June 2024

This is a brilliant video. Renewables, which are near-100% efficient, don’t need to replace all of the energy fossil fuels produce. They only need to replace 20-30% of that energy. Fossil fuel technologies are so hopelessly inefficient (‘rubbish’ as I often call them, because they really are), that 70-80% of the energy they burn is never used. It’s lost as heat and pollution.

Cars destroyed city life. Barcelona is just one city fighting back. This is what cities used to be like. Now they’re loud, the air is filthy, and vehicles dominate everything. When Bathurst launched a ‘Streets as Shared Spaces’ program to make minor changes to reduce the dominance of cars, you’d have thought the world was coming to an end. Ditto for the 15-minute city idea, which is designed to prevent the need for so much moving around by locating the things people need near where they live. Social media loons and the Pauline Hansons of the world turned it into some ludicrous conspiracy about locking people in their suburbs.

Another person asked me this week when I was going to stop wearing a mask. I wanted to ask them when they were going to grow a fucking brain, but can’t because they’re now home sick.

It’s all NSW Government money, Paul, the people of NSW. Not National Party money. Though that is how they run their novelty cheque grant program when in government.

Travel isn’t about seeing the world. You can do that with photos. It isn’t about experiencing the world either, because tourists don’t experience the world. They’re tourists, they don’t live in the places they go to. You can’t ‘experience’ a place, by visiting it. Like saying you can get to know somebody by shagging them. It’s about a pissing contest, a rivalry. At home. The most popular travel places (Japan right now for example) ‘trend’, just like shoes or TV shows trend. A status game, like everybody buying Hiluxes. It’s turning every location into a theme park. Western culture has zero - nada, zilch - understanding of place.

‘Manspreading’. Sitting with your legs spread is actually much healthier for your hip joints. When you’re sharing a tight seat, sure, put the legs together. But men sit like that naturally because that’s the way the body knows you should be sitting. Women are trained not to do it from a young age, because it’s considered ‘unladylike’. (If a woman sitting with legs apart makes you think of sex, you’re probably always thinking about sex, and that’s the actual problem.) It needs effort to force the legs together, and hurts the hips. If you sit at a desk a lot, you will tend to get very tight hips because having your legs together all day forces the hips to work the wrong way. If you sit with your legs at about 11 and 1 position (on a clock), you’ll also find your posture is more effortlessly upright.

It’s NSW money, Paul. It didn’t belong to the ‘former NSW government’. It wasn’t a gift from them or the NSW Nationals. Unless we want to start calling the Sydney Opera House the NSW Labor Opera House?

Human beings are creatures of desire. Not just for other human beings, but for all things and anything. They pretend to be rational or objective or any of those other words, but in reality it’s all desire. Objectivity is itself a desire. Those desires inevitably clash, leading to violence. The default state of all human groups and societies is violence. Not because individual people are violent in nature, but because we desire. And those desires clash. People who feel themselves above this violence are simply in a position of privilege, their desires are being fulfilled, at the expense of others. The greatest violence always coexists with the greatest peace. When you work in government, a much maligned job, this is your daily bread. Mediating peoples’ desires. Speaking of which, it’s Monday morning, and time to go and do that all again, for another week.

Japanese carmakers are making a motza with hybrids, which is why they keep spruiking them. Mostly targeting the mental illness of 'range anxiety'. Don't be fooled though, they're using the money to tool up for full-EVs. Good hybrids are wonderful vehicles, I have two. But driving a hybrid gives you a real appetite for a full-EV, because the petrol engine is like a ball and chain around the car's performance and efficiency. It's like eating an ice cream cone with one scoop of deluxe ice cream, and one scoop of cheap ice cream. It all tastes pretty good, but you want that cheaper scoop out of the cone as soon as possible.

If you want a taste for how AI is doing world-changing things, meet Phonely. An AI switchboard, that can answer calls, and have real-time conversations with people who call, redirect them to the required people etc. It can also learn and improve with every call. But here's the mind-boggling bit. It can answer one MILLION calls, SIMULTANEOUSLY. No more queues. Imagine what that could do for places like Centrelink.

Put this date in your diaries, and use it to have a barbecue, or something else useful.

In China, some cities are now almost completely silent, because everybody is driving EVs. I don’t think we recognise what a profound change that is. Plus the air is beautifully clean. Here it is, up close. https://www.tiktok.com/@fcohen/video/7312417846120697130

Top Gear is the home of petrolheads. One of their original hosts is now calling out the ongoing, deliberate campaign to try to undermine EVs, funded by fossil fuel and car companies and their associated media outlets. As Goebbels said, repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth for people. He counted over 150 articles in succession in the UK press slamming everything about EVs. It’s a deliberate media campaign by the same fossil fuel and car companies, to try to protect their business. But it works, all the bullshit they put in these stories becomes the anti-EV ‘facts’ people post here every day, like numpties. Thankfully it hasn’t stopped people wanting EVs in Oz. They’re just buying hybrids instead, for now, sales of those is exploding. They’ve been spooked, but not shifted.

When a nation's public health departments are replaced with kidults whining about their missed dining out, gig and travel opportunities.

Happy Birthday!

The paperclip could be wise.

It’s like they all face the same problems.

We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas. The fact this hasn't happened before in our lifetimes makes the cause obvious. But you're not allowed to say it. It's Covid. Either people with it, or people with damaged immune systems from it, catching other things. OPEN THE WINDOWS.

This is such important research, with implications that go well beyond day care. @[100062898426616:2048:Ben] and @[1748499329:2048:Jane] are right here on Facebook, if it's of interest. Humans are social creatures, it is I think their most fundamental characteristic. Once you see that you can't unsee it. So much of what we call adult life is humans being social creatures, hidden underneath fancy adult names. And in particular in the modern world, continuously recreating their high school social lives, without realising. https://theconversation.com/worried-about-sending-your-baby-to-daycare-our-research-shows-they-like-being-in-groups-220658

Review of the BYD hybrid (Sea Lion 6), just released in Australia. The reviewer was almost embarrassed that he couldn't find one thing wrong with the car. Superb engineering, amazing price. About 90 km electric-only range. Over 1100km as a hybrid. The RAV4 should be worried, a person will need zero fuel for this car unless going on long trips. And it's a much higher spec than a RAV4, into luxury territory.

