October 2023

Lovely to beat Queensland in 3 grand finals on the weekend. But they didn’t start Daylight Saving like us, so that gives them the win on grown-up things that actually matter. I’ve found a way to work around the stupid clock-shifting. I always got up at 5am to read the news. In summer I ditch that and get up at 6am instead, and then go to bed an hour later each night, so that my body’s circadian rhythm stays aligned with the other non-DST months.

It’s Spring! And, er. Hmm.

Ford is bringing a plug-in hybrid version of the Ranger to Oz in 2024 or 2025. It will have more grunt than any of the current petrol/diesel models, electric motors have huge torque. It’ll tow the same 3.5 tonnes. Pure EV (electric-only) range is 45km, Ford say the vast majority of Ranger drivers travel less than 40km per day (as do most drivers). It’ll have similar range when operating as a hybrid to current petrols and diesels, but with half the fuel consumption and more power. It will also give tradies 240V power for any tools, and cut most owner’s weekly fuel bills to zero.

The grid is changing fundamentally, have a look. It’s no longer a one-way grid, where the electricity flows from power stations to homes and businesses. It’s two-way, most of the energy is actually now generated at those homes and businesses. It’s not one-to-many, it’s many-to-many. Check out ‘export’ charges, for homes and businesses who export to the grid. They’re still a long way ahead financially, but they’re now being asked to help pay for infrastructure (poles, wires and batteries) that should have been built over the past 20 years. They’ll also qualify for much bigger feed-in rates if they export in peak hours. Notice also the ‘solar sponge’ rate during the day, soon to be common in NSW. Where electricity will be incredibly cheap in the middle of the day, to use the huge surge of production from solar. A home battery would pay for itself quickly by charging during the day for night time use, even without solar. Or you could set an electric hot water heater to heat your hot water during the day instead of overnight.

It’s Bathurst 1000 week, my favourite of the year! As a sporting event, it has a crowd almost 3 times the size of any football grand final. And it runs for almost a week. The ‘Figure it Out BRC’ FB group have had lots of opinions on this event, how it should be run better. I suggest heading over to that group right now to see how it’s going 😉

The previous government turned Australia into a quarry for the rest of the world. And we were practically giving the stuff away anyway. That’s all coming to an end. Right now, renewable energy and its associated minerals is our pathway to not just salvation, but riches. If only we could get social media and its army of gullible morons out of the way.

If you're in the market for a new car, now's the time to free yourself from this nonsense forever.

If you think Covid is over, ask your insurance company if they agree. Insurers ignore political spin.

The interesting question here is, what are they going to make people 'aware' of? 'Hey people, lots of you are having heart attacks, please stop'? I'm betting it won't be 'Covid, even mild cases, and even if you're vaccinated, can cause heart attacks and strokes.'

I wouldn't invest a lot of money in a new petrol or diesel right now. The secondhand market for it is going to dry up very, very fast. Sales of EVs are already growing exponentially, and once that happens, things explode.

These are the stories that haven’t been allowed to be told for more than 3 years. I’m sure you can see why, if you watch it. The most powerful 20 minutes of anything I’ve watched in a long time, none of that confected, manufactured sentimentality that is engineered to make us all weep over meaningless things. From the UK Covid inquiry. If the reality of Covid had been allowed to be shown, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell the public would ever have bought ‘living with’ it.

Always check who you're in bed with. If you're voting No, here they are. It should tell you something. Much of this crap is posted by government agencies in China and Russia (and fringe loons in the US), trying to destabilise Western democracies. Don't be stupid enough to help them.

Imagine more people questioning the ethics of flying. Only 2-4% of the world travel internationally. And they think everybody does it.

Have a look. I reckon they’ll make a motza.

The idea of ‘Country’ is one we as a travel culture simply don’t understand. Our travel obsessions reflect our understanding of place. Travel and Country are fundamentally opposed things. It’s pretty simple, as a culture, we don’t have any conception of ‘home’ that isn’t just an address or a house. No connection to the landscapes we live inside.

Where previously you could be stupendously dumb and do little harm, now with social media you can connect with all the other morons in the world and destroy societies.

The same society that kills tens of thousands of people a year with Covid, because otherwise it would be too disruptive to our lifestyles.

With solar growing so fast, demand on the grid at midday now is what it used to be in the middle of the night, at 2-3 am. Look at that huge drop from the purple to the dark green line, only one year. And this is 2 years ago, it's even lower now, and still dropping exponentially.

Tony Abbott on radio this morning saying Aboriginal Australians need to ‘integrate’ with our way of life. Why? In 235 years we’ve made exactly zero attempt to integrate with theirs.

