March 2024

One of the cool things about EVs is that on really hot or cold days, you can turn on the car's cooling and heating remotely so that when you get to the car, it's already at a comfortable temperature. No need to run any engine to heat or cool. You can even leave a dog or older kids inside while you go into the shops, with the heating/cooling still going. A Tesla will even display a message to say the cooling/heating is on, so passers-by won't panic. If you're worried this might drain the battery, an EV battery has enough energy to power an entire house for several days.

One for anybody you know who's an anti-vaxer.

Because I know everybody loves Covid stories, have a look at the surveillance/sentinel testing for Covid in NSW, between 2023 and 2024. The pandemic is getting worse, at the same time as most people assumed it ended 2 years ago. Reality and peoples’ beliefs are heading in opposite directions, at high speed.

We can pretend all we like Covid is over. Reality decides reality, not us. I think it’s only people who don’t work in essential services who can maintain the illusion that things are going OK.

Rubbish technology, which kills you to boot. 11,000 people in New South Wales die every year from vehicle exhaust pollution. Many of the rest get diseases like Alzheimers. And people not only defend it, they love it. The alternative is more powerful, orders of magnitude cheaper to run, emits no pollution or noise, and requires you to pay not one cent to Texans or Arabs to keep it moving. Dumb is winning. Imagine a city that is quiet and full of clean air.

I love that of all the things Welsh men could have chosen to do in life, right near the top of their list was to sing. This is music, there’s not much that can rival an all-male choir for goosebumps. Lithgow has a lot of Welsh history, sometimes you can feel it.

Australia like several rich countries has had 20-30 years of the politics of immigration. Have a look at these graphs. Without huge numbers of immigrants this country is terminal.

Burger shop in Texas.

Not a bad crowd in Las Vegas for the rugby league. Amazes me that, with the emergency of ongoing concussions and head injuries in the game, nothing excites the commentators more than a headshot.

2000-year-old Roman tile.

About 7400 Australians died because of Covid in 2023. That’s 20 a day. But sorry, I forgot we’ve all moved on. Except for the 7400.

That explains the beetroot. Amazing that Australia is a net importer of tinned food.

I love the story in here about a location in Iceland that was touristed almost to death, because Justin Bieber filmed a video there and millions then visited. Now closed to visitors for all but 5 weeks a year. Travel is not about the places, it’s about our social lives, we go to ‘see the sights’ because others go to see the sights. Once there we take selfies to feed back into that social imitation game, ‘here I am at X’. Or ‘here I am where Justin was, in his video’.

I know people are over Covid. But they’ve been sold a lie, that getting the vaccination alone will end the pandemic. Vaccines are brilliant and absolutely necessary. But they *have* to be accompanied by control of the spread of a disease, to prevent your immune system becoming overloaded with frequent infection, and to stop the virus evolving into new deadlier forms. No vaccine stops a virus by itself. And getting infected lots of times won’t make you more immune, it will trash your immune system. You have to take every measure possible to stop yourself getting constantly reinfected.

Here it comes.

Anyone want a nuclear power station at Wang or Mt Piper?

I suspect it’s not tiredness.

Meantime, Tony Abbott’s useless NBN has now morphed back into Kevin Rudd’s original NBN. Via the detour of wasted tens of billions of dollars on Abbott’s string telephone NBN, that had to be re-built as a full-fibre NBN, as originally planned.

I know people won‘t change what they’re doing, because their measure of what to do is ‘what everybody else is doing’. Peer pressure, nobody really leaves high school. I guess they can all go and see the cardiologist together. If they live that long. And there won’t be anywhere near enough cardiologists anyway, there aren’t already now.

I know, all this health and climate change stuff isn’t as fascinating as me on a cruise or at a gig. I apologise, I will eventually get to pretending to be a forever teenager, at some point. (That may be a lie.)

I shared how bad ocean temperatures were, in 2023 (yellow line). And then 2024 arrived (black line). This is the greatest threat to humanity in its entire existence. And yet we’re doing as good as nothing. We stopped the world for over a decade to fight two world wars that were only a tiny fraction of this threat. Covid shows you can’t stop it for 10 minutes now without people crawling into a foetal position because they can’t go to a gig.

Mark Gregory is an engineer. Some say I'm biased against the LNP. I'm actually a conservative person, but I have nothing but contempt for the LNP since the time of John Howard, which has remade itself as an ultra-conservative obstruction to every important thing Australia needs. We're decades behind now. If you or I wasted 30 to 40 billion dollars, they'd lock us up and throw away the key.

A sound principle I've discovered in the past 4-5 years is to take every word Nick Coatsworth says, and believe the exact opposite.

https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/did-public-housing-create-the-australian

Prices on EVs are still tumbling. This is the long-range Tesla Model 3, over 600 km on a charge. Dual electric motors, one per axle, so accelerates like a rocket ship too. Nearly $10,000 off now on this model.

Look where they used to build public housing. Some of it is still active. It's a tremendous asset for government, not a cost. n some areas tenants could even buy it at cheap rates, outside the idiot 'market'. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5590409/Inside-multi-million-dollar-harbour-housing-commission-homes.html

One of the most infectious diseases in the world. If you're not vaccinated or haven't had it, I'd make that a priority. Really fast.

