November 2023

John Lennon has been dead for longer than he was alive. To help you feel even older, The Beatles broke up over 50 years ago.

Success has an entire dropdown menu of related content. Failure is a 404 error. Jonathan Liew

Friend at work was onto Day 2 yesterday of very nasty immune issues, eyes puffed up like they’d done 12 rounds of boxing. Some of the hives on the face now suppressed with double-dosings of antihistamines. Is assuming hayfever, I’m sure it isn’t (they’re not a regular hayfever sufferer, and even if they were these would be pretty extreme symptoms). It’s very likely Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, a potentially very serious autoimmune problem, attacking connective tissue not just in the skin but also heart, brain, lungs etc. Classic after-effect of Covid infection, Covid attacks the immune system. At high risk of anaphylaxis too, will need to be careful about pretty much everything they eat or touch now (but won’t even be aware this may be what they’re suffering from, so an even greater risk). The long-term chronic impacts of these infections are beginning to emerge. Like HIV, which took 8-10 years to first appear as AIDS in people. I know nobody much is changing their approach to this virus, out of peer pressure to not be different to others. It saddens me that they’re trusting politicians with the health of themselves and their friends and family.

Michael was a film from 1996 that doesn’t rate a lot of mentions, but which I really enjoyed. Travolta plays an angel on a mission. One of the things I most enjoyed about it was his passion for ‘battle!’. That’s what good people have forgotten how to do, how to love the battle. I see so much of it on social media, how they retreat to curated happiness here, to enforced ‘positivity’, in defiance of the events they see happening around them, like a form of escapism. As if things will just go away or get better, if they ignore them and focus only on fun and ’nice’ things. Nothing makes you feel more alive than battle. Than jumping headfirst into problems, to help solve them, with humour and passion and intelligence. It’s an exquisite form of happiness, far greater than the happiness of retreat and diversionary fun like travel, eating out and gigs. It’s passion. It’s what grown-up life used to be about, before all of society became a high school.

Roy Hill mine (owned by Gina Reinhart) takes delivery of a 100% battery electric-powered long-haul locomotive. By using regenerative braking, it will charge its battery on the 344 kilometre downhill run from the mine to the port facility and use that stored energy to return to the mine, starting the cycle all over again.

Yep. Again, it's not that I love cars particularly or even renewables. It's that these obvious facts of physics and economics are hidden by the bullshit of social media. Energy is also central to all economies, so if you change energy, you change everything. We stop being slaves to Texas and the Middle East, and determine our own destinies. Using Australian-made (mostly free) energy.

Sorry to have missed this brains trust.

From a year ago. We're now entering our 8th wave. None of the 'experts' governments trot out are expert at anything except churning out spin for governments doing nothing. All working from home safe from the virus.

Trump asked his experts if swishing disinfectant through the lungs would fix Covid. Our homegrown elected halfwits told us a year ago there’d be no more waves of infection (in the year since we’ve doubled the number of waves). Our own local member when Deputy Premier said masks on children was ‘ludicrous’. Just about everybody I know and don’t know is trusting their health to these people.

I’ve been surprised just how many people I know have invested in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. You may as well pile all your money in the backyard and set fire to it.

I rarely go to gigs. Call me old-fashioned, I grew out of them, much preferring a night in in front of the telly. But for the sake of the historical record I love that the greatest live band of all time, by many country miles, is still showing it. This is a review from their current US tour. Live Aid is always given as evidence of how great a live band they were, when they embarrassed the biggest names in history on that day, blowing them all off the stage. But that wasn’t even a particularly good Queen gig, so even on an OK day, they were already head and shoulders above everybody else. On a good day they were (and are) simply stunning.

The bats are an increasing issue not just for Bathurst, but many other towns. The Botanic Gardens in Sydney used a novel approach to drive them out about a decade ago (not sure how it's going now), and it's not simple because it often just drives them somewhere else. For example if a local Council were to do this, it may drive the bats into resident backyards instead, which is unlikely to be seen as a solution. And again humans brought this on themselves by destroying so much habitat with strip-mine-farming and property development. But some beautiful parks are now nearly unusable. There are no easy answers. What I mean when I say we have no idea how to co-exist here with a much older Australia. We'll need to learn really fast. The people who do know we just screwed, telling them to be more like us.

John Birmingham on Tony Abbott.

Now is the time to act if you don't want Covid for Christmas. I'm not holding my breath that most will. https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/health-experts-warn-australians-may-be-faced-with-a-third-covid-christmas-as-eighth-wave-surges/news-story/5d42814b984a51657d3af4854b50350b

We’re very close to a time when there will be no living Beatles. I think that will be jarring for us as a culture because they marked the real escalation point I post about a lot, where adult life was replaced with adolescent culture. That’s what Beatlemania was. It’s meant they’ve always felt just there, and the rock stars that followed them the same, causing widespread grief 50 or more years after their prime, at death. Compare for example the death of somebody like Louis Armstrong. A giant in his day, but when he died in 1971 mainstream culture had long moved past him. There was sadness at his passing, but it wasn’t leading news bulletins. People saw it as the passing of something that was already long in the past. But try to imagine a world where none of these Beatles staring out at us from pictures exist any more. It’s jarring, like reality shuddering. They feel eternal, not because of their art, but because they were the vanguard of teenage music culture replacing adult life. A culture that refuses the passing of time, that refuses ageing, succession, of making way for what comes after. The Beatles have never felt ’in the past’, because time stopped passing in the usual adult way. Nobody thinks of them as what the remaining 2 actually are - elderly men. In their 80s. They seem eternally young. Again, that’s not their art, it’s our culture.

Many Australians doing it very tough right now. Look at far and away their greatest expense, transport. That’s fuel prices. That will drive the shift to hybrids and EVs faster than anything else. Always follow the money.

