July 2024

You wonder how many times these drag races have to be run before people register just how crap petrol and diesel engines are.

17 years ago today, dad died. That's him on the left. From the generation whose young lives were taken by war. Never spoke of it. Part of that huge wave of European migration post-WW2 that transformed Australia, with fantastic energy and intelligence and determination. Australia was a wild, exciting melting pot in those days. Now it takes its cues more from the US, with its dreary 'freedom' ideas that lead to public squalor and private riches. He'd have been disgusted with that, like most Germans he saw a problem, and just wanted it fixed. Fast, with no fuss. A nation of craftsmen, to this day. Of course I miss him, but losing somebody for me just begins a process of understanding of what they mean in your life. You never really understand that until much later I don't think, it takes death for that understanding to unroll, over time. Or even a breakup, in love. At the time it's all just happening. No sympathies please, it was a lot of years ago! Just reflections from me. I think of him when we talk about 'resilience' today, the tiny, laughable things that apparently make people distressed. Like putting a fucking mask on in a pandemic. Try being torn away from all of your family and friends, forever, to go to a strange country where you don't speak the language, and everybody hates you because you're from the enemy side in the war. He never once complained. I think I get my lack of patience with today's kidult culture, from him.

Great short video on the main benefit of semi-autonomous driving technology. It makes individual drivers drive in ways that benefit traffic as a whole. Excellent explanation of how even one driver can trigger jams in traffic, which can last for hours.

In 1997, over a quarter of a century ago, the world agreed to act to save us all from out of control climate change. Since that time, our use of fossil fuels has INCREASED by 55%.

In 1215 the Magna Carta declared that the King is not above the law. In 2024, Trump’s Supreme Court has just reversed that. The US is no longer a democracy, and only the fact most people spend their days on TikTok and probably don’t even know what the Magna Carta is allows this to happen, in plain sight.

Not hard to control a market that doesn't exist, because Western carmakers are too entitled and lazy to build any EVs.

Even more poignant if you’ve heard of the Magna Carta and know what it is.

I saw in the news this week that more than 50% of younger Australians surveyed engage in choking during sex, copied from a trend in online porn. So the woman is literally choked, for a short time. Humans imitate, it’s their most basic behaviour. This one is just mad, the risk of stroke from doing that is very high, and that risk continues for months afterwards. Some even urinate and defecate during the act, because the body goes into emergency mode. There seem to be many relationships that are basically just re-enacting porn, in the bedroom. Women often do it to please their men, who can’t be aroused by basic human intimacy any more. They’ve been de-sensitised by porn.

Happy Birthday!!

Happy Birthday :)

Heads up. While you're busy not sheltering from the threat, worth pondering why these threats keep happening. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/experts-warn-new-contagious-fluqe-covid-subvariant-taking-off-in-australia/news-story/2527e44c3be339de564e9c627251b392

Anybody want 4 ice skating tickets for opening night of the Winter Festival? Little brother was coming up with family, but Influenza A is now a house guest. I'm sure a discount may even be possible.

Come on Australia, we can get it to number 1!!

This group has lots of videos of ordinary street-legal family EVs embarrassing every muscle car thrown at them. The comments are hilarious, 'if the muscle car had a better driver/wheels, it would have won', 'yeh but the muscle car makes more noise', 'the muscle car has more range'. Etc. Even a professional petrol race car can't beat an ordinary family EV. More usefully I saw somebody on social media who was living in their EV, they had nowhere else. And the car's heating can run all night, keeping him toasty warm at 21 degrees C, as well as run a jug, toaster, fridge etc.

Secondhand petrols and diesels keep their value more because you're being ripped off when you buy the same cars new. New petrols and diesels go up in price with every model, which is what keeps secondhand values for the same cars higher, because people buy those instead so they're not ripped off. EV secondhand values are lower because every generation of NEW EVs is *cheaper* than the last. This is a good thing, it means motoring is getting cheaper for both new AND used cars. If you get less of a trade on an EV, you're also needing to spend much less on a new one. Anti-EV journalism isn't good at maths.

In Ireland, hospitals are awash with Covid. You'd think as healthcare facilities that would mean everybody would at least mask up? Hilarious! Instead patients are given a BROCHURE explaining what they can do to try to not catch Covid, while in hospital.

Remember how if we all kept getting Covid, we'd become immune? Yeh, science says nah. Covid right now more than twice as bad as the same time last year. I feel like people should be seriously pissed off when they realise they were lied to. Not holding my breath on the evidence so far.

It’s difficult to believe just how stupid this situation is. We give away our own gas to foreign fossil fuel companies, who get obscenely rich selling it overseas. (We literally give it away, they pay as good as nothing for it.) At the time they promised there’d be plenty for us too. That was a lie. And when they didn’t have enough, they took even MORE of our domestic gas, to meet their export contracts. We then buy our OWN gas back, from OVERSEAS, at huge prices. Gas we just GAVE AWAY, to these same companies. Not content then with having sucked our gas dry for their own benefit, they’ve been lobbying for years a ‘solution’ - we need to drill even MORE Australian gas, for them. See how this works? Every ‘solution’ involves them screwing us even more, for even more money, for them. Know what the real solution is? Tell them to fuck off. Replace the gas in our homes, with electricity.

One of the arguments for privatisation is that it saves the taxpayer money by shifting responsibility to private organisations. But the taxpayer ends up paying even more, in user charges. Driving is now much more expensive in Sydney, in the wrong places. A common argument used is ‘by having a private school (or road or hospital), it takes load off the public system’. Except it doesn’t, the numbers are absolutely clear. Somebody saying their private school is saving the government money could just as easily say if the government built them a home pool or private freeway, they’d take load off the local pool and local roads too. Yeh, nah. It’s enormously more expensive to build an entire new private hospital or school for some people, than it is to add them to existing hospitals and schools.

David is one of Australia's leading Long Covid specialists. He said this morning that people are being re-infected with the current variants as quickly as every 3-8 weeks. One of those who have to deal with the disaster of living with Covid, who isn't listened to. If you or people you know are having strange, serious medical issues that seem to make no sense, it is almost certainly caused by Covid. And good luck, because most GPs won't make the connection, and even if they do, there's no treatment.

Australians are in love with hybrids because they want full-EVs, but are anxious about range. Most full-EVs have 400-600km of range already, and unless you're doing a long trip that's plenty for at least a couple of weeks of driving. And you can charge them at home, you don't need to use a fast-charger. I love hybrids, but you'll quickly wish you bought a full-EV (none were available when I bought my hybrids). Like F1 engineers say, the best way to improve a hybrid is to get rid of the petrol engine. But still a far better car than a straight petrol or diesel, performance-wise as well as with fuel.

A UK conservative politician described the loss as ‘devastating’. This is the party that presided over the death of over 230,000 Brits, from Covid, and have never once said sorry or been held to account in any way. But losing an election is devastating. If you or I ran a single person over and they died, we’d go to jail for many years. These sociopathic clowns will go to plum jobs in the private sector.

Even women and the most enlightened men refer to feminism as being about ‘equality’. It was never about that, what would that even mean? It was about women having the right to define the world we live in, not just have equal place in a world defined by men.

