January 2024

All Councils have their accounts independently audited each year, by law, by the NSW Audit Office. The results are published for public viewing.

While you’re there Dorothy, can you explain what some dub the ‘Jesus Moose’? 😉

Try this. "We can't get rid of potholes, so we'll have to learn to live with them." Crazy, hey? And yet millions swallow this bullshit as some sort of common sense, for Covid.

On New Year's Eve, AEMO said new demand (not supply) had to be found for electricity in Victoria, or else some solar farms would need to be shut down. There was too much electricity. Remember being told by coal-carrying apes for the past 10 years that 'baseload power', supply of electricity, was the issue?

It is nice when somebody else says things you're not allowed to say in your job. Not as exciting as a narrative that goes 'bloody Council pulled out, and the business community stepped up to do it for them'. But there we are. Social media. Mostly bullshit.

Re-using this graph to counter another slogan, 'when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow'. This is a full 24-hour period. 2 is day time, and thus the huge surge of solar in orange. 1 and 3 are night time, and are dominated by wind power (green). Wind blows 24 hours per day, and is even stronger at night. This is why the wind farms morons are trying to block are so important. There's also a huge amount of battery storage currently being added to the grid, to capture some of that orange to use in the green times as well. But we need much less of that than people think, because of wind. And because we're mostly asleep at night and not using a lot of power.

Saw this posted by one of the anti-science social media influencers. Goes to my interest in gravity. Things in orbit don't float upwards. They're falling, like you would if you jumped out of a plane. It's not 'zero-g', despite being called that. There's almost as much gravity in orbit as we have here on Earth.

Such a fabulous story, thanks @[1792688510:2048:Trevor]. Pollution was a big incentive to shift to motorised vehicles. Fast forward to today and the amount of pollution from modern petrols and diesels is WAY bigger than any of the mess horses made, and much, much more dangerous to human health. We'll look back and wonder why we put up with it for so long.

Gas cooking really is seriously bad for your heath. Burning a naked gas flame in the house is like backing your car into the living room and breathing in the exhaust. The gas industry is desperately trying to hold on, it’s been spending big on the marketing for 100 years. All the ways people will tell you gas cooking is better are really paid slogans from that 100 years of campaigning. Like all electrification battles, the electric alternative is superior in every single way. Cooks faster, with much more control, and zero pollution.

Another side to the gas ‘debate’ is that a lot of gas infrastructure is old and failing, leading to dangerous explosions. New builds will increasingly no longer have gas as an option, though the industry will fight hard against it, as it always does. Once we convert back to electric hot water, the gas will be removed from our house entirely. https://time.com/22680/gas-explosion-harlem-aging-infrastructure/

Was watching this unfold live before going to sleep last night, and while pilots tend to get all the applause and publicity, the cabin crew managed to get nearly 400 people off this burning wreck in no time at all, without a single fatality. This is a cabin crew who obviously really knew their shit. They deserve medals, hey Kirsten.

Probably the most important work on Covid I've seen in a long time. Because it goes right to the heart of the fantasy that we're 'living with' it. David Cutler is an economist at Harvard, who's estimated what Long Covid is costing in the US alone. It's already greater than the GFC, nearly $4 trillion. As he says, spending even tens or hundreds of billions to fight Covid will be unbeatable ROI, in pure economic terms. This is the real story of Covid. Not the 'just like a cold' infections many experience. The growing carnage to peoples' long-term health, which, again, is already costing more than the GFC did. Societies will not survive unless they start fighting Covid again.

You do not have to go out the door To know what goes on in the world. You don't have to look out the window To see the way of heaven. The farther you go, The less you know. So the wise soul Doesn't go, but knows; Doesn't look, but sees; Doesn't do, but gets it done. Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching

Have been watching this and this 16-year-old kid is a genuine sensation.

People tell me they love travel with a passion. I'm not sure which bits they mean. It certainly can't be this bit. Maybe it's when you get on the plane with everybody re-breathing the same air and using the same toilets for up to 24 hours, while getting DVT because there's no legroom, and trying to sleep upright through strangers snoring. Melbourne, right now (I'm not there). Also not a mask in sight, Covid will be feasting on the herd.

FB is stepping up to run the town again in 2024. Now with expertise in micro-biological toxins.

We desperately need more men teaching, so this isn’t the rabbit hole grown men keep going down.

The drama around blue-green algae and recreational dam use. What’s less known is that it’s the greatest killer in the history of planet Earth. It’s not really an algae, it’s a bacteria, cyanobacteria. And it’s the origin of the atmosphere as we know it today, it produced then (and still does now) most of the oxygen in the atmosphere. About 2.5 billion years go it started what’s called the Great Oxygenation Event. That’s when the vast amounts of oxygen it produced bubbled out of the oceans and formed the atmosphere we know today. In the process of doing that, it killed 90% of all life on Earth. The earliest life on Earth was mostly anaerobic, and oxygen killed it. Still the greatest mass murder in history, and some scientists even question whether it was a key player in the other 5 mass extinction events in history. So it’s a real tricky beast, because without it we couldn’t breathe. But it can kill most things that swallow it, including us. And oxygen is vital for our life, but also a poison for living things in other ways. Oxidation is a toxic process. It’s also been linked to motor neurone disease. Let’s just say - you don’t want to be swimming in it.

Margulis is one of my heroes.

My limited experience of both Instagram and TikTok makes it feel like they're just the old Funniest Home Videos format, run on continuous loop?

I believe the Indians are seriously suggesting Test cricket should become 5 days of T20 cricket. It's how a lot of Test teams are already playing. A circus. And inflation of stupid is operating, we already have T10s. Soon players will be fined if they don't hit every ball for 6, and bowlers if every ball isn't a half-volley. To then be replaced by bowling machines on 'hit 6' settings.