‘Just like the flu’, the slogan about Covid. Australia has had 2 bad flu years in the past decade. Right now Australia is killing more people every *quarter* with Covid than die in a bad flu year. 40 years of bad flu years, every YEAR. 5000 dead again already, this year, from Covid. Slogans are killing us.

Happy Birthday, really 50 today?

Nothing flushes out society’s dumbest people faster than any social media post about electric vehicles. Have a look at the comments, usually with smirking emojis.

RIP Kangaroo Island.

Having a home battery opens up many doors, not just your own use. Amber Electric one of the new companies that allow ordinary people to access wholesale electricity, rather than retail. This can be a way to make big money, if you have a battery (don’t go near wholesale if you don’t have a battery). Wholesale electricity prices are often negative during the day now, due to huge solar production, so it means you actually get paid to fill your battery in daylight hours. Then you can sell it to the grid in peak times, when wholesale prices are much, much higher. For example you could fill your battery during the day, and get paid for that. Then sell anything you don’t need yourself at peak times, at $10/kWh. That’s $100+ profit to you, in a single day. You need the battery because otherwise you’re paying that $10/kWh yourself in peak times for your own home, when with retail rates it might be 40c/kWh. It would send you broke fast. In general wholesale electricity is a dangerous game, but with a battery and the software companies like Amber offer, it’s quite manageable. If you have solar that’s great too, though you don’t want a solar system that exports a lot during the day, because then the negative wholesale rates mean you’re actually paying to export to the grid.

Fascinating. Those who used hearing aids for hearing loss had a 50% reduction in risk for dementia. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/hearing-aids-slow-cognitive-decline-people-high-risk#:~:text=Hearing%20aids%20reduced%20the%20rate,of%20dementia%20in%20vulnerable%20populations.

These are the bats currently occupying central Bathurst, the grey-headed flying fox. Australia’s largest bat. Some facts about them that help shape how we can view what’s happening. - they only live on the east coast, and are critical for pollinating a lot of species in what’s left of our native forests between Adelaide and Brisbane - the massive 2019-20 bushfires decimated many of their feeding grounds - some of the only remaining forest they feed in and pollinate is earmarked for logging - heat stress from climate change has also been killing them - they give birth in October/November, which is why they’re in Bathurst right now, Machattie Park has become their nursery - ‘pup abandonment’, thousands of babies being left to die, is now sadly common. Nobody is sure why it happens. It’s happening in Bathurst too. - dispersal techniques i.e. scaring them off are ineffective for a variety of reasons. It’s also extremely stressful to them during this birthing event.

The pro-petrol/diesel crowd trawl FB looking for any mention of electric vehicles, and then it starts. The same dumb things said over and over. Not one of them here for example even understands what a PHEV is, that the 125km is the pure-electric range, enough for 3 days of ordinary driving for most Australians. And the petrol component kicks in for longer trips.

When the petrol and diesel fetishists run out of EV posts to dive-bomb, they move onto solar. This was a post about the NSW Government’s new solar scheme for low income earners, promising to slash power bills. Losers with the personality of inflamed haemorrhoids, the only energy they’ve ever come into contact with is a can of Monster. Some of them bots sponsored by fossil fuel companies.

MG was a famous British car company, bought by the Chinese, who turned it into innovative EV designs. Prices are dropping with every new model, soon EVs will be cheaper than ICEs to buy. They’re already hugely cheaper to run.

Happy Birthday :)

Imagine if this had been a self-driving car, there'd be calls for them to be immediately banned. It's fascinating how we attribute skill and morality with humans and machines. Nobody says (though I think they should) after an accident like this, 'humans can't be trusted to drive unaided'. https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/2023/11/06/daylesford-pub-crash?ahe=662efd944398edbb2d8f4d85736c4bb830fa6116abf076eb6d8317fd70698f95&utm_medium=email&lr_hash=&acid=3260892&utm_source=Adestra&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020231106

Raising kids to adulthood is pretty much the ultimate achievement of any life. Nothing is more important I think (or more expensive today). And nothing changes you as an adult more, nothing else can teach in that deep way.

Exactly what's happening, and has been for years. A lot of it began in the 1950s in the US, when political conservatives and churches formed an alliance to take control of government. To give you an indication of how deep this goes, our ex-PM gave a speech not long after losing saying that 'thank God' we don't trust government, or the UN. He's now in Israel freelancing, uninvited, on behalf of this shadow network. https://johnmenadue.com/an-ultraconservative-shadow-network-is-forming-designed-to-influence-you/

We're not living with Covid. We're pretending it went away. That pretending is killing record numbers of people, and leaving millions of others potentially with lifelong chronic illness. Slogans are not science.

Happy anniversary Kellie Ann. Love you :)

‘Building batteries and other EV parts is more polluting than petrol or diesel.’ Not even close. ICEs are rubbish. And the gap will get even more huge as years go on as components are recycled and electricity is all renewables.

I focus on cars and renewables because they’re the centre of a new industrial revolution. And therefore of a whole new society. Our petrols, diesels and coal-fired power are 19th century technologies, over a century old. What’s coming is more fascinating every day, if you can clear the fog of political and social media-generated spin about it. Asia is leading the charge while Western powers cling to 150-year old delusions of empire.

As an indication of how amazing this technology now is. The solar panels on our house generate enough energy every week to drive an EV from Sydney to Perth. Just from sunshine, on one roof. That’s up to $1000 worth of petrol or diesel in energy, every week.

Yep. And with zero air pollution and virtually zero noise. Our cities will be unrecognisably nicer and healthier, and we individually and as a nation will be hugely wealthier.

A US with Trump in charge would be far, far more dangerous than anything China does. Because we've rewound to old White Australia times, first with Aboriginal assimilation, and now with constant Yellow Peril talk about the Chinese, we're not seeing it.

I don't apologise for fixating on this revolution. What's happening out there should astonish people. This will change our whole society, not just energy. (These numbers are projected to double again by 2030.)

