October 2024

Melody is one of life’s great mysteries, that I don’t’ think gets a lot of attention. A melody follows no rules, unlike harmony, which does and can be applied to any melody almost mechanically. A melody is alive, it has a type of character. Mozart was a genius at melodies, pretty much everybody would have heard at least some of these. A melody is like Hamlet, or Harry Potter. Once created it feels like a living thing that has always existed. You can’t apply a formula to write a melody, it’s literally a type of magic. There aren’t as many great melody writers now, I think, in music. The riff has become dominant, rather than melody. More rhythm than melody. Country music cops some mockery, but some of the greatest melody writers of all are country music writers.

A common thing now is for tragedy to be used for fundraising. I notice here that the GoFundMe was up and running almost as soon as the tragedy happened, ditto for a recent young death here locally, where the first many knew the tragedy had happened was when they were asked to chip in money, with a fundraising goal that was way beyond costs for a funeral. I find it disgusting. There’s not any sense of decency, I was taken by the complaint of somebody who’d donated to a recent GoFundMe that there’d been not one acknowledgement to all of those who donated. Not a thank you, not a communication of any kind. Probably weeping selfie videos uploaded to Instagram to milk the whole tragedy for even more attention. Me me me, adults with the social skills of young teenagers. By contrast my own mum lost a colleague this week from her early teaching years. Her first priority? To find the addresses of the extended family, so she could send them a card.

Nothing creates the ‘starving artist’ more than the idea that all art is subjective. Why would you pay for somebody’s subjective fantasies? If we valued art, we’d value artists.

Do you know people younger than 50 suddenly developing cardiovascular pathologies, like strokes and heart problems? You’re going to see a lot more of that. We’re in tragic denial. What is not understood by the public is that Covid is not a respiratory disease. It’s not like a cold, or the flu. It’s a vascular disease. It attacks blood vessels. Wherever you have blood vessels, which is everywhere. Even where it attacks the lungs, it doesn’t attack the breathing passages, it attacks the blood vessels in the lungs. And the virus remains resident in bodies after you ‘get better’, continuing its assault on your blood vessels.

Northern NSW.

Range is the wrong measure for cars. A petrol or diesel vehicle gets long range by putting enormous amounts of energy into them, 80% of which then goes straight out the exhaust, unused, as pollution.

The impact of climate change. The Swiss and Italians have had to redraw their borders, which were previously defined by a lot of ice and glaciers. Many of which have now melted. Switzerland has lost 12% of its ice in the past 3 years.

Electricty bills are issued quarterly. The quarter that covered the first half of winter, our bill was $0. The next bill will cover the second half of winter. It will be a profit. The energy company will be paying us.

Local government elections are over. There will be ony two ways forward from here, no matter who was elected. Higher rates, or lower services. There is no magic bucket of money hidden by ‘corruption’ or ‘incompetence’. There is no magic source of new revenue, by running events or anything else. Just higher rates. Or lower services. No matter which town you live in, people spend far more on their personal travel, take away food, dining out and recreation/leisure activities, than they do on their rates. We’re not seeing the shift in societies, away from investment in the public good.

The BYD Shark is finally arriving. Shots fired! A ute you can use as full-electric for 100km of range i.e. double what you need for most peoples’ every day driving. And then the petrol engine will act as a generator for longer trips, using a lot less petrol than a full-petrol ute, because the electric motors it drives are more than 4 times more efficient and powerful. A full-electric Shark will come later too.

Leicester in the 1950s. The golden age of coal. I think of this sometimes when people still choose wood burners for heating. In the vast expanse of the universe, what distinguishes us is a breathable atmosphere. Which we shit in every day.

The heart is just the start of the Covid damage. Endothelial damage is an organ destroyer.

Read the comments. The whole world is starting to see the problem with travel. Many Blue Mountains towns are now unlivable on weekends and in holidays.

Had a look around a McLaren Artura the other day. It’s a hybrid supercar. They add the electric motor to improve the acceleration of the V6. Looks amazing of course. But it costs north of $250K. You can get similar performance with a family EV costing the same as a Toyota. Like I say, we’re living inside a revolution, and just haven’t noticed.