This shows the dominant shared information about the Voice debate. Easily the most dominant voice on the Voice is - an ex-Neighbours star who traffics in lunatic conspiracy theories. These platforms need to be shut down, they’re destroying democracies.

I love the phrase ‘gobsmackingly bananas’. Also applicable to the people who don’t believe experts like Zeke.

Facts from the cultural files. Australia has 2 million more dogs than children.

How did we think linking together all of the world's most stupid people into a political force, through social media, was going to end well? The danger is that it has power, Trump's mob for example organised through social media. Some of its members were the people who fired up the cookers in Victoria to oppose public health measures for Covid. Do we really want centuries of human progress to now be led by the kids who ate Perkins Paste at school?

I wonder if this is mostly about pokies. Few pubs or even clubs really survive without them now. The business model has been cactus for years, once upon a time food and alcohol kept pubs and clubs solvent, but the margins just aren't there now. Then gambling filled the gap.

Bathurst’s bats. This will happen more all the time now, as we trash the rest of the landscape and plants and animals come looking for somewhere to survive. I came up with a concept of ‘reality-based politics’, which means no matter what anybody believes, the ultimate decider for all ideas is reality. Covid and climate change are like that, people have their opinions. All of them are irrelevant, reality will decide the outcome. You can see the great Nobel-prize winning novelist Albert Camus said the same thing about pandemics. We’re too ‘wrapped up in ourselves’. Social media has vastly magnified that wrapping. We’re more likely to take a selfie in front of these bats than do anything about it. We don’t know what to do, even if we wanted to.

Happy Birthday!🎉🎂

Both Paris and London inundated with bed bugs. Experts say travel is the major cause of the spread, bugs have a field day as travellers spread them from room-to-room, continent-to-continent. Extremely difficult to get rid of. They feed on your blood while you sleep.

Happy Birthday :)

Everything points to us rewinding about 150 years, in the past 3 years.

Ordinary cars waste huge amounts of energy in braking, as heat. You can see it, the brake discs glowing red. EVs and hybrids capture 90 percent of this energy and use it to recharge the battery. Instead of only using friction of the brake pads against the discs to slow the car, the car is mostly slowed by spinning electric motors in reverse, as generators.

Underneath all the hot air of social media, reality continues to create a tsunami of change. Electricity is now like water or food, we’ll store it and just use it as we need it, rather than having to run dinosaur power stations 24 hours a day. Opponents will be flattened by the tsunami.

When you combine travel with social media, you reach new heights of stupid.

I think the F-35 is a stealth fighter only if you don’t have ears.

People patient and smart enough to continue avoiding Covid will be rewarded with new tools that are coming quickly. Nasal vaccines, that will give (long-lasting) immunity not just to severe disease, but to catching Covid at all. Like this one. It will sadly be too late for billions who were told to ‘live with’ the virus. Many will likely have reservoirs of Covid living inside them for the rest of their lives, causing long-term disease and even death. My anger at the politicians who did this for the past 3+ years was because I knew this day would arrive.

Bit of magic here.

If this camera had panned just a couple more degrees at the barn, you’d have seen me and Kell, sitting under a tree.

And once you arrive, with thousands of others, there’ll be no ‘natural’ beauty left to see. Travel culture has this weird fantasy that we’re all travelling the world alone, the picture even says it.

When you’re deciding Yes or No this weekend, imagine living somewhere for tens of thousands of years. Not just a generation or two or three, as some farmers are rightly proud of, 100-200 years. Tens of *thousands* of years, WAY before pyramids or Stonehenge were even imagined. And you spent those tens of thousands of years creating a paradise, the size of a continent, through generation after generation of hard work and genius. And then having people arrive and just walk onto your land, and say ‘this is ours now’. And shooting you and your wife and kids. It’s as simple as that.

Saw this on a local FB group. It’s a good example of how bad faith actors in places like the US (this is a US meme) prey on simple minds on social media in other countries. Whipping up angry mobs, protesting things that aren’t even real.

Europe. Every blue dot is a wind farm.

‘Baseload’ is another slogan politicians use. It encourages the public to think we have some sort of minimum amount of ’base’ power we need coal-fired power stations to supply, and without them all the lights will go off. It’s all rubbish. Have a look at the daily energy consumption in Australia, it’s up and down all over the place. There is no baseload.

The new fighting in the Middle East should remind us that we have to ship most of our fuel from there. Over $50 billion of it, per year. And it’s sending ordinary Australians broke. But we can power our cars with our own sunshine. And they’ll be faster, more powerful cars too, with zero pollution. Fresh air and quiet in our cities for the first time in nearly 100 years. It’s only a handful of idiot men (mostly men) on social media who use petrol and diesel as a type of penis extension who are stopping us.