BMWs have auto-emergency braking as standard. The driver obviously had it switched off. Something he can contemplate as he spends the rest of his life in jail, a tragedy in every way. I always have all the semi-autonomous driver assist stuff turned on, except in very rare circumstances, like gridlocked traffic.

Endless entertainment in the comments on EV posts on FB.

We’ll soon have had the solar for a full year. On current calculations, we’ll end that year with zero bills for electricty, plus over $500 surplus, straight into our bank account. Add that to the around $3000-$3500 we would have paid in bills without solar (includes all winter heating, in Lithgow), and that’s the ROI I often talk about. This is with a battery, so zero bills + profit is less likely with just panels, unless you use pretty much all of your electricty when the sun is up. But it’s swings and roundabouts, you’ll also pay less for the system without a battery, so will have a smaller amount to amortise. Most systems should pay for themselves in under 5 years, even under 3. With a battery it takes longer, but you get added benefits along the way. Systems have a lifetime of 20-25 years, so that means decades of nothing but pure profit.

This is why we should be furious with the idiots who spent the past 10 years saying the problem with our energy was supply. 'Baseload' power. Bullshit. This graph shows how much solar and wind energy is TURNED OFF ('curtailed') every day, because there's nowhere for it to go. So much (over 6000 MW, and still growing fast) it would break the grid if left on. We're swimming in energy. Enough to get us through peak hours too, 'when the sun doesn't shine'. It has to be turned off because that government did absolutely nothing to upgrade the grid to use all of this near-free energy. They should be in jail.

The Greenies over at Goldman Sachs (that's a joke). Again, if you disagree, I strongly encourage you to invest your life savings in petrol and diesel vehicle companies.

Wankpanzer.

If you run out of petrol or diesel, is it because your car doesn't have enough range? Or are you just a wally for not filling it?

Every single slogan below is a lie. This industry creates them to cast doubt, flooding social media with them, to create resistance to change. Why so much of my social media is about countering this nonsense. Renewables don’t work when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Affordable, dispatchable power. Gas is a vital transition fuel. EVs won’t tow your boat. EVs have nowhere to charge. The minerals in batteries are toxic. Windmill blades are an environmental disaster. Batteries will mean a lot more mining and will destroy the environment. Solar panels can’t be recycled and are filling up landfill. EV sales are plummeting. Nuclear energy is the answer. Only the rich can afford solar and an EV. EVs catch fire all the time. Building EVs creates more pollution than building ICEs. Windmills kill whales. Renewables can’t create baseload electricity. Baseload electricity means the minimum amount we need to produce every day for use.

Who remembers petrol at 70 cents per litre? It’s currently about $2.17. If you convert electricty costs to cents per litre, filling an EV costs about 40 cents per litre. And that’s using grid electricty, which is currently expensive, at peak times. Electricity companies offer EV rates where if you charge in off-peak times, that cost will drop to about 6 cents per litre. Fill it with your own solar and it’ll cost you close to zero.

I'm thinking about setting up on LocalVolts, so we can sell our surplus energy to friends and family at much reduced rates to what they're paying electricity retailers right now. Have a look, only a short vid.

Huge decision here. A mother suffering from Type 1 diabetes was told by her local school principal that she wasn't allowed to have her child learn from home to prevent her catching COVID from the school. The Department of Education has now lost this case. Just the tip of a very large iceberg.

'Living with the virus'. Just not as long. We're trashing a century of public health achievement. But at least we can go to gigs and fly to Bali. Welcome to Teenage World.

Lots of 'cash is king' memes yesterday with the Optus outage. The thing not as often spoken about with cash is that it's one of the most filthy objects you can handle. It's been in peoples' pockets and handbags next to their snotty hankies and tissues, in their hands (often unwashed or not washed properly after they've been to the toilet), people pick their noses and then handle cash, and huge amounts of it also has drug residue on it. Think about how many hands each piece of cash you have has been through, and what those hands have been doing. Wanking too.

Who remembers the big South Australian blackout in 2016? And how the mind midgets at the time were crowing about how this was an example of how unreliable renewables are? Have a look at the performance of SA. It's been adding more renewables at record pace. Easily the most reliable energy system in the country. ('Load shedding' is when they force big users to shut down, because there isn't enough supply.) What makes our electricity unreliable? Dinosaur coal plants breaking down all the time. Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story, hey.

Remember the slogan 'cheap and reliable power'? Look at South Australia. A wholesale price (purple line, the green is demand) of near ZERO. ALL DAY. Already easily the most reliable grid in the country. 99.8% solar and wind, day and night. This is what all of Australia will look like, when social media gets out of the way. Compare it with Queensland (bottom graph). Or any other State.

How your Christmas pans out has a lot to do with you, from here.

The science. Most of the energy produced by fossil fuels and nuclear is wasted converting it into usable energy. You can add petrol and diesel to the list.

Its almost miraculous that social media protest groups emerge so fast at every new renewables development. Except it isn’t, it’s very deliberately planned. The Atlas Network is a key player here, funded by fossil fuel interests and generating think tanks all over the world to create these campaigns and drive them into social media, where communities pick them up. They’ve been doing it with pumped hydro here in Lithgow too. They even funded the major Vote No campaigns in the referendum, because they saw a Yes as obstruction to more fossil fuel projects. Why I say social media is a disaster for societies, it allows bad faith actors to undermine critical work, by weaponising communities with cheap propaganda.

Happy Birthday Di! Beautiful day for it :)

Let me know if you see anybody suggest ‘living with’ tuberculosis. You won’t. Covid is much more dangerous than TB. You won’t find another disease anywhere that we’re asked to ‘live with’. Humans have never, not once in history, chosen to live with disease. They’ve been forced to sometimes, but they’ve never chosen to. Until now. That’s how fucked up the whole Covid thing is, driven by lunatic slogans propagated by - you guessed it - social media.

