February 2024

There were 131 local objections to the Glanmire solar farm. Only 6 letters of support. It was approved by the State Government. If that seems strange, objections included: - risk of fire (?!) - noise (?!) - impact on the view from Mount Panorama, 10 km away (?!) - glare for planes into Bathurst airport (?!) Another trick local protestors are now using for renewable energy farms is to lodge fake planning approval for homes they never intend to build, nearby. This causes huge delays in planning processes. Thankfully it seems State governments have had enough.

Transmission lines are vulnerable to extreme weather events, and everybody is getting a lot more of those. And it’s slow work building the 10,000km of new ones we need too. A really interesting proposal that’s now emerged is to use electric trains as mobile big batteries. They can move from town to town and also anywhere between them, carrying massive amounts of stored electricty. Some are even suggesting they could replace the need for new transmission lines. And act as emergency power for towns.

Hinkley C nuclear power station, in the UK. When building began people were told it would be done by 2017, at a cost of about $20 billion. Now the project is expected to be HALF finished by 2031. And the cost has blown out to nearly $93 billion. Worth remembering if having nuclear power in Australia is an issue at the next election. It’s a total fantasy.

Two stories today showing the sort of catastrophic damage climate change is already causing. It’s not really sinking in that this is the only problem we all have to urgently face now. None of anything else we’re doing in our work or personal lives really matters. We may already be out of time. The damage is already unaffordable, and it’s just getting started.

Odds-on he drives a Wankpanzer.

Much as bottled water is a no-no in most situations, this is the most refreshing thing I’ve ever drunk.

Social media is driving this.

I still get people telling me ‘we need to learn to live with this virus’. What they mean is we need to constantly lie about being sick, so that we can fit in with the peer pressure that says the pandemic is over. I see it everywhere, people saying things like ‘it’s just a cold’, or ‘it’s just hayfever’ (having done no testing). Or they say nothing at all, and just go to work and family things, sick. This is a social phenomenon. We NEED to pretend the pandemic is over, otherwise we stand out from the crowd.

Happy Birthday 🎂🎁

One possible future for agriculture.

This is called the size-weight illusion, or Charpentier’s illusion, which I re-discovered accidentally in the kitchen one morning. There are no useful explanations for it. Wikipedia has a nice summary of how all the most obvious explanations fail. “The illusion also occurs when the objects are not lifted against gravity, but accelerated horizontally, so it should be called a size-mass illusion. Similar illusions occurs with differences in material and colour: metal containers feel lighter than wooden containers of the same size and mass, and darker objects feel heavier than brighter objects of the same size and mass. These illusions have all been described as contrast with the expected weight, although the size-weight illusion occurs independent of visual estimates of the volume of material and the illusion does not depend on expectations, but occurs also if visual size information is only provided while already lifting.”

The federal government is putting forward 3 options for a fuel efficiency standard for Australian cars. Something every country in the world except us and Russia have had already for years. Check out Option A, one put forward by the car industry itself. If you’re having trouble seeing it, it completely overlaps the bottom axis i.e. zero savings at all. Re-connect your brains to your wallets, Australia.

Without question the greatest social disaster in Australia is housing. This book is about to be released and will be interesting reading for anybody who wants to understand how we got into this mess. The answer is the one Australia already found in the 1950s. For government to create a LOT more public housing, free of the housing market. That’s what created widespread home ownership in the first place.

Happy Birthday!🎁

Making fun of Lithgow is a national pastime. If you wanna ride that train, you better have something pretty special to match 8800 TONNES of Nutella, every year.

Having spent a lot of my working life in universities, one criticism I’d have of O-weeks is that they tend to assume a type of person arriving that doesn’t match a lot of the students who actually do. Much of it is intimidating to quieter students, who are stressed out when they arrive to hordes of loud, noisy, partying students.

A very good question. They seem to hand them out like confetti now.

Not really dressed for the desert. If only the photo had recorded sound too.

As anybody whose kids have left home has felt I’m sure, it’s a difficult transition. For them, and for parents. I think it goes beyond our usual ‘homesick’ type explanations. For most human history families didn’t fragment in this way, they didn’t disperse to all parts of the globe for the rest of their lives. ‘Home’ didn’t used to be restricted to just one couple’s block of land and house. It meant an ongoing connection to place, across generations. As some farming families still have, and of course Aboriginal Australians had for tens of thousands of years. But home has now become fragmented. When my kids leave home it’s not just that I obviously miss them, it’s the feeling of the home we shared together being pulled apart as well. They were part of that space, they helped to make it an ongoing experience. Now we just assume kids need to make their own way in the world, to make their own homes. Which when you zoom out *is* the fragmentation I’m talking about. And increasingly they can’t afford even the land and building anyway. I see a trend for kids to live with their parents for much longer now. That extended family model is the one we replaced with the fragmentation model. I wonder if reality is reasserting itself.