It's Spring in Arizona. And 46 degrees C. We're cooking, people. Anybody who says we aren't is a moron and wants to destroy your kids' future. Call it out.

The Murdoch press have been hammering the ‘the EV bubble has burst’ rubbish all week. But Australians are still shifting to EVs, fast. Hybrids are EVs. And sales of hybrids have exploded. They’re using them as a transition option.

You’ll never be popular criticising mad delusional obsessions. Travel is our greatest. Just unpack the logic here. Travel destroys locations, so the travel press publish new ‘undiscovered’ locations (that travellers will now rush to destroy too). All while complaining that too many travellers ruins the travel experience. I mean, it’s peak dumb, right?

Just another moron rock star. This interview was from 2021. Covid karma caught up with him. He’s just had 2 forced weeks of rest following collapse from ‘physical exhaustion’. He joked he’d been ‘hanging upside down’. Suggesting he has POTS, a serious, sometimes deadly, side-effect of Covid infection that being upside down helps to relieve the symptoms of. People flock to gigs now, not even aware that behind the scenes the stars are spending thousands to protect themselves from Covid, while letting the fans catch it with abandon. But we live in a teenage society, where rock stars are about the only leaders people now recognise. As I say, we’re at peak dumb.

The spread of potentially pandemic H5N1 continues at alarming pace. Now it’s in rodents, which is seriously bad news. Pandemic flus kill up to 50% of people infected with them, if they take off. I’m sure we’ll respond with demands for our freedom to travel, go to coffee shops and gigs. I miss grown ups.

A provocation. I think Cold Chisel are probably the greatest band of all time. The greatest songwriters at least. Unlike The Beatles or Elvis or any of the other huge names, the songs found a way to marry white and black music in the most authentic way. White music is famous for its melodies, black music for its rhythms and grooves. If you listen to a Chisel song you find these traditions blended in the most seamless way. It’s what Australian rock maybe does. (AC/DC did the same thing with Chuck Berry, so well that many never noticed.) The huge English acts like the Beatles, or Elvis in the US, used ‘eclecticism’ instead, where they emulate both styles in their songs. It’s all a bit arm’s-length, like tribute acts. The English have their eccentricity too, which became a bit of an affectation (and is heavily part of the allure of The Beatles). But it’s a bit shallow somehow, pantomime culture. The Americans and Brits also have their folk traditions, terribly earnest and a bit dull and serious (evolving into a whole swathe of existential angst artists), riffing on all of the problems of their cultures. But it becomes just a soundtrack to those problems, a bit wallowing. Hard not to see this as an offshoot of Australian culture itself. Always hybrid, always mixed, a penal colony abandoned on the other side of the known world at the time. The culture is intrinsically one of osmosis, not the battling group identity wars of other places on the planet. Listen to Chisel songs and you’ll hear it. Gorgeous melodies, but with a groove too. But married in a way that is totally seamless, into something very new. Not ebony and ivory living side by side, as the Brits and Yanks might say. A hybrid osmosis of both. Australian.

"Lynn Parramore: A recent Gallup poll says that 59% of Americans believe the pandemic is over. What’s the actual situation? Phillip Alvelda: By no means is it over. It is a continuing pandemic that most nations are not only failing to address — but are addressing more and more poorly. LP: So most of us are currently living in a false reality? PA: That’s correct." https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/from-long-covid-odds-to-lost-iq-points-ongoing-threats-you-dont-know-about

Open the windows in schools (and give them proper HVAC too). Schools are the engine rooms of sickness in the community. How is this difficult to understand? This is an entire generation under threat. Fuck what a society.

Very real, driven by social media from extremist groups in the US and State-sponsored groups from Russia. Your local Council has to deal with this every day now.

Dr Phillip Alvelda.

Olympus Mons, largest mountain in the solar system. It’s on Mars. 25 km high. That’s 3 times the height of Mount Everest.

The RATs circled in blue tested mucus blown from the nose into a tissue. The RAT in the middle tested the same person the standard way, by swabbing nose and mouth. Most workplaces have reverted to absolutely hopeless sick leave ideas. Like ‘more than 2 days and you need a doctor’s certificate’, and ‘come back to work if you’re symptom-free’. The latter is the idiot advice from NSW Health, which ignores that you can quite happily spread Covid while having no symptoms at all. The former is laughable, it can take weeks to even get an appointment with a GP. Go back to requiring a negative RAT to be back at work. (Or better multiple negatives, over the course of 1-2 days.) RATs measure how infectious you are. If we don’t do this, we just keep infecting more and more people.

I wonder how often people pause and think about how many things they love are only loved because they're the things everybody else loves too. The love is the joy of fitting in, and the release of anxiety from being different to others.

Happy Birthday you.

Happy Birthday :)

Did you know that Pink’s tour of Australia, about the same time as Taylor Swift’s, sold almost twice as many tickets?

Linda Ronstadt, performing in her younger days. Linda’s just had Covid. It damaged her brain so badly she was unable to speak.

Nap time, New York school. 1911. Notice how rugged up the kids are, likely winter. Keeping them healthy was considered more important. Back when grown ups ran the world.

Happy Birthday! 🎉🥳🎁

We’re gradually reaching the use by date of ‘living with Covid’. When even rock stars and their special protections aren’t enough to keep a person safe. Jon Bon Jovi had Long Covid too, he hasn’t been on a stage in a long time.

Thoughts? Do we still do thoughts?

Happy birthday!

Here’s a brains trust. Amazed they figured out which end of the cigars to put in their mouths.

How do you like your humans boiled, medium or hard? Soft is already over.