The Tesla Model Y is a brilliant mid-sized SUV. It’s also the world’s best-selling car. You can buy the base model in Australia now for less money than a Toyota RAV4 hybrid. It’s a much better car than a RAV4 hybrid. And while the petrol for the RAV4 will cost you up to $2/litre, you can ‘fill’ a Model Y for under $5. (And it needs no servicing.) If you like a bit of a hoon, it will leave any petrol or diesel, even expensive sports cars, miles behind in the rear-view mirror. For those who like interior things, you can turn the heating or cooling on remotely on hot or cold days, so that the car is at a comfortable temperature when you arrive. Or if you need to leave a pet or older child alone in the car, it can easily run air con or heating all day and night. It has a stupendous stereo system, and Tesla semi-autonomous driving is the best in the business. It has multiple cameras which act as monitoring security when you’re not with the car. Tesla even sell a fitted air mattress that converts the whole inside to a bed, for those who want to use it for travel. Some poor souls even live in their EVs now, who can’t afford homes, and the cars can run ordinary household appliances and keep heating or cooling going 24 hours a day. (A car battery is at least 5 times higher capacity than a home battery, the car can run things for days at a time. Including your home if there’s a blackout.)

I share energy things because many of the public are missing out on the fantastic innovation out there, living in a fog of social media propaganda. One of the great things about Tesla is their superb software. Whether inside their cars, or for home batteries, or if you have both, it integrates them beautifully. Their home battery software is so good solar installers tell people to ignore anything else. You can set it to charge a Tesla only with free solar energy, for example. Tesla are clever in that they’ve built a whole integrated ecosystem, including their fast charger network for travel, which the cars brilliantly calculate for you as you drive, so you have no range anxiety. Tesla EVs are also by far the most efficient to run, they’ve refined the electric drivetrain more than anybody else.

Studying history gives whole new perspectives to the present. Right now the US is like ancient Rome. Rome had a republic, what we’d call a democracy today. It was a complete disaster, nothing but violence and blood and death. Then it had a 200-year period of peace unlike anything else in Western history, called the Pax Romana. During that time it was led by 5 emperors, the last of which (Marcus Aurelius) was portrayed in Gladiator, speaking to Russ in the pic. His son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), was a tyrant and disaster, ending this golden period in Roman history. Trump is very much like Commodus, a vulgar populist with no brains and interested only in himself. Some running for local government this year see him as a hero.

George Tsakraklides, biologist and food scientist.

I’ve made these arguments here many times. Superbly analysed in this article. LGBQTIA is a dangerous, incoherent, illogical and increasingly violent set of ideas that are harming millions of people. LGBQTIA is a set of categories that aren’t even related, grouped together mostly by men to create the idea of a ‘community’ of ‘gender diverse’ people. In reality it’s mostly men trying to reverse the hard-won gains of feminism. It’s misogyny on steroids.

The big carmakers are still dominating sales (left hand side). This is what gives people an impression that traditional cars are still preferred. But their growth year-on-year is flatlining (right hand side). The huge growth is all in electric vehicle sales.

Social media is full every day of people ignoring this advice. The same people who will look for help (there isn’t any) or somebody to blame (it’s themselves), when they get chronically sick. I know many think I’m a broken record on this. But I’m already seeing lives being ruined.

You’re 1700% more likely to have a heart attack in the week after a respiratory infection, than at any other time. No infection is good for you, most don’t build your immunity, and even those that do create long-term damage to your body. Many also don’t get a flu shot, because they have ‘vaccine fatigue’ (i.e. they’re children in adult bodies). Flu shots cut the risk of heart attacks by 45%. I love my friends and family for trying to get me back into social activities that are certain to get me infected with Covid. I’ll still say no, and try to help keep them alive for longer instead.

This is Santorini. A famous Greek island, in the Aegean. Doesn’t it look amazing there? Now you’ve seen it and don’t need to go. Right now 3 to 4 massive cruise ships anchor more or less permanently in its harbour to offload thousands of tourists, while belching stinking exhaust gases from the ships into the town’s air. It stinks. You may say, ‘yes but I want to ‘experience’ Santorini!’ I can already tell you what you’ll experience. Thousands of other tourists, choking on the ship exhaust fumes. It’s another place that’s become a theme park, a caricature of itself. That’s what travel does, transforms the world into caricatures. Theme parks.

From within our own region. Loved the response from the ute-driving moron in Rockley. We worship the ute-driving moron, by all buying gutless utes we don’t need that handle like tractors on the road, and guzzle fuel. How much does stupid cost? About $2/litre right now. “The car itself is a joy to drive – smooth, silent and thrillingly quick – plus it’s fitted with a multitude of sensors, cameras and gadgetry that ease the pain of navigation, traffic and parking. Most surprising is that it’s fun – the battery pack gives it a low centre of gravity so it feels like a go-kart on all those wiggly country roads. …it’s hard to argue with the facts…this 1100-kilometre, week-long trip has been a breeze. Regional NSW has an ever-growing network of chargers that are easy to find, intuitive to use and, in many cases, free. In a comparable petrol engine SUV, this trip would have cost about $180 in fuel. In the EV, it was $36.34.”

Between May and November 2021, the world named 13 variants of Covid. You may remember some of those names, like ‘Delta’. Then, because this highlighted that the virus was evolving i.e. it was out of control, when we got to Omicron, the naming stopped. All part of the attempt to pretend Covid is over, when it’s actually getting worse every day. Since that time, there have been at least (brace yourself) TWO-THOUSAND-FIVE-HUNDRED new variants of Covid. That’s 2500. All called ‘Omicron’ so people think the virus is losing. Many of these 2500+ variants are much more different to each other than any of that original 13 we named. Scroll past and go back to more Covid infections, as I’m sure many will. Reality is coming for you, I’m sorry. A few people at work have asked me with confused fear, ‘what’s going on here?’, as they struggle with horrendous illness. Covid is what’s going on here.

Latest estimates say about 50% of the world population will have Long Covid, by August 2025.

People should be aware of the terrible risks they're taking. For some it's already too late. https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2589-0042%2823%2902718-9

The number 1 place most people catch Covid (or any respiratory disease) is at home. And they catch it there mostly from their kids, who pick it up at school. I had to consider the best way to protect the family in winter, when it’s more difficult to ventilate the home. Anybody could accidentally bring Covid home. This is where air purifiers can be very useful. There are 3 in our house, IKEA Starkvinds. We can control them from anywhere using the IKEA app. The filters are so cheap, you can run these year-round. Also useful if you live in a city with lots of traffic pollution, and fantastic if you get a bushfire season. If you or your neighbours heat with wood fires, you’d be mad not to use the technology, wood fires pump out more shit than smoking cigarettes all day.

I know that what people most want to see on FB and other social media, is what’s happening in other peoples’ lives. It’s what I refuse to post here, and thought I’d explain why. Do we think about what it means, to surrender our personal and social spaces, to these platforms? It’s not just a ‘tool’, increasingly both our personal and social lives are carried out ON these platforms. What other public spaces do we have? None. These platforms had already captured much of our economic lives, our businesses. Now they’ve vacuumed up our personal and social lives as well. And what do these platforms do with the things they capture? They weaponise them as rivalries. They turn them into ‘debates’, because debates generate activity and likes. Then they monetise them. It’s why your FB feed is now continuously full of ads, every time you mention anything. It’s why basic tasks like building new energy systems or transitioning to better electric vehicles are bogged down in ludicrous ‘debates’ that are completely devoid of any facts or sense. It turns friends against friends, and families against each other. I ask people to at least think about what it means that people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk now literally own the spaces where we live our personal and social lives. It’s destroying our societies, and peoples’ mental health, as their anxieties are whipped up and then monetised.

