don't seem to understand what it means though.

It’s finally happening. Shifting to this is the fastest way to cut the unproductive crap out of all workplaces, in the process of finding the savings. Small business making the most negative noises as always, proving yet again that they’re a ball and chain for every society. Pro-economy people love small business, because it fractures working people into millions of separate firms, where they can’t organise for better pay and conditions.

Grumpy old men are famous for criticising everything that’s new and young. I criticise the old for being a lead weight around the young’s shoulders, for blocking innovation and change that’s desperately needed. For refusing to grow up and therefore denying the young a place in the world. (P.S. in real life I’m not grumpy at all. I may seem it here because social media is a bog of curated fake toxic positivity. All of life makes me happy, the complexity and challenges, not just ‘happy’ times.)

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday :)

I love that you can't even start a petrol or diesel engine, without an electric motor. And that they need to sit running (idling) even when they're not going anywhere, otherwise you need to fire up the electric motor again to re-start them. Rubbish technology, get rid of the combustion bit and just use a bigger starter motor. Which is basically an EV.

One of the most interesting theories is that the Spanish Flu pandemic caused the 20th century epidemic of heart disease. The flu virus took up residence in peoples' bodies after they thought that pandemic was over, and became the largest cause of death for the next 50 years. We're now starting the next century in exactly the same way, with Covid. Another example here. Common cold viruses found in the brains of people who died of multiple sclerosis. But colds are harmless! Pig's arse. No infection is harmless.

@[1112555254:2048:Dan] and I both noticed this trend. There's a huge, extremely rapid shift to electric mowers, line trimmers and other garden tools. Why is it happening so fast? Because no idiot turned it into a team sport, like they did for cars. People saw how obviously superior the technology is, and just went for it, without having to back their idiot team on social media.

I have friends who are actuaries. Actuaries are an excellent BS detector, because they calculate risks and those calculations are tied to peoples’ money. So no matter how much spin and propaganda is out there, reality will speak, through actuarial risk, and through that to the insurers actuaries often work for. And here’s the perfect example. Decades of pure fantasy climate denial, where governments did nothing to manage the greatest risk in human history, have loaded all that risk onto individuals, through their insurance. And now that insurance is either completely unaffordable, or not even available. Governments are doing the same with Covid, shifting all of the publicly-managed risk (what’s called ‘public health’) onto individuals. It will fail in the same way, killing and maiming millions. As always, look to the actuaries. Covid is already excluded from many insurance policies.

This is only a minute long, you won’t regret it. I often say the economy doesn’t even exist. Here’s a property developer laying it all out there, what the economy really is, without even realising. It’s feudalism, the dominant social form for all human history. Re-badged with wanky economic terms to disguise it. The ‘cost of living crisis’ is us all being disciplined, to know our place.

An example of what the new AI can already do. The Wharton business school is one of the most prestigious business schools in the world. It pitted 200 of its graduates against ChatGPT (AI software) in a competition to come up with a marketing strategy for a $50 or less product to sell to college students. ChatGPT wiped the floor with the students, in only a matter of seconds. 88% of the top 10% of ideas came from ChatGPT.

How's 'living with the virus' going? You're not supposed to ask.

Expect similar here some time in the next 6 months.

Fantastic idea. Not sure how it works for people that don’t have tanks, where all the down pipes don’t meet at the tank but go straight to ground?