Hallstatt, Austria. Population 780. In tourist season, between 10,000 and 20,000 visitors arrive every single day, for months at a time. Residents are so fed up that they blocked the tunnel leading to the town, in protest. Going to ‘see’ places destroys them.

Who knew that crowdfunding was a mass movement of mobilised stupidity? I don’t go anywhere near mass crowdfunding things, no jeans for genes, or red noses, or bandaged bears. All adolescent cutesie things that nobody even looks at as they shell out the cash. That’s the idea. These are basic public services that should already be provided. Stop voting for idiots who take the money for these public services and give it as huge tax cuts instead, to people who don’t need them.

Happy birthday Dan!!

Today's trivia question. What might this poor chap be suffering from? https://www.tiktok.com/@mrairbnb/video/7307332710475861254

The Arctic. 1928 at the top, 2002 at the bottom.

Neighbourhood Watch runs in several countries. The idea being the community more engaged in assisting in the prevention and reporting of crime. So here’s my idea. We need something similar for roads. For example, motorists who drive particular stretches of road regularly could have dashcams paid for by government, and could submit footage of incidents they see. The ultimate ‘unmarked car’. And hugely cheaper than more highway patrol cars or speed cameras.

This stuff is insidious. SKY News UK, woman on the right is a Professor of Medicine at Oxford. That’s surely a digital filter on her face? Like a dynamic airbrushing. I never get much traction with this, likely because the culture is now so far gone up its own social media orifice, it doesn’t even seem unusual.

Thanks @[756306193:2048:Tim]. Scary how many use social media as a guide to pretty much everything. Amazing they’re still alive.

They’ll have to get the staff out to blow on it.

Another of the fear-mongering slogans about EVs is that you have to replace their batteries, and it costs a fortune. Tesla has the data on this. After over 320,000 km of driving, the batteries are still at 90% of their original capacity. An EV can do half-a-million to a million km using the same battery.

My great friends Ben and Jane are about to release a book. A book that should revolutionise how we think about babies, and how they mature and develop. Challenging the dominant ‘dyad’ view of attachment theory that babies form a dominant binary relationship with one person, usually a mother, and use that as a springboard for their whole development. Jane and Ben show that in reality, babies from a very young age delight in having multiple interactions, including with other babies. That they communicate prolifically without any necessary preference for one ‘attachment’. Ben and Jane can correct any of my errors of understanding!

Reading the comments on this one, worth pointing out that the State government designs, builds and maintains all highways, including the parts of highways that run through towns. And all traffic lights on highways. Nothing to do with Councils.

Another trend we’re seeing, gentrification of bush towns. The Rockley Pub another good example. Where cashed-up, often young city folk transform local communities into boutique luxury lifestyle options. It’s a tough one, often without them nothing at all happens. But it’s not clear it’s a sustainable new model for regions, it may increase the tourist dollar, but whether that translates into a reinvigoration of the town itself is never guaranteed.

Two days after this happened, I was driving to work in Bathurst along the same stretch of road, and a ute towing two dirt bikes overtook me doing at least 20 km/h over the speed limit.

The multi-millionaire cricketers are winning games, but players seem to have the ascendancy over selectors now. Pathetic Test play by most other nations has hidden the problem. Warner’s performances have been in free fall for a long time. We may have won the last Ashes series outright for example, without his hopeless batting there. And on the topic of hidden declines, Steve Smith was lauded only a few years ago as having the second greatest batting average in history, behind only Bradman. He’s now 11th in the all-time list.

The most popular EV in Australia, Tesla’s Model 3. Can be bought for less than the price of Australia’s favourite car, the Toyota Hilux. But that’s just the sale price: - fuel costs for the EV can be close to zero - market data shows that the only servicing needed is the usual fresh tyres, up to 160,000 km of motoring and beyond - market data also shows the battery will last for up to 1,000,000 km, without significant drop in performance, and - the drivetrain is also built to last at least a million km.

Another untold story of what’s happened to cricket. This famous spell is legend. What’s not said is that Johnson ‘retired’ shortly afterwards. But he didn’t really retire, he played 3 years of IPL circus cricket, to make himself very rich. And who wouldn’t? But those are years he could have been playing for Australia.

The new Western Sydney international airport will be open as early as 2026. Had a look at the flight paths today, some of which will go right over the Blue Mountains and Lithgow. And unlike Kingsford Smith, it’ll be open 24 hours a day, so flights day and night. Thankfully for Lithgow, planes will already be at 20,000ft+ by the time they arrive over here, but the lower Blue Mountins could be in for interesting times.

Why is the East Coast so wet this summer? For the same reason I posted in the winter. The ocean is cooking, due to climate change. All that heat ends up as evaporation and rain. Surprisingly, our strategy of buying lots of big American guzzling SUVs isn’t working.

Hopefully the FB groups trying to run Bathurst saw this. The bats in Bathurst were part of a mass starvation event. Well over a thousand pups died in Machattie Park alone. This matters in huge ways, because bats pollinate a lot of our native forests. Without them, the plants there can’t reproduce. So expect it to get even worse, as those forests collapse even further, causing even more starvation for more species.

Happy Birthday sir.

We should have been highly sceptical from the start that the financial industry was asked to determine how much super people need in retirement. It's very lucrative business for them. The 'comfortable' rating for example is a joke, very few ordinary folk will reach it, and most of them will be far better off in retirement than when they were working, even by NOT reaching it. Even worse, these ratings cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars in concessional taxes, most of which flow to people who were already swimming in money. That's money government can't use to provide the public services ordinary people desperately need right now, while they're working.

You just never know what animals are really thinking.

I like that this helps make visible to people the astronomical amount of fuel/energy we use for our recreational travel.