I’m sure Adam will nod! I did a comparison of the energy used by leaving a reverse cycle heat pump on all night, to heat the house (blue circle), and leaving it off at night and then turning it on in the morning to heat the house (yellow circle). Leaving it on all night used less than half the energy only turning it on in the morning used. Heat pumps run even more efficiently when they’re not constantly having to dramatically heat or cool the air. They ‘condition’ the air, which is why they’re called air conditioners, not ‘heaters and coolers’. Or as the great analogy Adam gave me says, you don’t just turn the fridge on when you want to cool your drink down. They have thermostats and inverters too, which means they regulate themselves - they automatically adjust how much energy is needed. Leaving the heat pumps on constantly also warms or cools the walls and other objects in your home, which further reduces the energy needed to heat or cool the home at hot or cold times. In winter the warm walls re-radiate the heat at night, or in summer the cooler conditioned air stops heat outside building up in the walls during the day. Heat pumps are a wonder of the world. They’re up to 600% or more efficient, compared to well below 100% for everything else. Nobody should really be using anything else for heating and cooling now, unless they’re living in a tent. Including burning wood, which is a disaster for air pollution and as configurable as a brick.

This is an image of the entire internet, captured in 2005.

The Murdoch press last week was posting stories about EV sales falling off a cliff. That’s because it lies, compulsively. EVs are booming. Glad to see BYD making inroads too, the Seal has been popular. They’re only just getting started here.

British elections are some of the most entertaining in the world.

People who swear that the best music is ‘subjective’ can’t explain manias. Where millions of people suddenly all swarm around a single act. That’s not subjective, when everybody likes the same thing. Humans don’t desire things, they desire what other people desire. It’s a social, competitive process, they want to be part of the in-crowd. You can see the same with anything. Take interior design. In the 1960s and 70s, the widespread ‘subjective’ view was that strong colours were best. Then the very same people in the 1980s and 90s swore it was washed-out pastels. Then in the 2000s, suddenly the very same people were all about monochromatic whites and greys. There must be an objective reason these clear patterns happen. If it was just subjective, you wouldn’t get these huge swarms of unified desire. And there is, what we like is a social process of fitting in with the crowd. It has nothing to do with the things we say we like.

Cars on a dock in China this week, ready for export. This is going to disrupt and possibly even destroy much of the Western car industry. Any damage is richly deserved.

You can get the BYD Sea Lion for $5,000-$10,000 less than the top of the range RAV4. It also has twice the power, can do nearly 100km completely electric, has a much higher interior spec, is bigger, and can do 0-100 in 5.9 seconds. You can see why local car companies are scared.

Alan is Trauma Director at Nepean Hospital, works at Royal Hobart and is also a clinical Associate Professor at USyd. Knows his shit. At a time the population is ageing rapidly and needs exponentially increasing amounts of healthcare, the whole system is on the brink of collapse. And getting worse, at speed. ‘Living with’ Covid was a deliberate decision, *knowing* we have these challenges already. Society is falling apart, ask anybody working on essential services.

“…a social trend of “petro-masculinity” in which men flamboyantly use fossil fuels to express their opposition to social progress.” Also the more aggressive style of driving the vehicles encourage that’s mentioned here is on full display on the Bathurst-Lithgow road every day. It’s a daily wankpanzer derby.

When the kids were younger I remember reading the debates about co-sleeping with young kids. This is what you can expect if you do 🙂

(Kris is a climate scientist.) It’s summer now in Greenland. The average temperature in summer in Greenland is about 7 degrees C. Right now it’s 15 degrees C. The enormous quantity of ice in Greenland was already melting at record speed. Rain will accelerate that melting hugely. If all of the ice in Greenland were to melt and flow into the oceans, sea levels would rise by 7 metres. That’s all our coastal cities underwater, about 85% of Australia’s entire population.

Wyoming. Remember this every time somebody complains about maybe having to cut back on their take away food and travel spending, to pay more rates.

Many young people I speak to think Biden is a disaster, because he’s ‘old’. (Like that’s the worst thing a person can be.) Biden may be a bit slow to speak these days, but there’s a sharp brain and decades of experience there. I’ll leave it to you to judge Trump’s brain, here.

People will die rather than go against what everybody else is doing. We never leave high school.

"So, if we were to eliminate the diphtheria, pertussis, mumps, measles, and polio vaccines, normalize the spread of all these viruses, use a year in which mortality was high for our analysis, and adjust for population, we would expect 43,079 Americans to die each year, of all five combined. 43 thousand deaths from diphtheria, pertussis, mumps, measles, and polio, which we successfully prevent each year, and consider it a great achievement to do so. Last year over 75,603 Americans died of COVID. An undercount." Julia Doubleday

Thanks to @[1112555254:2048:Dan] for the tip. A BYD Seal, an absolutely superb car which insiders liken to a Mercedes in quality, costs $50K in Australia. That's almost giving it away. In the EU and soon US, the price? Up to $90K. They've put huge tariffs on Chinese EVs, to protect their car industries. Now's a brilliant time to be Australian, because we don't have any bloated, entitled, heavily-subsidised car industries to protect. Don't listen to the BS from them about China 'subsidising' EVs, and therefore we need tariffs. Of course they're subsidising EVs, just as Western governments have always heavily subsidised petrol and diesel. That's why big utes sell well here right now, because they get huge government subsidies. We need emergency speed to transition to EVs, and China is the world's best bet. And the cars are really superb, and outrageously cheap, if you live in Australia. They're also only just getting started. Ditch your bullshit combustion clunker at your next buy, completely rubbish technology from the day it was invented. Not only are you supporting a lazy and entitled industry, you're also paying more than $2/litre to offshore oil wells to fuel the bloody thing, killing millions with air pollution and helping incinerate the planet with climate change.

It appears Michael Mosley had moved to that concrete fence to find shade, and raise his legs. Suggesting he thought he was about to faint. Seems more and more like heat stroke or heat exhaustion. Brits are so often attracted to heat, like moths to a flame. Tragic that he got within metres of help.

Heat exhaustion is a horrible death. The blood thickens, kidneys fail, your muscles start to liquefy, the person becomes disoriented and confused, the heart stops. What’s tragic about it is sufferers rarely know this is what’s happening until much too late, as appears to have happened to Michael Mosley. The human body can only survive longer term within a very narrow temperature range. And unlike individuals, who can be cooled and treated if got to in time, the planet has no hospital. No pool it can jump into, to cool down. No IV fluids. This is what so many don’t understand about climate change. We only exist within a very narrow band of temperatures. Outside those, we’re all dead. And there’s no outside way to cool us down, we have to stop generating the heat now, from within. Like Mosley, we’re stumbling towards death, thinking it’s all just ‘lovely warm days’.