Here’s why I post about cars so much. As a social and cultural phenomenon, not just a technology thing. Cars are the most anti-social part of democracies. This brilliant idea, of town and city planning removing the dependence on cars by putting what people need within 15 minutes of where they live has been hijacked by people who are literally insane, and violent with it. There are local groups campaigning relentlessly and ruthlessly against it, all driven (as usual) by bullshit they’ve read on social media, usually from the US. Margaret Thatcher saw cars as the key tool to implement her ‘there is no such thing as society’ agenda. She openly said it all the time, it was a deliberate plan, this isn’t a conspiracy. And they’ve succeeded everywhere, everywhere cars dominate societies, societies begin to collapse, as was her wish. Because I drive so much each day I see it our on the roads, nothing makes a person more aggressively ‘me me me, get out of my way’ than driving. Cars get bigger and more like tanks, to push everybody else out of the way. Notice also that the anti-climate action people are nearly always car nuts. Not just in their opposition to EVs, but in their opposition to any sort of climate action. Burning petrol and diesel is like a totemic thing for the anti-climate crowd. It’s all part of the same anti-social movement. Even their recreation involves burning vast quantities of fuel in overseas flights and cruises, 4WDs, boats, jet skis, motorbikes etc. It’s more society is a high school, it’s a very teenage way of looking at the world, teenagers historically have been passionate about their vehicles and moving around. It was their first real freedom.

Travel! Say you like somebody, in a desiring sort of way. And you had the choice of standing next to them and taking a photo, or a personal letter from them. Which would you choose? The letter, of course. It gives you access to more of them, who they are, what they think, how they feel. Going to the Eiffel Tower won't bring you any closer to Paris, or France, or French culture. Being French is a dynamic ongoing process of living in a place. 'Paris' is what emerges from that ongoing process, every day. There's not one way in which physically being there brings you any closer to anything, just as you could have 100 selfies with Beyonce and still not know a thing about her or register in her life at all. In fact it's even worse, because as a tourist you'll be cocooned into tourist zones, to minimise impact on the locals. You'll be even further from the 'real Paris' than if you stayed home and read a book about it. You can't get around this, locations are not just places on a map. You could live there, but then you're not a traveller. The main function of travel is to show other people, that you travelled. As in shots like these. The focus of attention isn't yourself, it's other people. It's a self-referential loop, where people travel because other people travel, who show other people that they travelled...and around it goes.

Only 2-4% of the world flies internationally. They burn 400 billion litres of jet fuel every year, on those flights.

And people still think Covid is like a cold. That line hasn't stopped heading up.

Last Covid for the day.

I sometimes think it’s just a total absence of basic science. Here’s the argument for fighting climate change, in the most basic scientific terms. Fossil fuels took HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of years to accumulate, from sunshine. We’ve burned it all in UNDER 300 YEARS. We burn 16 BILLION litres of oil in the world, every DAY. We burn 8 BILLION tonnes of coal every year. We burn 3640 TRILLION litres of gas every year. Where do we think the pollution from all of that burning goes? Are we really that stupid?

Here’s another good example. The Caribbean has been a prized holiday destination for generations. People will say tourism is great for the Caribbean economy, to make themselves feel good about going there. The only reason the Caribbean needs tourist dollars is that it was systematically plundered by the British, who turned the inhabitants into slaves. Many of the most popular tourist destinations in the world are exactly the same, ex-colonial territories. The current inhabitants are meant to feel grateful to serve us as tourists, as we ‘experience’ their land.

I think we should get rid of all elections and political parties. They served a (brief) purpose in organising democracies, but now they're destroying them, and fast. The problems societies now face are not problems that need competing viewpoints, they're engineering problems mostly. You don't take a vote on who flies the plane when you travel, nor on which way to fix a gutter on your house. Critical things that are making societies collapse are being sidelined by elections, which are just popularity contests for adults.

I think of travel as a relationship, because that's what it is. A relationship with place, as opposed to just people. It takes time to build a relationship, a lot of time to 'get to know'. My criticism of travel isn't just about how much energy it uses, it's even more that we ignore the relationship thing. You don't 'experience the culture' of somewhere on a travel visit. It's speed dating at best. And with speed dating you at least have the opportunity to spend more time with the person, to get to know them. Not with travel, you don't live there, you're just a very-temporary visitor. Even in the very structured world of a workplace, it takes people months, even years, to really get to experience the 'workplace culture'. We know all of this, for relationships and work. We forget all of it, for travel. This is about basic respect. If you go into a relationship, you respect the other person by taking the time to get to know them. Same for respecting a new workplace. But we have absolutely zero respect for place, with travel. Zero. This is other people's homes, their most sacred spaces on Earth.