If a famous chef put their name on it, people would pay $25. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/food/crazy-cost-for-brunch-staple-shines-light-on-cost-of-living-crisis/news-story/c7a205458b0a26332ea32e22fa2cc75e

There's such a fundamental lack of respect shown for these experts in climate science, by people who wouldn't know their climate arses from their elbows. I still imagine how they'd feel if climate scientists turned up at their workplace to tell them how to do their jobs. It's a disgrace.

Australian governments are heading down this same UK path. Huge absences due to infectious illness caused by mass Covid infection being described as an attendance problem instead, as wagging. With ads like these encouraging parents to send their kids to school, sick.

Covid is a Biosafety Level 3 (BSL3) pathogen. At the top you can see how scientists work with BSL3 pathogens. At the bottom, how the rest of us do. If you want a long life, it’s time to say enough.

I plead with people to watch this from the Victorian Department of Health. Every COVID infection, no matter how mild it seems, can cause Long Covid. And the more infections you have, the more likely you are to get it. It can literally destroy your life, as Jordan, a healthy, fit young man, found. There are no treatments, and there's no compensation if you're unable to work.

Alex.

Chinese EV makers are in an all-out brawl to offer cheaper EVs. Woe is us :) Some of them may go belly-up this year if they can't find international markets, so the discounting will be on in earnest. https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/motoring-news/gmw-ora-now-australias-cheapest-ev/news-story/1ec28d39e38144bbefe6caaf91866f66

I'll say more about this, but suggesting again people try simple palms-up sitting for some time every day. You may be amazed the impact it has on your entire body. More on why that may be another day.

Another legacy carmaker backing hydrogen not because it’s better, but because it means them not having to retool their factories as much. Green hydrogen costs a fortune to make, and wastes astronomical amounts of electricity. There’ll be barely enough even for industrial uses, let alone cars. A pipe dream, EVs are orders of magnitude cheaper to make and run and are WAY more efficient. Money will win the argument.

There are at least 20 TRILLION galaxies in the universe. On average a galaxy has about 100 billion stars. Yeh, wow.

David is an engineer, and as you can see, a grid run by renewables isn't really that difficult. Out of every 24 hours, you only need storage for 5. It will change all of our lives, and those of our descendants, to no longer be dependent on the Middle East and Texas for our energy. It's ridiculous that we ever were.

Here's a vital scientific reason why what we're doing with Covid won't work, can never work, and will maim and kill lots of people, forever, unless we change course. Our strategy is called 'hybrid immunity', meaning allowing people to become immune to Covid through repeated vaccinations and infections. Based on peoples' lived experiences with things like colds. Here's the reason that's scientific codswallop. Humans have never achieved immunity to a SINGLE pathogen, without vaccination. You need to get everybody primed at about the same time, so the pathogen has no chance to evolve its way out of the immunity. You also need a powerful vaccine that helps prevent transmission as well as severe disease and death. We don't have a vaccine like that, for Covid. And more than half the population isn't even bothering to get vaccinated anyway. So we're relying upon infection to do the job. But it's physically and mathematically *impossible* to do, with infection alone. As Ellie describes, the levels of immunity in the community are all over the shop, using that approach, there's no chance we'll get population immunity. And that's also lethally dangerous, because it allows the virus to keep on evolving, to evade the little immunity we do have. So it's always just a matter of time until more lethal variants arrive, killing more people. And not at all restricted to just the old or vulnerable. Spanish Flu killed the young more than the old, and Covid could easily evolve to do the same.

“…even if using the most expensive charging options — and completely avoiding charging at home — driving an EV will save the average person about 70 per cent on fuel.” Fuel is one of the greatest cost of living challenges. You can fix it right now. WIll also remove most car servicing costs from your budget.

Happy Birthday!! 18, a biggie :) Enjoy the day.

I'm not noticing any changed behaviour. You can lead a horse to water.

@[621123725:2048:Adam], I believe advice you gave people here some time ago. Just leave it on.

Another not as often mentioned benefit of solar panels, in summer, is that they shade the roof. Just like they shade paddocks in big solar farms. What used to be the hottest rooms in our house, on the top floor, are much cooler now on hot days, because the sun never hits the roof directly.

Woolworths scaled down its Australia Day products because nobody was buying them. Why does Dutton do this? Because his strategy to win government is the same Tony Abbott’s was - starting lots of fights. As politics, it works in the short-term, it turns public issues into team sports, like you’re watching a football game. He needs to remember how long Abbott lasted.

Living things don’t generally use engines. They don’t build a structure, then look for something to move that structure along. They turn the structure itself into the engine, transforming forces like gravity into movement. That’s what our muscles do, they absorbe gravity elastically, then release that elastic energy into movement. It’s superb engineering. This idea could be applied to vehicles too. Vehicles are very heavy, they have loads of potential energy through gravity. We use almost none of it to move them, instead we haul that mass around with engines. Regenerative braking in EVs is one of the few vehicle examples of using the forces on a structure to help power the structure. Huge amounts of potential energy are being wasted.

Nobody is investing in any of the old stuff like oil or coal or nuclear, or even gas now. Haven't done for years. Businesses are telling us who's winning here, and they're not Greenies, or Lefties, or any other stupid name. They want to make money, and renewables make them lots of money. Fossil fuels and nuclear power are stranded assets, they don't don't want to go anywhere near them.

Andrew Forrest is investing hugely in renewables. This is him turning the first sod for NSW's biggest wind farm, near Wellington. He has 14 GW of renewables projects in the pipeline around Australia. Again, definitely not a Leftie or a Greenie. A shrewd businessman who can smell big money. We're living in a revolution, and huge numbers of us have brains so pickled by BS on social media, we're not even noticing.

As Dutto would say, this is what we fought for.