Last Thursday one of the big generating units at the Loy Yang coal power station tripped, just before 2am. This caused a frequency collapse in the national grid (red line). That's a very bad thing, it can stop electrical equipment from working and even damage or destroy it. But what happened next is fun. The coal power station in Gladstone Queensland was supposed to be the backup. But within MILLIseconds the Tesla big battery in South Australia had fired up to restore the grid frequency - red line going up. So much for 'baseload' power. The renewables infrastructure sat it on its arse.

More than 170,000 influenza cases have been confirmed so far in 2024, with 29% of them in children under 9 years of age. Infections in 2024 are already 27% higher than the first 6 months of 2023. It's several years since any lockdowns. This isn't people 'catching up' with missed infections (which is anti-scientific nonsense anyway).

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you'd have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can't agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it. Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn't follow. At first, it was media companies, whom Facebook preferentially crammed down its users' throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying full-text feeds inside Facebook's walled garden. This made publications truly dependent on Facebook—their readers no longer visited the publications' websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to "boost" their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds. Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of non-consensually harvested personal data they'd stolen from you. Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook's cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue. Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you're a user, a media company, or an advertiser." Cory Doctorow

One of the misunderstood things about charging EVs is that it takes a long time. It can take quite a while if you want to charge them to 100%. The chemistry of batteries currently requires you to charge them slowly for the last 10-20%. But you can charge that first 80% very fast. And that’s what people do, at public chargers now. They charge to 80%, which may take only 10 minutes. That’s about the same time it takes you to get petrol. That 80% gives them hundreds of kilometres of range, more than enough. They can top up that last 10-20% at home.

Just a public health tip (because public health officials now only ever say 'live with it'.) Cryptosporidiosis isn't killed by hand sanitiser. Soap and water will kill it though. How's 'living with the virus' going for everybody? Guy at work had this, last week. 5 days of bowels like a sluice gate.

Sydney’s toll roads are an epic story of how privatisation is always the gouging of taxpayers. Transurban built and runs the roads. It spent $36 billion building them. How much will it make from them, in tolls? At least $195 billion. The NSW Government could have made these public roads, paid for by the same tolls. Then we’d have only needed to pay $36 billion, minus the $160 billion of profit to private investors. But it thought the private sector was more ‘efficient’. Meaning they have chums in road building, who they wanted to help get rich, and offer them juicy jobs when they retire from politics.

Who remembers the videos from around the world showing happy smiling people ripping off their masks, for freedom? BA did one. They're not very happy now.

Happy Birthday David. Enjoy some Velvet Underground on me :)

Hooray for the farmers! Make this bullshit end.

The public mostly wants to go electric. And it could, right now, except for nonsense slogans funded by ICE car and fossil fuel companies about things like ‘range’, making them anxious. So they’re going hybrid to try to allay those anxieties, none of which represent anything real. Another victory for modern propaganda. Not coincidentally these same ICE car companies make most of the hybrids.

Happy 50th little bro!!! Rock on.

I find the NDIS intrinsically dangerous. The base rationale for it is unquestionably fabulous, to support people with a disability. But the devil is so much in the details as to how you go about that. As it stands it will collapse the Australian social care system. Somebody at work commented on something today that I and others have also noticed, how hostile and demanding disability activists have in turn become. Zealotry turned to 11. I can fully understand them coming off the back of many years of sheer frustration, but the rudeness and complete tunnel vision borders on the sociopathic.

I’ve studied social media since it began. It’s both the most seductive thing humanity has ever invented, and the most dangerous. It’s classic bait-and-switch, the platforms vacuumed up whole populations, by offering them a sweet plum they couldn’t resist. A way to be socially connected. Like the old social pages in the local newspaper, most peoples’ favourite bit. The switch then is to use your personal life to generate revenue and prosecute political causes. These platforms are not the public spaces we use them as. They’re tightly controlled locations owned by private companies, run by revenue-maximising algorithms. Those algorithms are designed to maximise conflict, because conflict generates likes. And likes generate revenue. The platforms now more or less own our most personal, social lives. People literally transact a large part of their lives, through these platforms. They shop, organise family events, share family news, etc. And it’s not just a ‘tool’, the algorithms determine what you see here, which in turn shapes you both emotionally and psychologically. They will feed you the things that generate the most reaction, the most clicks and likes. Like force-feeding sugar or heroin. The single worst thing you can use social media for is the thing people overwhelmingly use it for. To transact your personal life. To share what you and your friends and family are doing. By doing that you’re allowing the platforms to not only monetise your social relationships, but you’re introducing the conflictual social comparison of the algorithms, into your social life. I’ve seen families split apart by it.

Some help with the translation. ‘Even though the pandemic may be behind us, there’s still a raging pandemic’.

You get insights into weather from your solar data. This winter has been very cold, and quite dark. You can see it in the different amount of solar our system generated in June this year, compared to last year. We’ll still have no bills, even with much increased heating, but it’s a dark winter.

Imagine you were hiring somebody for a senior management position, and their CV listed: - a declared bankrupt 6 times - convicted of 34 felonies, and - running a casino and the casino going broke.

We started ‘living with Covid’ at the end of 2021. We said we’d ‘protect the vulnerable’, so it would be fine. That’s when aged care homes became slaughterhouses. Nobody gives a shit.

Flu and other viruses getting more ‘potent’. Actually peoples’ immune systems have been damaged by Covid, which has let these other diseases have a field day. I’m seeing people at work with horrendous chronic conditions, months after Covid.

Scientists are excited, because it appears China has reached peak fossil fuel, with electricity from renewables now becoming its dominant energy source. Massive investment in renewables and EVs in China has done what the rest of the world only pays lip service to. Just look at the graph, the West doing as good as nothing, for nearly 40 years, and actually getting worse as time goes on. That massive investment is also driving down the costs of these technologies for us. Our own leaders may as well be cardboard cutouts for the use they are to us. Right now they’re desperately trying to shut this down in China, with massive tariffs. They say it’s ’unfair’ to our car and energy businesses. Businesses we should have shut down 30 years ago.

Come on snow. Last time it snowed, the government is now so obsessed with ‘living with’ disasters, they left the road open. It was like ice skating with cars out there.

This was up within minutes. Not ‘our thoughts to the families of the deceased and injured’. Just whipping the mob into even more of a rage, which is what these platforms and the Trumps do.

Government ministers visit for actual things. Nobody came to visit us for the nuclear fantasy. Without this, Lithgow is toast.

Remember those stories about collapsing demand for EVs and yards full of unsold cars? Yeh nah. Just lies, as always. Still setting records for new sales, and this is the US, one of the least EV-friendly nations on the planet.

To give a sense of the quality of the human beings competing to lead the US. Pelosi’s (Democrat) 82-year-old husband was beaten with a hammer by a home invading Trump fan, who’d come to interrogate her. It fractured his skull. You can see how each side responds to this sort of violence here.