It’s difficult to see this as anything except an act of political suicide. There was a time in Oz when opposing climate change action won you votes. That had already passed at the last election, where the Liberals lost some of their blue ribbon seats because of their climate denialism. Many blue ribbon Liberals in those seats will be furious, the Teal vote should go up even further. It’s a desperate act from a desperate man. Plus what he’s offering is vastly more expensive, involves putting nuclear reactors in peoples’ communities, and will take decades to get beyond a brain fart, if it ever does.

Ooops.

One of the dumb things about the huge popularity of SUVs and utes is how hopeless they are in terms of wind resistance. They're about as aerodynamic as a brick, and you can see the difference on windy days for example, how much more fuel the car uses. The reason leading EVs look quite similar is that they're optimised for low air resistance. Sedans in general are far better for that. It also makes them quieter inside, much less wind noise. EV sedans are the best of the lot.

The clear winner is split systems. I had all our gas heating and its ducting removed. The ducting was obstructing the subfloor ventilation anyway. It was a ridiculously cumbersome system. The problem with ducted systems, even when attached to heat pumps (air con) is that you lose so much energy in the ducts themselves. And they need regular cleaning (which most never organise). I had a split system installed in every room instead. Was much cheaper as a bonus. Add solar and a battery, and that y-axis isn’t even needed. It’s costing us nothing to heat now. Add that heat pumps work more efficiently when you run them 24 hours a day, and why would you use anything else?

‘Female’ cyclist Molly Cameron. It’s not ‘transphobia’ to question what’s going on here. These are very dangerous times, when social movements mobilised through social media require you to accept the most ludicrous nonsense, and prevent anybody questioning why the Emperor is wearing no clothes by inventing ‘phobias’ as immediate criticism, like the person asking has a mental illness.

What right do we have to impose a million years of responsibility onto future generations? None at all.

Happy Birthday Alun, you're a fine-looking 110 year old :)

I don't even need to criticise travel culture. It does a good enough job on its own. https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/travel/2024/06/12/bali-tourists-australia-travel?ahe=662efd944398edbb2d8f4d85736c4bb830fa6116abf076eb6d8317fd70698f95&acid=3260892&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020240613&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Adestra&lr_hash=

'The spicy cough' is a phrase for morons, incapable of adult responsibility.

Work is putting on a Greek lunch. "Bring your own toga." Togas are Roman. I might keep that to myself until after the feed.

Looks good?

Fellow residents of Lithgow, a ‘dying town’. What treasures await us. (Thanks @[1211100269:2048:Adam].)

Running the reverse-cycle units 24 hours a day activates the thermal mass of the building. In winter the heat produced is stored in the walls and other materials of the house, where it can release back into the house. In summer the cooling cools the same materials, preventing heat accumulated from outside being released into the house. Overall it thermoregulates the home. Homeostasis. Keeping a steady temperature, rather than cycling between extremes, which uses much more energy. Many only turn the air con on when they want to heat or cool. They can do that, but that’s not how they work the most efficiently. Also better for your body, which has to thermoregulate to keep you alive, as Michael Mosley tragically discovered. Living in a building with a steady temperature makes that job a lot easier for your body, so you’re healthier. No other form of heating/cooling (really temperature regulation) achieves this like heat pumps. Wood fires vastly overheat a space, putting stresses on your own thermoregulation in your body. Running gas heating 24 hours day will send you bankrupt. Running heat pumps constantly actually makes them cheaper to run. Again, it’s a wonder of the world. Like EVs. Science and engineering kinda rock. Humans are too stupid to use them.

Happy Birthday!!

What’s the most accurate KPI for stupidity? Travelling never disappoints, still the gold standard.

China will now do what Tesla’s Board and shareholders refused to do. $84 billion is beyond a sick joke for any CEO. Tesla’s EV development has stalled while this dipshit has been off prosecuting his culture wars on Twitter. China has been taking over the EV space without him. The Tesla Board and shareholders are asleep at the wheel. Tesla make brilliant cars, but they’ve missed the opportunity to be a truly mass automaker now, unless something radical changes.

Enjoy your birthday! 🎂🎈🥳

Have been running the reverse-cycle units (heat pumps in techno language) 24 hours a day this (cold) winter, as an experiment. You can see in the yellow circle that overnight, in a cold Lithgow winter, they use hardly anything. Between 0.5-1kW draw, all night. The bigger peaks are the jug, toaster and induction cooktop, making breakfasts. Once you get the house to a temperature its thermal mass helps to avoid the need for constant heating or cooling. This allows the heat pumps to operate in their most efficient range i.e. to do not much work at all. It helps to have double-brick, a lot of thermal mass. But in general heat pumps will always use less energy if you keep the inside temperature pretty constant, with half-decent insulation so you’re not just heating the backyard. As an obvious bonus, you get great comfort 24 hours a day.

If you have a wood fire, this stuff is also going into your lungs. And those of your neighbours.

10 in Lithgow now, the roll-out really ramping up. Most locals will charge at home. Huge list of whingers in the comments. They can go and buy some $2/litre happiness to cheer up.

By my count there are about 40 petrol bowsers in Lithgow. There are now 10 EV chargers. Some may think that means we need a lot more EV chargers. But most local drivers in a town won’t use fast-chargers, they’ll charge at home. Unlike petrol or diesel, where EVERY fill-up has to be at a bowser. This is one of the most basic things about the shift to EVs that many don’t understand.

When you back a cause, make sure you understand what you’re backing. Think, don’t emote.

I know many people allowing themselves to get repeated Covid infections, thinking they’re getting more immune with each infection. They’ve been lied to, and it will shorten their lives. If you don’t control infections the pathogen continues to evolve. The blue diagram shows all the ways that happens. The graph shows what’s happening right now, because we’re not stopping the infections. The red circle is when we were stopping infections early in the pandemic. You can see the virus evolution was below the trend line, flattening out and heading for extinction. Then from late-2021, we decided to ‘live with’ the virus i.e. let people catch it, over and over. The blue circle is what happened next. Mutations well above the trend line, and still accelerating. This is why getting Covid over and over won’t make you immune to it. It does the opposite. It keeps evading our immunity with these mutations, making immunity even further away, with each infection. And it trashes your immune system with every infection, leaving you wide open to a whole range of other dangerous diseases. Which is exactly what we’re seeing right now. I’ve never seen the community this sick. This will only get worse, not better. Life expectancies are in decline, for the first time in a century. That’s your life, getting shorter with each infection.