While it will be great to have EV batteries that fully recharge in minutes, in many ways it's a misunderstanding. As Finn says even current batteries will add nearly 300 km of range in 15 minutes. Having to stop for 15 minutes to 'fuel' every 2.5-3 hours is what we're supposed to be doing anyway, for safety, on long trips. And as always nearly all EV journeys won't need servos, people will charge at home. Whereas petrol and diesel vehicles need to go to the servo every time they need to refuel.

There are two truly staggering things in play here. One is the level of corruption and criminal behaviour, by a US President. The other is the number of people, including here in Australia (and often young people), who couldn’t care less, and still love him. Because Trump is a creature of social media, of naked populism. Democracy is dead.

New records 7 years in a row. "In 2023, the oceans absorbed about 287 zettajoules of heat, which...is the equivalent of eight Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating every second of every day into the ocean." Scientists are terrified. People who watch YouTube and use social media for information, where there's always the comforting strength of numbers behind every stupidity imaginable, not so much.

The mRNA technology that anti-vax loons, amplified through social media, made people fear, may within 10 years provide treatments or even cures for some of our most difficult diseases. https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/news/20230411/cancer-heart-disease-vaccines-ready-2030-moderna

Brilliant Central Coast company that not only developed swappable truck batteries (much, much faster than filling a truck with diesel), but will also convert existing diesel trucks to electric, for truck owners.

Those who say it’s too hard to fight Covid, usually meaning it interrupts their travel and eating out and gigs, should have a look at how they used to avoid kids catching TB in the Netherlands. In the middle of winter.

The cervical cancer HPV vaccine is so good that data suggest cervical cancer may cease to exist, within our lifetimes.

Seems a bit gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Yup. On even the hottest days just touching the frame or glass shows that very little heat gets through.

I find many are unaware of political strategy. The Nats had lost a lot of farmers, because the party became addicted to fossil fuel and mining dollars. Now they’ve found a way to marry those two together, by whipping up hysteria in the bush about renewables. That energises some farmers, and also pleases their fossil fuel donors, who obviously aren't big on renewables. The only reason this is ‘dividing’ communities is because that’s what the Nats want it to do, it generates votes.

Happy Birthday!!!

Because suppression of information on Covid is deliberate and widespread, and even many GPs are woefully uninformed about it, here's a tip. If you get Covid, AVOID EXERCISE for at least 6-8 weeks. Exercise is a real trigger of Long Covid. If you already have Long Covid and a doctor suggests you exercise, get another doctor.

Another Covid tip. If you get Covid and want to reduce your risk of Long Covid, talk to your GP about getting some Metformin, quickly (within the first 72 hours of falling ill). It's originally a diabetes drug, but has also been shown to reduce risk of Long Covid by between 40-60%, which is huge. Safe and cheap. Take articles like this with you to the GP in case they haven't kept up to date with current practice. As context, I get this information from top doctors working with Long Covid, that are friends of mine, not just from articles. And you really don't want Long Covid, it can destroy lives.

Following up on my earlier post, probably the single worst thing you can do when infected with Covid is exercise. Australian cricketers play at an elite high exertion level, with full-blown Covid. It's medical insanity. https://wwos.nine.com.au/cricket/news-2024-mitchell-marsh-covid-australia-vs-west-indies-t20-series/7e4b5b6a-74a0-4523-943b-a8c1dccc3ab1

There was only one EV again at the Bathurst charging station when I was there today. (Not this one, it was a Tesla Model Y.) I had a chat to the owner, who obviously loved his car. The hysteria about chargers and range is mostly a storm in a social media tea cup.

The north Tasman Sea is currently as warm as sub-tropical Queensland water. Just look at this graph. The ocean is boiling, and we’re cooking. Also the hottest ever January, globally. The people who continue to argue this is some sort of normal thing are a threat not just to society, but to civilisation itself. We will not survive this unless urgent action is taken.

What could be behind this surge (black line on the graph) in childhood pneumonia? (Hint: we're seeing the same surge in every country that decided to 'live with' Covid.) We're still not even vaccinating our youngest children against Covid. But hey, it's only kids, we can always make some more! Or just go on a trip or to a gig and drink our troubles away, maximum positivity.

Happy Birthday! I taught you, and you're now 45 *gulp*

Solar system data for January.

One of my favourite FB genres is ‘I’m living the best life, being incredibly positive about everything, and here’s how you can buy what I have for sale’.

If you want to filter the air, at home or at work, a great idea even without a pandemic (particularly if you live in a city, or somewhere that uses wood fires for heating), these IKEA Starkvind purifiers are pretty astounding value for money. $200 (upright version) - $250 (table version). The even more outstanding value is the filters, only $20 each. Normally purifiers with the filtration efficiency these have cost nearly $1000, and their filters can cost hundreds. They’re HEPA 12 filters, one grade below the gold standard HEPA 13. But they have such a high single-pass efficiency, and the difference in filtration is only that between 99.95% and 99.5%, that it doesn’t matter. They’re also pretty quiet for the volume of air they shift. The table version is a terrific piece of furniture to boot.