"The Tesla Model 3 is the top-selling sedan in the country...easily outselling the once-dominant Toyota Camry that is tens of thousands of dollars cheaper." This whole article shows the main reason for the delay with EVs is lazy legacy car makers who have billions invested in current technology, and don't want to or can't shift fast enough. They'll be road kill, like Kodak.

Price war still going. That's the drive away price.

An El Niño means cooler ocean temperatures off Australia. But right now, that ocean is 2.5-3 degrees hotter than normal. That’s ENORMOUS. The difference between heat (energy), and temperature. 2.5-3 degrees doesn’t sound a lot. But that’s a gigantic amount of water so it needed a gigantic amount of energy to warm it, by that much. That energy is now being released, back onto us. The oceans have absorbed over 90% of the heat generated by our fossil fuel pollution. They can’t hold any more. The damage will accelerate because not only do we now have the heat from our current pollution, the oceans will start releasing the heat from our past pollution as well.

On the same day there were stories about Warner’s seven-storey mansion at Maroubra with its own private beach, he hires a helicopter to get to a game. It should ring alarm bells. This game, where they struggle now to get crowds (or even teams) at most Test matches, and nobody is much interested in 50-over cricket or even T20s, has players retiring in their 30s with tens of millions in the bank. Hard not to see it as one generation of players pillaging the game for personal benefit, leaving wreckage behind them.

Great publicity for Lithgow. Councils don’t have enough money to fix or build basic infrastructure now. People don’t want to have the conversation, but pay far more for personal recreation, travel and dining out/take away, than they do on basic civic infrastructure through their rates.

BYD is planning to release a plug-in hybrid SUV in Australia as early as this year. It will be about the size and price of a RAV4, but have an electric-only range of up to 150km. So people can drive it as a pure-EV for most of their driving, and then as a hybrid for long trips (where they can just use petrol if there are no chargers). Brilliant engineering at a crazy low price.

Much of the anti-EV rubbish you read online comes from this community. The ‘towing’ community. Most of them haven’t even got a clue about towing, let alone EVs, hurtling along highways uninsured, with tonnes of gear, well overweight, like lethal missiles. Know-alls who know nothing, drunk on a macho culture of big SUVs and fantasies about living off-grid.

Inosculation is when two neighbouring trees self-graft, usually through rubbing creating an open surface where the graft can take. In this case, the smaller tree was cut down years ago, but remains alive because it became grafted to the larger tree next to it. It looks like the large tree is holding the small tree, keeping it alive, which is more or less what is actually happening.

If I was in the market for a car right now, this is is what I’d probably buy. The BYD Seal, EV. Designed by ex-Audi engineers, has superb build quality, and the performance version does 0-100 in 3.6 seconds. It has a 150,000 km/ 6 year warranty, 180,000 km on the battery. Range up to 650 km. Base model just over $50K, top sports model just over $70K. $12,000 cheaper than a Tesla.

When you look at adult life, socially little changes from your days at school. Take the fake debates over EVs, as an example. Grease put to music that cars have always been a key rallying point for particular social groups, often the kids at school who weren’t that good at the more academic stuff. That doesn’t change as they leave school, the adults who oppose EVs for example are often still defending that old social territory, which vehicles carved out for them. Pulling cars apart in the shed was part of the culture, for those groups, EVs take that away from them. The dominance of cars in our culture had given these groups a social place right at the centre of society, something school never did. So they will resist the collapse of this social artefact, because it literally threatens their whole social world. Reality doesn’t care, and they will lose that place, unless they adapt. It’s hugely interesting though to take every topic humans debate, and identify the social groupings or teams behind the debates. That’s what’s really going on, it’s not about facts or the content of the debates much at all. It’s team sports. That’s the model for all of society. Bands and other musical acts exactly the same. The same mechanism, repeated over and over.

"There’s actually something called “the EV smile” — what people get after or while testing out an electric vehicle. I’ve seen it time after time now, and I’ve had it time after time."

Imagine being rid of this filthy air. We may even in my lifetime, as well as being free of the relentless noise the engines who produce it make. Show this pic to your grandkids and explain to them why we put up with this rubbish for so long. Imagine actually barracking for it to continue.

Colleague at work is now nearly deaf, due to Long Covid. Everywhere you have a blood vessel, this bastard virus can get you.

To say this makes Australia look like yokels is unkind to yokels. That solar farms can now be rejected because they spoil the view. Having lived near two butt-ugly coal power stations for the past 30 years, I can promise nobody was ever asked if they spoiled the view. Let alone open-cut coal mines in country areas, which turn the landscape into a huge hole in the ground. We're too stupid to survive.

A few years ago I posted a few times how I thought T20 would destroy cricket as a game. People said I was being melodramatic. It’s the same populist shift we’re seeing in politics too.

This got the anti-EV mental midgets excited yesterday. Some electric cars having to queue for hours for a charge in Chicago in frigid conditions. Some had to be towed away because they ran out of charge. So, the reality? This has happened to petrol and diesel cars forever in freak cold storms, with drivers low on fuel idling the engine to keep the heating running inside the car, then running out and having to abandon the car or freeze to death. Many of these drivers could easily have been charging from home, sitting inside and warm, and not needing to queue at all. You don’t need a servo for an EV when you’re not travelling. These same drivers waited until their batteries were nearly empty, to charge. In freak weather conditions this isn’t going to work no matter what technology you use, because you’re going to need to heat the car while you wait. These extreme weather conditions are also very rare for most people, so the crowing about this showing EVs as being a disaster is just morons at play.

As a Part 2 to the Chicago anti-EV piffle circulated by the mind midgets at SKY News Australia, the irony is the same city has seen the same propaganda before. In 2011 hundreds of petrol cars were abandoned because the owners ran out of fuel, trying to keep the car warm.