Hybrids gleaming in the driveway, ready for another day of using bugger-all fuel at eye-watering prices. And silently smoking utes and SUVs at red lights.

Amortisation. Why things like solar and hybrids/EVs make you lots of money, at a time money is very tight for people. The ticket or sticker price can seem high (and is dropping fast anyway), but you have to do the simple maths over a few years. For example I commute about 30,000km per year. The hybrids we have cost about $2K more than a standard petrol or diesel, though again the difference is collapsing quickly. But in our case, I’m saving between $3000-$4000 per year in fuel costs. The difference in sticker price for the car, to an ordinary petrol or diesel, will be amortised inside a year. We’ll drive the cars for 5 or 6, or maybe even longer. So by year 2 already we’re well ahead, in dollar terms. More than $20,000 extra in our pockets over the lifetime of the cars.

Say you buy a new car, and drive it for 100,000 km. If it's a petrol or diesel car, the fuel over the lifetime of the car will cost you around $25,000. if you buy an EV, the electricity to drive 100,000 km will cost you less than $5000 over the lifetime of the car, and that's if you use grid power. The cost of that electricity can be close to zero if you charge it from home solar. You can see how massively you're ahead in dollar terms, going hybrid or electric. Tens of thousands of dollars over the lifetime of the car. And you'll be able to drive the EV for much longer than 100,000 km too, because there's nothing much mechanically that can go wrong with them. Some Teslas for example have done 800,000 km on the same motors and battery.

Seinfeld ended 25 years ago. Quarter of a century. Yikes.

Had to re-jig an earlier post because I’d badly mis-remembered the price difference between a standard petrol and a hybrid. Using Toyota as an example, and a larger 7-seater. I thought it was about $10K. You can see here right now it’s only about $2600. You’d save more than that in under a year in reduced fuel bills. The hybrid will make you easily $20,000+ better off over the lifetime of the car. And it will be a much better drive, maximum torque across the full speed range. I have one of these (Kluger hybrid), and it has the same fuel economy as a Toyota Corolla or other small car. But more power and acceleration than a V6.

You need air to burn things, and turbos provide a lot of extra air, by sucking it out of the exhaust and back into the engine. They don’t make a petrol or diesel much more efficient (you might get to 40-50% efficiency at best), but they do allow you to use a smaller engine to get the same power, which is where any fuel savings come from. It still makes turbos much less efficient than any electric motor, which runs at over 90% efficiency, and which gives instant power and torque. It doesn’t need air, it’s not burning anything.

This weekend a nation of obsessive travellers will probably demonstrate the myth of 'travel broadens the mind'. By voting No.

Remember when we were told we had to live with the virus to save the economy? Oops. All that 'natural immunity' isn't working either.

If you want a sense of just how enormous the 'grunt' of an electric motor is, check out the Aspark Owl. It can go from 0-100 km/h in 1.69 seconds. Imagine how that feels in the car.

Reality, vs social media. “…electric vehicle sales had topped Bloomberg NEF’s mass adoption tipping point on track to 30 per cent of sales by 2027; AEMC research showed most domestic batteries will hit the affordability turning point by 2025, years ahead of predictions; real estate searches for electrified and energy-efficient homes are surging, and are marketing net zero homes.”

That awkward moment for some where their friends and even family have a weaker moral compass than Kyle and Jackie O. (Both voted Yes.)

Pandemics aren't the normal, where big things only come from the actions of millions of individuals. In a pandemic individuals can shape the fate of millions. Every person you see wearing a mask has likely saved hundreds or even thousands of lives, by interrupting chains of transmission. Conversely every person who can't be bothered has potentially infected and even killed hundreds, or thousands.

Here's a story of the pandemic that is never told. How we jumped straight from government action, to 'personal responsibility'. Leaving business completely off the hook. We've had WHS laws for a century that they should have been applying to prevent Covid in the workplace. That's where nearly everybody now catches it, including schools. 'Economy' focused politics always excludes responsibility (and cost) for business.

Niki Savva nailed it today. Former senior adviser to John Howard and Peter Costello.

For a country so obsessed with travel, Australia seems to not have the first clue how ridiculous we will look to the rest of the world, if the vote is No. And how much that will damage us.