Coastal residents say windmills spoil the view. They prefer big rusty coal carriers.

I did the Bathurst Council meeting last night, and can’t comment more than that. But in neighbouring Orange you can see the sorts of things that now dominate politics at all levels, while societies collapse around us. In the news today also a story about 500 public swimming pools that may need to be closed, because Councils can’t afford to maintain them. We’re fiddling while Rome burns.

Raiding super to pay for houses is probably the stupidest political idea out there right now. And that's a tough field. The raids on super during the pandemic were a disaster too. I don't think it's well understood why the LNP hates super so much. Super represents the greatest transfer of wealth from landowners and business to ordinary working people in history. The LNP historically is the party of wealthy landowners and business.

The Pompeiians sculpted by a pyroclastic cloud almost 2000 years ago at the eruption of Vesuvius are like the old death masks, applied to an entire body. Very powerful. The facts and figures are too. The volcano ejected 1.5 million tonnes of rock and ash every second. The heat energy from the eruption was the equivalent of 200,000 atomic bombs.

I think this shows how offensive 'just like the flu' is, for Covid.

From the late-1970s, a political movement created what we today call 'the economy'. To replace what we previously called society. Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the big drivers of the shift. Thatcher said 'there is no such thing as society'. You can see the shift in photos, the big corporates that hijacked the societies Thatcher, Reagan and their fans broke now dominate the skylines. This is London, it took only 40 years.

"Last month was the warmest February on record globally, making it the ninth month in a row with record temperatures for the time of year, scientists have said. Global sea surface temperatures are also at their highest ever recorded, data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service shows." People who deny the catastrophe underway can go back and eat Play Doh, where they belong.

I’ve had even a few Australians say to me that Joe Biden is a joke, that he’s ’too old’. Some of these Australians admire Trump. Let’s have a short look at this champion of the stupid.

My early childhood was the 1970s. I’ve been waiting for the aesthetics of that time to make a comeback, we’ve had years now of bland washed-out greys and whites in interior design, most new homes that people ooh and ahh about have the aesthetic of a hospital operating theatre. The 70s had real flair, great use of colour and form. And not the modern obsession with hard floors, which I hate, so loud and sterile and bland.

“It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.”

What she said. Social media did this, it created a global social movement completely decoupled from reality. None of the usual tests through society's institutions to check the legitimacy of belief. Said to be true and real purely based on likes on social media platforms, popularity. Also happening for every other issue, look at the outrageous fantasies Trump peddles for example. The Twitter President.

Current car sales figures. EV sales are up over 70% since 2023. The ICE sales here are the filling of back-orders, delays still from the pandemic. ICE sales are flat. Tesla had no backlog, its percentages are all new sales. Incidentally, the Model Y is due for an upgrade mid-year, so I'd wait if you want one of those. Superb car, and sales to match.

Lithgow folk, what the hell was that? Earthquake? Explosion?

Toyota finally releases its first full-EV. And it’s OK, designed to ease people into the transition rather than be anything revolutionary. Subaru has just done the same with its Solterra, which uses the same platform so is actually very similar. Japanese car makers have been slow to EVs, the Koreans, Chinese and Americans are eating them for lunch. The push is on there now to try to close the gap.

I’ve wondered how these sorts of things survive for thousands of years, old Roman houses obviously just left after they fell into ruins, and soil gradually building up over them. I think it’s because there was no real earthmoving equipment then to do demolitions, today it’s a very quick job to completely remove all trace of a building. Back then it would take a huge amount of manual work, much of the time people would have demolished walls and just left the rest.

It’s like a big join-the-dots puzzle, and people still searching for a pencil.

Say your car is under warranty, and it brings up a message saying ‘problem with brakes, please see your dealer’. So you take it to the dealer, who finds no problems with the brakes. And charges you for checking. That doesn’t seem quite right? It was the car demanding to be checked. And it’s under warranty.

Another one for your infection bingo card.

A highlight of today’s cricket is hearing NZ commentators announce Henry’s bowling figures of 6 for 66.

England heading for a comprehensive moral victory in India, in the last Test.

The simplest way to increase happiness in the world? Teach the opposite of this. Teach people how to NOT ‘fit in’. Fitting in is the source of pretty much all of our unhappiness and suffering. The reason the advice we get is the opposite, is that the people who run the world and write these articles are the weak folk who do fit in. Who don’t rock the boat, who turn a blind eye to the world’s bullies, hoping for a life free of conflict. It doesn’t work, the conflict just becomes internalised as they compromise their true selves to the bullshit requirements of their social groupings.

Australians need to decide just how gullible they are. The car companies opposing this change have been selling vehicles overseas to meet the same and even higher standards, for years. In every other country in the world. Good on Tesla and Polestar for making that exact point. Australia, the land of the empty slogan. We’re an international embarrassment.