We drove the Bells Line today. No question the more beautiful of the two mountain roads. But the road itself is lethal, not even close to modern safety standards. Amazing more people aren’t killed on it. And it was chock full of dickheads using it as a racetrack. Stopped at Mt Wilson on the way back, surely one of the most beautiful locations in the entire country. All due to generations of passionate gardening. Street trees, they transform a place. (Photos, Garry Hayes and Kalan Robb)

What Hemingway said of bankruptcy, that it happens gradually then suddenly, is also true of natural disaster. This ‘tipping point’ would be a catastrophe, an extinction-level event. And it will happen fast, maybe inside a day. History shows we put our entire lives on hold to fight Hitler, for 7 years. This risk is FAR greater than Hitler. And what are we doing? Mostly nothing. We should be giving up pretty much everything, our jobs and recreational lifestyles, to fight climate change. I honestly think many are not seeing how perverse this situation is. This can end civilisation as we know it.

Alan Fels was in the news this week with his report on price gouging as a key source of inflation. What wasn’t reported was what he said about electric cars.

I hear this all the time, that ‘lockdowns’ stopped children getting necessary infections, and now their immune systems are missing immunity, which is why they’re getting sick. It’s scientific nonsense, completely untrue.

Happy Birthday🎉🎂

Happy Birthday 🎈🎁🎂

One of the FB groups that makes me chuckle is dedicated to photos of people who find their own likenesses in art galleries.

Was sad to hear that Christopher Alexander died, nearly 2 years ago. Alexander was a giant of modern architecture, entirely different. His ideas went well beyond architecture, agile software development and wikis for example stemmed from his work. He strongly believed you couldn’t create a building with any great beauty or even functionality using the method we use now, with drawings then built out on site. He thought buildings needed to be built from patterns, patterns that repeat at multiple scales, with the design evolving during the building process itself. An example of a pattern is ‘light on two sides of every room’. The patterns he developed were all derived from the lived experience of buildings, things people found inspiring in them. They were simple statements, not drawings, in a hierarchical list, so that the big and small patterns were always linked together, every pattern shaped every other pattern, every detail in the building went towards creating the larger whole of the building, and every change to that whole shaped the details. Once you had the pattern list, the building would then evolve from them on site, in the process of construction. He compared this process to cell differentiation, where instead of adding bits and pieces together to create a whole, you began with the whole (the cell), which then differentiates into different details, with the whole and the details always woven together, so that changes to one always changed the others, at the same time. He refined this process over time, but it was this idea of nested patterns that software makers for example took up.

I had a long chat today with one of Australia’s leading Covid specialists. He says things are much, much worse than even I share here. He sees even very young people with terrible ongoing health problems. And people who he’d estimated would develop full Parkinson’s disease in 5-6 years, now develop it in 6 months, because of Covid. He says the Long Covid burden is already unmanageable (there are no treatments), and predicts by end-2024 it will be a crisis. Taking any of this seriously is exactly like this image.

Anyone else find this one thigh-slappingly funny? Me either.

Happy Birthday🎉🎉🎉

Happy Birthday! 🎉🎂🎈

The Powerwall 2 ships with a capacity of 13.5 kWh. But because it’s chemistry and not neat, you’ll often get more than that. You can test how much the capacity of your battery has degraded over time, it’s warranted to still have 70% of capacity after 10 years. We’ve been using ours for over a year now. I tested the capacity today, it was 14.7 kWh. Not even more than advertised, we’ve also had 0% degradation in a year of heavy use. These things are beautifully engineered.

Pushy telephone marketing, the new variety where the person calls and starts talking to you at a million miles an hour as if you’ve already agreed to buy something, and asks for your details and for photos of where they can install it (like a hot water heater). I humoured one yesterday, and then said ‘so is there a quote somewhere in this process?’ Silence. They don’t want to quote, the whole con is to pretend the sale is done, before they even ring.

This is Widcombe Junior School, in the UK. They raised funds to put air purifiers in every classroom in the school. It cost them 20 pounds per student. Compare this to the national average cost of hiring casuals when teachers are off sick? 171 pounds per student. It’s outrageous that basics like this aren’t standard issue, here too. Politics is such a sewer that parents have been actually banned from buying these for schools. It would expose the national strategy of deliberately infecting children, to create immunity for the wider (older) population.

Lots of sick Covid people today. Start of school has taken what was already a large outbreak and pushed it even further through the community. I'm genuinely curious when people think this nonsense will end, catching a disease far more serious than the flu at least once every year? Generally people don't respond, I suspect because we need to maintain the illusion we're 'living with' Covid, and admitting how sick everybody is getting, over and over, would puncture that balloon full of hot air.