You won’t convince most No voters to change their minds, because they’re not using their minds. As with EVs, climate change, renewables, Covid and everything else, they’re cheering on their ‘team’. It’s team sports, it’s about their team winning. They will turn any issue into more fodder for the team sports. Whatever the leaders of their team - politicians, prominent media and social media identities - tell them to think, they will think. X is bad, Y is good. Once that call is made, they will ‘research’ every lunatic theory that makes X look bad, and Y look good. Mostly on social media. Electric mowers and tools, and trains, are examples I’ve used before. The same people who will tell you electric cars are ridiculous, will happily go out and buy an electric mower or ride in an electric train. Why? Because the team leaders have never told them to hate electric mowers or trains. If they did, they’d be ‘researching’ everything ‘wrong’ with them, on social media, right now.

A mystery.

Conferences are based on a weird idea that if you put lots of people together in rooms, something will be created. Boredom, mostly.

Don’t wear a Yes or No shirt or other item to vote tomorrow. It’s not allowed.

KIA’s EV options are now 5 different model of all sizes, change is happening fast. And beautiful cars too, I think the smartest car company in the world right now. The Koreans are making amazing cars.

I’d trust a self-driving car over a human-driven car every day of the week. I travel hundreds of kilometres every week, and the human driving I see is appalling. We already have self-flying planes and self-driving trains, and that made flying and trains enormously safer. Even semi-autonomous driving is way better, which cars (like mine) already have. I never switch it off.

Arijit is a friend, a research scientist. Reality doesn’t give a shit about your feelings. About whether you’re ‘over’ Covid, bored with it.

Another mystery.

Seems a solution to today’s housing crisis. Just shoot and poison the owners of the places you like.

The Beatles put ultra-high frequency sounds on Sgt Peppers, inaudible to humans, because they were amused with the idea of people playing it and their dogs getting excited.

Interview with voters about why they voted No. “We already have some of them in the parliament.” (‘them’ 🤔) “We need to be one nation, not special rules for their culture.’ (‘their’ 🤔)

I’d rather be having an ingrown toenail cut out without an anaesthetic than be at something like this. Note Mark just coincidentally managed to share a picture of himself addressing the crowd.

My politics? Get rid of all elections, all referendums. All political team sports (parties). There are very simple, clear things that need doing to fix our worst problems, none of which need a popularity-based mechanism as a roadblock. Something being popular is no measure at all of it being right, anybody who raises or teaches kids or manages staff knows that. Elections and parties are high school culture grafted onto adult life. We all know high school runs on popularity. Also why we love team sports, the same social mechanism. We know how to get rid of Covid, how to fix climate change, how to repair roads, etc. We can’t do any of those things because of the roadblock of popularity politics.

One for science teachers.

I still see people buy standard petrol and diesel cars now, and wonder how much thought they’ve put into it. Not only are they massively more expensive now over their lifetimes, we’re very quickly approaching a point where they’ll be stranded assets - nobody will want to buy them when somebody wants to trade them in. Tesla is now worth more money than the top 10 largest older car companies in the world, COMBINED. They’re all scrambling to catch up, they’ll all go full EV much faster than people realise. Otherwise they’ll go bankrupt. Read this article. Reality always wins.

Australia broke a new record on Friday. Over 70% of its electricty came from renewables during the day. That number will hit 100% by 2025, in just over a year. Between 8 and 4 every day right now, the energy is not only cheap, the price is negative. They’re paying wholesalers to use it.

The late-18th century was when the First Fleet arrived. But it was the 19th century when the wider settlement of Australia happened, a history only now starting to be really told. It was an uncontrolled expansion into the inland to take land and exploit it for riches. The Brits lost control of this rush. Like the timber-fellers, who plundered most native forests in search of red cedar (really a mahogany). Most of it was gone before 1880. Nearly 90% of what was felled was wasted, left to rot in the forest, far too heavy for them to move even with bullocks. To give a sense of the numbers, Melbourne households burned up to 450,000 tonnes of firewood per year. Timber was also used for building, including ships. This is the settlement history of Australia, a permanent gold rush of get-rich-quick schemes, most of which failed. The destruction was almost total. Much of the work was done by Aborigines, as slaves. Labour hire slaves still do much of the work in inland Australia today. Farming, mining, forestry. Extractive industries. Most Australians don’t live inland, then or now. It’s a place we plunder, still clawing each other’s eyes out to acquire ‘real estate‘, grow cash crops, cut and sell timber, look for gold and minerals. The brutal frontier ethos survives, settler culture is still rampant, particularly in Queensland. The sugar cane crops that have polluted the Great Barrier Reef for decades began in these settler times, more get-rich-quick, copied from earlier Brit colonialism in the West Indies.

Want to see how travel is really just the continuation of colonialism? Jamaica! Where fewer than 1% of the beaches are accessible to - Jamaicans. Tourism ‘owns’ the beaches. We do this everywhere, first take possession of places, strip-mine them of resources, then use them as tourist destinations. Locals are supposed to feel privileged to act as servants in tourist resorts. We say that’s ‘great for their economy’.