Fascinating graph that should make us question the Australia we think we know (and it applies to many Western countries). The grey is Australia’s population broken into age groups, in 2022. Blue is what 2034 will look like, if we have high migration. Red is no migration at all. The key thing here is how the blue and red lines are almost identical, past the age of 50. That’s because we’re an ageing society, and we import much of the workforce we need. The same applies to most Western countries. They’re all very old, and getting older. The only way they keep going is importing new young workers from overseas, to do the work. But then they kick them out again, they don’t want them living here and getting old. That’s why the blue and red lines converge completely past working age. Cutting migration won’t cut our population, because without the migration there’s nobody to do the work. The number of people who are 85 or older will double in the next decade. Without migration there’ll be nobody to look after our very old country. Young workers will be like gold globally, from places like India. As they get richer, they may have far fewer young workers to spare.

This is the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, under construction in the UK. (Actually a model, it’s years away from being finished.) Keep this one in mind as the debates around nuclear power heat up here. When finished it will only produce about as much electricty as two coal-fired power stations in Australia. It will take about 20 years to build the station. A solar farm of the same capacity would take less than a year to build. The final cost is estimated to be $90 billion. That’s about 10 times more expensive than a coal-fired power station. And 30,000 times more expensive than building a solar farm with the same capacity.

I don’t like travel very much. For a whole range of reasons.

BYD is a force of nature right now. It plans to release 4 (4!) new models in Australia in 2024. It already has 3 so that’ll be 7 in all. The next will be the Seal-U, a mid-range SUV to challenge the Toyota RAV-4 hybrid. The BYD will also be a hybrid, but a plug-in version, giving up to 150km of full electric range, plus the petrol motor in the hybrid, for longer trips. One of the remaining 4 models to be released this year will be a ute. And also likely a large SUV. And these will all likely be cheaper than the competition, even when fully electric. BYD wants to overtake Toyota as Australia’s largest car brand.

Here’s something less well known about the measles vaccine, that makes it even more of a good idea. When they started vaccinating kids for measles, child mortality dropped significantly. But it wasn’t just because kids weren’t getting measles. It’s called heterologous immunity, the vaccine provides cross-protection against other diseases too. The flu vaccine for example does the same against heart disease. The shingles vaccine too. My advice to anybody is to get every vaccine you qualify for, for any disease. Cross-protection will come into play, even for longer-term things like dementia and heart disease. Some scientists have even suggested giving everybody MMR (measles) boosters, to fight Covid. Get your MMR shots, if you haven’t already. Measles is spreading worldwide, and is extremely nasty. If you’ve had measles, even ask your GP to order serology tests to see if you are still immune, and get more MMR shots if not. It will likely also protect you from the nastier side of Covid, and a range of other things.

Just normal autumn weather, I'm sure climate deniers would say. Maybe in the time of the dinosaurs. (Climate change killed the dinosaurs.)

For all of the years shown on this graph, most Australians would tell you that house prices can only ever go up. It's our culture, it began with gold rushes and other get-rich-quick schemes. All the get-rich-quick schemes eventually collapse. Mega-pain for many of those households now.

Having worked as an engineer at Lucas Heights, I can promise you Matt Canavan knows as little about this as he does about everything else. This isn't even the Lucas Heights reactor (in the picture), it's Australia's synchrotron. And the Lucas Heights reactor doesn't generate electricity anyway. Anybody who votes for these clowns is condemning Australia to the arse-end of everything.

Nice graphic showing risk of Covid infection based on how much ventilation (measured by CO2 levels) you have and what type of mask you use (or no mask). Have put a red square where I've been for the past 4-5 years, through deliberate design of my workplace and social events. I have a small CO2 meter I can use to test with. You can see how good P2/N95 masks are, that the infection risk is only 3% even with very poor ventilation.

Guess how much Sydney motorists will pay in tolls between now and 2060? $195 BILLION dollars 🤔 Governments should just build public infrastructure, like they used to.

Why people really need to ignore social media as a window into reality. EV sales are booming, and where? In the outer, poorer suburbs. They’re saving people a FORTUNE. To quote from the article: “I can do my entire work commute for like five to 10 bucks a week … it's ridiculously cheap." The same guy points out that after nearly 40,000km of motoring, he hasn’t *once* needed to charge away from home. Peter Dutton is targeting these suburbs to try to win the next election, on cost of living. They’re living the exact opposite of the bullshit slogans he’s offering them on EVs.

The scariest news story from yesterday was 80 trees just dropping dead in the heat in Adelaide. If our tree cover goes, we’re doomed. Again, I don’t think many people have any real understanding of the magnitude of the catastrophe underway.

Thank you Paul Bongiorno.

Like I say, watch BYD. They're here to crush petrol and diesel car companies. And not before time. EVs are already astronomically cheaper to run, BYD is making them cheaper to buy too. Game over. And look at what they're doing with hybrids: "Its next-gen DM-i system will enable PHEVs to drive over 1,200 miles (2,000 km) with a fuel tank and full charge. This will make it hard for traditional gas cars to compete."