Walking in a large shopping mall in a school holiday is a brilliant people-watching experience. What I increasingly notice is how the mobile phone has allowed us to essentially live inside our social networks now, more than at any other time in history. The phone has allowed us to take our friends everywhere with us. People are glued to them everywhere they go. They use the phone camera to plug their friends into where they are, and more importantly to curate a social look and feel inside their social networks. The whole world becomes raw material to build out that social identity. We are literally living inside the phones, because those phones are our social network. This is also leading to a dramatic acceleration of imitation, of fashions and trends, and from that the huge growth in interest in luxury or ‘premium’ things, because status is the currency of social life. I watched thousands of people looking almost identical in how they dressed, in expensive gear, all shaped by their imitative social networks.

There’s beautiful counterpoint in music hidden in some older songs. Take this oldie from Nat King Cole, listen to the second verse from about 1:05 onwards. There’s the main melody he’s singing, and alongside that the saxophones are playing harmony, but with a completely different melody of their own. Melodies and counter-melodies, rather than melody + harmony. https://youtu.be/S2lG1K-QYh0?si=bkZSgaZMGy9kNKhQ

First review of the BYD Shark. Reviewers astounded at what BYD have done here. Have a watch, an incredible vehicle. Other ute makers will be literally shitting themselves. How’s 0-100 in under 6 seconds sound, for a ute? With permanent electric AWD that’s phenomenal off-road, and amazing cornering on standard roads with almost zero body roll? With a range of over 800km.

Pffft, what does science know, next to ‘But I like it!’

Another mystery, Scoob!

I didn’t know that your feet often get bigger with age. I’m now in a size 15. I was a 14 for years. Ligament spread as you age, etc.

Nigel, Adam, Dan, GF tip?

Covid levels currently reasonably low in Australia. That’s about to change, with yet another variant created by uncontrolled spread of this virus. Infection can’t stop infection.

We’re just back from a short Queensland holiday. Visited Sea World again, to give Alice a taste of theme parks (she’s never been). We were all bored by everything except seeing some marine life, and winced at $13 servings of hot chips. Theme parks are interesting though because they’re the root model for all tourism. To transform a location into entertainment, for visitors. There’s an escalation of ‘thrills’ at tourism sites, to try to keep tourists stimulated. It never lasts, they move on, bored, to find other thrills, elsewhere, leaving a trashed location behind them. We consume the landscape in Australia, mostly with farming, mining and tourism. It becomes a resource. We wallow in a confected numinosity of our fantasy called the outback, or at one of our tens of thousands of beaches. It’s all in our heads, we’re travelling through our own fantasies, like leafing through postcards. The land is absolutely stunning, but we have no meaningful connection to it at all. We’re just ‘seeing’ it, literally like looking at/living in postcards. Camping in it doesn’t bring you any closer to it. That’s our Crocodile Dundee fantasy. Most campers have tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear. But even with just a swag, physical presence in a landscape creates no actual connection with it. Or people avoid the tourist hot spots, not realising they’re just creating the new tourist hot spots. Reproducing the same model. We enjoyed our time, mostly because it was us time together. But none of us really like invading places where other people, plants and animals live. I love just being in the Pacific Ocean for a while. But am always mindful that I live in a culture that is a tourist in its own land. That knows Australia only as one of many theme parks, even if only some are directly called that. Byron Bay is now a theme park. Where we retire to travel throughout the land, as permanent tourists. Tourists in our own land, it’s absolutely perverse. Thinking if we accumulate enough sights, we’re somehow closing this void of connection with it. But culturally, we don’t see it. That’s our problem to solve. We have no idea how.

Have used our Kluger hybrid for 2 longer trips, Broken Hill and the Gold Coast. For a family car using a combustion engine, it’s about as good as it’s ever going to get. Beautifully engineered. The hybrid means it uses 5.5-6L/100km, for a vehicle over 2 tonnes, also fully loaded. Toyota’s series-parallel hybrids ensure you get just the amount of power you need, at every speed, with minimal fuel use, and no need for changing gears. Makes it a pleasure to drive. I say as good as it’s ever going to get, because the ultimate vehicle will always be a full-electric. There’s not one way a combustion engine can ever compete, all that keeps them in the game is putting huge fuel tanks in them to give them (very expensive) greater range. That gap is closing fast, in fact it’s already closed with many new EVs.