You can see in what happened here how modern politics works. Turn everything into a ‘fight’. When Trump say he’s fighting, he means his own people, in the US. But on the other ‘team’. Which some call the ‘Far Left’. But he makes up new enemies all the time, it’s how the politics of fights works. We’ve seen the same method used for immigrants, nuclear power, EVs, renewable energy, climate change, etc. Set up a fight, lots of fights. That creates teams, and energises them. Like turning all of our social life into the NRL. Social media is what enables this. Those battling teams create lots of clicks and likes, and therefore lots of revenue for platform shareholders. So the algorithms create and magnify this process. We hear all the guff about society now being more ‘divided’ and more ‘polarised’. Of course it is, when that’s your political business model, and the business model of the platforms we now more or less live on.

Can China please hurry up and take over the world already?

America is toast. I welcome our new Chinese overlords, and their ‘authoritarian’ free energy and cheap electric cars.

The Australian olympic swim team, can anyone spot the fashion accessory that is coming back on-trend?

I don't think you could even make a movie this bad.

The housing market is a get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme. We bid up prices on existing houses, we don't build new ones.

An American friend works in the biotech industry. His son just got a ‘mild’ Covid infection. He now has parosmia. Parosmia is a condition where your brain distorts what you smell, in this case his son smells an absolutely disgusting smell, all day, that doesn’t correspond with anything around him. Like having fresh shit smeared under his nostrils that he can’t wash off. When you look at articles about parosmia and Covid, it says parosmia is something people can get ‘after’ they’ve had a Covid infection. Um, sorry, there is no after. Parosmia is literal brain damage, caused by the continuing action of the virus in the body, after you think you’re better. Covid never leaves. It sets up shop. And then eats you from within. I can only plead again that people do everything they can not to catch it. Catching it will not make you more immune, that’s a disgusting political lie. Catching it all the time is making us all *less* immune, by generating more and more variants of the virus. If you’re catching it from your kids (where most catch it), who catch it at school, ask your school what they’re doing against Covid. (It will be nothing.) Then ask them TO do something. Like open fucking windows, and put some inexpensive air purifiers in the classroom. Hand sanitiser is NOT action against Covid, and I doubt most even bother with that now. If you’re worried doing something like wearing a mask will make you look silly with your friends, imagine having fresh shit smeared under your nostrils, that you can’t wash off, for the rest of your life. That should help.

House toasty warm all winter. Icing on the cake right here. Thank you solar. All the anti-renewables and anti-EV folks out there, maybe you could burn cash in the fireplace to keep warm.

Your circadian rhythm is the thing that Daylight Saving fucks up twice every year.

Loved this from Transurban: "...a state-owned tolling entity would add a level of bureaucracy without benefiting motorists." The same Transurban who spent $36 billion building the tollways, and is charging taxpayers nearly $200 billion to use them. 'Bureaucracy' is always a word private companies use when somebody stops them gouging taxpayers.

Happy birthday!!!

Happy Birthday Lisa :)

The Model 3 is Tesla's cheapest car. They've just released a performance version that is brutal. 0-100 in 2.9 seconds. Superb handling in corners. So fast and powerful that it makes even experienced race drivers feel a bit queasy, if they really open it up. It costs less than half what European and American sports and muscle cars cost. And will leave them all in the rear view mirror. Combustion engines have no hope of ever competing with electric. It's basic physics.

Tesla’s Model Y, a mid-sized SUV, is the biggest selling car in the world. People love mid-sized SUVs. BYD is after them, it’s launching the SeaLion 7 in Australia this year. It’s slightly bigger than the Model Y. And will likely be quite a bit cheaper. This is the space of the Toyota RAV4 hybrid, one of the most popular cars in the world. The Model Y has overtaken it. The SeaLion 7 will be a huge challenger for the Y. It’ll even do 0-100 in 4.5 seconds, for those who like grunt. A family SUV with more grunt than any V8, and an interior like a Mercedes or Audi. Costing less than a Toyota. Tesla is rushing to update the Y right now, called Project Juniper. I still think the people who don’t like EVs are mostly just people who have never driven one. You never want to go back, there’s not one single thing a petrol or diesel offers that can compete. And who wants to pay $2/litre?

Those who look at what’s happening in the US politically with horror, need to carefully assess the teams at this year’s local government elections in NSW. Local government is where a lot of the Trump base target local Australian people, with Trumpian ideas, through social media. There are quite a few teams running for councils across the State that are fronts for Trumpism. They won’t always advertise that explicitly, but you can identify them by their big populist claims, and constant attacks on existing councils for being ‘incompetent’ and ‘corrupt’, and their claim to be champions of ‘the people’ over these corrupt councils. Everybody loves to give the local council a good kicking, they’re tapping into that. State and federal government processes tend to weed this stuff out, but a lot of it is getting through unfiltered to local areas and local government. Proud Trumpians have already won seats on councils.

Political strategy 101. Remember at school if somebody yelled 'fight!', how people would come running from all directions? The social group Trump represents doesn't have to fight for anything, they're rich and already own the US. But by pretending everything is a fight, they get millions to flock to the cause. It's what Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton and the Murdoch press and SKY News Australia do here in Oz too. Turn every issue into a fake fight, to mobilise lots of people. Worth remembering too that it was one of Trump's own supporters who shot him.

UK teachers have been in the Covid firing line longer than Australian teachers. But Australian teachers will catch up. It's disgusting how we treat teachers and kids. https://inews.co.uk/news/teachers-legal-fight-long-covid-support-3144937#:~:text=More%20than%20120%20teachers%20are,result%20of%20contracting%20the%20disease.

In this week’s Antarctic cold blast, a third of Australia’s electricity came from wind power alone. As the regulator explains here, ‘baseload’ never meant the base amount of power we need to run the country. It always meant the minimum we have to USE, so as not to have shut down coal plants overnight. It’s a concept we don’t need any more.

The ref is always on the winning team.

Maybe it’s working so long in governance that makes me see and think this. But when you watch professional sport, who are by far the most skilled people out there on the court or field? It’s the referees. By far. The people everybody loves to hate. What they do out there is easily more difficult than being a player. They have to watch a dozen or more athletes, all the time, playing at elite speeds, and not just identify rule-breaking but make a decision in real time as to which to penalise, and which to allow, for the flow of the game, without compromising fairness. They have to be physical athletes themselves too, to keep up with professional athletes in constant fast motion. All while processing everything I said above, on the move. It’s phenomenal when you think about it. And they make mistakes, because who wouldn’t in that situation. They make far fewer mistakes than players.

The most humid place on Earth is the Persian Gulf, in the Middle East. Mostly desert. Sea temperatures there are currently 35 degrees C. That’s the SEA temperature. Heat indices on the land range from 50-65 degrees C. Humidity is off the scale oppressive. Standard air conditioners cease to operate at those higher temperatures, and the plants and animals we eat can’t survive, while the water we drink becomes home to toxic algae. Climate change isn’t just some nice warm weather. It’s life or death.

Good morning Bathurst.

Covid is a 'seasonal' virus, people trained in social media science say. Yes, you now get it in every season.