In simple terms, catching Covid is likely just the on-ramp for the virus to take up residence in your body. It may persist there for the rest of your life, causing potentially crippling and even fatal disease. Persistent infection with viruses for example is now known to cause MS, and is strongly linked to heart disease, Alzheimers and Parkinsons, as well as many other chronic conditions. It doesn't matter if your infection is completely asymptomatic, mild or severe. I can only say again, we are all being lied to. I think the greatest crime ever committed against humanity, along with climate change denial (driven by the same people). https://johnsnowproject.org/insights/a-new-disease-paradigm/

Most of the world travels to find a home. Somewhere to stop and settle.

Teachers are thought of as people who put knowledge in peoples’ heads, like you put fuel in a car. That’s not their actual job. Their job is what holds all of society together. They take a classroom full of people who would otherwise interact in the way you see in a playground, and slowly introduce knowledge into their lives to create a new way of being social. They teach society how to use knowledge to steer what it does. They socialise knowledge, is another way of putting it. They teach society how to act. Without them society becomes the playground, full of bullies and social status games, decoupled from the knowledge that makes societies progress. Hat tip to Kellie and Amy and Amanda and Natalie and Chelsea and every other teacher I know. I see what you do.

The idea that solar is only worth it if you have a lot of north-facing roof dates from a time when the panels were expensive. The panels are now ridiculously cheap. You can face them north, south, west or east and still make plenty of electricty. For example, panels on a south-facing roof in Australia still produce more electricity than panels on the best-facing roofs in the UK. Always buy as many panels as you can afford, with EVs coming you won’t ever regret having more. And get micro—inverters (i.e. one per panel), they maximise how much you produce even when some might be shaded.

These wallies won about 3 elections dog whistling racist claptrap with ‘Stop the Boats’. Don’t take my word for it, Malcolm Fraser and others resigned from the party in disgust. They see ‘bashing the blacks’ as a way to avoid 2-3 terms in opposition. Nothing is beneath them.

20 mph is about 30 km/h. I remember the huge fuss when we moved to 50km/h here. Now hardly anybody thinks about it. Getting cars out of the centre of our lives will be fought every step of the way. It’s a fight for our freedom, mobility is a prison. The moment you can travel anywhere with ease is the moment your own place on the Earth, your home, becomes irrelevant to anybody else. The function of cars is to get to somewhere else, and as fast as you can. ‘Get out of my way.’

Nikki also describes herself as a ‘pure blood’ because she isn’t vaccinated. I see people re-posting these pro-cash memes without the first clue of the sewer they’re supporting. Just one more of the hundreds of lunatic conspiracy theories that thrive on social media.

I hope Wang 9 (one of the biggest batteries in the world) gets the same public enthusiasm when it opens as the original Wang coal-fired plant did in 1958. Wang 9 will have the same capacity as the old station (500-1000MW). It puts Lithgow on the map, globally. It’ll be owned by one of the biggest oil companies in the world (Shell), showing they know where the money now is in energy. Lithgow is a prime position for renewables infrastructure because of the existing high-voltage grid. And unlike the old station, which released over 370 million tonnes of pollutants (it’s all we knew back then), Wang 9 won’t release a single gram of any pollution. We should be cheering this superb engineering.

Landline had a great story today about how the biggest obstacle to building the new electricity grid is community opposition, to solar farms, wind farms, pumped hydro and new transmission lines. This isn’t the Australia I grew up in. Nobody cared how electricty was generated or transmitted, we left that to the experts. Social media did this, it made everybody think that everybody else’s business is now their business. It’s like letting passengers fly the plane. Social media needs to be shut down.

Listened to this lots as a kid, it made the story seem even more gripping. What I didn’t know then is that one of the major inspirations H.G. Wells used for the story was the slaughter of Tasmanian Aboriginals. He imagined what it would feel like for Europeans to be slaughtered in that way.