Has won an Emmy, is an award-winning novelist, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Maths? Not so much.

Paul McCartney said a similar thing about fame. That the real motivation to be famous is to be recognised and accepted for who you really are. (Which fame is probably the worst mechanism to achieve.) Being loved is usually to be the object of somebody else’s projection of you. They love the image they have of you, not you.

I share the solar stuff for those interested in how it pans out in practice. Here’s our highest-level use per quarter, in the past year. Yellow is electricty imports, green exports (we earn $ for those). Not shown is the solar electricity we used ourselves, which is the biggest money earner. A is before we had the solar, Spring 2022. Solar went on just before Christmas 2022, so B is a mix but mostly no-solar. C was the beginning of full solar, summer + half of autumn. Etc. You can see even in winter we exported more than we imported. (All our heating is electric.)

Most Australians live on the coast, making offshore wind a superb method of electricity generation for us, active now overseas for over 30 years. Offshore wind is often strongest at peak usage times as well, like when we’re all home after work cooking dinner. Superb engineering.

This is what offshore wind turbines look like, 20 kms out to sea (you may need a magnifying glass). The ones proposed for Australia are even further out, to 35 km. The people who complain about it ruining their view are the people who get their knowledge about the world from social media.

🙄 The gastro is likely also Covid. ‘Hundreds’ infected.

Happy birthday!

Happy Birthday old friend :)

Happy 50th! I hope you got a day off :)

Aged care Covid cases in Australia, yellow is aged care staff, red is residents. Left picture is 3 months ago, right is now.

Iceland had 1000 mini-earthquakes in a day this weekend. Imagine trying to sleep or do anything with this happening all day and night. It could mean a volcanic eruption is imminent.

Because I know Gen X’ers love it. We started kindergarten 50 years ago.

Dr Cameron Murray is doing brilliant work on understanding the disaster that is Australian housing. Unsurprisingly it’s pretty simple. Home ownership became a widespread Australian thing when governments built lots of affordable houses. As they did in the 1950s, see the graph, that’s when Australian home ownership began. Not the market. The market will never deliver widespread home ownership, or affordable housing.

One of the finest modern examples of adults now being lifelong teenagers is them thinking that “I’m over the pandemic” is the same thing as ”the pandemic is over”.

The Department of Defence produced a training package for firefighters dealing with EVs. Lots of great information in there for people who mistake clickbait for facts. Clickbait is how self-declared ‘experts’ like John here, on social media, make a fortune. They put up clickbait headlines like ‘rescuers and the public are unprepared against the risks’, thousands or even millions of gullible numpties click it, and ka-ching, John gets rich through the YouTube monetisation program. These experts often use conspiratorial style, like ‘this is what they’re not telling you’ (‘they’ is never defined). In reality they’re like the drunk guys in pubs who corner you and offload some fantasy theory of the world they’ve been pickling in beer for decades. None of the tools behind ‘John’ here look like they’ve even been used. It’s social theatre, playing to prejudices about ‘experts’ vs the apparently sensible home guy in his shed. I sat through one of his videos, there wasn’t a single fact in it, just lots of sneering nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

We're infecting everybody. Let that sink in, the social implications of that if Covid ends up having catastrophic longer-term health outcomes, like HIV/AIDS. We didn't let the entire population get HIV, our society would have collapsed. We're not only infecting everybody with SARS-Cov-2, we're doing it over and over and over. To CHILDREN too. ALL of them.

Andrew Irvine (L) and George Mallory. Possibly the first to reach the top of Mt Everest in the 1920s. Nobody knows, Mallory's body was found by American climbers a few years ago, nearly a century later, mummified by the cold, face down in the rocks. (See second pic.) Irvine has never been found, and had the camera that could have proved if they reached the summit. Conspiracy theorists say Chinese climbers took Irvine's body and camera to disguise that he and Mallory got to the top of Everest using the north face first (the Chinese were the first to do this officially, mid-20th century). The more likely explanation is that Irvine fell thousands of metres and his body has been covered by a century of snow and avalanches. Injuries to Mallory's body suggest he fell, and Irvine held him by a rope, which he was then forced to cut.

One of these passed me on the road today. Haval is doing great business, it’s the old Great Wall Motors. An example of how fast China learned to make cars, these are great vehicles. High quality, and cheap. And the Chinese are dominating EV manufacture, existing carmakers will be toast unless they pull their fingers out.

CSU was the worst I’ve ever seen for meetings. Every day full of them, from beginning to end. It wasn’t always like that, changes at the top end brought total incompetence at that level, and the organisation spent all day trying to figure out what it should be doing, with the void at the top providing either no guidance, or ridiculous plans that staff had to try to force-feed into some sort of reality. That’s what all the meetings were about, ‘what the hell are we doing here?’ Not sure if any of that has improved. Despite the bad press local government gets, I average zero meetings per week there.

My enjoyment of this reminded Kell that infants and primary teachers have a tough job, trying to make boys grow up.

Tesla Powerwall sales in Australia are booming. The thing I love about the Amber wholesale company is that it allows people with batteries to sell their excess power into the grid at peak times, which is the only time existing coal-fired plants now make money (they lose money all day, they have to pay to put power into the grid because there’s so much solar). This accelerates the collapse of the coal plants, eating into the only opportunity they had left to break even. Great little earner for ordinary homeowners too. As an example, the current wholesale rate here in Lithgow over breakfast is 32c/kWh. Compare that with a standard feed-in tariff for solar of 5 or 7 cents. A battery owner can increase their earnings right now by 500-600%, and sometimes even more, in peak times.

Somebody suffering from range anxiety, hooking up the caravan for their daily 800km drive to the shops.