Ford researched American driving habits, when considering their EV models. More than 50% of Americans only travelled over 200km, 4 or LESS times, every year. The 'range anxiety' debates on EVs assume everybody is a retired boomer travelling all over the countryside, 7 days a week, towing caravans and boats. Not coincidentally the people who do that sort of travelling are often older, and don't like the fact society is changing. EVs to them represent change, a shift out of a social comfort zone. Like computers and phones. EVs already have plenty of range for nearly all of the driving most people do. Range anxiety is a mental illness, it's in the name.

We had an Industrial Revolution over 250 years ago. Another one has been happening right under our noses for most of our lives, in China.

I know at least 3 people exhibiting symptoms of MCAS. All of them have had Covid. MCAS is quite common after Covid infection. It can be torture to live with. It has no cure. Many GPs won't recognise it nor link it to Covid, a medical specialist friend who treats people with Long Covid told me the connection. Sharing in case you or anybody you know has symptoms similar to this, and you've had Covid. The chronic after-effects of Covid infection will be mostly ignored by society and medicine, to admit they exist is to admit living with Covid was a catastrophic mistake. You'll be on your own. https://www.webmd.com/allergies/what-is-mast-cell-activation-syndrome

Peter Dutton pretends he’ll stop of all of this if he wins goverment, and replace it with nuclear. He won’t though, because he can’t. The coal plants will fall over years before nuclear could give off a single watt of electricity. By the time nuclear could be built, the grid will be full renewables already. It’s a brilliant time to be alive, to see all this unfold. Spoiled by the sewer of idiocy on social media.

West Connex was promoted, as all new freeways are, as the answer to traffic congestion, in this case along Parramatta Road. It’s been fantastic for people like us, who rarely go to Sydney, a super easy (but bloody expensive) way to get straight to the Eastern suburbs. BUT. Has it taken traffic off Parramatta Road? No. Traffic volumes there are the same as before West Connex opened. Roads create traffic, they don’t reduce it. That’s the number one law of traffic engineering that no politician will listen to. Particularly politicians with chums in the construction sector, offering juicy kickbacks. The new tolls on the M4 and M5, introduced to sweeten the deal for the privatisation, have forced thousands of cars and trucks onto local residential roads, to try to avoid the tolls. Those tolls will be $65 billion, over the next 37 years. That’s 3 times what it cost to build. Cities overseas are replacing tolls with congestion pricing, targeting actual congestion. Rather than gouging taxpayers to pay construction companies. Meanwhile the skilled labour sucked into these vast white elephants starves housing and other industries of engineers and tradies. The massive white elephant gas and coal projects around the country are doing the same. In both cases all profits are going offshore. As they will for nuclear power too, if we build that colossal white elephant.

When I was a kid, nobody talked about energy. When Wang opened in 1957, nobody did either. We just left it to engineers to sort out, the best possible power grid for Australia. And got on with our lives. That’s what’s changed today, that we’re not seeing. There shouldn’t even be debates about energy. The cheapest, most efficient way to provide it has already been worked out, by engineers. So why are we having debates? Mostly it’s social media. These platforms get rich by encouraging people to argue. Also politicians deliberately start fights, to generate votes. Nothing gets peoples’ attention faster than a fight, remember at school?

Happy Birthday cuz :)

This is Trump's pick for Vice-President. Saying 'the professors are the enemy', quoting Nixon. We may gasp or even chuckle at that. Except very many Australians would probably agree, knowledge has no traction in any of our current politics. The most outrageously stupid things are the most popular things.

I mentioned this one earlier in the week. Mid-sized full electric SUV to compete with Tesla's Model Y. And of course with the hybrid RAV4. BYD doesn't muck around, they're looking to double sales every year, to overtake Tesla and enter the Australia top 10 of overall sales, by the end of 2025. It ultimately wants to overtake Toyota as our biggest brand. Predicted price is around $55,000, which will make it cheaper than both a RAV4 (with the same sort of specs) and Model Y. Note car companies wrap unreleased cars in fabric to prevent the press showing pre-release, thus the weird look of the car in the pic.

Another ex-pollie going to a plum job in the resources sector. The conflict of interest sticks out, to use a phrase of my grandfather's, like a pair of donkey's balls. Perrottet was one of the main drivers of 'living with Covid' in Australia. 22,000 people died in the first year of that lunacy alone. https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/politics/former-nsw-premier-dominic-perrottet-resigns-from-parliament/news-story/fa0dd51a81176f9a13624619f017837b

We’re living in the middle of a revolution. A revolution that we can’t see, because our eyes are blinded, by the Wormtongue of social media. Did you know that 100% of car sales are projected to be electric, in under a decade? There are fabulous electric cars out there right now, well priced, that cost you next to nothing to run, and which have more grunt than any combustion clunker. Did you know that with a mere 100,000 EVs and their batteries, NSW and the ACT could be backed up, against grid outages? They’re massive storage, on wheels.

The death of local papers is mostly social media. People get their news and more importantly their sense of community now, through social media. That’s its bait, in a bait-and-switch operation that is really about capturing our personal and social lives, and then monetising them. Much of what happens in our community now, is shaped by these platforms. And we still use them as if they’re cuddly places where we share our togetherness with family and friends. They’re owned by a handful of billionaires, whose views on society are straight out of a Charles Dickens novel.

I think we’re in denial about just how old our society now is. Take Lithgow as an example. Current population is over 20,000. Here’s a trivia question - how many of those people actually work? Only just over 4,500. That’s only just over 20% of the population, of working age. And you can see this is about an ageing society when you look at where most people work. Lithgow is famous for being a mining town. But almost twice as many people in Lithgow now look after the aged and sick, as work down the mines.

A home battery doesn’t just save money. It’s insurance against disasters (and with climate change there are a lot more of those). The whole street will likely have no power today while this is fixed on the neighbour’s nature strip. It’s yanked the mains out of both sides of the street. Our battery creates a micro-grid for us, so we’ll have power as normal. The solar will power both us and the battery. If you have solar panels without a battery, you don’t form a micro-grid and you’re without power like everybody else.

Some days feel like being at work. The line that is still potentially live (the street still has grid power), laying on the street, is behind two sets of signs to prevent people driving on that part of the street. Morons are driving around the signs, and straight over the line.

Powerline repairs underway. The battery cuts the solar feed while it’s full, to prevent overload. As the battery runs down it then automatically turns the solar back on, to top up any used. The process happens in milliseconds, we didn’t even realise the grid had been switched off.

Just for those interested in batteries and how they work. The Powerwall ran down to 90%, after which it automatically turned the solar inverters back on again and began powering the house and re-charging the battery, while the grid is still down.

Yesterday was the 55th anniversary of the first landing on the moon. I still remember the sense of disbelief and excitement, like a Jules Verne novel become real. The magnitude of achievement of what’s happening with renewable energy now far surpasses going to the moon. Being spoiled for whole generations by the sewer of social media.

For those who grew up with Tom Baker and his jelly babies.

Can you feel space? Neuroscientists discovered something remarkable, when they got people to try. As an example, can you feel the space between your head and your hips? Or between your eyes? Or between you and the TV, or the page of the book you’re reading? Try to feel spaces, and see what happens. Rather than just seeing or hearing things around you or in your body, feel the spaces between them. If you have a pain in your body somewhere, feel it in space, and feel the space around it. If you’re sitting somewhere right now, feel every space in the room, within your body, and between you and every other object in the room. I’d be interested to hear what you experience.