Why social media is dangerous. 1) It creates fake social lives that people then consciously and unconsciously compare to their own. This creates enormous stress and anxiety, as the relentlessly happy and fun posts clash with the actual lives people live. It also sets up imitative rivalry, ‘you went to London? Well here we are in Rome.’ Etc. 2) It encourages the idea that we’re all equal, on all topics. This dissolves trust in society, in every area. It doesn’t matter that somebody may have decades of training and experience, their voice is said to be equivalent to every idiot and their opinion. 3) This collapse in trust leads to conspiracy theories, about everything. Because people don’t understand what they’re seeing, and won’t trust the people actually responsible for that thing, they invent conspiracies to explain it. Americans invented social media. Many Americans (including the platform owners) have a pathological hatred and distrust of their own institutions. These platforms are now spreading that paranoia to the whole world. While at the same time returning us socially to high school, comparing our social lives to each other all day, every day.

Happy birthday Meg :)

Brand is a standard product of social media. His beliefs are all over the shop, nothing coherent from one day to the next. But one thing links it all - himself and his popularity. Everything is about him. Outrage drives followers to him, it’s all about generating likes and from those, money.

4 Corners on Qantas. Plane toilets not being cleaned with disinfectant. Staff handling wet tissues, used masks and soiled nappies with their bare hands. Tray tables cleaned with the same wet cloth, with no disinfectant. 35% of Qantas engineers sacked in the pandemic. Just makes you want to get on a plane. Well, some people anyway.

The oil and gas industry has made nearly $5 billion profit per DAY, every day for the past 50 YEARS. Never be in doubt who funds climate denialism. Anybody who lines up to cheer on petrol and diesel is doing the dirty work for these crooked bastards. Renewable energy cuts these parasites completely loose from the hold they have over every country in the world. It’s free and available anywhere the sun shines and wind blows. And when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, the electricity is stored, just as water is when it doesn’t rain. Slogans are for morons.

Anybody who thinks nuclear power is the answer for Australia is scientifically and economically illiterate. I worked in nuclear engineering. This is Dutton creating an argument with outrageous fantasy ideas, to fire up apathetic voters and then harvest those votes. Turning it into team sports. He’s doing the same with the Voice. He doesn’t believe any of this stuff. If you do, mission accomplished.

Have a watch, fascinating and moving. How social media is driving stupidity deep into individual families as well as institutions. And breaking them apart. These platforms need to be shut down.

Happy Birthday :)

It's a vascular disease. Everywhere you have a blood vessel is at risk.

In Spring, Summer and Autumn we accumulate surpluses to pay for any winter grid power we need. We had hundreds in surplus even after winter. A licence to print money. Can heat or air condition the entire house, and still print money. Nothing can beat the ROI of solar. (Now at 48kWh exported for the day.) Also we bought a battery not just for ROI, but for energy security. This summer may be a good example.

Exactly. Range isn’t a property of a car, it’s a property of the fuelling system. It costs trillions of dollars to give petrol and diesel cars range, with refineries and pipelines and tankers and service stations. It’s not the cars. The refuelling network for EVs is mostly already there, in every person’s home. 10 million EV ‘service stations’ already exist. Fast-chargers are just for long trips, travellers.

And here’s the oil companies screwing everybody again, as they do every holidays. Know what doesn’t change price in the school holidays? Electricity. I like this picture, giving the middle finger to fossil fuel companies.

Happy Birthday cuz :)

Ask for a 10% discount in cash-only shops. They’re mostly doing it to avoid paying GST, they’re pocketing that 10% themselves. GST pays for roads, schools, hospitals etc.

Listeria is mostly mild, often asymptomatic. It tends to kill only ‘the vulnerable’, and can even be cured by antibiotics if diagnosed. And yet it’s an excellent measure of how corrupted our Covid response is, because do they let listeria run loose in the community? Of course not, it’s a public health alert. We have stricter requirements for food preparation for a disease like this, than we do for a disease that killed more Australians last year than have died from any other event since WW2.