Electric charging stations will be modelled more on airports than service stations. Petrol and diesel fuel stations are more like the Tinder of energy supply. Wham bam, 10 minutes, out of there. Energy brothels. Here’s a new EV charging station in the US. 40 high-speed charging stalls (with solar panels above those roofs). With a range of shopping and entertainment options for charging drivers. A person could do part of their weekly shop, while charging.

Kudos to the engineers who work on mapping software for our phones. Our trips to and from the Gold Coast were almost 1000 km, each way. For both journeys, the mapping software predicted our arrival time at the exact address, 10 hours in advance, correct to the nearest minute. That’s allowing for traffic, weather, geography etc. It just knew. (Graphic is a screenshot of the software, not our trip.)

I think it’s important to hear ordinary Australians speak about their experience of buying EVs. To cut through the fog of misinformation on social media. Like this guy’s 20-second summary, who’s now owned his Tesla Model Y for 6 months. People find it transformational, going well beyond motoring. (Full very nuanced, warts and all video review is at: https://youtu.be/9N6MQmIfWKw?si=sYLdFEQAu8ZvIVpy)

12 men walked on the moon. Only 4 are still alive. I was born just as the Apollo program was doing this. I’d sit for hours staring at the NASA photos of all the missions, amazed by the audacity of the engineering and vision. Just as kids did with their Jules Verne novels in the 19th century, about amazing submarines and moon rockets. Then along came Elvis, and The Beatles. Suddenly the passion of kids was directed at people standing on a stage with guitars, singing into microphones. That shift is still with us today. You can send a rocket to Mars and it won’t even get on the news. But a new tour by Oasis will. Music has always been a first love of mine. But to make it the centre of culture was a terrible mistake. My passion for renewables and EVs is the same passion I had staring at the NASA photos as a kid. The excitement of building an amazing new world. Not singing about it. Birds use music to create and maintain territory. When you hear ‘bell birds’ (bell miners), you’re hearing war cries, they’ve driven out the opposition. Our shift to music was really a shift to war. Competing teams, each with their own war cry. Nothing fires up people more than criticism of their favourite acts. The explosion of music represented a fracturing of society.

This is the second US hurricane in a fortnight. The reason is the same reason Australia has been so wet in the past 2 years. The oceans are boiling. Water in the Gulf there is 1-3 degrees hotter than normal. That doesn’t sound a lot, but that’s confusing temperature with heat. Heating that enormous mass of water by only a degree (temperature) is an *enormous* amount of heat (energy) that needs to go somewhere.

There are now a lot of people with long-term experiences to share of owning an EV. A couple more today, Teslas again though all the EVs are good. Tesla I think are the best combination of engineering, efficiency, safety, price, charging infrastructure and just plain fun. Here’s the 1-year review by the same bloke I shared yesterday, of a Model Y as a family car. The suspension issue he mentions - the suspension is stiff to favour performance - has been resolved since. (Quick summary: still the best car in the world. A family SUV with supercar performance. Also the safest car in the world, on the data.)

This is such an important window into long-term EV ownership. 165,000km of driving. No servicing required that entire time. Battery still with 90% capacity. The car looks brand new, both inside and out, incredibly rugged design and materials. Also incredible insights into the amount of data Teslas can give you, even how many wipes of the wiper blades. Tesla can access all of the data remotely if needed, to diagnose any issues, and they resolve them by sending a service person directly to you. A car that needs NO SERVICING. Huge. There’s nothing really that can go wrong with an EV, in its basic mechanics. Costs almost nothing to ‘fuel’ it, mind bending amounts of power and acceleration, the ability to control the car remotely if needed, etc. etc. This guy drove the Tesla from the top of the UK to the bottom, stopping only once to charge. Range is a furphy. And over-the-air updates add more features to the car almost every week, other cars need new models to bring new features.

James worked at NASA from the early 1980s, and is sometimes called the ‘father of global warming’ because of his early identification of the problem.

Heard a loud bang at 1:20am here in Lithgow. Not sure if man-made, or an earth tremor. Nothing listed on the official earthquake site. Anybody else?