Jean Carroll has won two defamation cases against Trump already, costing him over $130 million. He's so stupid, and like his followers so ignorant of basic reality, that he's now bad-mouthing her again, for the same thing. I hope she sues again and bankrupts the moron for good. https://apnews.com/article/e-jean-carroll-trump-defamation-columnist-9a9932b83d2f7dcae1b63701f6405352

BYD also cater for the top-end of the motoring market. Like their U8, in the Toyota Landcruiser class. Except it's bigger than a Landcruiser (over 5m long), and can do 0-100 in 3 seconds. It can also 'tank turn' (turn on the same spot without moving forward or backwards), because each wheel is independently driven by its own electric motor. Its computer drive control is so sophisticated the car can continue to drive at up to 120 km/h with a flat tyre. It has a range of 1000 km. It can float in water, an amphibious vehicle.

He also has a tin of striped paint and a left-handed screwdriver for sale.

I've often posted about how 'the economy' isn't even a thing. It's a political invention designed to replace public life with the dominant cultural form humanity has used for nearly all of its history - feudalism. How does it do that? It pretends societies are markets, and a market is separate individuals with no collective connection. Like a big machine, which you drive with controls like interest rates. Which destroys society and public-focused life in one step. There is no public in an economy, just customers. And here we are, we've arrived exactly where I predicted we would. Back at feudalism. Landowners, and peasants. https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/australia-should-prepare-for-the-death-of-the-middle-class-experts-warn/news-story/cfdb521814fef5a1b6c686cd4c3a1f0e

Paul Alexander died yesterday, age 78. He contracted polio at age 6, in 1952. He’s spent much of his life in an iron lung. He died of Covid. I don’t have words for my disgust that hardly a person I know would do a thing to stop Covid reaching people like Paul, because it might interrupt their lifestyle. RIP.

"Scientists generally advocate for permanent ST, or “natural time,” as Gentry calls it because it better aligns people’s schedules with the sun year-round. “People who study the issue are all in agreement,” he said. This shouldn't even be a debate. Societies should run according to knowledge, not popularity. Like I always say, we never leave high school now.

Happy Birthday James :)

Was sitting in traffic the other day thinking about this again, how you have to actually run/idle a petrol or diesel engine even when you're not moving. It's such an obvious way in which you can see how rubbish the technology is. Once people drive electrics, most would never go back. Total silence, much more grunt, no pollution, continuous maximum power rather than having to rev the crap out of the thing and grind through gears.

People forget that it took 25 years for service stations to appear, when petrol and diesel cars were introduced. EVs launched with already hundreds of km of range, and people pretend that's a big issue. Given that an EV is perfectly fine right now even with the range they have, this sort of innovation will only make them even more spectacularly better than the rubbish ICEs we drive now. I don't say that to be provocative, combustion engines really are complete rubbish on every metric. The only defence people can mount for them is if they like the noise they make. Like marrying somebody because you like how they fart. We will look back and wonder why we stuck with the rubbish for so long.

Really good review of the BYD Seal here. Conclusion? BYD is offering us cars as good as luxury European marques, for the price of a Toyota. $80,000 cheaper. The ICE car industry is dead in the water.

Great to see. Cut the local Flat Earthers out entirely.

More views of the BYD mid-size SUV, the Seal-U. Will be available as both a full-EV, and plug-in hybrid. BYD are beautifully designed and engineered cars, at astonishing prices.

If you leave things to the market, the market happily turns your country into nothing more than a quarry for the rest of the world. Which is currently what we are. No leadership, for decades. Tony Abbott gleefully shut down our car industry. And destroyed our broadband network, while gutting revenue we get from mining. The list of clusterfucks is very long.

One Lib government left in Australia. Maybe not for long. Trashed Tasmania, just as they trashed the rest of the country. I would actually love a conservative government that *conserved* things. It’s in the name. Modern conservative parties are fake shopfronts for fossil fuel and mining barons.

Drove through Leura today. Had to dig out an older photo, to remember what it looked like before. Now it’s completely overrun by tourists. Almost mind-boggling numbers of cars and people, the streets 3 or 4 deep around the main street completely full of parked cars, and pedestrians swarming everywhere else like an ants nest. The place is destroyed, locals must run a mile on weekends. I’m sure some say it’s good for the economy. Until the economy trashes it and everybody leaves, as is happening in places like Venice.

Brilliant idea. Which means it won’t happen. The Australian brain is quick-set cement.

30% of people die. Note the link to Covid infection.

BYD have phenomenal engineering and design resources. Now they’ve released a supercar too. 0-100 in 2.36 seconds. I mention BYD a lot because they’re now the really big disruptor with EVs, they can get them to scale fast and at low cost. Even Tesla is struggling to compete.

What a stat, clothing adds more to global pollution than international flights and shipping combined. I have mostly the same clothes that I wore 20 years ago, sometimes even 30. I add to them only when they wear out.

Firstly, we should all travel so much less. Secondly, if it’s me, I’m now flying Airbus, Boeing is in serious trouble.

Review from a couple who bought a Tesla Model Y. I saw petrol at $2.50 a litre over the weekend. Anybody who pays that and is still anti-EV? People need therapy.

Call me simple, but I kinda feel like planes not falling out of the sky is what creates Boeing’s financial performance.

“Gee I love getting up for work in the dark”. Said nobody ever. Daylight stealing nearly over for another stupid year.