Deborah summarising here Professor Brendan Crabb's assessment of the current Covid situation. Brendan is one of Australia's leading infectious disease experts, and an acquaintance of mine (one of the people I get Covid info from). Unlike National Cabinet, who are morons.

You may have seen in the news the disaster varroa mite is for our beekeepers. The story they don't tell is why the eradication effort failed. Because beekeepers themselves decided to apply the approach we're using with Covid, to the mite. "Non-compliance from beekeepers and illegal hive movement was a major factor in the failed eradication effort".

The comparison of the No vote in the referendum with Brexit is incredibly accurate. Both populist movements based on a native xenophobia, both will be international embarrassments. Don't ask me, Nigel Farage is pointing it out, the main architect of Brexit. As a reminder, Brexit was and remains a disaster for the UK. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/2023/09/20/brexit-reloaded-no-campaign-hailed-as-a-populist-pivot/?utm_sha256_email=662efd944398edbb2d8f4d85736c4bb830fa6116abf076eb6d8317fd70698f95&utm_contact_id=3260892&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020230921&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Adestra&lr_hash=

If you want a sense of just how inefficient petrol/diesel engines are, one tank of fuel is enough energy to power an entire home for a month.

Populism is the political system we now live under. It’s not Labor, Liberal, National or Green. It’s not Left or Right. It’s much simpler than that. It’s a politics that says what is most popular, is right. It replaces every objective measure of what is correct, with what is the most popular thing. For example, Covid. What’s scientifically correct is that we’re in an uncontrolled pandemic. But that’s unpopular. So instead we’re pretending it’s over. Because that’s popular. But as this famous 1936 photo of August Landmesser refusing to do the Nazi salute shows, what’s popular is no guide as to what’s right. Or petrol and diesel cars are popular, and flying overseas whenever we feel like it. If you challenge these things, you’ll be told to get a life. Everybody is doing it, you see, it’s popular. So it must be right. ‘Majority rules.’ High school, schoolyard bullshit. What is popular is NEVER right. Because popularity isn’t a thinking thing, it’s a social confomity thing. To ‘fit in’. Also why doing the opposite to what everybody else is doing will be just as wrong. Because that’s still all about social conformity, about defining your place in the group, this time as a contrarian. Not about the actual truth of the situation.

Can’t believe this is nearly 10 years old. And still spot on, actually a very smart way to understand just how stupid social media is, by translating what happens there into real life situations. The platforms are changing how we live and think. Not in good ways.

This is one of populism’s tricks. To identify expertise in society, call it an ‘elite’, and then rally ‘the people’ against this expertise. The actual elites in society are the rich, like Murdoch, or Trump. Who pretend to be the champions of ‘the people’, against ‘the elites’. All it does is shift control of society from expertise, to the rich.

What’s less known about populism (believing that only what is popular is right and real) is that fascism is just a form of populism. Fascism is what you get if you let populism run. Hitler and Mussolini for example spoke endlessly of ‘the people’, and sold themselves as champions of the people, against ‘elites’. Sound familiar? Trump, the most famous modern populist, does the same. Within one term of government his supporters were sacking the Capitol building. Populism is a mechanism to bypass all existing due processes in societies, all institutions. A fast-track way to ultimate power. Anything can be made popular, it’s just marketing. Right now people line up to get infected with Covid, over and over, it’s hugely popular. Infection and disease are popular! Ffs. It’s high school culture, we all went to high school, we all know popularity is the currency there. Populism is the transfer of adolescent culture to all of life.

Not gonna need Sherlock Holmes for all of these ‘mystery’ illnesses.

It’s something to be in the eye of a social media storm. To feel the surge of stupid incoherent rage and righteousness. And to watch the damage that great surge of dumb causes, as it unfolds and destroys things.

Living in a society where the dominant currency is popularity, in politics and in all things (a society of ‘likes’, of social media), doesn’t mean at all that it’s based on people getting the things they want. Popularity is THE most cruel of all social behaviours. What is popular is a brutal hierarchy of imitative rivalry. Only a tiny few (about 5%) of any group drive the whole game. The ‘influencers’, which includes political leaders.