Paul McCartney busking unrecognised in London.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is back in the news, with a multibillion new gas project approved for Santos. They swear it will be ‘carbon neutral’, that they can capture the carbon through CCS technologies. CCS is like ‘small modular nuclear reactors’, make-believe political spin, it doesn’t exist. Have a look at how well Shell and Exxon are going with their CCS. (You may need to squint to see the green bars at the top of each column.)

A friend at work has had to leave work for the second time, suffering a ‘mystery’ illness. Suspected mini-strokes. They may never return. They can’t afford to retire. I think we all know the source of these mystery illnesses. But let’s all go to a gig or on a cruise, like the good perpetual teenagers we are.

For the mental illness of ‘range anxiety’.

Happy Birthday Shaz!

More mysteries 🤔

How do you 'live with' a 'brutal Covid bomb'? Are we done with this dumb yet? I know, too many gigs, trips and restaurants to do. What's the morality of killing people so your recreational lifestyle isn't interrupted?

The mind midgets are going to have to dig pretty deep on YouTube to counter this one. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/15/renewables-predicted-to-avert-risk-of-blackouts-as-scorching-summer-looms-for-australia?CMP=share_btn_tw

News article giving people advice for possible blackouts this summer. I made some minor edits.

🤡

My EV did 900km on its latest tank. 45 litres. These labels are on the number plates, one of the things less understood about EVs is that they don’t have to be fully electric to be an EV. In a hybrid the petrol motor acts more like a generator for the electric motors, it’s not connected to the wheels. Lots of anti-EV folk think they’ve demolished them by showing them doing things like charging from a generator. It’s irrelevant. All vehicles are converging on using easily the most efficient and powerful motors - electric - with varying options for providing energy to those motors. The electric motors are more than twice as efficient, meaning even if you do use petrol or diesel to power them, you’re using a huge amount less. As a bonus they’re much more powerful too.

Our grandparents could (and did) often die from something as simple as a scratch. We think those times are over. But we’re deluding ourselves, vastly overusing antibiotics and loading far too much weight onto vaccines, to pretend we can ‘live with’ infections. It’s like having Jack the Ripper as a house guest, or trying to live with termites.

‘Here I am on the beers’ should be as ridiculous a topic for adult photos as ‘here I am using the toilet without a nappy’. But it isn’t, because we live in a teen culture, at all ages now. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

A really excellent service, especially with cost of living pressures. They find the best energy plan for you, and they continuously assess the market and let you know if there's an even better option. There is a small annual fee, but they guarantee you'll get more than that back with your first bill.

Any other ex-New College folk from our UNSW days probably remember Manoa. I lived with Manoa for a few years, always so much fun. He used to lather up his then-affro in the shower and throw huge handfuls of suds at anybody who came into the shared bathroom. I see the hair is now gone. And that he's now the Deputy PM of Fiji.

EV wins. Second place was also an EV. Costs less than $40,000. Only needs servicing every 2 years.

Oil and gas are both decomposed plankton. Coal is decomposed plants. All three are really just sunlight, compressed over millions of years.

The mining industry is one of the fastest to adopt EV technology. This truck is entirely electric, battery-powered. It will fast-charge in only 30 minutes, and carry nearly 250 tonnes. It will use its massive weight to generate electricty in use as well. Mining trucks have been hybrids (diesel-electric) already for years, because it saves the industry massive amounts of fuel. They’re also more powerful.

1500% more people visit Paris every year than live there. 30 million vs 2 million. Like with climbing Everest, the main purpose is to say and show that you went there. If you go there to 'experience' it, what you'll experience is a tsunami of other tourists trying to experience Paris. This is what mass travel does. Turns peoples' homes into theme parks. As with love, our travel is driven by an idea of something, not the thing itself. And increasingly that idea is imitative rivalry, driven hugely by social media.

I find this sort of thing amusing, when guitarists aren't really musicians and go down the rabbit hole of scales and modes and have no clue about actual melody and rhythm. People get lost playing the same pentatonic scales over and over, it becomes a prison. Play songs, play melodies. Make the guitar a voice. No amount of playing scales or modes or anything else will create music. Start where you want to end. Playing songs and melodies will automatically teach your fingers where to go.

Trans-culture took historically quite common fun with androgyny, and tried to turn it into an actual identity. Social media enabled this, allowing it to bypass the usual slow percolation through various testing grounds of new ideas, and go straight to an independent unquestionable reality. I think it's the endgame of a ruthlessly individualist political and life philosophy, that stripped away collective mechanisms for defining identity and purpose. Forcing people to try to turn their own person and identity into a type of miniature nation-state. To give them a sense of agency in the world. Gender dysphoria is an actual thing. But most trans culture is not about gender dysphoria. It's old-fashioned androgyny dressed up as something much bigger than it is. People (rightly) rejecting rigid gender roles. Men were dandies in Elizabethan times. They didn't think they were actual women.

lol, ah Rupert. ‘Flexibility’. “For new and existing customers in these areas with a Foxtel satellite TV service, these customers have the flexibility to choose and arrange their own local technician to install or conduct maintenance of their infrastructure at their own cost.”

This should make us ashamed. We have probably the greatest renewable resources in the world, and a tiny country in not particularly sunny Europe is way ahead of us. Worth remembering every time you see anti-renewable and anti-EV people on social media parroting slogans funded by fossil fuel companies, via their representatives in local politics.

A daily vaccination against social media slogans. This one for the claims that solar panels and windmills produce as much if not more waste than fossil fuels.

I shot this very short vid about 10 years ago, to show that ‘3D’ is not about stereopsis i.e. two eyes or two camera lenses. This is a single lens, but in a light field camera.

‘Certified Health Nut’ Troy Casey demonstrating the power of ball slapping. https://youtu.be/-9XcnBbF9tI?si=9IKJqCurJ9_ECI7x

That modern cultural curiosity, where tens of thousands of people gather in stadiums to watch TV, with crap sound and disgusting toilets, before queuing for hours in traffic to get home.