Eric Idle is in financial difficulty, having to sell even his home to make ends meet. Python is a great example of how you need good management. They still own everything they made, but the income stream from it all has dried up, which seems bizarre for such a globally recognised brand. Idle is also not really friends with John Cleese now, they haven't spoken in 7 years. I asked Eric about their manager, Jim Beach, also Queen's manager and considered one of the great administrators. He said Cleese fired him, unilaterally. Some real bitterness there.

How's the slogan go? 'Affordable, reliable power'? Victoria's biggest coal plant completely offline, in their heatwave. Some irony there, given that these plants cause most of the heatwaves.

Some politicians will tell you superannuation is 'your money', so you should be able to withdraw it whenever you like. That's a lie designed to destroy the super system. Look at those tax rates, a huge portion of your super is publicly-funded, through enormous tax concessions. And that 0% tax at pension age? Watch that one disappear for Gen X and younger.

Look at what the collapse of the coal plant in Victoria has done to the wholesale electricity price there. Nearly $17,000/MWh. OUCH. Compare with South Australia, with its renewables? They're giving the energy away there. -$86/MWh. Not just free, they'll PAY you take it.

They don’t want to do this obvious thing because every developer and mum and dad investor think they’d lose money, by having cheap housing in the market. But it’s not in the market, it’s public housing. We used to build lots of it. Then economic morons decided to turn public housing into a market. Housing is an essential service, it should never have become a market.

Meanwhile, as Covid damages everybody’s immune systems, other pathogens keep moving in to share the feast.

Scabies alerts now in schools (thanks Dan). Let's add to the smorgasbord of infectious joys. Big jump in scabies, likely because the neutrophils that your body needs to stop spread are damaged by Covid.

Australia's Covid strategy is called 'hybrid immunity'. Where immunity (supposedly) comes from a combination of infections and vaccinations. Except nobody is getting the vaccinations. So it's really a 'couldn't give a fuck, do nothing' strategy.

This is huge. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/13/trial-offers-hope-for-millions-that-jab-could-prevent-rheumatoid-arthritis

We spend an average $70 a week on fuel. That’s for well over 600km of driving. If it was just around town driving, it’d be barely $10. It speaks volumes about how dumb public life is now that as petrol and diesel are at $2/litre, people are rushing to buy bigger, thirstier cars.

Private health, education, housing, electricity and roads are all catastrophic failures, kept afloat only by huge injections of taxpayer dollars. Let them all live by their beloved market rules, take the taxpayer dollars off them and see how they go.

This is Australia’s opportunity to become, like I’ve said before, the Saudi Arabia of the next 2 centuries. Seriously rich. But we seem unlikely and too stupid to do it, preferring instead to keep making Texans and Arabs rich, keeping our role as the world’s biggest and dumbest quarry.

Just about to be released and already sold out. Did you know Australia's housing market is running at $10 TRILLION? Outrageously absurd. I liked Michael Pascoe's review: "The vast majority of what is written and said about Australian housing is either nonsense, property porn, clickbait or lies, all more-or-less to the benefit of interests vested in maintaining the status quo of ever-more expensive shelter with all the social damage that causes. Cameron Murray’s The Great Housing Hijack is the exception that proves the rule – the only book you need to understand the giant con we have fallen for. Nobody escapes unscathed. Read it."

Some organisations now go out of their way to prevent people contacting them, they don’t list phone numbers or email contacts or even web forms. I discovered the joy of this yesterday when a UK medical imaging firm sent me a person’s medical files, thinking that I was due for an MRI scan with them this week. Obviously a huge violation of this poor bugger’s privacy, and I have no way at all of notifying them that they have the wrong person.  

"Our group believes we are facing the most critical issue in the history of the Oberon community..." They mean windmills. Not the collapse of the life systems on the only known habitable planet in the universe. Windmills. Because they spoil the view, and other Flat Earth gibberish.

Little Richard seems to have had a very big head.

Next time you see protests anywhere about Council rates, it's worth noting that the 2022 floods in NSW caused damage to over 13,000km of roads. That's enough road to cross Australia 4 times. Those roads were already nearly $2 billion in arrears for essential maintenance when the floods hit. There have been more floods since, and they're still coming. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/15/nsw-flood-damaged-roads-repairs-road-works

My greatest pleasure in driving is finding ways to maximise the smoothness and efficiency of the trip. Not changing gears (only cars with engines that have no grunt need gears), or any of the other boy-racer fetishes surrounding driving. What’s not well understood I don’t think is that the world’s best drivers, racing drivers, drive using the same principle. Smooth, efficient. Because that’s also the fastest way to get around a track. I watched a documentary hosted by Jackie Stewart, the famous F1 driver. He was getting people to drive around a track and comparing data with a professional F1 driver driving the same track. In every case the amateur’s data was jerky and all over the place, far too much acceleration and braking. The F1 driver’s data though was super smooth, efficient driving. Also much faster. This is the myth I like to explore, that the sort of yob-driving that dominates discussions around cars is somehow more advanced driving in some way. It’s not, it’s embarrassingly bad driving, on every metric. The same yobs who say we don’t need more road rules, just better driving. They can’t drive for shit, and cause most of the accidents.