This stuff is dishonest. Firstly it uses the most expensive electricity in the country, in fast-chargers, up to 70c/kWh. That's more than twice what many pay at home for electricity, and more than 10 times what you pay to recharge your EV at the rates now available from many energy companies. The fast-charger rates will come down as more are installed and there's more competition. Some fast-chargers are already as low as 15c/kWh. It also says it only took 6 minutes to fuel the ICE, and over an hour to charge the EV. That's technically true, but this is a 900 km journey, people should stop for a rest every 2 hours anyway. The ICE 'range' people never factor that in, it may take 6 minutes to fill the car, but they're still having the rest stops on top of that. Both types of vehicles are off the road for about the same time. And an EV can charge itself while you're inside having food and drink, unlike an ICE, where you have to stay with the bowser until you're full, then go and pay, then move the vehicle and park it, then go inside. A good 10-15 minutes, easily. And that's before you have your rest, with food and drink, toilet etc. An EV driver just arrives, parks, plugs in and goes straight inside for their rest stop.

Me in my youth, plugging fossil fuels. I didn’t inhale.

EVs are already changing the culture of Australian towns. Many towns are bypassed by big highways with big servos on them. Now those towns are adding chargers and suddenly people are visiting them again. The service station model is Big Oil, hugely expensive and concentrated in high traffic areas. There are only 7000 servos for over 20 million vehicles in Australia. With EVs people will be able to 'fuel' almost anywhere, they don't have to go to one of the only 7000 servos. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/22/electric-vehicles-australia

Many have no idea of the apocalypse climate change can be. All of these species aren't like things in a zoo, to look at. They're vital cogs in the engine that makes the planet livable. That makes it possible to breathe, drink water and eat. Food, clean water and air are all by-products of ecological groups of living things. You can't replace it with machines, they are the planet's machines.

Have seen some weird accidents before, but I’ll be intrigued how the one currently just the Bathurst side of Maccas happened.

Range is just a slogan.

Happy 94th birthday dad, wherever you are.

Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie will have no power for up to a week. Storms destroyed several transmission towers. Backup gas generators have failed as well. There’s no fuel, because service stations can’t operate without electricty (ha). Here’s people queueing to get fuel in a neighbouring town instead. Anyone there with an EV and their own solar and battery - unaffected.

There are so many debates about housing, and like in so many other things, some of the ways these problems have been solved in the past have been forgotten. From the 17th century in Europe and 19th century here in Australia, a very popular way to house many more people in much less space, while retaining real elegance of urban design, was terracing. The famous terrace form is seen throughout the UK and France for example, but also here in Oz from the Victorian era, some of it even surviving in country towns. Lithgow and Bathurst both have remnant terrace housing. Terrace houses built well were orginally designed for the aristocracy, because they look elegant. They went on to become social housing as well. In Oz because we had so much land, terracing quickly gave way to suburban single-dwelling blocks. That model lead to our urban sprawl, which has now reached its limits. I think we should look to re-terrace urban areas, not least because it will make our cities look a lot more attractive again, as European cities are.

The huge untold story of petrol and diesel vehicle range is what it costs the country, never spoken about. The range of a vehicle is a property of its energy supply network, not of the vehicle. Without that network, its range is zero. Here are 3 facts that bring it into focus: 1) 65 million TONNES of imported fuel is transported around the country, every year. Mostly by road. 2) That fuel is transported over 15 BILLION kilometres. 3) There are over 2.6 million tanker journeys every year. That's more than 7200 per DAY, on average. The costs for all of that are astronomical, to run, buy and maintain the trucks, in damage to roads, in the costs of importing the fuel itself, in building and maintaining service stations etc. With the transition to electric vehicles, ALL of these costs disappear. No fuel needs to be imported or transported or pumped anywhere.

This was the accident I saw yesterday, I only saw the vehicle on its side. It'd be some explanation to see, how this happened, on such a low-speed piece of road.

Where there's a will to change, the answers don't take long to figure out. We went to the moon ffs, none of this is hard.

A personal post, a bit long, but a rare one about me, the person. I know many people who avoid the news, feeling that the world is too depressing and they don’t see a way out of the numerous problems societies are facing. Many retreat to a forced positivity, refusing to engage with anything that isn’t fun and ‘positive’ (whatever that means). Thus the obsession with recreation, whether travel, or going to concerts, or socialising more generally. I see all of this a bit differently. We live in rich societies where for the past 70 years we’ve been able to live lives that historically are very rare. Very few wars, prosperity, huge increases in life expectancy, etc. In historical terms, we’ve lived like gods. It’s SO important to recognise a few things here. Firstly, that *most of the the world* hasn’t lived like this for the past 70 years, or ever. What we’re experiencing right now is in some ways a correction, us coming back to the rest of the human pack. The gods are becoming mortal again, our 70 years of ignoring some basic realities of existence are over. We don’t get to live lives that are just about being constantly entertained, we have to face tough questions head-on. Secondly our 70 years of living like gods were created by catastrophe. The world wars mostly, and the Spanish Flu pandemic between them. That forced us to create a huge range of public institutions to regulate and improve life, during and after the wars. That’s why things got so much better for us. We had better water and food, better healthcare, we introduced massive public health measures to drive down deaths from infectious disease (see the graph), something the rest of the world still dies from more than anything else. At the same time since the late-1970s, our politics has attacked these public institutions, we got so used to life being good that we forgot what created that god-like life. The institutions became ‘red tape’, or ‘bureaucracy’. Fantasy ideas of all of this good life happening by itself through ‘markets’ were introduced instead. In reality it drove us backwards, to the time pre-wars, and all the problems we then shared with the rest of the world. Humans are like that. Without catastrophe, they don’t act well collectively, they form status hierarchies, like we do at school, and these status hierarchies compete. Let that run long enough, and life gets so bad that catastrophes happen, forcing collective action. Which then improves life, for long enough that people then forget and assume that good life happens by itself. Then the whole cycle starts again. That’s us, right now. This is why what makes me happiest, what’s most ‘fun’ for me, is addressing the problems we all face. Running away from them through gigs or travel or eating out, or booze - all of that just feels fake and childish, to me. Like we’re partying as the Titanic goes down. Being an adult means loving a challenge, solving problems, thinking through solutions. It’s fun. We don’t ’live with’ lethal viruses, for example, that’s a ridiculous conceit only rich societies totally divorced from the realities of life could entertain. Like Rome in its final days.