This is a catastrophe that parents, schools and societies as a whole need to act on now. And fast. This is an entire generation. If you line up behind deliberately infecting kids, over and over, which cornflakes box did you get your morals and brains out of?

What’s caused the ‘cost of living crisis’? What’s not well understood is that our lifestyles have ALWAYS been expensive. Western lifestyles are the most expensive lifestyles in human history, they’re ruinously expensive in terms of resources. So why a sudden crisis? Because those costs were privatised. Decades of privatising costs that previously our government paid for us. Now we pay the costs for housing, health, education, energy, water, roads, etc. etc. Costs that used to be heavily subsidised by the governments we set up, to make things cheaper through economies of scale.

Another window into how we never leave high school. I joined a FB group that talks about energy efficiency in homes. Over 120,000 members. Some useful information gets discussed there. I contributed my experiment at running reverse-cycle units continuously in winter, to use less energy. The admins of the group, who love that the 120,000+ people there worship them as gods of energy efficiency, were so angry that my story violated the advice they’d been giving everybody for years, that they blocked all of my posts to the group. Social media is a dumb sewer, where people compete for popularity (likes) the way they did at school. It’s transforming our entire world into a school playground. Some engineers on the group contacted me privately to say how much they enjoyed my posts, and they were trying the same things too. Incidentally the advice the admins of that group were giving people is to leave your house cold for 18 hours a day, and only run the heating when you’re at home and not in bed. The lead admin even tried to tell me that a reverse-cycle unit works most efficiently when it has to heat freezing cold rooms, or cool stinking hot rooms. (Doing either of those things runs them flat out, and absolutely gulps energy.) I left the group :)

You may have fancy things in your town, but I bet a chocolate factory isn’t one of them. Was it 14,000 TONNES of chocolate a year, Tanya?

All of the variants of Covid to date. Still growing fast.

The two greatest cultural forces of the past 70 years.

There are 55 GW of generation capacity in the Australian electricty grid. At current prices, it costs $25 billion per GW to build a nuclear plant. To make our electricty system nuclear would therefore cost over a TRILLION dollars. You can see why I say it will never happen. It’s just a fantasy story, to drum up votes.

A good reason to not use ducted systems. You can clean them, but most don’t bother. And it’s a bugger of a job, or will cost you money to get somebody else to do it. And the ducting absorbs energy. (Not our house in the picture - we got rid of all the ducting.)

Portable heat pumps you can install yourself by just placing in the window frame are now being rolled out in New York. Designed to allow renters to have access to reverse-cycle air conditioning for heating and cooling. But would be great for anybody.

Notice that this farm is owned by a company in the Philippines. People offshore aren't stupid, they know renewables is the gold mine asset to own right now. Meanwhile in Straya, we're going to ANOTHER election trashing renewables, and giving hundreds of billions to other countries, to provide our energy. Like gas, they'll end up selling our own renewables back to us, at huge prices.

This was Saudi Arabia’s first major oil well, in 1938. We know the rest. The Saudis make up to a billion dollars per DAY from oil. They’ve been selling it for 70 years. Just imagine how much money that is. Right now the world is at another 1938 moment. Where the source of our energy will be decided for at least the next century. And who’s the Saudi Arabia of 2024, who has the world’s largest reserves of that new energy? Australia.

When petrol and diesel cars were first released, they were hugely expensive. Way beyond the reach of ordinary people. There were also no service stations, for 25 years afterwards. If social media had existed then, no doubt thousands on there would have been talking about how horses were still the way to go, that petrol and diesel would burn you to death, and have no range, unlike a horse. All social change is the same. Nobody wants to leave the comfort of the status quo, until it’s forced upon them. Ever noticed the power measurement for cars? ‘Horsepower’.

I’ve wasted so much time at physios over the years. ‘Stretch and strengthen’. The thing is, muscles are not tight. They’re not like like bits of leather, or springs, that need to be stretched out. Nor are they weak by default, unless you ‘work’ them. They’re living electrified tissue, woven into your nervous system. Muscles tightEN. Verb. The brain tightENS them, according to need. If you try to bend down without allowing your legs to bend too, you will feel tightness. That’s not because your muscles are tight, it’s because your brain is trying to stop you falling forward onto your noggin. If you live in very physically restricted ways, say hunched over a keyboard staring at a computer screen, your tissues will adapt to that way of doing things. That doesn’t mean your muscles are then tight. They’re doing exactly what you asked them to do. You don’t need to stretch them back to less-tight. You need to stop narrowing into that computer screen.

Mt Piper nuclear power station announced today. NSW Premier ruled out any nuclear in NSW (Victoria the same). Game over. Vote for somebody who isn't a fool.

Going well so far.

So travel junkies, at what point does it register that YOU are the problem?

We haven’t been to trivia nights in over 4 years. This nonsense yesterday made me think about it. The reason we stopped going to trivia was simple, it’s not Covid-safe. Objectively, scientifically, you should not catch Covid. It’s a lethal virus, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t kill you straight away. It will, eventually. But the actual objective reality of things is not how societies work now. The reason a politician can suggest something as manifestly idiotic as nuclear power stations for Australia, is because few pay any attention to the facts of anything. We don’t live as if facts matter. We just socialise. Society became adolescent. No responsibility, no concern that the right thing be done. Just ‘fun times’. ‘Living your best life.’ No adult sense of responsibility to fix the shit in the world, just vote for whoever promises you endless uninterrupted fun. Yeh, not me. I finished high school nearly 40 years ago. I enjoyed it, but I was enjoying adult life even more. Until high school life now took it over as well. That’s our culture now. We’re cooked.

Seeing people I know sensing something is really wrong with all of this repeated illness. They still play the ‘it is what it is’ adolescent fatalism card, but you can see in their eyes they know something isn’t right.