In the land where sport is sacred, where the lab'rer is a god You must pander to the people, make a hero of the clod. -- Henry Lawson

For years now it's been illegal for politicians to deal with lobbyists from the tobacco industry. We've seen the outcome, a dramatic decrease in smoking and smoking-related illness. Now there's a possibility, led by Europe, of a similar ban being used for fossil fuel lobbyists. That would change the world.

The storm between Bathurst and Lithgow tonight was the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to Armageddon on a road. 20km or more of cyclonic rain, lightning strikes metres from the road and overhead, maybe 100 cars pulled over because they couldn’t see.

I think she’s remarkable. But I’ve never liked live shows with lots of people on stage, including dancers. One of the magic things about rock shows was just 3-4 people on stage, making all the sound. It felt raw and dangerous and a bit magic. The modern choreographed shows with dance routines leave me cold, it’s too slick somehow, and you lose that sense of surprise, songs were never the same twice in a 3-4 piece band. Now the music becomes a soundtrack to the choreography instead. Not that I go to any shows any more anyway, they bore me. Even music itself has started to, as I’ve got older I’ve been drawn to the complexity of sound itself, and away from the repetitive and compulsive ear worms of music. It becomes annoying, once you perceive the throttling of sound into these repetitive patterns. And as we’ve lost our social structures, music has increasingly been the glue that holds us together socially, which I find very unhealthy. We’re not teenagers.

An Australian car needs $120 of fuel to travel the same distance for which an American car only needs $100 of fuel. European cars are even better than American. This is why the new vehicle/fuel efficiency standards are so important.

February is normally the hottest month of the year in Australia. And yet here on the East coast it’s still raining. And for the same reason we’ve seen all summer. The ocean is crazy hot. Evaporation produces rain, go figure.

Reality is rapidly catching up with this toxic fraud. A bullshit con artist, who destroyed what’s left of American democracy. Thankfully the law still holds against these modern populist dictators.

Diagnostics on the Powerwall after more than a year of use. You can see they’re sold as a capacity of 13.5kWh, but you can end up with more, as ours is, 14.7kWh. And 0% degradation for the battery after more than a year is fantastic, means it hasn’t lost any capacity to charge. It’s warranted to hold 70% of its original capacity even after 10 years, which is still ample storage for most homes. (‘Energy remaining’ means today, battery currently charging.)

You know time is marching on when newspapers have to include backgrounding like this for readers.

The car at the back is a BYD Seal EV. Half the price of the boring Audi in front of it.

Had a chat with a few people here a while back about whether a big show like this can be worth going to, especially at a few hundred bucks per ticket. Not many agreed with me. The picture tells the story I was trying to tell I think. Tay-Tay circled in red.

I saw love defined as giving somebody the power to destroy you. And then hoping that they don’t use it.

Solar farms in the UK take up less space than golf courses and Christmas tree farms. People forget that farming was the activity of the most privileged parts of the population, who now don’t want their lifestyles impacted. Crocodile tears about impact on the landscape, which modern farming has more or less destroyed with industrial agriculture. Much of Australia’s farmland for example is currently sitting at the bottom of the Tasman Sea, blown there by wind and washed down destroyed rivers.

It’s not difficult to make medium density housing beautiful. In fact many would prefer to live in this sort of house than in vast acres of separate dwellings unconnected to any social life.

Remember when ocean temperature numbers looked shocking in 2023? We have a new winner. If you’re talking with people who deny this stuff, they probably have some form of head injury.

Researchers track climate denialism. It’s shifted now, from denying climate change itself, which has failed, to now denying the technologies which create the solutions, like solar and wind and EVs. Funded by the fossil fuel industry, but the people who utter this rubbish will swear it’s all their own ideas. Usually the people who were bad at science at school, who feel powerful now. Social media allows them to feel revenge for years of feeling dumb in science classes.

Happy Birthday!!

I encourage everybody to pressure leadership of their local schools to do this course. https://www.covidsafetyforschools.org/

There's an element of schadenfreude in watching people who lived the carefree good life while you were raising your own kids, sleepless and exhausted, now having their own kids and looking smashed every day.

2000 horsepower, 4000NM of torque. All it lacks for many race fans is the farting, which is what the exhaust noise is from a petrol race car.

Spotted this BYD Atto 3 in Bathurst yesterday, there are a few of them around. Have a look if you see one parked somewhere, really cool design. Lots of room inside too for a small car, and the interior is even funkier than the outside. Designed by ex-Audi folk, who know about style.