The Caribbean, a primary source of slaves in our early empires and therefore of our wealth today, is the most touristed place in the world. 80% of the income from that tourism leaves the Caribbean. The same for the Pacific Islands in our regions, where Australian farmers in the 1800s stole over 60,000 people, as slaves to work on their farms. They’re still doing it, they just call it ‘labour hire’ now.

“People are choosing bigger and bigger cars, then it turns into a bit of an arms race where people then feel less safe if they’re in a smaller vehicle, and so they want a bigger vehicle, and then everyone else feels less safe, so they want a bigger vehicle – and on it goes." The country is in a terminal death spiral of stupid, on just about every metric.

'End the division' by splitting something 60/40. Straya and maths, a love story.

CEO of VW, the largest producer of diesels in the world and second-largest producer of petrol vehicles.

Latest electricity bill. For winter. All of our heating is electric too.

Batteries are going to win in the debate over which is more important, more transmission lines, or more storage. An example from our own region right here. In the US power companies are starting to buy home batteries for people too, to avoid the need to spend billions on new transmission lines.

South Australia's big battery paid for itself inside 2.5 years. That's off the scale in energy infrastructure, which never pays for itself. It also saved people of South Australia about $150 million in electricity charges. We're still stuck in a model that says generate huge power somewhere, then transmit it across the country. But solar panels are SOOO much cheaper than anything else, meaning you can put them up anywhere, and if it's a place with low sunlight you just put up lots more. It's super cheap. Then you put in batteries at all levels, from households to communities to grid-level. No need for many big transmission lines. Our own home battery gets cheaper all the time, with electricity prices going up it saves us more money every day.

New study which examined the impact of Covid infection on the brains of dogs, extrapolated to humans.

The problem is easy to see, and nobody wants to admit it. Social media is a disaster for societies, a 24/7 assault on the trust that holds them together. It makes all views equivalent, the most pig-ignorant, bigoted bullshit suddenly has as much power as knowledge accumulated over 2000 years. It’s a particularly American, libertarian set of beliefs from the US, built into the platforms themselves. Everything we need to do to fix this is already poisoned as ‘authoritarian’, by these beliefs built into the platforms. Why we couldn’t even do basic public health against Covid. No-brainers like switching to almost free clean energy are opposed every day, climate change action is constantly stalled, and towns are allowed to go bankrupt because social media influencers without a clue use these platforms to mobilise resistance to basic local governance.

Pears are my favourite supermarket fruit buy. And unripe pears, nice and crispy. Can’t stand ripe ones, dribbling all over your face, blegh.

Not only are ICE cars rubbish, they’re even more rubbish than they’re advertised to be. Not actually difficult to do these measurements yourself. VW criminally lied about the performance of its diesels (Dieselgate). Those lies have now cost it over $50 billion in damages payments.

A great victory against stupid.

I post a lot about cars because they’re the centre of a whole universe of social behaviours that need to change. The car is the most anti-social part of societies, and ‘drives’ (pun intended) a whole swathe of other anti-social behaviours. And the bigger the car, the more anti-social it tends to be. If you’re wondering why Australian social life seems to be fracturing, the shift to big cars is one place to look.

Historical photo of Bathurst's famous street lamps being installed, a century ago. An interesting bit of trivia is that this caused community outrage at the time.

New nasty wave of Covid brewing. A little true story to motivate you to not catch it. "A nurse said Long Covid made her so forgetful she thought she had early-onset Alzheimer's. She would get in the car and forget where she was going."

My dad once said it’s every generation’s responsibility to plant trees. That way every generation gets to enjoy them. It’s cheap, and quick. Imagine every street looking like this, mid-Piper Street in Bathurst. Not even an exclusive part of town. Our best weapon against climate change too. They don’t call expensive suburbs ‘leafy’ for nothing.

I see the new tank-sized utes are also called 'wankpanzers' :)

Made my day.

Another mystery illness. I reckon Scooby could solve these, no need for Velma.

Such a sparkling life force. Brilliant and funny. 32 years gone now, ouch.

Wankpanzers are combining two vacuous Australian passions, travel and big cars, to destroy Australian beaches.

We haven't paid a cent for electricity in over a year. We're making money from it. The previous government vomited endless propaganda about 'cheap, reliable power'. It was never cheap or reliable, because coal power stations break down constantly, and coal is much, much more expensive than solar. I think with renewables we'll get to a point where energy will be almost free for everybody, as landline phone calls are now.