Singapore has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world. How did it do it? Public housing, built by the government. Every newlywed is offered a cheap apartment, on a 99-year lease. 80% of the country now lives in these apartments. They can be sold with certain conditions, and make good profits, so they're not ghettos only for the poor. And because each younger person is offered an apartment at the cheap price, those sales don't exclude young people from home ownership. And people look after them and decorate them beautifully because they know they can make great money from them. The only way housing is ever affordable is if government is the main property developer.

Together with 'range anxiety' for EVs, many have battery anxiety, thinking they'll be up for thousands to replace faulty batteries. Both myths originating in social media slogans. EV batteries last way longer than you will ever own the car, soon up to 6 million km. And if anything goes wrong with them they're warranted for 160,000km for most EVs, though even that warranty is for them to still have more than 70% capacity, not for them to be unusable. https://nickelinstitute.org/en/blog/2022/march/four-million-mile-battery-is-now-a-reality/

The beauty of climate change is that it gives you the option of being fried (on land), or poached or boiled (at sea).

“It’s not like we’re breaking records by a little bit now and then,” Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, said. “It’s like the whole climate just fast-forwarded by fifty or a hundred years.” Researchers say if this doesn’t turn out to be a 1-2 year anomaly, it could mean global warming is accelerating well beyond their predictions. And their predictions were already very bad.

Electrified pretty much everything here a couple of years ago already. Shifted heating to heat pumps more than 5 years ago. Financially it’s the smartest thing we’ve ever done, it increased our disposable income by nearly $10,000 per year. The CBA knows household electrification is where investment is going, in the trillions.

Here come the renewables, doing what they do. Make things cheaper.

When even your own family see through you.

Senator Alex Antic. I used to go to barbershops at the age he’s talking about here, and it wasn’t to get product-saturated wanky hairdos while sipping beers, drinking barista coffee and playing Playstations. Just to get a haircut, not to bond against cultural marxists and commies. I thought being a male teenager was boring when I was a male teenager. Imagine living your whole life as one.

Chinese EV makers and Tesla are crushing traditional car makers. Honda and Nissan, arch enemies, working together now on EV development. Japanese car makers have been ridiculously and surprisingly slow to move on EVs. Now it’s panic time. Like I’ve often said, this is Kodak time for the car industry. Kodak, the company that thought digital photography was a fad. It filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

This is where our fun lifestyles are actually made. In factories in Asia. Asia graduates more engineers than the West graduates people in all disciplines combined. Asia has been restored to the centre of the world it had for much of history. We’re living the delusions of the old British empire, long gone. Asia laughs at us.

In Asia they use strong government to drive investment and innovation. More than a decade ago they identified electric cars as the way of the future, and began developing EV batteries. They now pretty much own that entire space, while we sat here in the West with lazy delusions that ‘the market’ would do all this for us. The market is a fiction. Now other carmakers are scrambling to try to catch up. Australia used to have strong government and leadership, in the last-half of the 20th century. For the past 30 years we’ve mostly voted for morons who told us government was the problem. It turned us into the world’s quarry, producing nothing, and not investing even the pitiful returns we get for those resources, back into Australia. Instead pissing it away in election-bribes as tax cuts, hoping we’d all run out to the shed with the money and start building EV batteries. The market (not) at work. While saluting British flags and pining for the old days of empire.

One for Kaye :)

This is the very good reason Council has kept the park closed for the past few months. Happening with lots of trees.

Some BYD cars are already cheaper than their petrol/diesel equivalents. And this trend is really accelerating, by 2027 EVs should regularly be cheaper than ICEs. It's absolutely beyond me why somebody would now buy a new petrol or diesel vehicle, and not at least buy a hybrid. With fuel at over $2/litre too, and hybrids and EVs offering so much more grunt to boot. https://www.fastcompany.com/91050391/battery-electric-vehicles-cheaper-gas-2027#:~:text=Battery%20electric%20vehicles%20will%20be,firm%20Gartner%20said%20on%20Thursday.

It’s taken several years to move away from the bullshit of lockdowns causing this surge in other diseases. To identify the main culprit, Covid, which compromises your immune system.

Happy Birthday :)

This poor kid wasn't vaccinated against Covid, because his parents worried he'd get myocarditis from the vaccine. He got that and a lot more besides, from Covid. https://www.straitstimes.com/life/triple-whammy-nine-year-old-boy-in-singapore-suffers-covid-19-myocarditis-and-stroke

Termites solved the problem of how to heat or cool your home, while at the same time keeping it full of fresh air. (Important in Covid times.) Air constantly flows through a termitarium wall, heating/cooling as it does, the walls act as a heat exchanger. Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery (MVHR) does a similar thing for a human house. Basically a fan installed through a wall, with a heat exchanger between the two ends to heat/cool the air as fresh air comes in and stale air is sucked out. Or it can be done as a full ducted system. So in winter for example stale warm air from inside is sucked out, leaving its heat in the heat exchanger to warm the fresh cold air coming in at the same time. And vice versa in summer. Passivhaus designs use MVHRs. They’re not expensive, and cost almost nothing to run.