I’m a Spinozan. Life has only one joy. Understanding. All of our other happinesses and joys are really this one thing, understanding. Love, pleasure, food, travel, music…whatever. All are derivative from this one and only one true joy. That’s not bookish learning either, it’s not ’overthinking’. Understanding can come in all sorts of ways. But it’s all that matters, in any life. All of our other faux happinesses and joys don’t survive, without true understanding. Understanding isn’t added to life, knowledge is part of reality, not separate to it. Ecstasy isn’t joy. Happiness isn’t joy. Pleasure isn’t joy. All derivative. Only that a-ha feeling of understanding something is joy. I imagine this couple started like most, in ecstatic happiness. The only joy in love is understanding too. Not least understanding that it isn’t a feeling.

This is per YEAR. And doesn’t even include the greatest cost, transport. Add a hybrid or EV to at least double the savings.

Aurora at one of the poles of Saturn.

This is what street-level chargers look like for EVs. Many countries have already installed thousands of these. Unlike petrol or diesel, electricity runs down every street, it’s an easy thing to tap into it. Useful for people without off-street parking, or for anybody who has to park in a street.

Elias won the Nobel Prize partly for his work in understanding crowds, something his generation experienced in frightening detail in 20th century Europe, where tens of millions died as populations with previous ties to localities and customs and traditions suddenly became mass crowds. He observed that if you were to walk up to a stranger and touch them, it would be considered an intense violation. But in a crowd that resistance disappears. It rarely ends well. Today mass crowds are very popular again, which should make us more nervous than it does.

Molly had her last uni class ever last week. Absolutely smashed uni, blitzed every subject, a river of distinctions and HDs. Never got many awards at school. A typical pattern for the genuinely smart kids, finally freed from all of the social webs of influence around schools, where parents and their relationship with teachers determine a lot of the outcomes.

When I listen to the Pauline Hansons of the world and her fellow travellers, it reminds me what pig-ignorant morons we must seem to our Asian neighbours. (P.S. we live in Asia.)

An example of carbon capture and storage (CCS), often promoted by people who think we should just keep burning fossil fuels. Here’s a stat for you. You would need 40 MILLION of these plants worldwide, to capture just one year’s worth of emissions. It’s a deliberate distraction, a total fantasy.

We passed the projections for 2 degrees of warming this week. That’s the entire atmosphere heating by 2 degrees, phenomenal amounts of heat. 1.5 was the target to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, so we’re now in deep trouble. Only the YouTube wallies think otherwise, and I use the word think ironically. To give a sense of the scale of the pollution we’ve spewed into the atmosphere: the enormous bushfires here in 2019? The world has been putting 100 times that amount of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, every year, for the past 270 years.

There are over 2,000 offshore wind farms globally, producing 64,987MW of energy (doubling roughly every 2 years).

Social media has won another election. Argentina, this new president is a big fan of Trump. Spend a couple of minutes watching just how crazy he is (short YouTube video). Social media won Trump the US presidency, and now this wally too. No doubt he hates renewables and EVs too.

Having seen some of the behind the scenes work underway to try to limit the damage, it’s very real. Put a mask on, who cares if others don’t. Be the grown up.

To the Brit method of winning cricket games, through moral victories, we can now add the Indian way of winning them, on paper.

Nuclear power plant in China. China is now dramatically slowing its rollout of nuclear power. Why? Because wind and solar are so much faster and cheaper to build.

Chinese car makers are growing fast. Chery is one I'd never even heard of, but it's the biggest exporter of cars in China. This EV (they have petrols and hybrids too) gets excellent reviews, on price and equipment and driveability. Reality will win as always, once these cheaper EVs hit the market here, why would you spend more on something that costs you $2.20 a litre to fuel as well? 7 year unlimited warranty. A few years ago people scoffed about KIA, now it's a dominant force here. Before that Hyundai - same. Haval's sales are up more than double too. Asia is smart, it's going to dominate the next century. Or two.

As a kid I used to wonder why cars could go up to 260 km/h, when by law you could only drive at 110 km/h maximum. The reason is that petrol and diesel engines are so hopelessly weak, that they make them much larger so that they're not strained and use too much fuel at ordinary driving speeds.

The bats are as good as gone in Bathurst for now, and unsurprisingly social media hysteria had no part to play in fixing anything.

A concerning explosion in ‘mystery’ pneumonia in China, targeting teachers and students most for now. Not fully responsive to usual treatments. As always, I think the mystery is an easy one to solve, immune system damage from prior Covid infection. Watch this story unfold, and hope for the best.

This group has about as much factual content as a Milli Vanilli album.

I don't know how anybody could tolerate 30 seconds of them.

This is a HUGE shift. Essentially the government is (rightly) saying that privatisation of electricity has failed. This is the sort of brave public policy we haven't seen in Australia for years. Hats off to them, well done. If you're a sceptic, explain how else we're going to get electricity. And how it will be cheap and reliable. https://reneweconomy.com.au/bowen-dumps-ret-for-32-gw-of-auctions-in-massive-policy-shift-to-fast-track-renewables/

Have done over a year’s driving now in the Kluger hybrid. The money saved in petrol has easily covered the difference in price to the regular petrol model. Every km we drive now is pure profit. And hybrids give you that beautiful, smooth, instant power and torque at every speed that makes me laugh at the thought of ever driving a standard petrol or diesel again, running constantly up and down gears to try to get any power out of the engine. Was at the lights next to a Hilux this week, who wanted a drag race. I don’t drag race, but I don’t need to, the Kluger moved away from the lights with instant torque and power, while the Hilux revved the shit out of the engine, moving up through the gears, yo-yoing forward and backwards as the power came in bursts through the gear changes. I watched it in the rear view mirror.