I drive this road every day, and it's made me think about whether we've got lazy with road building. Lots of hilly bits like here, where instead of cutting the road into the topography of the land, to prevent large inclines, the road is just plonked straight on top of the topography. You drive up and down hills constantly. With modern cars you can get away with that, because they have the power to do it (note the old road nearby was designed to avoid large hills as much as possible, because large hills were a problem for old cars). Are we saving (government) money during construction, but then pushing the costs to our individual wallets over the millions of vehicle trips in the decades afterwards? For comparison, train tracks are never like this. They're built to avoid inclines wherever possible, not least because trains aren't good on hills. But it also saves energy per trip. That's a longer-term view, it costs more at first, but is much more efficient over decades.

The true motivations of the No camp are now clear, because they know they won and now don't care about saying what they were really thinking. Tony Abbott already back out saying we need to get rid of the Aboriginal Flag and welcome to country ceremonies. None of that was part of the referendum, and he'd have denied it pre-vote too. And this debate on the naming of a Sydney train station is back on too. It's classic 'bash the blacks', hidden as always behind weasel words. All stand and salute the Union Jack and old Blighty, and these blacks are primitive savages etc.

Social media: “there are Palestinian Christians?!” Bethlehem and Nazareth are both Palestinian locations.

From today officially suppressing all meaningful information about Covid. Trying to make the problem go away by pretending it no longer exists.

The times they are a changin’. Get out of the way or be roadkill.

Battery research is going gangbusters. Sodium-sulfur batteries are what Toyota is rumoured to have ready to go within the next few years too, 4 times the range, much cheaper to make, and much faster to charge. That will bring us cars with 2000-3000km range per charge. Again, get out of the way, or be roadkill.

When these guys got famous in the early 1990s I thought they were the only interesting new band I’d heard in years. Fantastic live too. Then they split up just as they were becoming really big. Very few bands come back from there. They’re back now, but mostly stuck on the nostalgia tour circuit. Pop music is as much cultural and social as musical. You get one chance at being only one age group’s soundtrack for their lives, with very rare exceptions.

I wonder if young people today aren’t really into band/live music culture as much, and this is the pandemic accelerating a trend that was already happening. Nothing anchors people permanently in adolescence more than the music scene, life passes them by.

Boom!

Another travel and tourism pressure point. We’re treating places as sluts, why is it so difficult to understand that if we all decide to descend on the Earth’s beauty spots, it destroys them?

‘Australians with periods‘ are women. JK Rowling made this same point a few years ago and has been hounded disgracefully ever since. If the trans community find it distasteful, remember that post-menopausal women and women who’ve had hysterectomies don’t have periods either. They’re still women. All Australians who have periods are women. Call them women. Social media is destroying our world.

Baby tourism. Where you hop between countries to give birth, to accumulate passports, avoid paying tax on income and expand your freedom to travel. All while posing for social media videos, with every hair, gesture and smile carefully choreographed, while babbling gibberish about increasing your freedom. A new chapter of colonialism, which I’m sure Tarzan and Jane here have never heard of.

Happy birthday!

Bathurst Our Town hitting it out of the park as usual with brain food. No doubt advice on how to run the town will follow.

Indonesia's 'crackdown on tourism' is ramping up. The poor Indonesians, first colonised by the Dutch, and now by millions of vacuous selfie-zombies with chiselled abs and injected lips.

The French are looking to cover all their large car parks with solar panels, generating as much electricity as 10 nuclear plants. At a *tiny* fraction of the cost. And no nuclear waste. And shaded parking for all.

Another victory for local social media groups full of morons.

A few times over recent years I’ve posted about the debacle the Snowy 2.0 would be. 4 Corners last night showed it in all its sad detail. (And it’s actually a $10 billion debacle, and growing.) The biggest mistake the LNP made here is to think you need huge amounts of storage for ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’. An empty slogan. When the sun doesn’t shine most people are in bed asleep, when we don’t need much electricity. (There’s still plenty of wind though.) Batteries are way faster and cheaper to build. The engineers say it in this latest story. This slogan has cost Australians tens of billions of dollars. We’ll have almost nothing to show for it.

Peer-to-peer electricity trading may be coming. It's like 'Uber' energy. What this means is somebody like me, who has lots of surplus electricity every day, would be able to sell it to friends and family at heavily discounted rates, directly, without them needing to go through an energy retailer or have solar. So they may be paying 40c/kWh right now, I could sell electricity to them at 15-20c/kWh. Cuts their costs in half, and doubles my profits.

Happy Birthday Wayne!

You can fix this problem yourself, right now. Get rid of your rubbish ICE.

So many have no idea of the revolution happening out there, and how far removed it is from the bullshit they read on social media.

Nurses and teachers are being screwed so we get to continue meaningless recreational lifestyles, while somebody minds the kids, and looks after us when we get Covid for the 15th time.