Lots of anger about Coles and Woolies supposedly price gouging. What’s not explained is why the majority still shop there, when Aldi for example is right there as a cheaper alternative. Or why people stay with the Big 4 banks, who genuinely do screw them. Or why the housing market, which has lots of competition, has had exponentially increasing prices for decades. No ideas around ‘the economy’ make any sense if you spend even 5 minutes with them.

What happens when you 'live with' viruses. Over 4 billion people worldwide are infected with herpes simplex virus. If you've ever had a cold sore, you're one of them.

Windmill blades are REALLY big. What a great time to be alive, to have this sort of wonderful engineering, sitting alongside a sewer of idiots on social media.

Food could be a bit dire when I was at uni. But a schnitzel cut up into slices and warmed in a microwave, served with a packet of Smiths Chips?

I remember 1990, when Freddie Mercury looked shockingly gaunt. Best estimate of his infection with HIV is around 1982. So he’d lived for 6-7 years looking and possibly feeling quite normal, but infection was destroying his immune system that whole time. By 1991 he was dead, just under a decade after his HIV infection, which he may not even have noticed, it was possibly quite mild. It was vast numbers suddenly dying that led to the discovery of HIV, nobody knew it was even there the whole time. As Hemingway said about bankruptcy, death by chronic infection comes in two stages. Gradually, then suddenly. The people around me are lining up for infection with something really nasty right now. They see me as odd, because I refuse to. To me they’re Freddie in 1982.

It’s frustrating not to be able to comment on this. But as a more general personal comment, I think we should all be very afraid of towns run by social media groups. We’ve seen that happen even at a country level, in the USA, where Trump (the Twitter President) supporters were sacking the parliament inside one term. When even educated friends take their cues from these groups, I think we’re looking at a society in full collapse mode.

I love how aggressive BYD is, their plug-in hybrid ute is due this year already, in Australia. BYD knows most of the anti-EV stuff comes from legacy car companies shitting themselves because they can’t shift their business models to EVs. Kodak, anyone? Wave bye bye to them.

Europeans paying 50% of what we pay in fuel costs, staggering. Example here of a European VW Golf doing 3.9L/100km, while the Australian version is nearly 6L/100km. Some people DEFEND this aggressively. Dumb is winning.

Measles cases grew nearly 80% worldwide last year. Due to morons like this.

Australia has a love affair with trades. But almost complete indifference to sophisticated engineering. Like this artificial heart, made of titanium, with the only moving part a single spinning disc suspended in a magnetic field. It doesn’t even try to pump, like an ordinary heart of other artificial hearts (whose pumps always fail). Instead it continuously adjusts the flow of blood as needed - the patient has no pulse, because there’s no pumping. It’s being seen as a possible solution for the thousands of Australians who die of heart failure, whose only hope right now is a heart transplant. Most donor organs come from car crashes, and with the improvements in car safety only just over 100 donor hearts are available every year. This artificial heart can potentially work for the rest of a person’s life, it may be a total revolution. No contacting moving parts means little can fail in it. And all developed by a Queensland biomedical engineer, whose dad died of heart failure. As did mine.

This is what I think many still don’t understand about climate change. The damage from one storm has crippled many of these communities. Just as a climate storm destroyed our gas supply a couple of years ago, for weeks. Forcing some in the article to ask for what I’ve said we should all be doing, more solar panels and batteries for homes and businesses. That’s why we bought a battery, not just to save money. To give us energy security. The whole country needs that shift, it’s an engineering solution to massive climate events. Burying powerlines is la-la land stupidity. Ruinously expensive, and brings a whole raft of new problems to boot.

And another climate event. Beyond the capacity of councils to afford. Meanwhile communities spend a huge proportion of their weekly incomes on personal entertainment, dining out and travel, and then complain when suggestions of increased rates come forward, to try to deal with the collapse underway in our infrastructure. We need to reverse our priorities, to again celebrate the idea of investing in public services.

Queensland is going gangbusters now, after a slow start.

Another astonishing breakthrough by materials scientists. (Disclaimer: my original training was as a materials scientist ;)) Battery development is on steroids right now, put the engineers to work and watch them go. Meanwhile politicians are only interested in tradies driving Hiluxes.

Want to see how our clown car approach to Covid has now fucked over all public health? Florida is having a measles outbreak. It's allowing parents to decide whether to send kids to school with measles. If that doesn't astound and horrify you, time for fewer beers and more books. It took 150 years for public health to free us from these infectious pathogens. All down the toilet now.

How have older workers responded to Covid? Mostly by retiring early. Who would blame them, given workplaces are doing nothing to protect anybody. In clear breach of WHS law.

Many of these new food delivery business models are rank piracy. Often they set up webpages for local restaurants without even telling the owners, and then customers order through these websites, with the food delivery company taking a cut. Once customer traffic is entrenched in this way, it’s literally a ransom situation, the company charges local restaurants fees to use its service. It sends restaurants broke, and the delivery drivers are paid slave wages. One US pizza shop got smart and started organising lots of fake orders through the food delivery site, to its own business, and then delivered nothing but the pizza boxes with a bit of raw dough in them, pocketing the usual rate for the pizzas. They were getting the pizzas delivered to themselves, and taking the delivery service’s money for a full pizza sale.