This very interesting graph compares the cost of driving 100km for petrol and EV, at different prices for electricty. Yellow is one of the EV rates of 6c/kWh now on offer from some retailers. Blue is an average grid rate for electricty at home. Green is the rate at a fast-charger. Look at where the blue line crosses each of the other lines. That tells you the amount you’d need to pay per litre for petrol, to be competitive with an EV. So for the yellow rate, petrol would need to be 12c/litre to compete. For the red, 47c, and for the green, $1.13. Even the most expensive electricity is about half the cost of using petrol.

We need to join the dots here. All of these illnesses that we thought were things of the past are now back, and the reason is very simple. The ‘living with the virus’ we introduced for Covid was actually a destruction of ALL public health. It’s bullshit, and it’s now driving the destruction into how we deal with all other infectious diseases too.

Personally I think we need to see more of this. The ‘sovereign citizens’ and other loons who bog down basic services with their ridiculous conspiracies and funded slogans in areas like renewables, Covid and basic town governance. The Australian Electoral Commission took them on a while back, and now this NZ mayor famously too. I’m not sure people know just how unhinged, often violently so, many of these people are.

The Greenland ice cap is losing 30 million TONNES of ice every HOUR. To those who still pretend this is all normal, a tip. It wasn’t losing 30 million tonnes of ice an hour in our lifetimes, or anybody else’s, for at least the past 400,000 years. If the entire Greenland ice shelf melts, sea levels around the world will rise by 7.4 metres. That’s every coastal town and city in Australia completely underwater. Societies don’t survive that, most of our civilisation is in those towns and cities. They’re not portable.

When I posted about this a few years ago many were sceptical it would ever happen. But here it is. Humans are terrible drivers, this technology couldn’t come fast enough.

Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, was born two days after my dad. I post him here to ask the question, what great human project are we engaged with today, that rivals the moon landings? I want to highlight how our horizons have been forcibly shrunk to our own individual lifestyles, focused on ourselves. That shift is political, the shift away from any public ambition, to lives that feel more like being stuck on a cruise forever, if you can get time off from a meaningless job.

With all the talk about cost of living, why does nobody ask who we’re paying, to live? How life suddenly became a product to be bought?

On the scale of 1-10 of shithouse ideas, this is an 11.

“All of this is why governments must invest in long-term strategies for managing COVID into the future, experts say — particularly by introducing standards for indoor air quality. But until then, they say, Australians can and should take precautions against COVID to reduce transmission and protect their health. And doing so is relatively simple.” I post this sure that hardly anybody will actually do it. We never leave high school now, people take their cues from what everybody else is doing, not from knowledge of what should be done. People would rather die than resist peer pressure.

One of the things I like to try to do in the garden is to tap the ecology that will happen by itself. Far too much gardening in my view is about control, about imposing a form on the landscape, that then takes a huge amount of energy, resources and work to maintain. An example is the grass at the back of our backyard. A plumber had to dig a 4m deep ditch in the back half of the yard. It left us with bare ground there, the topsoil got buried when he filled the hole again. Traditionally gardening advice would be to top-dress or even completely re-seed or turf the area. Instead I decided to use ecological succession ideas. Weeds will usually colonise the ground automatically as the first responders. They have deeper, much stronger roots and will tend to open up the soil beneath them. They also bring deeper nutrients to the surface. Grasses will follow the weeds, and you can see below how that process is playing out after only a few months (it was bare dirt before). Looks a bit messy for a while, but the work is being done for us, free of charge. If we left it eventually shrubs and trees would follow the grasses, most lawns are just interrupted succession states towards canopy plants.

Scientists calling for the declaration of a planetary emergency. Civilisations don’t survive massive climate changes, it’s that serious.

Detroit has 300,000 buildings. 70,000 of them now sit empty, because the only thing that made them function was cars. As oil prices went up, people in the suburbs could no longer afford commuting, and the suburbs died. Cars destroy cities.

We’ve now had solar a full year. I did the sums. Electricty used = $2774. What did we pay? Nothing. We made $110. Which means the investment made us $2884. Current lifetime return on investment is over 240%, about 10% per year. Solar doesn’t cost you money, it doesn’t even just save you money. It makes you money.

An election year for local government, and these groups are continuing to set agendas for towns. Illiterate, ignorant. The surge of bats has been gone for almost two months. The other dimwit is looking for somewhere to ride unregistered bikes, illegally.

Trump is clearly an imbecile. Electing him again would be a disaster on just about every measure. But it’s looking increasingly likely. How does this happen, in a democracy? Because democracy always was a fantasy. Humans want Kings. Anybody like Trump who offers them that model wins. Always, in history. Humans are driven by status, it’s the most fundamental human behaviour. Kings are the top of a cascading status hierarchy. If you don’t believe it, it’s likely because we just aren’t good at spotting status-driven behaviour. Like everybody buying Toyota Hiluxes or wankpanzers. All status-driven. Tell somebody you think their favourite singer or band sucks, and watch the status hierarchy explode into view. Right now the government is terrified of not offering ridiculous tax cuts to a tiny minority of already rich people. Why? Because they know people don’t hate the rich, they want to be them. Status.