I wonder if Toyota planned this reflection.

Trades won’t escape automation. This Australian-invented robot brick layer will lay 300 bricks every hour. 24 hours a day. Love the name too.

Over 100 communities are now building their own power stations, owned by them with profits going to them. Solar farms. They're cheap, and quick to build. There's a farmer here who doesn't like what it will do to his view. Most Australian agricultural land is a cesspit of erosion and dust. Smart farmers welcome this as a new source of income. It also improves their land, by shading it.

We have one of these, a ZR hybrid. Not only does it drive brilliantly (it smokes everything at the lights, because of the huge low-end torque from the electric motor), but it corners like nothing else, as many hatches do. And fuel consumption, if we just drive this around town, it costs us $6 a week in fuel. I don't know why people still buy full-ICEs, it's insane when you get so much better performance and fuel economy with a hybrid or EV.

This could fundamentally change the cruise industry. As in destroy it. And not a bad thing either. https://www.9news.com.au/national/ruby-princess-covid-19-class-action-passengers-win-lawsuit-against-cruise-lines/8e6dc751-debc-42fb-b9ab-4942d219e97f#:~:text=Passengers%20aboard%20the%20cruise%20ship,was%20erupting%20around%20the%20world.

This could destroy the cruise industry. What a loss that would be, ha.

You can see the power of the fossil fuel industry. The world has been on fire the past year, and we still doubled our subsidies to that industry. Meanwhile it also spends billions on misinformation and disinformation using fake accounts on social media, so people think nothing is wrong.

It’s revealing that even though most are taught that gravity is pulling them down all day, they spend very little of their days ‘holding themselves up’.

I know people resist the idea that our culture is now a teenage culture, from cradle to grave. Always follow the money. If peoples' lives and passions at 80 are the same as they are at 18, so that you become super rich selling the same product at 80 as you did at 18, you're in a teenage culture.

There's no price on Allan Border. As a heads-up, if you're paying $7291 for a fully installed 13.2 kW system, you're almost certainly buying rubbish. Use solarquotes.com.au to organise 3 reputable quotes for you. That's how I found Penrith Solar, who I still highly recommend.

Happy birthday, one more year until the big one :)

This is Capital Wind Farm, NSW's largest wind farm. It powers the Sydney desalination plant, producing 250 million litres of fresh water every day when needed. And has energy to spare.

Peter struggling to understand here. We do this because 99% of human behaviour is imitative rivalry. Status games. Keeping up with the Joneses, as it used to be called. I saw it in Lithgow, the rivalry even got locals buying ridiculously expensive European SUVs like Range Rovers and BMW X5s. Nobody leaves high school any more, not an analogy. That is our culture.

When Australia led the world in defeating HIV in the 1980s it was largely due to a brilliant health minister, Neal Blewett. If you’re wondering why we’re doing nothing at all about Covid, here’s our current health minister, doing the conference circuit. Also a nice window into what childish time-wasting bullshit conferences are. I’m so glad to be close to retirement.

Happy Birthday!

The waltz was considered scandalous when it began, due to the close touching of male and female bodies. We can laugh at that now, but what replaced it? Modern dancing is mostly individuals making stuff up (very often badly), and there's little if any touching. I think the decline of choreographed dances was a real social loss. Only the very best musicians can improvise well for example, now we expect everybody to do that, with dancing. It excludes so many from the activity. Plus dance was a sophisticated social thing, a way to mediate the relationship between the sexes. Replaced now with ridiculous 'consent' culture trying to paper over the void left by the stripping away of these sorts of frameworks. Like you're haggling over a second hand car.

John Cleese is 84 today. We're rapidly approaching that time when an entire generation of people who shaped the world we live in now will disappear. It's a weird feeling. But that's how life works, that generation's influence went on for far too long as well. I still think the circle of life may be broken, leaving us without any sort of succession plan.

Covid is evolving 2.5 times faster than flu, the previous world champion at evolving to avoid our immunity. Because we're not stopping its spread, it's having an evolutionary field day. That 'mild' nonsense people say? That's one tiny moment in time brought to us by the vaccines. The virus is evolving fast to escape them.

Yep! Got the bills to prove it. I think the government is finally realising targeting households is the fastest and cheapest way to go. The LNP still agitating for nuclear, which they don’t actually want (it’d be electoral suicide), but just to do the only thing they know how to do - try to wreck. Take it from somebody who worked in nuclear engineering, nobody wants it, it costs a fortune, nobody wants the waste, it would take at least a decade to get off the ground, and the small modular reactors don’t even exist.