“People dash from A to B very fast while other people dash from B to A very fast. People at C wonder what's so great at A that so many people from B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about B that so many people from A are so keen to get there." Douglas Adams

Agora Garden is a building in Taipei, now complete but with greenery still growing. The model shows what it will eventually look like when all the gardens have grown. It harvests rainwater, and the greenery blocks noise and cleans the air, as well as cooling the building. Have a close look at the model, what a pleasure it would be to live there. I love smart things, including the EV parked in front.

Like anything from Rupert, as factual as saying the moon is made of cheese. Our EVs cut our cost of car ownership almost in half, and they’re only hybrids. Paying virtually nothing for fuel and maintenance with an EV, with petrol now between $2-$2.50 per litre, makes this sort of article just clickbait. Complete shit-stirring nonsense.

I do understand the drivers of petrol cars like the sound of them. If gutless cars farting is your thing, that’s a fetish that’s legal. But diesels? They sound like tractors, no redeeming features at all. 

Only 3 vaccines provide lifelong protection, measles, rubella and yellow fever. They’re all produced from live virus, that is then modified (attenuated) to prevent it causing serious illness in you. I mention this because nearly every vaccine we take isn’t in this category, and needs boosters. Including your Covid vaccine. If you haven’t had boosters, which most Australians haven’t, you’re wide-open. Getting infected will damage you, possibly irreversibly. Infection is not attenuated, it’s an assault on your body.

As a part 2 to my other post about vaccination, have a look how far down the list the Covid vaccines are. Not because they’re bad vaccines, but because Covid is a bastard to control. If you’re not getting boosted at LEAST every 6 months, you’re again wide-open to taking years off your life. And government is only offering boosters to most every 12 months.

Rod decided to do his own road repairs, because his Ferrari kept bottoming-out (we all feel for him). Part of a trend that’s obvious everywhere. No money for councils to fix roads, the public and their 5-car families then blame the councils and mock the road workers, while refusing to pay any more rates or taxes. Rod like most is too stupid to realise that his half-arsed repairs here with gravel will likely cause accidents, for which he’ll be legally liable.

Happy Birthday🎊🎉

I remember when self-driving was considered a fantasy. Now any car with ‘adaptive cruise control’ (they call it that for legal reasons I think, to emphasise they still want the driver to be paying attention) can do a lot of this. My adaptive cruise control is never off on the highway and even often in urban traffic. It makes driving a lot safer and less wearing on the driver, and you use less fuel.

Shell also owns the big battery being installed at Wang.

This is the social media business model (not a joke, this is actually it). 1. Offer people a way to network socially. This is like social heroin for people, irresistible. 2. Transform that network into an economy of likes, a hierarchy of what’s most popular. 3. Harvest the data from that hierarchy of likes and sell it to advertisers. 4. Allow advertisers to pitch their ads precisely, according to the likes. 5. Weave together the social hierarchies with the products, with ‘influencers’. Like a giant networked Tupperware party. 6. Offer the platforms to publishers of content, who can then precisely target their information according to the same ‘like’ data. 7. At this stage users, advertisers and publishers are then locked together, mutually feeding each other. 8. Then gradually remove the original benefits offered to users, advertisers and publishers, and redirect them to the platforms and their shareholders. 9. So for example, users see less and less of their original social network, and ever-more targeted advertising and publications. You may have noticed this in your feed, how it increasingly begins to look like the classifieds and opinion pages in old newspapers. 10. Advertisers in the meantime have their rates increased massively, while the platform fails to prevent fraud and scams, meaning increasingly the ads don’t even target the intended users. 11. Publishers are forced to publish their entire work on the platform, with no links to anything external, so that the platform becomes the sole place they can publish. The platforms then control and monetise access.

You can see the real decline in use of petrol in the US now, as EVs multiply. Black line is latest year.

Sitting in the dark because of Daylight Stealing, and just noticed the morons have made the end-date not even the long weekend, which would be the logical time to do it. But then science and logic have nothing to do with this whole stupid mess.

From a (glowing) review of the BYD Seal from the UK. But here making the critical point that we in the West outsourced most of our manufacturing to China during the ‘free market’ delusions of the 1980s-early 2000s. And now, as he says, China are ‘really, really good’ at building things, including cars. Now the biggest producer of cars in the world, and still growing.

Here’s how to end Covid. Ventilate schools. Schools are the breeding ground for community spread, because the entire community is mixed there, in its kids, who then take it home. You can see it in the prevalence data for the UK, how kids have the most Covid. And the adults in the list? Most of them, the vast majority, catch it from kids. From schools. We don’t need to lock down the community, or even all wear masks, to end most Covid infections. We just need to get fresh air into classrooms. As we do for most commercial and public buildings already, with HVAC systems. Schools have ZERO measures for ventilation except windows. Which most teachers don’t open, and in winter it’s too cold. You need proper ventilation systems. Only a profoundly stupid and immoral society hasn’t done this already. It’s our children. Politicians have ventilation systems that give them 8 complete fresh air changes in parliament every *hour*. If we did that for schools, not only would we destroy Covid, we’d get rid of most colds and flu too. Adults get colds 2-4 times every year. Kids up to 10. All because the air in our schools is filthy. It costs the beloved economy tens of billions every year.