Have posted about gears many times. I think it’s such an important thing, because ’driving a stick’ is such a totemic thing for many ICE-lovers. The only reason ICEs have gears is because the engines are so inefficient and puny, you need to rev the crap out of them to get any power or torque. That’s what gears are for, to allow you to rev the crap out of the engine as you gain speed. Otherwise the car stalls. Driving a stick is like a jockey flogging a slow horse.

This really is brilliant public policy. They'll use reverse auctions to drive prices down from bidders (what we should do for housing too). And they've put a ceiling and a floor on profits, so that the investors get a guaranteed return, but anything above a certain amount flows straight back to us, the taxpayers, not to the companies. Investment is going to explode, watch this space over the next 4 or 5 years. It'll add as much as half of the existing size of the grid in new renewables in only a handful of years. It already delivered 1 GW of new storage to NSW this week. For Lithgow folk, worth remembering one of the biggest batteries in the country will be right here in Wang.

People should flock to these towns immediately to ruin them, like they have with Byron. There's nothing dumber than travel. https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/reviews-and-advice/10-beach-towns-that-are-better-than-byron-20231121-p5elkf.html

Another reason people think petrols and diesels have more grunt is the sound they make. The roar of a V8! The sound an ICE makes is the car farting. Exhaust gases. Like choosing a human partner by how loud they fart. So the engine is puny, and it farts non-stop. The ultimate muscle grunt-machine is the equivalent of a puny guy who farts all the time. I guess if that’s your type…

We’ve had years of hot air about how coal-fired electricty is cheaper for consumers. The reason our electricty prices are currently so high is the price of coal, which became prohibitively expensive. Just one more reason to get rid of it. Renewables can supply the grid with free power (actually so cheap they pay you to use it now, negative prices), which is why in this decade we should see power prices drop to historically low levels. Eventually it should be like landline phone calls, effectively free.

Fossil fuel power fails again. Imagine if it had been a solar or wind farm, the mind midgets would be like chattering monkeys.

Happy Birthday 🎈🎁🎊

Watch Jeremy Clarkson, who generally hates EVs, race Tesla’s 7-seater family SUV against a 600 horsepower, V10 Audi R8.

This is the main mechanicals of an EV. Beautifully simple. Electric motors (in red here) on the axles so no energy losses through having to translate motion to the wheels. The drivetrain in an ICE is so ridiculous, vertical piston motion, that then has to be transmitted to circular motion at the wheels through complex mechanical transformations, each of which can fail and is grossly inefficient, as well as having to go through a gearbox. Also why EVs will be so much cheaper in the longer run, because the design is so simple, with very few moving parts. And why they rarely need servicing, very little can go wrong with them. Also vastly cheaper to run, and much more grunt than an ICE. You can see why ICEs are about to become extinct dinosaurs of transport.

The main reason petrol and diesel cars were built to have a relatively high range is so they wouldn’t need to go to the servo very often. There are only 6500 servos for over 10 million vehicles in Australia. If they needed to re-fuel often, you’d completely overwhelm the servos. Servos and their network of tanks and trucks and refineries cost a *fortune* to build and maintain. They don’t pump the fuel from the refinery, tanker trucks have to drive it to each of these 6500 stations every week (after it arrives by ship). None of that is needed for EVs, you can even produce the fuel on your own roof. They use a top-up rather than fill-up model, where you just top them up every night, like you do for your phone. You couldn’t do that with a petrol or diesel unless you went to the servo every day. And that would make the servo network collapse.

From one of the local FB groups. You know, the ones with a bottomless well of expertise in how to run a town, and everything else.

Costs per megawatt of different sources of electricity generation. Nuclear (regular plant) - $220-$350 Small modular nuclear reactor - $189 Wind - $45 Solar - $35 Solar and wind could generate twice what the entire grid currently uses, and still cost less than half what nuclear power costs. This includes the costs of new storage, and transmission lines. Small modular reactors also don’t exist commercially, and even if they work (no guarantees), they won’t be available until the 2040s.

Wholesale electricity prices fell 76% in the past year. And are still falling.

Been saying this here for the entire pandemic.

The reason we've experienced such a dramatic rise in electricity prices over the past 2 years is that we generate most of it (in NSW) using coal. And look at the price of coal. Meantime the price of renewables has been incredibly low, often negative.

A guide for those still testing. There's no excuse not to, they're often giving the tests away.

Know what would protect our community, Chris? You being better than the moron you replaced. Being back at work in a couple of days means being back at work while still highly infectious.

Alan Kohler.

All burning of fossil fuels is grossly inefficient. Two-thirds of the energy is lost as heat. For example a petrol or diesel car’s fabled ‘range’ is actually bought by putting over 3000km worth of energy into a tank, and getting 700-800km of driving out of it. By electrifying everything, including transport, the world will need less than half the energy it’s using right now.

Somebody described my posts as ‘boring’ the other day. They certainly don’t attract much interest, maybe they are. Heh, who cares, I’m not selling tickets to an event here. What interests FB is oversharing of the details of peoples’ personal lives. Still strikes me as bizarre that you give people a global platform, and the thing they choose to share on it is ‘here’s what I did today’. We’re fixated on our social selves, on how we appear to others. You could scroll this platform all day every day, and not come a millimetre closer to understanding most of the people on it. I think ‘selfies’ are very badly named. A selfie is a picture of you as others see you. Only language will show people the you *you* experience, by expressing what you think and feel. Very few want to share that, it terrifies them for some reason.

A very astute observation *peers out at solar panels on own roof, not powered by a Korean coal mine*

If people only understood how many pies Covid has its fingers in.

Many mistake the prices for the early adoption of a new technology with the mature price, as it gets rolled out. A Model T car cost the equivalent (in today's dollars) of nearly $30,000 in 1909. 15 years later it cost $8000.

Sales of Teslas by year.

Tesla have the market almost to themselves because the rest of them can’t get their act together. (Ferrari is a highly niche market with huge markups.)