Do you remember Tony Abbott's string-and-tin-can NBN being fact-checked multiple times? It made no difference, we still got it (it's still being fixed now). And the facts clearly say nuclear is a stupid idea. Peter Dutton has no intention of building nuclear power stations. He just wants something that will mop up the votes of those who want to address climate change, but don't want Labor. He'll be long retired before they even turn a sod (which they won't).

Heh.

When people ask ‘when will you stop wearing a mask?’, I say ‘when are you going to stop getting sick?’

It should still amaze us that a modern air conditioner can provide about 6 times more heat or cold energy than it uses in electricity. 600% efficient. That’s AMAZING. We’re so blasé. It provides 6 times more energy than it uses.

There’s an avalanche of disease out there. And now no antibiotics or other medications available to treat it. Sick and carer’s leave is up 60% across the community. 60%!! Can people not see the complete madness this is? This is all down to ‘living with’ Covid. Karma has arrived for our stupidity.

The energy system is falling apart. Years of delays has led to this. The idiots who did the delaying will blame renewables, even though it’s fossil fuels that are failing, not renewables. Why we invested in our own solar and a battery. We have some energy security in our micro-grid at home, when the main grid has issues. And we don’t heat with gas. Some might think that’s a bit pricey. You know what’s pricey? Overseas trips. And filling expensive wankpanzer utes with fuel. And constantly eating out, buying take away and going to gigs. Choices.

Vale to a wonderful Canadian, Dorothy! You can always tell a great actor by the fact they’re totally believable in every role they play. They become the character so seamlessly. Sutherland was like that, playing sweet Mr Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, or an evil bastard in Hunger Games, or the film Hawkeye in MASH. He always was the character.

Satoshi is a friend. An emergency doctor working in Sydney hospitals. He’s a great example of how increasingly it’s those who take Covid seriously (including by masking) who are carrying the burden of those who don’t. Doing the work of the people who are repeatedly sick, and can’t be at work. The terror of those who won’t mask or take any precautions, because they don’t want to be different to everybody else, is behaviour learned in high school. It’s going to shorten their lives, and load good people like Satoshi up with impossible workloads.

Happy Birthday!

In the energy debates, lots of mention of 'baseload power'. The public is encouraged to believe this is the minimum amount of 24/7 power that is needed to keep society running. That's not baseload power. Baseload is demand, not supply. The load on the grid. It's in the name. Baseload is the amount of power consumers have to USE, to prevent the grid collapsing. Coal-fired power stations can't be switched off and on every night, they need to run constantly. If we don't use enough power, they're in serious trouble, and the stability of the grid collapses. That's also why 'off peak' rates were invented, to try to use the overnight capacity from the coal plants. They're big dumb dinosaurs, 18th century technology. A nuclear plant is just a coal plant with a reactor instead of a furnace. Still that same 18th century process of heating water to create steam, to drive a turbine, which generates electricity. They're even slower to ramp up and down when needed, than a coal plant. So we don't need 'baseload' power. It's a pain in the neck, an artefact of 18th century technology. We need energy delivered only when it's needed. And know what does that superbly? Renewables. You 'overbuild' (create much more than you need), because renewables are SO cheap. This gives you the capacity to turn them off and on as needed, to meet instant demand. And they are literally instant. Then you add some storage, though much less than people think (we're in bed when 'the sun doesn't shine', and wind blows 24 hours per day, and even more at night than in the day time).

The people who don't understand this think nuclear is a tremendous idea. It would also take 20 years for nuclear to be 'ready'. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/21/power-bills-could-rise-by-1000-a-year-under-coalition-plan-to-boost-gas-until-nuclear-is-ready-analysts-say

Work colleague who sits about a metre away from me was home sick with Covid this week. The boss came in and said ‘they have the spicy cough’. This idiot, childish phrase is offensive. Minimising the seriousness of what’s going on, like it’s some new flavour of Doritos, or KFC chicken wings. We don’t do it for malaria. Or HIV. Or Dengue Fever. It would be considered ridiculous. It’s exactly as ridiculous for Covid, which kills a lot more people than most of those other diseases. Grow the fuck up.

Australia has about 16 operating coal-fired power stations. The nuclear proposal is replacing these with 7 nuclear plants. Nuclear power stations don’t produce more power than coal-fired ones. So how do you replace 16, with 7? You don’t. The nuclear power stations proposed will only be able to generate about 10% of Australia’s electricty. At a cost of well over $100 billion. Let that sink in, the magnitude of stupidity in play here.

Who remembers themselves and friends getting pneumonia at all, as kids? Let alone twice in 8 weeks? This is Covid at work. Trashing kids’ immune systems.

Happy happy birthday! 🥳🎂

So Adam, was the final bowl to win the Australian Open by Aron Sherriff as good as bowling gets?

Tested the thermal mass of the house. I turned the AC off overnight, to see how well the house held the heat. It did brilliantly, dropped only a degree. The heat it stored yesterday was gradually released overnight. So my updated strategy now will be to run the AC all day (also when solar will make it zero cost), to heat the house so that it then carries that heat through the night, when I’ll give the units a rest. This may not work for all homes, our house is double brick and has a lot of thermal mass. But it should for many. It also wasn’t sub-zero last night so will re-assess when we get the next frost. This is the difference between heating/cooling your home, and keeping your home at a constant temperature. Those aren’t the same thing. The former leaves your house hot or cold for most of the day, using lots of energy to heat and cool it in short times. The latter is about achieving a homeostasis, using the house and the AC in partnership.

I know people don’t like discussing things like this, because they say it’s ‘politics’, and they don’t like conflict. But putting politics to one side, I’m genuinely curious how people can genuinely believe nuclear power is a good idea for Australia? Pretend all parties agree with it, ditch the team sports. Given that not only does it not add up in any way you look at it, but it would also create massive destruction to our energy system and destroy our action against climate change? All while costing an absolute fortune, we’d literally be paying hundreds of billions of dollars to destroy our own country? We have a HUGE advantage with renewables over the rest of the world. Why on Earth would we sell the family silver instead to buy in eye-wateringly expensive technology from somewhere else?