From the UK. The value of new petrol and diesel cars drops 30% in the first year after you buy them.

Genuinely curious what people think of this.

Shows how much energy each source contains per kg. The tiny energy density of a lithium battery shows the extraordinary efficiency of electric motors. EVs already get close to the range of a petrol or diesel vehicle, with only a fraction of the energy. The range of petrol and diesel cars is due to the enormous amount of energy in petrol and diesel, 80% of which they blast as heat straight out the exhaust, which they can’t use. With that same amount of energy an EV would travel thousands of kilometres. Range is also a furphy. Most people travel less than 40km per day.

The huge amount of electricty renewables are producing during the day is making energy retailers charge huge amounts in peak times. That makes batteries even more financially viable, if you use them during peaks times, you’re saving huge amounts of money. In some States they’re also now offering super cheap rates of 8c per kWh during the day, to use that huge surge of available electricity. If you bought just a battery even without solar, and charged it during the day at 8c/kWh, you’re cutting your electricity bill massively.

Elections began as a way to select leaders. They now define reality itself, now what the ‘majority’ thinks becomes reality. That’s populism.

At school speech days there are often speeches about leadership. To me there’s only one test of leadership. Are you doing something that’s unpopular? Popular things will do themselves, and need no leadership. Popular things are nearly always stupid things. This includes a manager or CEO doing things that are unpopular only with staff, but popular with management. That’s not leadership, it’s team sports. Only things unpopular to *everybody* need leading, everything else will do itself. Good parents and teachers know this, you won’t survive a day being either of those things, using popularity.

Love the explosion of Spring growth. Behind the 2-storey section at the back with the solar panels visible is the large Chinese elm, which we had the crown raised in a few weeks ago, a big job. With the increasingly hot summers the shade the gardens create makes a big difference.

Petrol prices are eye-watering right now. When I was planning the solar system for the house, I was looking ahead to having full-EVs as vehicles. Here’s the system this month, nowhere near peak production yet. Green means surplus power we’re exporting to the grid, after everything in the house has been powered. Yellow is anything we’ve imported from the grid. An EV will use about 15 kWh to travel 100km. So right now, every day we’re producing enough spare electricity to add 300 km of range to an EV. Between 2000-3000 km of range, per week. That will almost double by mid-summer. Way, way more than we’ll ever need, even with 2 cars. Completely free fuel for motoring, a huge reduction in costs.

Leeton, one of several towns in Australia now trialling a new approach where the town is run by social media. Much excitement on the socials. Tenterfield is ahead of it. Now it’s selling historic parts of the town for their one-off asset value, to try to fix a recurrent revenue deficit.

To give an indication of how much of an international laughing stock we’ll be if (when) we vote No at the referendum, compare with other major countries with indigenous populations. In the US, there are treaties with hundreds of Native American tribes, and tribal sovereignty is recognised in the US constitution. In Canada, rights for indigenous people are enshrined in their constitution, as well as indigenous people having treaty rights. In New Zealand, a treaty was signed with indigenous people as early as 1840. (New Zealand has no formal constitution.) If we want to look like a bunch of red-necked racist yokels, voting No to a few words in the Constitution and a bloody advisory committee will do it.

David is a friend of mine and a leading specialist on this topic. There is not one way that Daylight Saving is a smart thing to be doing. If we want an extra hour after work, work an hour less. Don't change the clocks.