Probably quite a lot of people aren’t aware of the difference between public health and medicine. Public health isn’t doctors or nurses, or rather it’s very specific types of doctors, who work on the health of the population, rather than just individuals. This article today shows how Australia led the world with Covid, by using public health. We spent much, much less on healthcare. And had much better health outcomes. Other countries who are hostile to public everything just dumped the infected on the healthcare system (doctors and nurses), and spent way more than we did, and had far worse health outcomes. From late-2021 Australia shifted to this approach too, disastrously, the idea of ‘personal responsibility’ public health. A complete oxymoron, like saying ‘personal responsibility traffic control’. That’s the shift that made me angry and makes me post about Covid nearly every day, it’s a total betrayal of Australia’s previously magnificent public health system. Now in ruins. Political ‘small government’ ideology replaced public health. It’s screwed the ‘economy’ as much or even more than it has people’s health. Public health was invented to look after both.

The Chinese are scaling back their nuclear power plans dramatically. They realised solar and wind are exponentially faster and cheaper for them to build. They built more solar and wind capacity in 8 months than their entire nuclear program will provide.

What the deliberate destruction of Covid testing does. The yellow line is test results. The blue is Covid found in wastewater samples at sewage treatment plants.

I don't generally like American cars, they're mostly woeful. But Tesla is different, innovative engineering. Have a look at their new Roadster, the fastest car in the world. The acceleration you see in this short video is real (0-100 in 1.1 to 1.9 seconds). Also has 1000km range, and will do over 400 km/h. Obviously a top-end supercar (though hundreds of thousands cheaper than other supercars), but you can buy an ordinary Tesla for less than it costs to buy a Toyota Hilux, Australia's most popular car. And prices are still dropping, and will keep dropping.

This is a Tesla semi. Will do a few posts on this, because it’s revolutionising trucking. A range of over 800km. And here’s the main thing that has the trucking industry excited. Using one of these instead of a diesel truck for 3 years will save a trucking company $200,000 in fuel, and slashes their maintenance budget because the truck needs almost zero maintenance. That’s only scratching the surface of the genius of the engineering here, much more to come in other posts.

Tesla semi again, so many amazing stories about this one. The engineers designed the truck to drive just like a car, so that (get this) the truck is less likely to disrupt other traffic. They recognised that a lot of road accidents happen with people trying to get around slow trucks. Traditional semis are very slow from a start, say at a red light, and also up hills. Because electric motors have maximum torque from a standing start, this truck doesn’t have those issues. When you hook a 30-tonne load to this truck, the driver doesn’t even notice the load has been added when the truck sets off. There’s no difference to the performance, it gets up to speed the same way as it does unloaded. Traditional semis have 10-18 gears, to get the torque and power at every speed, like I post about a lot (the gears make the engine rev, to get power and torque, they have no grunt at low revs). Not on this truck. It has no gears, because like all EVs it has maximum power and torque at every speed. Also down hills, traditionally dangerous times for a fully-loaded semi, the Tesla truck uses no brakes at all, like a train it converts all of the downhill into energy to recharge the battery. So the brakes can’t fail, it’s not even using any. It’s also just as quick up hills as a car, so won’t hold up traffic. Finally, another window into the detail they went into. The average age of truckers in the US is over 50. A crisis. Normal semis need a lot of practice at double-clutching and gear-changing (you can hear trainee drivers crunching the gears around towns). EV trucks don’t need gears, gears are only needed for weak engines, so there’s no need to train younger drivers in those skills. They just hop straight in and drive.

Final on the Tesla semi for now. Jay Leno had a long chat with Tesla engineers and took one for a test drive. Quite a long video but fascinating at every moment. Little brilliant design details, like steps into the cabin from ground level, because one of the largest WHS issues for trucking is drivers climbing into and falling out of cabs. And the cabin being large enough to stand 3-5 people, so the driver can get up and stretch and walk around in the long delays truckers get. Leno is amazed when they hitch about 30 tonnes to the back with a trailer, and he doesn't even notice when driving off. It also has the same turning circle as an ordinary sedan, and half the wind resistance of a standard truck. And...the total silence. And no diesel fumes. Cities will be transformed.

Here they come. I wouldn't want to own a traditional car company right now. Many of them are slowing down their EV plans not because they think EVs don't have a market, but because they can't produce them fast enough. Welcome to extinction.

They're already cheaper, if you count the total cost of owning the car over its lifetime, including fuel and maintenance. Like a fleet buyer, that's how they calculate the actual cost of a vehicle, and how we should too. Once the sale price is lower as well for the slow learners, we'll see if peoples' money is where their mouths are.

The only thing keeping our coal industry afloat is China. Imagine the irony of that export now collapsing, as China shifts at warp speed to renewables, leaving us with nothing. While we have all the natural advantages with renewables, and are doing almost nothing with it, people get onto social media every day to trade in fantasy slogans about ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’, nuclear power and EV range instead, blocking progress. Meanwhile we’re buying our solar and wind technology FROM China. They must look on at us and think we’re morons. They’d be right.

A mapping of Covid variants. When you allow a pathogen free rein to infect people at will, it will keep evolving. We’re not throwing any resistance at it, so it’s doing whatever it likes. At this rate of evolution it’s already figured out how to beat our vaccines, which are only just managing to stop the worst disease (and not even that, in record numbers of people).

Happy Birthday 🎉🎁 celebrate in style as you always do!

The smart thing Tesla understands is that a big part of making the shift to EVs will be a social shift, not engineering. The engineering is a no-brainer, ICEs are rubbish and the sooner they’re gone, the better. Tesla wants to break a lot of the teenage masturbatory fantasies that surround existing cars. If it demonstrates how pathetic they are, it’s one more barrier removed. Like here, the new Tesla Cybertruck (like a large ute) easily beating a Porsche in a drag race. While towing another Porsche.