Could be two cyclones in a month. When you pump enormous amounts of energy into the oceans for over 250 years, it has to go somewhere.

London is a Roman city. Originally Londinium. Much of our civilisation we owe to the Roman Empire, and specifically its adoption of Christianity as the Holy Roman Empire.

Sea surface temperatures off north-east Queensland today. Where the cyclone is due.

A climate denier trick is to claim that every change to climate we experience is just normal variation. Luckily we have data to show this isn’t true. Take sea temperatures, a hugely important measure, because the oceans have absorbed most of the heat from climate change to date. The first graph shows the enormous amount of extra heat going into the oceans in the past half-century. The other three graphs show the impact on oceans around Australia. The last graph is this week, showing the anomalies in this temperature i.e. how much they’re NOT normal. It’s a direct measure they calculate. The map of Australia with the tinges of blue off the north-west and south. Look at the ocean off the east coast, showing sea temperatures there are way beyond the normal averages. And this is during an El Niño event, where ocean temperatures are usually cooler. These are LONG-TERM data series. If these changes were normal, this data would show no change. We’re cooking. 720 million tonnes of Greenland’s ice sheet are melting every DAY.

You won’t find a State or town in the country who has anywhere near enough money to provide the basic services people demand, like repairing these roads. We as the public need to start to make some tough decisions about how we balance private and public benefit. Tax cuts won’t fix this road. Low Council rates won’t either. It’s time to invest in public things again.

I’m not sure a reduced tax cut for the very wealthy from $9000 to $4500 a year will be seen by the wider community as the outrage this pair seem to think it is.

How progressive tax works is one more thing I think has been lost in public understanding in our time. We have a progressive tax system, where there are increasing rates of tax as you earn more, because that way each person pays roughly the same proportion of tax, according to their income. Without those increasing tax rates, lower income earners pay a much larger share of the tax burden. This is what flat tax rates do, which many conservative politicians argue for. And what Scott Morrison’s Stage 3 tax cuts were trying to push Australia towards, by abolishing the 37 cents in the dollar rate so that those better off paid less tax proportionally. It’s unfair, hidden behind simplistic stories about aspiration, ‘if you work harder, you deserve to be rewarded by paying less tax’. It’s self-serving nonsense, that slogan assumes people who earn more work harder, which there’s no evidence of at all, in fact they often work much less hard, or not at all, living off interest and/or speculative investments. With flat tax rates the tax burden falls on those who earn less, because they pay proportionally more tax. Just one more example of slogan-led politics.

The ‘live with the virus’ slogan has driven a huge escalation in anti-vax beliefs and behaviour. We’re told that vaccinations will protect us from Covid, but nobody is getting them. And they’re also stopping their vaccinations for other diseases too, rates are declining. This isn’t accidental. It’s a political strategy, part of a long tradition to dismantle public life. Public education and transport have been under assault for years, public housing is dead, Medicare is almost terminal, new roads are privatised user-pays, and public health was the next target. We’re even paying for our own Covid tests, in a pandemic! We privatised the pandemic, lockdowns never ended. Now the sick have to lock themselves down, at their own expense, many have no sick leave left either. The old and chronically ill are prisoners in their own homes, unless they want to allow themselves to become infected, which is killing them at historically high rates.

Seeing an amusing number of Australians share this, close to Australia Day, who read the first sentence about Aboriginals not owning the land, and go ‘yeah!’, and ignore the rest. Ignoring that they, as European Australians, think THEY own the land. Land they kicked the aborigines off. I’m always glad when the annual flag-waving festival of dumb is over.

Who fears a China under Xi more than an America under Trump?

Venus. Actual photo, James Webb Telescope.

You too can play for Australia, while suffering from the highly infectious third leading cause of Australian deaths.

Australia Day? I love Australia, it’s truly unique in the world. Not the imported Barnum and Bailey flag-waving patriotism of the US, which today will be full of. A convict colony that survived being sent to the remote reaches of civilisation, society’s rejects. Dumped in an ancient land which still holds the secret of all human civilisation, that nobody is interested in. The Australian character we like to celebrate is the product of the encounter of those convicts, with humanity’s most ancient land and civilisation. That’s what being truly Australian is, a product of that encounter. Much as I love the Brits, you’d have to be some kind of patsy to celebrate them dumping us here with utter contempt. Which is what 26 January specifically is, the date of the setting up of the penal colony. It’s like cheering on England in the Ashes. Celebrate what we did next, not that.

People using digital filters in real-time on live TV, even very big names like Idris. Look at these stills. He looks like a cartoon. It’s not a resolution thing, his background and shirt are crystal clear. We’re living in an idiot social media bubble.

New York has declared social media a public health hazard. Which it is. It’s also a hazard to every other part of society, generating continuous tidal waves of bullshit to obstruct the most basic essential services. It makes every person feel like they’re an expert, on everything, and turns adult life into a high school culture of continual social comparison and peer pressure. How is that not obvious? These platforms work on ‘likes’. Being liked IS high school culture.

Renewables have cut the wholesale price of electricity in half in the past year. Consumers should see that in their bills from mid-year, when the regulators update the pricing for retailers.

When it pays off. Pretty yuck weather out there, hot and windy. Got 5 air conditioners going, and the double-glazing means they’re not working hard, as well as blocking any hint of the wind outside, perfect silence. Battery charged for tonight before lunch. The house is an oasis of quiet cool. Not only costing us nothing, we’re making money exporting the excess power.

The annual flag-worship is over for another year. Have to give it to the flag-worshippers, they at least dress sun-smart. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Nothing good has ever happened under a flag.