Social media has made all needed social change almost impossible, bogged down in endless fake debates. The smartest thing the ALP can do right now is target households with full electrification for their homes. Heavily subsidise solar, electric appliances, and batteries, and install batteries at community and grid level too. Regulate emissions standards for cars to give a fast boost to EV take-up. Fast, cheap, immediate cost of living relief for everybody, and also the most effective new way to build the grid. It also bypasses most of the morons on social media, and the wreckers in the LNP with their nuclear fantasies.

Business has had enough of the wrecking morons as well.

Hard to photograph the number of bats in Machattie Park in Bathurst right now. They’ll be here for months, the sky is a constant stream of bat piss and droppings, which coats everything underneath. The places the bats used to live have been mostly cleared for farming and suburbs. What I mean by us not having any idea how to actually live in Australia. We just royally shafted the people who do know. This land will keep reminding us that we don’t know, in increasingly disastrous ways.

Another surge of Covid about. Take care. It’s not good for you.

You can see here that even if we decided not to use renewables, shifting to EVs using our current grid electricity would still cut the cost of motoring by 50%. Add renewables and that’s 70-80%. And that doesn’t even take into account the much, much lower servicing costs, EVs need virtually no servicing. Reality will prevail, it always does. Always follow the money.

Even without climate change, the world would shift to solar and wind power. Because it’s enormously cheaper. The energy industry is like any business, it will go where it can make the most money. And it makes huge profits from solar and wind. Nuclear is the only technology getting *more* expensive over time. Dead in the water.

The $25 hamburger.

I was sceptical about tyre repair kits they ship with a lot of new cars now, instead of a spare. The ones that pump sealant into the tyre while inflating it. But I’m a fan now, actually preferring it to a spare. Saves a lot of space and weight in the rear of a car, is much faster than changing a tyre, and also therefore much safer (a ridiculous number of people die changing tyres, when hit by other traffic).

I think history will show McCartney to be the true giant in The Beatles. Even while Lennon was alive the other 3 members admitted McCartney was the band’s leader, they’d have got nothing done without him. Fascinating to hear him finally call Lennon out on some of his BS too, though without the bitterness Lennon showed him.

This is what social media is doing. Australia already built virtually nothing, we’re a quarry for other countries, with our local political flag-saluting halfwits obligingly ripping up what puny royalties we got for that too. Now you couldn’t run a lemonade stand without some motivated group of morons mobilising resistance through social media. Australia needs desperately fast, urgent acton on things like renewable energy. Not just for climate change but because it’s our economic future. It’s stalling because of community opposition that is off with the fairies, peddling idiot conspiracy theories. What do people think will keep Australia running? Our biggest exports are all industries in free fall.

This is why fossil fuels historically seemed cheap. The industry has never had to pay for its pollution. (In economics terms, those are ‘externalities’ it can simply ignore, and pass the cost on to the rest of us.) No other industry would get away with it, people would be in jail.

Terrible. I’d suggest getting an EV, never needs a mechanic, or a starter motor :)

Great Central Coast company, converting prime movers to EVs. You can see how they swap out the battery when it needs charging, takes only a few minutes, much faster than filling the truck with diesel. Swap-out stations will be along the main trucking routes. The trucks run silently, have far more torque/grunt, and have no pollution. Why will trucking companies move this way? The same reason all fleets for all vehicles will. It will save them a shit-tonne of money, in fuel and maintenance.

Another surge. Remember when they said Covid would become ‘endemic’? It will never become endemic, it’s an epidemic virus. It could keep infecting in waves for centuries, unless we stop it. I still mask, pretty much nobody else at work does. People are more afraid about looking different than they are about their own health.

New Covid after-effects today, a work colleague. Allergic reactions in the face, itchy, red and hives. Like Woogie in There's Something About Mary. Likely Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, a nasty immune impact after Covid infection. Can impact not just the skin, but the brains, heart, lungs etc.

Last week South Australia got 99.8% of its electricity from solar (yellow) and wind (green) only. That's day and night, not just days. On Saturday it actually hit 264%, but because prices were negative in the grid because of so much supply, it didn't use over 160% of the renewables power it had available. It plans to use those huge surpluses to fill batteries and produce green hydrogen, to make green steel, which could make it very rich.

I’m on the couch reading porn.

By 2050, 25% of the people on the planet will be African.

Emerging symptoms in kids for latest versions of Covid.

We’ve been ‘living with’ pathogens ever since we invented antibiotics and vaccines. Before that we avoided them at all costs. That living with was always a mistake that was going to catch up with us. They’re living things, they evolve to beat everything we throw at them, in an arms race we can never win.

1970 and 2023 are the same distance in time apart as 1970 and 1917.