If your German is no good, what this diagram shows is the network of infrastructure needed to get energy into your car, for the current fuelling options. To the right of each car is the outputs (pollution). EVs at the top. Then hydrogen. Then biofuels. Then petrol/diesel. I think the message is clear. We’re using the hardest, most expensive and most damaging option right now. (P.S. for the EVs, not even the transmission tower or fast-charger shown is needed, if you charge using your own solar.)

Happy Birthday!!!🎉🎉🎉

Happy Birthday ‼️

If I said to you all of the Covid that still circulates in the community has its origins in one place, where would you guess that might be? A hint in the graph. We could fix Covid quickly, cheaply and with minimal disruption to anybody. Schools, like most other modern buildings, just need proper ventilation. That's it. That's all that's needed. And people will tell you we can't stop Covid, we need to learn to live with it. A slogan, and bullshit. Doing this would also dramatically reduce the 10 colds a year kids get, and 2-4 for adults. As well as wipe out most flu.

I think we’ve wasted so much time in health thinking about nutrition. Most of our health is due to the microbes in us and around us. But here’s where the two overlap. Eat porridge. Porridge is food for good microbes in your gut, and the flow-on benefits to your entire health are enormous. It’s also cheap, and very filling. It’s a ‘slow-release carb’, if we have to use dietary language, so also great for people who have to watch that part of their diet too. Some researchers think it’s the most critical thing you can do for your health, as described in this article. I looked further into the research and it stacks up. They say you need a good 100g (about a cup) a day to trigger the health benefits. You also lose weight because you’re just not hungry for anything else, all day, and because obesity is likely caused by bad microbes in your gut, which the porridge overwhelm by feeding the good microbes. Probiotics are too hit and miss, nobody knows what the best bugs are for a person. But porridge is like soil that lets the good ones grow by themselves.

Most large public and private buildings have full HVAC systems. Not just for heating and cooling, but to also supply continuous fresh air. The one glaring exception? Schools. This is our kids, how is this justifiable? Adding HVAC to schools would cost about 1% of what the infectious diseases that spread from them cost us every year. We could almost eliminate colds, flu, Covid, RSV etc. from our societies, if we did this.

And this calculation is done assuming people only have one (petrol) car in the gas and petrol home. Common sense will win this, it’s just a matter of time.

Cocoa prices. Happy Easter.

It feels like only this year that people were saying mega stadium gigs are a healthy thing. And silly me saying they vacuum all of the entertainment dollars out of the country.

Trump in a gay sauna with his bum on backwards. (Thanks to Mike Carlton.)

Stand up for what you believe in.

Alan Kohler making the brilliant point that fossil fuel export projects, which make us bugger all anyway, are hogging more than half of the workforce we need to build new homes and our renewable energy infrastructure. Both critically urgent. They need to be shut down, they're approved now using 'it creates jobs' as a justification. Infrastructure workers have far too much work right now, they don't need more jobs.

When this song came out I remember it being mesmerising for just about everybody. Very few knew who it was at first. Its influence also goes way further than many realise. This one song was the main inspiration for Michael Jackson's Thriller album, the one that made him the biggest act in the world. When visiting Queen recording this song, he said: 'That's where I want to be. That's what I want to do.' The bridge between black/funk and rock music. Queen's own Hot Space album tried to do the same, 2 years after this. Jackson beat them to the punch. Queen, as so often was the case, were there first. https://youtu.be/rY0WxgSXdEE?si=Xq2icSJWNaQlI-pk

It’s a stupendously beautiful day.

Barely 10% of Australians now smoke. That will be the future of ICE cars too.

The BYD hybrid ute will be up against the Ford Ranger hybrid, from this year. It'll be interesting to see the pricing on both. My guess is Australia is too stupid yet to realise a hybrid ute has more grunt than a petrol or diesel ute, and uses about half the fuel, but let's see. I think BYD is also doing a full-electric version for 2025.

The obsession with cash (usually just a tax-dodge so retailers can avoid paying GST) has a new challenge. Armaguard is now the only company left that moves cash around the country. And it's in trouble.

The big gas companies shipping our gas offshore? They paid $30 in tax, on over $58 billion of income last year. Feeling like suckers yet, Australia? Speed up renewables so we can kick these parasites out.

Ben Chilfley Dam, autumn. Social media warriors blame the Council, and say ‘it’s only on the edge of the dam’. The world is cooking. And is full of dumb cookers. Never swim with blue-green algae, unless you want motor neurone disease. You really don’t want motor neurone disease. Ask Stephen Hawking. Except he’s dead.

This is what the chassis of an EV looks like (in this case a BYD Seal). The battery forms the floor, and because it’s so low down in the car, you don’t really notice the weight. It’s weight higher up that impacts a car’s dynamics, because the weight has inertia and opposes changes in direction. It makes the dynamics of EVs pretty special, it’s really difficult to roll an EV for example, because of that low-down weight. Speaking of the Seal, it’s an absolute steal at these prices. A beautifully-engineered car, and a real luxury experience, at family car prices. And your fuel bill will go from $100 a week, to about $6, or even less. Zero if you use your own solar. You can also enjoy smoking Hiluxes, RAMS and Ford Rangers (and any other ICE) at traffic lights.