The insurance industry invented fire brigades. It was in their obvious interest to try to protect the property they insure. It's the place I always go to to strip away the bullshit political spin around a topic. With climate change for example, you already can't get insurance in some areas, despite all the climate deniers claiming the whole thing is a hoax. And now with Covid, despite all the political spin about 'living with' a pandemic virus (impossible, it can't be done), the insurers and actuaries expose the actual truth. They think the disaster is even bigger than asbestos. Much bigger, because many people never worked with asbestos. Everybody is being forced to catch Covid. https://insurancenewsnet.com/innarticle/insurance-industry-coalition-forms-non-profit-to-study-excess-mortality?fbclid=IwAR2S_NvT0Zyw76fWPRsDZkn2gGACv-16lr3FzWYdWld87exRWl0C81tJOkI_aem_ASwSeHt2zCVTNBectn3necvwq-H4NA9F_9jSCXuBFUwEpfz_WJtooc7b0X49SGMH2Wo

I admire that people will basically bankrupt themselves, rather than admit the solution to this is sitting right under their noses. The same people who love 'Australian Made' campaigns. Except for energy, where sending more than $50 billion overseas to OPEC pirates every year gives them a hard-on.

At Mt Vic today, petrols and diesels showing their skills at not catching fire.

If you feel stiff or tight, as most do as they age, reframe how you think about it. Don’t try to stretch the tension away, or try to release it. Stiffness is your body already stretching. That’s why it feels tight. Just let it be stiff. Let it do the stretching it’s already doing, without trying to change any of it. This may be hard, because we love to try to fix things, to make discomfort go away. But once you reframe it, you’ll start to feel it for what it is, your body stretching for you. It’s much smarter than you, it knows what needs stretching. It’ll stretch all day for you, unlike these silly exercises, which presume to know what needs stretching. They don’t.

Society is a giant high school. Not an analogy.

This one had Alex written all over it.

In the UK more than 4500 people died of heat, in 2022. In the UK.

When Rupert Murdoch dies, it will trigger something fascinating. His 4 oldest children (circled in red) each have an equal vote on what happens with the business. Lachlan is the chosen one while Rupert is alive, but the other 3 have fundamentally different views to Lachlan, and will likely have him removed as CEO of Murdoch's businesses. They'd already asked that FOX stop being an attack dog for Republicans in the US and the LNP in Australia, and were knocked back. Rupert, and through him Lachlan, are on borrowed time.

The first Industrial Revolution was an energy revolution. Fossil fuels, about 150 years ago. This pollution is the result, and is not something we have to 'balance' against any fictitious economy. It's much simpler, it's a call to update with a new Industrial Revolution, of clean energy. Industrial Revolutions solve social problems, there is no economy. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/20/revealed-almost-everyone-in-europe-breathing-toxic-air

The cleaning of the duck pond.

Australian households are smashing solar world records every single year. Most Australians are falling over themselves to shift to renewables, and EVs. A tiny minority of simpletons infected with social media memes and political slogans make a lot of noise to suggest otherwise.

Forecast for Grand Final day. 36 Degrees C.

The men social media produces.

The Big 4 consulting firms that incompetent senior managers in every industry and in government throw billions at every year are like the Wild West. No regulation, everybody is a partner because that way they escape any of the requirements of corporate governance. Designed purely as money-making machines, vampire squids that attach themselves to organisations and don’t leave until they’ve sucked them dry. Deb O’Neill’s brutal take-down of them in the Senate inquiry is glorious to watch.

Today's quiz question. What could be causing this?

Happy Birthday Dan the Drone Man! I hope the women in your family are deferential just once this year, it doesn't work at my end ;)

Much excitement from the locals when the refill started.

None of this happened before social media. Laurence Fox here, famous Brit actor whose wife Billie Piper dumped him for being an unhinged loon. Social media got to him, as it gets to millions of others. I have close friends from school who are now like this, I’ve had to block them, they’re raving sociopathic zombies. Failed science at school, and now gullible numpties who swallow every lunatic conspiracy theory on social media. Like this one, if you catch an infectious disease, your immune system fires up to challenge it. All vaccines do is repeat the same process, but with all the dangerous parts of the disease removed.

When you let pretty private school boys achieve senior positions in Health.

Kell agrees the picture quality on modern TVs is outstanding.

Hundreds of thousands of people all looking for their own secluded spot then get puzzled and annoyed when the rest of the hundreds of thousands arrive too. Byron trashed, Ballina will be next. Travel culture is so dumb it doesn’t even see this contradiction.