I ran the diagnostic on the Powerwall today, it’s heading towards nearly 2 years of use. Battery degradation in those nearly 2 years? (Warranty is for it to have 70% capacity still after 10 years.) Degradation so far is 0%. The Powerwall performed beautifully yesterday with the grid outage all day. Wouldn’t have known there was even a blackout, inside, life went on as normal, and the solar not only provided extra power but also re-charged the Powerwall as we used it. Batteries don’t just store energy. They turn your house into a micro-grid, which can function separately to the main grid if needed, like in blackouts. Without a battery solar panels won’t function, if there’s a blackout, they turn off to prevent electrocuting line workers.

Somebody told me once EVs only do OK because they’re ‘subsidised’. Actually wankpanzers are by far the most subsidised vehicles on the road. $250 million a year, for these multi-tonne piles of shit.

Scans of an 18-year-old woman who developed psychotic episodes after Covid infection. You can see the enormous inflammation of the brain on the right, well after she ‘recovered’ from Covid.

Here’s an example of how social media took over the world. It’s a bait-and-switch operation. First it offered us the bait of ways to ‘connect’ with our friends and family. It then sold us as data, to media companies and advertisers. That’s the switch. It baited these same companies by offering them us, our data, as targeted audiences. It then switched them, by restricting their capacity to use these platforms to run their businesses. The platforms became the only place they could really do business, and on the terms of the platform owners, not on their own terms. Now most news comes through social media, as we see in this story. Nobody uses newspapers now. But this is happening across every industry. Government itself is now being transacted through social media, the leading candidates in upcoming council elections for example mobilise through social media. We think only of the bait, and don’t notice the switch. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-22/newsagencies-decline-as-online-news-beats-print-media-newspapers/104117872?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link

The man who led a coup to try to overthrow a democratically-elected government, is now favourite to win elected control of that same government. Because one of his own supporters shot him in the ear, missing his head. I like to think we’ve reached peak stupid, but we’re endlessly inventive.

There’s a trillion tonnes of water in this iceberg. Not one mention in the description below of the disaster this ‘calving’ represents. If (when) all the Antarctic sea ice melts, sea levels will rise between 60 and 70 metres. That’s all coastal cities completely wiped out. That’s most of the Australian population. If you think ‘we’ll have time’, how do you think you pick up a capital city and move it? Delusional.

Today is the first time I really registered that the word Devil has the word evil in it.

The BYD Seal is an extraordinary bargain. Staggering what you get for the dollars, like a cross between a Porsche and a Mercedes, for the price of a Toyota Camry.

Petrolheads often use the concept of the ‘driver’s car’. They use it to suggest only they know what good driving is, and everybody else should defer to their expertise. It’s bog standard protecting of social territory. As you can see in the clip, nobody can actually define what the term even means. Usually it includes needing to drive a manual, and fast. Except a manual petrol/diesel vehicle is the bottom of the evolutionary tree, for motoring. They cling to it because it defined their social group, growing up. You’ll see how the guy here sneers at the suggestion a Tesla (for example) could be a driver’s car. Which gives the game away. It’s all about territory. You know what I think good driving is, and a driver’s car? Driving is a social activity, so good driving is driving in a way that maximises the experience of everybody on the road. And a car that enables that. That means driving at a constant speed, to keep gaps in the traffic. Driving smoothly. (Also what race car drivers do, it’s the fastest way to get somewhere.) And having the technology to help do that, while keeping everybody safe. Driving like you’re on a race track isn’t better driving. It’s actually easier, because you only have to think of yourself. It’s something for race tracks, not public roads. And good race drivers conserve tyres and drive as smoothly as possible anyway, not like ‘driver’s car’ wankers. Public road driving is not race track driving, though they converge in important ways that don’t resemble ‘driver’s car’ driving at all. It’s not an easier or less skilful form of driving. Race cars that go the fastest are now converging with cars and drivers that drive in the safest and most considerate way on public roads anyway. Lots of driver-assist. Just as happened with planes. And much more powerful drive units, electric in the case of cars. And smooth driving, which gets you there faster than jerky erratic revhead driving. The old driving a ‘stick’ as fast as you can is just old men mostly, desperately clinging to a world that’s leaving them behind at speed. Many young people have no interest in driving at all, let alone ‘driver’s car’ wank driving. And the fastest race cars gave up on a stick years ago. Gears are only there because combustion engines are gutless unless you rev the crap out of them.

It’s only when people retrofit combustion cars as EVs that you see just how much complicated rubbish is normally in an engine bay. I don’t call combustion engines rubbish to be provocative. I mean it literally, from an engineering point of view. They’re 150-year old complicated and inefficient rubbish. A new EV has almost nothing in the engine bay at all. It’s a frunk, a front-trunk (boot).

One Australian athlete at the Games already down with Covid. And it's 2 days before anything starts.

Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth.

This is global air surface temperatures. A new world record on 21 July. Broken on 22 July.

"When it comes to batteries, roughly 70 per cent of the original energy produced at the source performs useful work in the vehicle. With hydrogen, that drops to between 25 per cent and 30 per cent, while internal combustion engines at best deliver 20 per cent efficiency." Lots of the combustion cult have been using hydrogen as a way to deny the reality of renewables and EVs. Like nuclear, a fact-free fantasy.

Precision fermentation (PF) is a revolution still happening. Industrial agriculture is the most destructive industry on the planet. PF may destroy it. With dairy, outside that 3.3%, which PF can make easily, the rest of a bottle of milk is mostly sugar, water and fat.

Fish dont know water exists until they’re beached. In the same way, our own culture is the thing most invisible to us. Like travel, again. This passion Australians have to do the ‘Big Lap’, or equivalent. To accumulate lots of sights, like doing an inventory of the whole continent. Lucky Starr’s “I’ve Been Everywhere, Man.” Macca’s “Australia All Over” weekend radio show, with the same theme. It’s all actually quite strange. I think at the deepest level what’s going on here is that we know, as a nation huddled mostly on the coast, that we have no real connection to the land. Notice that’s the route of The Big Lap, because that’s where most of us live, as far away from the actual land as we can get. And we think ‘collecting’ lots of sights will somehow repair that connection. Diverting through the centre of the continent, trending now in travel, doesn’t change this. We’re tourists in our own land, and we don’t see it. No amount of travel, no amount of ‘sights’, brings us any closer to any meaningful relationship to the continent. We’re just tourists. We’re window shopping our own home. Some set up home in the more remote parts of the country, thinking this is a more authentic connection. But they’re living lives not dissimilar to the coasties, just with more room and quiet. Remote towns are permanent campsites. The whole continent is gripped by a Madonna-Whore complex, we plunder the land for ‘resources’ and real estate, and camp in the ‘outback’. 200+ years of trashing the world’s greatest mystery. You might think this is exaggeration. But this continent is falling apart. Mass extinctions, topsoil all washed and blown out to sea, ongoing record land-clearing. All the stuff that actually keeps us alive. That’s the ‘whore’ side of our culture, while we travel to the inland to do our best Crocodile Dundee impersonation, wallowing in the numinosity of an ‘outback’ we can’t even define. That’s the Madonna. We’re like the US and UK. Mostly a vulgar and brutal settler culture, a culture of get-rich-quick, only sometimes interrupted by mass migration from much more nuanced cultures that take the rough edges off it.