I’m so bored by rock stars and music more generally. Also why I’m so critical of gig culture. The reason we have no kids doing subjects like maths or science now is that all of our role models are fucking musicians. And it doesn’t change as people age, people well into middle-age and beyond are obsessed with their favourite bands and artists. I love music, but it has its place, and I’m not going to have the same interests in my mid-50s as I did when I was 17. The real heroes of modern life are engineers and scientists. I used to spend hours as a kid looking at photos of the different space missions. We went to space! Just staggeringly remarkable, even today. Doesn’t even register now, people are more excited by gigs. We’re trapped inside perpetual adolescence. It’s not just space travel, the technologies of the modern world are almost beyond belief. We awake from our gig slumber only to spruik technologies like petrol and diesel cars, technologies more than 250-years-old. Which is why kids don’t study science and maths. They have no role models there. Asia *is* passionate about these things, which is why they’re not only building the world we all enjoy, they’re going to be running it very shortly.

Happy Birthday, Kym!

Ah travel, the big dumb wrecking ball.

I have multiple friends struggling with bizarre health symptoms which their GPs have no idea about. Many GPs have no understanding of the sequelae of Covid infection, at all. Many seem to delight in telling their patients what a nothing it all is. Widespread unprofessional laziness, not even basic reading to keep updated on the research. Some of these friends will either die soon or be permanently disabled. I look at many pictures shared here of people living happy social lives, and watched the near-rapture of happiness when ‘normal’ life was allowed to return. I invite people who feel that’s the reality to meet with some of these people now experiencing terrifying symptoms, their bodies out of control. There are no treatments. Every infection brings you closer to being them.

Happy Birthday🎉

Next to the resurrection of Jesus, my favourite Easter story is traffic jams. Proof that doing a dumb thing once is no protection against doing it again. And again.

The sort of bullshit you see all over social media. Of course most mechanics ‘don’t want to touch EVs’, they don’t have a clue what to do with them. (And they rarely need fixing anyway.) Just as butchers don’t want to touch your electrical wiring. There’s a heavy concentration of absolute morons in the car community.

Running a superannuation system in parallel with a pension system is exactly the same as running a private health insurance system in parallel with a universal healthcare system (Medicare). A staggering waste of money, and hopelessly inefficient. We need to get rid of super, bolster the aged pension with the savings and reduce the age of eligibility back to 60, or even 55. And build tens of thousands of new public houses, outside the market. Super is really just a way to make older people eye-wateringly rich in retirement, at the expense of other taxpayers. Look at the graph. Right now Australia has enough money in superannuation to pay for the *entire* aged pension for more than half a century. And most of that money is going to people who are already wealthy. Taxpayers foot much of the bill through astronomical tax concessions that already cost more than the entire aged pension every year.

The NRMA’s new charger on the Nullarbor. The Tesla obviously arrived without going flat, no range anxiety there.

This is a social catastrophe that still has a long way to run. Cities and towns (including Bathurst) can’t even house essential workers. The standard idea that it’s all a problem of ‘supply’ isn’t right. It’s a lack of supply of *affordable houses*, something a market system has never been able to produce. Right now what are we doing to control inflation? Raising interest rates, which stops the building of houses. When asked on Q&A the other night, the panellists talking about housing actually all said they *didn’t* want house prices to drop, they just want to ‘moderate growth in prices’. Dropping house prices would crash the Australian economy. There’s only ever been one solution. Government has to build LOTS of affordable public housing.

In Norway, super doesn’t cost you a cent. Instead they set high rates for royalties for their oil production, and fund the entire scheme with that. Currently the scheme has about $450,000 per person saved, for every person in the country. It’s basically a hugely generous aged pension, rather than super. Australia has vastly more natural resources than Norway. We mostly give them away to foreign mining and fossil fuel companies. Because we’re lazy, and stupid. As a measure of just how stupid, we not only give our resources away. Foreign companies then sell them back to us, at highly inflated prices.

I fell asleep behind the wheel a few years ago, with the whole family in the car. (They were all asleep in the car at the time too, we’d had a very early start.) Thankfully we were only travelling slowly and ended up in the shrubs at the side of the road, with little damage. It’s one of the main reasons I love having semi-autonomous driving technology now, you never think it’ll be you who dozes off when driving. Now the car would alert me and take control, if it happened again.

One of the great reality checks coming for all societies is the delusional idea that retirement should be the time when you’re richest. In an ageing world, that’s a recipe for total disaster. Here’s the numbers for 8 countries, for the gap between the retirements they have planned, and the actual savings they have put aside to fund them. In 2015 that gap was already $70 TRILLION dollars. By 2050 it will be $400 TRILLION. $9 trillion for Australia, that’s over 5 times greater than our entire annual GDP. The ever-shrinking number of younger workers are already overwhelmed, it’s going to get a LOT worse for them yet. Societies simply can’t afford this, they won’t survive.

Alex I have some song and prop suggestions for your next gig. Throw in some moonshine on the back of the pickup.