From a story today about schools being closed if they’re in a bushfire risk situation. I want somebody to explain what this parent means by ‘but at what cost?’ That if it means keeping them home for the day, let them burn instead? There are disturbing numbers of kiddults raising children today. Why they don’t bat an eyelid about schools being a Covid swamp either. So long as their lifestyle is protected, all is fine.

I worked at a nuclear facility. Here’s what the proponents of nuclear power never say. Nobody wants the waste. What does somewhere like the US do with its nuclear waste? Nothing. It’s all sitting at the nuclear plants still, in (leaking) containers. Nobody wants it, why would they? The last ‘plan’ to get rid of it was stillborn in 1987. Thousands of tonnes of solid waste, and millions of litres of liquid waste. I can promise you Peter Dutton doesn’t want nuclear power, it’s an electoral train wreck as well as a technological wet dream. He’s just trying to stir you up to make you angry, so you’ll vote for him.

For those seduced by the slogan that Covid 'only kills old people'. Most diseases only kill old people.

Happy Birthday! Hope you got a day off.

Happy Birthday to you! :)

Too much of the work that made societies peaceful and prosperous became invisible. Societies in the past did it almost too well, people assumed it all happened by magic. Until it didn't. That made people angry. Like spoiled children, who only know good times.

From the UK. Have a gander at 'illnesses which do not require absences from school'. The Tories have probably terminally damaged the UK, on every measure.

From media today. The people who support Daylight Saving don’t even understand it themselves. Daylight Saving doesn’t make days any longer or create any more light.

To help cut through the sloganocracy that replaced our democracy, there are now already almost as many public charging stations for EVs as there are service stations for petrol and diesel cars. But even more importantly, for nearly all of your driving, you DON’T NEED THEM. You charge at home. There are 10 million EV charging stations there.

The new Lithgow tip is awesome. Can’t even really call it a tip, it’s a genuine waste management centre.

Interesting that the AFL chose two elderly acts as their pre-game and half-time shows. KISS played great, Marc Seymour was OK. I doubt there are a lot of fans under 40 who listen to either of them.

Is Victorian beer double strength? I’m trying to understand what is interesting about AFL. I’ve given it a genuine chance a few times over the years. Total snorefest. Kick the ball around, scramble around on the ground trying to grab it like it’s greased. Is there something else?

Crispian Chan, a Chinese-Australian. Australians don’t like being called racist, a country that even had a ‘White Australia’ policy and that regularly votes for Pauline Hanson and to ‘stop the boats’. Those who’ve experienced racism know it’s a lie. It’s all over the No campaign in this referendum, with all the usual sly ways to hide it behind clever rationalisations. I was called a Nazi regularly as a kid. Unlike the trend today of curling up in a ball and saying it hurts my mental health, it’s always just made me more fiercely mocking of this bullshit and of the people who sign up to it. Without the balls to even admit what they’re doing. I see you, you’re pathetic, weak and ridiculous, and destroying what’s left of our international reputation.

Clive Ellis in this video is the reason everybody should ignore the conspiracy loons, on everything. His second bout of Covid, his first gave him no meaningful immunity. You can’t infect your way out of a pandemic.

Finally got an electric mower. Ozito is often considered an el cheapo brand, but everything I read about this mower was 5-star, not one flaw. And costs about half what a ‘brand’ electric mower would normally cost. It’s beautifully made, has a steel deck, and everything is well designed and incredibly solid. A pleasure to mow with, did the whole yard and used only a third of the battery charge. Under $500, including 2 batteries and a fast charger. 5-year warranty.

My boy is 18 today. A grown up. Still the most gentle, sweet, considerate and smart person you’ll ever meet. I sometimes tell him that only the truly strong can be gentle. It takes enormous skill and patience and strength and intelligence to treat the world gently, anybody can lash out when the world doesn’t do what they want it to do. The most gentle of all the forces of nature is gravity, and it’s the force that shapes the entire universe. The meek shall inherit the Earth. Happy Birthday buddy, love ya.