It can be very frustrating to not be allowed to comment on your own work publicly. But I can at least say it’s worth noting this amazing festival is put together by THREE PEOPLE. What reward do Council workers get for this sort of amazing effort? A constant kicking.

Lithgow Council pushing back hard here. And it’s a Nationals-led Council, in a LNP seat.

Nuclear power plants share something in common with the rubbish petrol and diesel engines I’m always so unkind to. They’re hopelessly inefficient. About two-thirds of the energy they produce goes straight up the chimney. Renewables are nearly 100% efficient. Nearly every kW of energy they produce can be used. Also why you need much less of them (at much lower cost) than these old dinosaur power plants.

One turn of these big wind turbines generates enough electricity to power 5 homes for a whole day. Only one rotation. Just one of these can power 5000 homes, day and night.

Astronaut Bruce McCandless II, on a space walk. Looks like he’s floating over the Earth, in zero gravity. But he’s actually falling, at huge speed. It’s just that he’s falling away from the Earth (sideways) as well, at the same time. Add those huge downwards and sideways speeds together, and you get - an orbit.

Humans act socially, always. Ask them individually what they think of nuclear power? They hate it. But make it the rallying cry for their team, their political party? How great is nuclear power! Peter Dutton knows this, it’s the same strategy he used with The Voice. He’s just picking a fight, because fights energise the teams. Never mind that it’s a total engineering, economic and scientific fantasy, that will never happen. The teams don’t pay attention to all that nerdy stuff.

I'm amazed at the stupid things people fall for, with scammers. Just keep your finances simple, never ever respond to anybody canvassing you for investments or anything else. Having said that, Australian banks are also criminally good at avoiding any liability for scams. That will need to change. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-23/canberra-woman-loses-million-dollars-to-scam-banks-regulation/104010742

Only 60% of Australians think dangerous climate change is caused by humans.

Who cares what voters think? Why is that even relevant? Do we let passengers fly planes?

Anthony Albanese has a real opportunity right now, to steal the debate. To do what Saul Griffith, the Australian engineer who also advised Joe Biden, suggested he do 2 years ago. To heavily subsidise Australian households to electrify everything. To drive their costs of living down now, TODAY. Not wait 15-20 years for some nuclear fantasy that won’t happen, that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and only drive prices up anyway. TODAY. Like we already did here at home, nearly 2 years ago. There’s no cost of living crisis here, and I earn less than just about everybody I know. Have a read. If you want to believe politicians over engineers, I can’t help you. https://www.rewiringaustralia.org

We haven’t done significant travelling in years, nor do we invest in a lot of other popular recreational lifestyle things. But we did invest in the house, with proper windows, ripping the expensive gas heating out, installing solar and a battery and heat pumps. And now every square centimetre of the house is toasty warm 24 hours a day, all winter. And it doesn’t cost us a cent. Cool all summer, for the same reason.

I saw a candidate for election say this. "[Aborigines] were not an advanced civilisation and DEFINITELY would have had to have some form of colonisation by someone in the 18th century." I think many Australians probably even agree with it. As somebody highly trained in advanced science and technology, I think we use modern fancy gadgets as some sort of evidence of us being more advanced. But I can tell you, from inside the tent, that's not true. It takes a much more advanced knowledge to manage a civilisation in a landscape for tens of thousands of years. So much more advanced that we don't have a clue where to start. In 250 years of our 'advanced' civilisation, the landscape is in ruins. It won't sustain us for even 500 years. Let alone tens of thousands. It doesn't matter if you have planes and cars and computers and whatever else, if you can't sustain yourself, as a civilisation. All great empires forgot this, it's why they no longer exist. A single species is infinitely more complex than anything we've ever built, and we're destroying species at a frightening pace. We're living inside the world's greatest mystery. How Aborigines managed to sustain a civilisation for tens of thousands of years. No other culture is even within light years of that record. We're too vain and stupid to understand this.

American living in the UK, pointing out how the entire country is built to sustain damp chill. Not humid hot. Even tougher times ahead for Brits.

What distinguishes most of the top 5 airlines in the world? They’re government-owned. What distinguishes our once great Qantas? Its horrific free fall down the rankings (outside the top 20 now), when it was privatised and run ‘efficiently by the private sector’.

Things going well in $2/litre land. Reckon you can siphon charge out of a battery? Buy an EV.

As a man of course there’s a continuous battle with maturity. When you’re doing the stocktake at Council stores, and the plumbing section lists cocks, lubricants and nipples in consecutive order, the struggle is real.

For the climate sceptics. Natural disasters in Northern Europe have increased by 1000% in our lifetime. 1000%. We haven’t even arrived at the serious end of the climate scale yet.

Up to 70% of road accidents are caused by human error. Humans love to believe they're brilliant drivers, but no human can ever drive (or fly) as accurately or consistently as a machine. There's no need to go as far as replacing the driver, like with planes we just need the technology to carry a lot of the load. My car already does it. I've seen cars described as 'driver's cars'. Meaning basically a road-registered race car. Something 'with 3 pedals', and 'a stick' (i.e. manual gear shift). It's very telling, that people who believe that bullshit see the road as a racetrack. It's how they drive too. Good driving is nothing to do with that, at all. It's about driving in a way that takes maximum account of everybody else on the road. Not just to be safe, but because that also improves traffic flow. Leaving that to individual drivers will ALWAYS fail. It's why commercial pilots are not allowed to fly planes most of the time they're in the air. Good flying isn't about acrobatics or getting maximum speed through a corner. It's about getting people there safely, and in the optimum time, taking account of everything else in the air. Machines doing most of the work do that much better, and always will.

I've seen car nuts spend a couple of hours washing their car. But some extra minutes refuelling is apparently the end of civilisation.

Life expectancy in the UK.

3 years is a long time to remember something, I guess.

HIV is an initial infection or infections that seem like a cold or mild flu. Followed 8-10 years later by total system collapse and death. We have no idea of the 8-10 year outlook for Covid. We do know people are getting serious, possibly lifelong chronic impacts, after only 2-3 years. Sometimes those impacts are fatal. And we’re infecting EVERYBODY. Over and over and over. Imagine if we’d infected the entire world, with HIV. Society would now be over.