Because government actively suppress this information now. Epidemic diseases come in waves, we’re currently on the downslope (again). This is the time people stay ‘see? It’s over’. Which then generates the next up-wave. And so on, ad infinitum.

More Mast Cell Activation fun, a very common condition after you've had Covid. One of the people at work is ready to claw their eyes out with a fork, they're so irritated by MCAS. They look even worse than the person in the picture, because the eyelids are swollen too. There is no cure, and it doesn't resolve itself. Ever. One of my medical researcher friends said 'I'd hate to see the rest of their organs too'. All preventable with a $2 mask. Many say 'you have to live your life.' Go for it. I find eyes useful in my life.

ICE sales static. All the growth is in EVs, whether hybrid or BEV.

My favourite headline of the day. Petrol car catches fire while parked in a spot reserved for EVs.

Trump is the only US President to lose the popular vote twice. He also lost the Presidency at the height of his popularity. It’ll be interesting to see how this election pans out, given that the US people had a gutful of him once already.

Such a fundamentally decent man, with a tragic adult life. (He also lost one of the two surviving sons, to brain cancer.) Disgusted me that him being old was seen as being more of a problem than somebody being a convicted felon, who organised a coup, has been bankrupted 6 times and who deliberately allowed over a million Americans to die, from Covid.

Australia will win gold medals in Paris. But none of those athletes will come within light years of achieving what Australian biomedical engineer Daniel Timms has done. I posted about him once before. Here he is, holding the artificial heart he invented. It’s made of titanium, so the body won’t reject it. It has only one moving part, a levitating magnetic metal disc, that floats inside it, touching nothing except blood. Doctors are hoping it can be a permanent heart replacement, for those with heart failure. Previously artificial hearts failed inside a year, and even the better ones were seen only as a temporary thing, until a transplant could be found. One of the senior doctors working with it says it will pump until ‘the sun no longer exists’. It’s that good. It can pump with or without pulsatile motion i.e. continuously, or in ‘pulses’, as our hearts do. Nobody is sure whether we even need a pulse, it may just be a feature of our muscular hearts that this one doesn’t need (though it can do that too). It can be implanted in children, women and men. Daniel’s dad was a plumber, who died in his 50s of heart failure. They worked on the original idea together, but it came too late to save him. These are now being put into actual patients in clinical trials. Everybody has their fingers crossed the trials will go well, the animal trials have been superb. Smart is the only true sexy. Fuck this is smart. I’m at a stage in my life where I’m very intolerant of stupidity standing in the way of improving our lives, and unapologetically so.

Long Covid is badly named. It suggests most people get ‘Short Covid’, and some unlucky ones then get some irritating persistent ‘long’ symptoms. In reality Covid goes to war against your body, even in mild cases. Our health systems and wider societies cannot deal with the avalanche of chronic disease that’s already starting.

Ideas constantly improve things. Mostly it’s unnoticed because everyday things seem simple. Like my new dishbrush. I paid a bit more for this one, but was a bit sceptical because it didn’t look very strong. The bristles are spread much further apart, it looked like they wouldn’t have the ‘grunt’ of the old one, where the bristles were clumped much closer together. This thing would rip the rust off a seaside pier. Somebody’s done research into optimum placement and angle of bristles, it’s clear. Research that will be invisible to most of us, because it just works. Ever noticed how cars got progressively quieter and more efficient over the years? Somebody, somewhere, is always thinking and improving things. Smart is the only sexy. The stupid will cling to a point-in-time version for most things, objects and unchanging ideas become totems their social groups rally around. All human progress is the battle between knowledge and social team sports.

A boyfriend broke her heart, and at the same time the brains of the people of NSW. The law wasn't fooled. https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/courts-law/former-nsw-premier-gladys-berejiklian-to-learn-fate-over-corruption-finding/news-story/49881432264c489a9e2156165444903f

O dear @[100000262864906:2048:Dorothy], not the Canadians! I've never watched a 'Tillies' game I should add, including their flogging last night where they were apparently lucky not to lose 6-0. https://www.thestar.com/sports/olympics-and-paralympics/the-canadian-soccer-spying-scandal-is-growing-the-olympic-champions-are-in-ruins/article_9b5c8820-486c-11ef-afab-cf98fe783cbc.html

If you want a glimpse at what Joe Biden achieved, have a look.

Replacing Biden with Harris in the US attracted $220 milllion in donations for Democrats. In a week.

Only the French have the vanity of running long speeches in a native tongue that relatively few speak outside the country, at the most international of events. Not even any sub-titles. Pissing down rain, richly deserved.

It’s not just the amazing torque, it’s that it’s mostly silent too. We’ll look back and wonder why we drove anything else.

I also feel a dog would have been one of the first to die.

A while back I posted here how I get every single vaccination I qualify for. For any disease. This is why.

I would do this over travel, every day of the week.

Tesla’s dog mode not only allows you to leave air con or heating on in the car for dogs (or older kids), for hours if needed. (An EV can run heating or cooling for days.) The Tesla app on your phone also allows you to monitor how the dogs (or kids) are remotely, using the car’s internal cameras.

If you want a sense of the reality of what’s happening in the car world, rather than the social media bubble filled with whining petrolheads, have a look at the staggering number of EV utes under development. The Nissan with the solid state battery particularly interesting. The phenomenal and instant torque of EVs will vastly improve the experience for heavy vehicles. Drove next to a diesel semi the other day shifting up and down 24 gears, belching black filth into the air. Just crap technology, always was.

I talk about EVs so much not because of any fetish for them. But because they’re a window into our culture. Take the Chinese EVs. The true genius of China isn’t in design, they plagiarise most of that from Europeans. Because they’re trying to sell us what they know we like. Their genius is manufacturing. They have far and away the greatest number of tool makers and other manufacturing genius in the world. They can transform an idea into a reality faster than anybody. Other car companies take years to bring a new model to development. You can see that with BYD right now. They’re a juggernaut, rolling out across the entire world at breathtaking speed. And what they do is listen carefully to first reviews, and immediately incorporate feedback into designs. They can transform that feedback into the cars *immediately*. Not in a year or 3 years, with a new model like other car makers. Straight away. The BYD Seal that was for sale in March is different to the one you buy in April. It’s that quick. That’s manufacturing genius.

Another cultural observation. I often hear ‘cheap Chinese crap’ when there’s talk about Chinese goods. The Chinese are master manufacturers, just as the Japanese learned to be, very quickly. Or BYD, now making big inroads into Australia. BYD help make most of the iPhones and iPads people use, as an example. And this feedback from a London bus driver speaks volumes.

Dum di dum.

Some of the olympic events have no commentary at all. Is that the Channel 9 strike in action? Or are they just not bothering to have commentators for some events?

The BYD Seal and Tesla Models 3 and Y are the leading EVs to buy right now. I’ve done an exhaustive comparison of the 3 and the Seal, competing sedans. It’s very hard to split them, both are a jaw-dropping bargain for the tech you get. I think the Seal probably has the edge, and its premium model (advertised here) is cheaper than the base model of the Tesla Model 3.

It’s interesting that Mel Gibson’s career nosedived when his weird, extreme beliefs were exposed. But Tom Cruise is more popular than ever, despite being one of the international leaders of a Scientology cult.