Hilarious. German farmers want the exact opposite thing to what Australian farmers say they want. In both cases because it means opposing government plans for renewables. It shows that it's all really just about opposing what they see as 'Lefties' and 'Greenies'. Even though power companies are shifting to renewables anyway, because they're so much cheaper for them. People never grow up, they never leave high school.

Measles is about the most infectious disease in the world. It also wipes your immune memory, meaning your immune system forgets how to fight EVERY disease it's ever fought. You're like a new-born baby, for 2-3 years. And we're now letting that genie out of the bottle.

If you want to understand why nobody is getting Covid vaccines, look no further than highly paid idiots behind microphones. This is an outrageous breach of media standards.

I was watching a documentary the other day about big tours in the 1980s, and the promoters and bands all saying 'you never make any money from a tour'. Now they make hundreds of millions off a single tour. It's not difficult maths, the ticket prices are ridiculous. These tours are like giant vacuum cleaners, sucking all of the entertainment dollars away from other acts. In stadiums where you can't see or hear properly, with 100,000 other people. Fools and their money.

BYD, again. Existing car makers will be extremely nervous, as EVs now begin to be cheaper than petrols or diesels, to buy. They're enormously cheaper already, to run.

And BYD, again. As the review says, an ‘absolute bargain’. Beautiful engineering.

Windmills ‘fanning’ fires. What more can you say. This is the astounding and angry stupidity that now runs whole societies, through social media. (For the confused, windmills don’t create wind.)

Humans as we know them have existed for about 300,000 years. Compare that to dinosaurs, who lived for about 165 million years. They lived for 550 times longer than humans have currently existed. Changes in climate likely led to their extinction. How much money would you bet on us getting even to a million years, let alone 165 million, given our total apathy about climate change? https://www.salon.com/2023/11/29/most-dinosaurs-were-by-climate-change-not-a-meteorite-new-study-suggests/

Just like the flu. In February.

Is this one from your team Michelle? :)

It’s going well in the UK. Living our best lives.

180 people have died of Covid in aged care in 2024 so far. It’s February. Why doesn’t this matter to people? Too much Tay-Tay? Getting on the beers? Cruises? OS trips? All of those are more important? Where do people think these aged care residents catch Covid from?

Beautiful. Can’t remember the name of the digital artist.

Another cult generated by social media. Any mention of ‘free’ or ‘freedom’ is a sure indicator.

Hey Gen Xers. We qualify for a Seniors Card in only 4-5 years. No need to thank me.

This is the side of super I don’t think is understood well enough. Most people will be more comfortable in retirement than they are while working, which shows how perverted our retirement income system now is. The lump sum amounts of money people are told they need in super at retirement are gross exaggerations of what’s actually needed. People can still access the aged pension, super was never designed as a replacement for the aged pension.

The Baby Animals are using a private jet for this tour? Really bad optics.

At this point it’s difficult to find any infectious disease that isn’t feasting on us. This is the collapse of public health.

When you go to gigs, don’t be fooled into thinking the band/act is sharing the audience’s joy at completely ignoring Covid. Caesar’s Palace spent over $450,000 on air purification systems for Adele’s shows, to try to make sure she doesn’t catch Covid. And as you can see here, she doesn’t even hide that it’s a real problem for her. Living with the virus is a lie. And these performers don’t give a shit if you catch it, they just want your money.

The joys that come your way when you fuck your immune system by letting Covid play in it are legion. A new disaster every single day. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/violent-diarrhea-virus-sweeps-across-us-and-forces-schools-to-close-as-cdc-closely-monitors-bug/ar-BB1iQbHd

“On Sunday morning, new moon of Aquarius, Sally peacefully birthed her two twins in the waters of her home. In all of those waves of beauty, love, shock and heartbreak; Those two spirit babies didn’t have a contract with the earth outside her womb and at the same time of welcoming them in, she said goodbye.” There's a GoFundMe, they're cleaning up. Is there a GoJailMe? A GoFindMeaBrain?

Wow that takes me back.

The article was about why Swift isn’t doing meet and greets with fans on this tour. She doesn’t want to catch Covid.

I posted about CAR-T cell therapy here last week I think, how it’s showing signs of being a complete cure for auto-immune diseases. But it now also seems to be able to slow or stop ageing. Watch this space, a revolution underway.

In the UK, some energy companies are now offering EV drivers completely free charging. All they need to do to qualify is allow their cars to be used for vehicle-to-the-grid (V2G) use, i.e. plug it in at home and the battery is then used as a grid battery as well, in peak times. $2/litre for petrol or diesel, versus completely FREE motoring, how's that working out for people?