The tragedy of AF447, where an Air France jet smashed into the Atlantic, killing everybody on board, is a window into the need for proper automation in flying and driving. The jet crashed because the autopilot cut out due to ice on wind sensors, and the experienced pilots had no idea how to fly at altitude without it. (Because airlines don’t allow pilots to ‘hand-fly’ at altitude for any length of time.) If the pilots had done nothing, leaving the previous settings from the autopilot, everything would have been fine. It’s because they tried to fly the plane manually, that it crashed. Good automation needs ‘hand-off’ between pilot/driver and the autopilot. The moral here isn’t that automation is bad, automated flight is all that's safe at altitude. As an experienced pilot told me: “In the flight levels above 20,000 feet, where the air gets very thin, modern swept wing jets have a very narrow speed range between stall and over speed towards Mach 1. You cannot actually fly them safely by hand for any length of time.” Many more people die on roads. Nearly all of them are dead because humans think they’re better drivers than machines. We don’t need fully automated cars, but we need people to use a much greater amount of driver-assist automation. It also uses less fuel, a human is not capable of the precise throttle regulation an autopilot system uses.

Good. There needs to be more of just getting on with it, ignoring the whingers. People have their heads up their arses, at the magnitude of the threat humanity is facing.

At the end of 2021 we reached a fork in the road. At that fork people could choose between what politicians said about Covid, and what scientists said. Overwhelmingly people went with the politicians (!). Karma has arrived. It’s only going to get a lot worse from here. A vascular disease that also attacks the immune system? I’m seeing so much bewildered suffering right now. But there’s no mystery.

-5.5 here this morning. Have 7 heat pumps running, keeping the whole house toasty warm (as it was all night). Collectively they’re drawing less electricity than a single standard column or bar heater.

If you have Covid and go into public in NSW without taking precautions, you can be jailed for 6 months. If some clown turns up at your workplace or home saying they have Covid, unmasked, I'd remind them of this.

Kell and I don’t share personal lives much on social media. But this kid did something amazing this year. Headed off to uni for 4 years. Then told us one day (we thought he was joking) that he’d been awarded a scholarship of $100,000, to pay for that entire 4 years. That’s my boy. Legend. Kell and I are unleashing 3 bloody smart and ruthlessly kind, gentle and decent people on the world. I hope it’s ready for them.

I’m ending my working life in local government. And am more happy with that choice every day. Meaningful work, unlike jobs where you just sit around in meetings all day discussing bits of paper that never lead to anything. Sure, everybody hates you. It means you’re doing important things.

Enjoy your birthday! 🥳🎈🎊

I’m not on any ‘side’ of trans debates. People with a brain don’t play team sports with ideas. But I do tend to listen to smart women, on the future of women, more than I listen to crusading men.

The game of make-believe we’re playing with Covid. Reality isn’t fooled. Vedder blamed the crowd, no self-awareness at all that everybody in that crowd is also at risk, because of his band’s show.

Portugal is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, for Covid. More than Australia. Vaccination alone is not enough. And infecting everybody is not creating immunity.

Marriage. Kell: Look at Zac Efron’s face, ridiculous. Me: He’s had work done? Kell: Yes, and why? People already think men’s faces have character as they age. Me: Does my face have character? Kell: No.

I bet it’s the first time these words have been used behind the POTUS lectern.

The world has had enough clever technology to let us all work only about a day a week, for decades. That never happens because businesses just use the clever technology to sack most of us, and pocket the savings. And that’s inevitable, because you don’t run a business to reduce work. You run it to make money.

Dogs may not be the best choice for home security. Alex

Saul Griffith, Australian engineer.

KIA is pushing affordable EVs, with its EV4 and EV3, about to be released. This will also help adoption because many towns have KIA dealerships, and while EVs need very little servicing, having options close to home is important to people.

The saying that the eyes are the window to the soul. But the eyes are a black hole, at the centre. A chilling void, if you look ‘into’ somebody’s eyes, as the romantic line goes. They’re not a window. It’s the eyelids and muscles around the eyes that make the eyes expressive. The face is the only part of the body where the function of the muscles is to express emotion, rather than create movement or support. Film directors use close-ups on the face, to express emotion. Botox, fillers and plastic surgery are all destructive of emotion.

WInd turbine fire in Victoria. ‘First in 20 years’, locals say. No problem at all to deal with, say local firefighters. Queenland coal mine on fire. Authorities pumping nitrogen into the mine and telling all locals to close windows and doors, vast quantities of toxic smoke belching into the local air. Nobody sure how it will be put out, or when.

Australia is in a lot of trouble with energy. We’ll run out inside the next decade, unless urgent action is taken. The previous government had 21 energy policies in 10 years. TWENTY-ONE. How many of those did it actually implement? ZERO. It preferred to use energy as a political football, to win votes. 10 years of doing nothing has unsurprisingly left us with a disaster, at the same time as the existing generators were already falling apart. There’s talk now of expanding gas, but there are no gas plants, and no gas to feed them even if we had them. It will takes years to fix that. Renewables are cheap and fast to install, but are being stalled by culture war morons, still stuck in that 10 years of inaction, still trying to use energy to win votes. Nuclear is an outrageously expensive fantasy that won’t provide a single watt of electricty for at least 15 years, even if we decided to use it. China meanwhile is doing what we should have already been doing. Mostly because it doesn’t have social media blocking the basic work of keeping a society’s lights on. It’s building renewables (red line), at record pace. The blue line is their nuclear. Like the US, UK and France, they’ve given up on that as way too expensive and slow. Watch all sides converge on subsiding solar and batteries and electric appliances (and cars), in homes. It’s the only fast action available now to try to head off this disaster. It’s why I made this house as energy-independent as it can be, because this crisis was obvious to anybody with half a brain.

History shows time and again that the only thing that makes humans act meaningfully outside the existing status quo, is total catastrophe. Read Alan Kohler today if you want to understand just how much that's us right now, with climate change. We're doomed. Most have no idea of the magnitude of the disaster this is. Humanity as we know it won't survive.

Happy birthday Jas, hope it's a fantastic day.