Several people have been removed from my FB friend group, or muted. The ones who just vomit slogans all day that they pick up from various sewers of disinformation on social media. There’s a great fear in challenging friends on their beliefs, and it’s sad that social media has done this to social groups. But certain beliefs and behaviours make people not really friends.

Travel and tourism destroys places. Including towns close to home.

Happy Birthday Tash 🎉💕

Without cheating, who is this? (An inspiration for me, died much too young from infectious disease, so would have found our casual approach to that bizarre.)

When politicians refuse to act on emergencies like climate change and Covid, the risk doesn’t go away. It gets privatised, individuals have to deal with it themselves. Insurance is the way they try to do it, insurance is a risk management tool. It’s destroying the insurance industry. The same gutless, weak politicians who won’t act against the risks then lead the public criticism of insurers.

I sometimes say society is falling apart. If you work in essential service areas, the collapse is visible every day. Why did this happen? I think because the retiring generation is so large that the focus of attention has been that generation and its needs, neglecting those that followed them.

Globally, young women and young men are diverging widely in their views, with young women becoming more progressive and young men becoming ultra-conservative, even more than older men. This is historically very unusual. In Korea it’s partly led to a collapse in marriages and births. The most likely cause? Social media, where women and men inhabit very different universes. People use social media to transact much of their social lives. The shift in young men is particularly dangerous, towards increasingly rigid and sometimes violent viewpoints.

Playing with Covid worked out well for Travis Head. If he’d had a muscle strain, we’d have said he was playing with an injury. But Covid, the third leading cause of death in Australia? Not mentioned.

*nods* I thought of this when Australia’s batting collapsed twice in this Test, how if they had just a few more private helicopter rides and seaside mansions, they may be better able to hit a ball.

Appeared in my feed from 10 years ago. Bittersweet memories of CSU again, from the time when leadership had disappeared and people sat in meetings like these all day, trying to figure out what the organisation should be doing. Producing long lists of banalities that provided no direction, transcribed into documents that more meetings then finessed, which nobody ever read or used. Part of the fantasy that organisations (or even societies) emerge from the ‘bottom up’.

I believe Gen X is the last generation for some time who will have the experience of an adult life that is qualitatively different from high school life. And only at the beginning of their careers, now past, social media has caused a rapid acceleration of the process of replacing adult life with high school culture, so in the second half of their careers they’ve also experienced that transition. One of the reasons I most look forward to retirement is that I resent my adult life being hijacked again by the social rules of school, the economy of likes, of status hierarchies built upon popularity. It was a great relief to leave that shit behind, in high school. Now it’s back, and it’s everywhere, at all ages and in all activities. That’s what social media has done. Entire lives, including work, are now transacted through it. Not because others are more popular, it’s easy enough to be popular, if you play that game. It’s not a jealousy thing. It’s the exhaustion of dealing with that in the much more complex and serious adult world of work. Of seeing basic and urgent needs going unmet, because they’re re-routed through status hierarchies of popularity. Your own kids’ worlds being trashed by influencers, mostly morons, whose only interest is themselves.

This is my foot, X-rayed yesterday. Sharing because of the quality of modern imaging, stunning. And because the body is fascinating. Bone is actually tissue, obviously, as otherwise you’d have to be born with an adult-sized skeleton. It will also grow preferentially according to forces applied to it. For my bodywork friends, bone is a tensegritous structure, usually tensegrity models of the body make the bones the spacers (which they also are), but bone itself is also a tensegrity structure.

https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Studie-Rekord-Krankenstand-fuehrte-zur-Rezession-article24690123.html

I think it’s terrifying Western car makers, who don’t want to change their business models. The public is asleep at the wheel of wankpanzers.

A school over 1,100 km from the coast, in the desert, has had to close because of mould, due to sustained humidity this summer. And where did that humidity come from? From oceans that are cooking. I think many really don’t understand how civilisation as we know it can only exist with a climate that is now gone.

Politics is mostly done with words. Take the loaded word ‘spending’. Invented in the 1970s to portray all government as wasteful. A much more accurate word is investment. Governments invest in communities, creating wealth. You have to spend money to make money, as the saying goes. Look at how Australia boomed after massive government investment in WW2. Modern politics causes governments to run what business calls ‘lazy balance sheets’. Little to no investment, so continuous degrading of infrastructure and little new industry. On the fantasy that individuals will do it instead. When was the last time any of you built an airport, or rail line, or power station?

Any emotions around this story today, @[1025558373:2048:Alex]?

Heat is easily the greatest killer of all natural disasters. And extreme heat is growing very fast, every year is breaking records from the year before. Councils are having to plan ways to try to cool towns down. It’s very difficult.

The federal government collects more from HECS than it does from the fossil fuel industry. In Norway they tax the fossil fuel industry and give free education to students. We subsidise fossil fuels, and charge people huge sums to study.

State governments are now taking control of renewable projects, to bypass the local obstruction, often mobilised by Nationals MPs. Solar panels can improve farmland, have a look at how much shelter has been traditional on Australian farmland. Zero. Better for stock, better for crops, better for the soil, to not have all of it baking in the sun. The panels also trap condensation and therefore raise soil moisture. And solar and wind farms are a great source of new income for many farmers. This is scare-mongering to drum up votes. The Nats miss their novelty cheques.

Airline staff used to have a saying, ‘if it’s not Boeing, I’m not going’. That’s how trusted the brand was. Now quality control systems have been stripped away, after the merger with McDonnell Douglas. You won’t get me on these new 737s, or any newer Boeing aircraft, if I have a choice in it. Add to that the cut-throat nature of the airline business itself, with corners cut on maintenance and staffing, and I’m always glad when a plane touches down and I’m off, safe.

Politicians told us the pandemic would be over when the vaccines arrived. That was at the red arrow. The vaccines are great (anti-vaxers are insane). But alone they’re not even close to being enough to end this pandemic.