Fantastic piece from serious public health professionals. Ignore all the rubbish you hear from hand-picked celebrity experts on TV, chosen if they match the government intention to do nothing. Of course as always I expect most people will continue to ignore it. Until they can't, and doctors can't help them. https://theconversation.com/a-pandemic-that-wont-go-away-as-covid-enters-its-5th-year-nz-needs-a-realistic-strategy-224047

If you don't know about measles, it's super-hyper-infectious. Each person with it can infect up to 18 others. And it can wipe your immune memory clean, if you do get it, so that for 2-3 years you'll have as good as no strong protection against any infection. You'll be like a newborn baby. It also can kill or seriously injure even healthy people. If you haven't had measles or been vaccinated against it, I'd suggest doing that right now.

South Australia planned to be net 100% renewables by 2030. It’s now brought that forward to 2027, it’s going so well. Only 3 years away. Just takes brains and determination. They’ll be an economic powerhouse, using the energy to also produce things like green hydrogen and green steel, which will be in huge global demand.

It’s now clear that England’s new ‘Bazball’ cricket is just a way to get flogged in the all the same old ways, while declaring those floggings a win. Straight out of the Trump playbook. England lost as badly on this tour of India as they did on the last, which triggered the end of Root’s captaincy. And there’s still a Test to go, so they can do even worse than last time yet.

To give an indication of just how corrupt fossil fuel politics is, it's worth remembering that university students pay more of Australia's bills through their HECS payments than all of the coal, oil and gas companies combined. They're parasites on every country, the sooner removed the better.

Meanwhile, BYD invades Europe. A guy told me EVs are a fad earlier this week. I suggested he invest his life savings in petrol and diesel vehicles. That way he will eventually not be able to afford to be on the internet, and spare us more BS.

England's water infrastructure was privatised in 1989, sold to the private sector for 6.1 billion pounds, with no debt carried forward. Since that time those private sector companies have extracted 75 billion pounds in dividends from the assets. Water bills are up 40%. And have a look at the state of the infrastructure, a train wreck. One to show those who go on about the wonders of the private sector.

The stories about slowing EV sales are actually the big existing carmakers like Ford and GM struggling to make them. And the sales of all cars have slowed, due to the economic cost of living problems. In reality sales of EVs are still booming. And why wouldn't they be, EVs are hugely cheaper to run. And absolutely beautiful to drive, you'd never go back.

https://switchedon.reneweconomy.com.au/content/i-was-sick-of-spending-all-that-money-and-sick-of-being-cold---how-sarah-electrified?fbclid=IwAR3IWpedSYoSAbRaYODdBOoIvS96aW6W_cXWPtp1Lf9PnF3ikJrk-X8fj5U

One of the reasons I never pursued music as a career is that the industry is so depressingly stupid. Part 2 to my Adele post the other day. Covid got her.

1.56.3. Boom!

If you go to a car race, you’ll notice the cars rev like crazy at the start. Internal combustion engines have no power unless you rev the crap out of them. What sounds like glorious grunt is actually a compensation for a hopeless technology. Also the reason they rev the cars when down-shifting as well as up-shifting, to try to keep the engine providing power. The mistake is to think the noise = grunt. It actually means the reverse.

I think the greatest mistake we made for the mental health of our entire population is to use a model of social life for popular kids, of lots of social mixing, as the ideal for all people to aspire to. We’re all brought up now told that this is the ‘normal’ life we need to learn how to live. That we need friends, and preferably a lot of them, or else we’ll be ‘lonely’ and depressed. If we’d followed the sort of advice in this article, I think the world would be an infinitely better place. True happiness only comes from individual resilience, which only comes from cultivating your self independently of what others think. It also makes you a much better social person, much less dependent on others. This should be the default that friendships and relationships then develop from. In reality the popular-kid model is a lie anyway. They’re not happier, as many Hollywood films have used as raw material. Popular kids can go through life entirely dependent on external validation for everything they think and do.

Global EV sales jumped nearly 70% between 2023 and 2024. Worth remembering when the social media mind midgets post their hysterical nonsense about EV sales dropping.

Exactly what's happening. Muppets regurgitate the slogans these think tanks release into the wild, actually believing it's their own ideas. https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-network-of-conservative-think-tanks-out-to-kill-the-switch-to-renewables/

The government has launched a consumer guide for people interested in solar. My personal preference is still the Solar Quotes company, which as well as providing you the best quotes from reputable installers, also has a ton of great information about solar. (https://www.solarquotes.com.au/) https://www.energy.gov.au/solar

Last day of winter in Texas. They’ll be looking forward to some warmer weather.

Somebody asked me at work the other day ‘aren’t you worried you might damage your immune system by always wearing that mask?’ If you agree with this person, I strongly suggest some reading for the weekend on immunity. It might save your life.

In the dog v cat wars, I've never seen this advice about cats.