It’s fascinating to experiment with this stuff. On a sub-zero night, I run the reverse-cycle units (heat pumps) all night, because as you can see they use only trickle amounts of energy to keep the rooms at temperature, that were heated during the day. In an 8-hour period overnight, they use about 5kWh of energy. If I turn them off before bed, and back on on a freezing morning, their draw jumps to 6-8 kW, to raise the room temperatures, with the heat pump outside having to work much harder against the sub-zero temps. The units are running 24 hours on those days, but it probably creates less wear and tear than a morning-only surging blast, which makes them work a lot harder.

Watched this on the weekend. Entertaining, but missed some opportunities I think. About fake people in relationships, who pretend to be something they’re not, often in sinister ways. The image here shows the emphasis in this story, about predatory men, ‘love bombing’, gaslighting etc. What the story missed for me is exploration of why these men do it, and why women fall for it. 1970s feminism would (rightly) have a field day with this, with the woman portrayed as a helpless victim, with little insight or agency. And women can also be fake in relationships, creating a version of themselves to fit with a particular partner, or even to be manipulative. A more interesting story for me would have explored why love itself is fundamentally fake in so many ways. Not out of bad intent, but because of the impossible distance between two people. Rather than the dominant vibe in this series, of people being perpetually wounded and ‘cheated’. We are always in love with our idea of another person. When our ideas turn out to vary from the reality of that person, that’s not betrayal or cheating. That’s an inescapable reality. True love is living in that unbridgeable gap, enjoying its sparks and wearing its wounds.

The guy who likes to sexually assault women, run coup attempts after elections and bankrupt businesses, may be losing. This is a FOX News survey.

BYD will have two mid-sized SUVs in Australia this year. I mention BYD because seriously, we’re living inside a revolution right now. The quality of the engineering here is premium/world class, and the price defies belief. The Sea Lion 6 shown here is 25 THOUSAND cheaper than the Mitsubishi Outlander equivalent, and is a much better car. It’s a plug-in hybrid, for those who get range anxiety. It’ll do about 80km on battery alone, and then use the petrol motor as well, as a hybrid, for longer trips. I’ve seen multiple reviews of this car now that couldn’t find a single flaw in it. Not one. Motoring journalists literally gobsmacked. The Sea Lion 7 will be here soon, and is a full electric. You’re getting Mercedes/Audi quality with these vehicles, for cheaper than a Toyota.

There’s a huge train crash coming for aged care. Many working in that industry say it’s here already, which is also true. But it’s about to get much, much worse. There is no easy answer to this, apart from importing lots and lots of workers. But the whole world wants those workers, they’re very hard to find. And they don’t stick around when you do get them, they move on to better paid jobs. One of the great tensions will be that baby boomers, who hold most of society’s wealth, will want taxpayers as a whole to pay for a fix to this problem. But younger generations can’t even afford a roof over their own heads. A crash is coming.

As somebody who works in governance, the greatest danger by far to human life is what is sometimes called populism. Governing only by what is popular. It sounds harmless, even democratic. Try raising your kids or teaching a class using that same principle and you’ll produce sociopaths. Societies are the same. You can see all the science and other expertise and terrible experience aligned here for the umpteenth time, against Daylight Saving. It won’t make a difference, because what will be the deciding principle? Whether people ‘like’ it. People like Andrew Tate. And eating too much sugar, and drinking too much alcohol. And fossil fuel vehicles. And not paying rates or taxes. And smoking, and making their partners play out fantasies they see on porn sites. And not exercising. And not fighting climate change or Covid. And and and. That’s the world you get, when the only principle is ‘likes’.

The things you miss staring at your phone.

The phone is the tool that transforms life into social media. And it’s not a one-way or even two-way process. It’s a circular self-referential loop, where we use the world to feed our social media feeds, which in turn remake the world according to what’s trending on those feeds. And what controls this bubblefication of life? Algorithms on these platforms. They now don’t just control the world, they shape it. All for the benefit of revenue for platform owners and shareholders. Transforming your most intimate personal, family and friendship moments into dollars, while looping back to change that most intimate life in turn, to conform with what’s trending in the revenue algorithms. Peoples’ bodies are even surgically altered, as part of this looping.

The Chinese engineering juggernaut continues on. An updated version of the BYD Seal due this year already, with big increases in charging speeds, addition of semi-autonomous driving technology and rumoured even fancier interiors. It takes other brands years to bring a new model to market.

Condoms offered to athletes at the Olympics. Meanwhile the water polo team is almost entirely infected with Covid and played regardless, breathing all over their opponents. One prominent British athlete who openly has Covid breathed all over Princess Anne presenting his medal. The world is literally insane. There are simple treatments for STIs/STDs, but it’s great public health to avoid them. There are no treatments for Covid, still the 3rd leading cause of death in Australia.

Here you go Dan, right on cue. As always, we don’t need Scooby and the gang to solve this mystery.

Dan :)

If you’re a cyclist, you may notice that the pandemic didn’t end. Factories in South East Asia have been shut down to prevent spread.

Kyle and Jackie O have been a multi-million dollar flop in Melbourne. It’s not difficult to see why. What is difficult is understanding why they’re popular anywhere else.

Another mystery solved, Scoob!

Watching the Olympics strengthens a feeling maybe my European friends can comment on, that Europe has now become a theme park for the Americans and Chinese in particular?

Ruh Roh, Scoob!

BYD is hammering lazy and entitled traditional car companies. We should celebrate this.

This is Oliver Cromwell’s actual head. Cromwell led the parliamentary forces in the English Civil War of the 17th century, that removed the monarchy and House of Lords, and decapitated Charles I. He then took control of Britain, even living in the King’s old palaces. When he died power passed to his son, who was quickly deposed by those wanting to restore the monarchy, under Charles II. The new King had Cromwell’s body dug up from Westminster Abbey, and hung outside (executed after death). He then had the body beheaded, and put the head on a 20-foot stake outside the Tower of London for nearly 30 years. Never piss off a king.

They may now not use the Seine for swimming events at the Olympics because of the presence of E. coli. E. coli is a BSL-1 organism. The higher in the pyramid, the more dangerous the disease. Can you see what’s hiding up there at BSL-3? Free to every athlete.

I’m sure this used to happen at every olympics, athletes pulling out left, right and centre with colds and the flu. Or maybe we’re just full of shit.

If you like a hot bath, and who doesn’t? The North Atlantic has plenty of room for all. The aim of international climate action was to to keep the rise in global temperatures below an average of 1.5 degrees. In the northern hemisphere right now they’re looking at hitting 2.5 degrees. See them sweltering at the olympics? We’re racing to extinction.

And what does all the heat in the air and oceans do? It melts all of the ice. If you know anybody still sceptical about climate change, try blowing gently in one of their ears and see if the air comes straight out the other ear.

Ignore Elon Musk and enjoy the genius of his engineers instead.

Do you think all of the armchair epidemiologists who advised us that we ‘need to learn to live with Covid’ told olympic athletes that it would mean wasting 4 years of training?

Nobody does jingoistic bullshit better than Channel 9. ‘Our Jess’ *vomit* One Australian team flogged the USA yesterday, comprising mostly young women from regional Australia. (Hint: it wasn’t the Matildas.) Mass public hysterias are so arbitrary in their chosen darlings.