This is the new XEC variant. I could encourage everybody I know to take precautions. I know the vast majority won’t. People are more scared of being different to others, than they are of being infected with a lethal virus.

We were a bit slow getting to this show. I always thought the Lord of the Rings (the books and films) story began when all the most interesting stuff had already happened. The fight against Sauron when at his most powerful. This series tells that story, a prequel. It was a bit slow to start, but wham, once it gets going, it pushes you back in your seat. Great writing, amazing special effects (the most expensive TV show ever made).

Ah, petrol and diesel. Meanwhile Florida EV owners are charging at home and getting a headstart on the highways out of there. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/08/business/hurricane-milton-florida-gasoline-shortages/index.html

Martina isn't buying.

The Governor of Florida recently signed legislation forbidding reference to climate change in the State's law. Reality said "uh huh".

"We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled...more and more scientists have begun to research the possibility of societal collapse." 2024 State of the Climate Report (https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biae087/7808595?login=false) Humans won't change to fix this. Catastrophe will do it for us.

My favourite V8 fan is the lady sitting by herself crocheting.

The weather decided to play nice. Town looked a picture.

Bathurst elects its next Mayor and Deputy Mayor today, streamed live for your viewing pleasure from 2pm, on the Bathurst Regional Council YouTube page. (Link below.) The stream will come online a bit before 2, and just show a message saying the meeting will start soon, if you’re interested and want to have a few minutes to find the stream. If you can’t see it, click the ‘Live’ link. https://youtube.com/@bathurstregionalcouncil1012?si=u379NBdkf2h2clP4

In Western Australia residents pay twice as much in vehicle registration to the State budget as the State collects in gas royalties every year. The international gas industry is laughing at us. Electrify everything, boot them out.

Barefoot shoes to me are an example of what can go wrong with the idea of 'natural' health. They are absolutely not good for some types of feet, some peoples' current foot condition, and the activities they plan to do. They can be a disaster for some. They assume a sort of perfect foot and that before we wore shoes all people had perfect feet that never caused any problems, and ignore the now nearly universal hard flat surfaces we all walk on too. This is the problem with most ideas of 'natural', they're universalising generalisations. I have a lot of background in bodywork ideas, and know this to be true from my own bitter experience. The pain from my feet before I got properly supported shoes was the worst I've ever experienced. I'm never going back there again. https://actpodiatry.com.au/barefoot-walking-and-minimalist-footwear/#:~:text=Because%20of%20the%20lack%20of,high%20arched%2C%20rigid%20foot%20types.

As people queue up to be infected with the next Covid variant here, XEC. You can lead a horse to water...

Ooops. Thankfully KIA has an excellent range of EVs that don't have this problem.

Adam and Nigel. Reminded me of our discussion about petrol chainsaws.

A few notice the transformation of all adult life into high school life. In my 50s I decided to say enough. I now break all the rules of that adult life, probably alienating many I know. I refuse to play those status games, games of identity. I refuse to make the guiding principle of my life ‘what other people are doing’, that constant daily monitoring of how I fit in. I’m not a contrarian either, that’s just doing the opposite of what everybody else is doing, and is even more slave to the whole stupid high school process. My priority every day when I get up is the same. To understand the world a little better, and act accordingly. It’s also joyful, unlike the continuous anxiety of monitoring your status - how you fit in - which passes for much of adult life now. A person who tells you they only want fun, happy experiences means they don’t want to make waves. They want to fit in. Enslaved to high school life. Nearly always their heroes are musicians, like teenagers.

You can see here range is a non-issue. Chinese EVs (the ones they sell for their domestic market) already have ranges exceeding 800km. And practically, any range above about 40km is like having a 10-inch penis. It has no practical application in the real world, for most people, most of the time.

"If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would've told me a faster horse." Henry Ford

Matching your symptoms, @[621123725:2048:Adam]?

I keep waiting for the community to register 'hmm, gee isn't everybody sick a lot these days'. By the way hand sanitiser is useless for a lot of gastro. Soap and water.

Perfect example of how EVs are much more than differently-powered cars. They carry enough usable energy to run an entire home for days. That gives you enormous potential to do all sorts of things with them.

Elon Musk’s nonsensical big product launch yesterday and this story are interesting contrasts. You can see here the phenomenal ability of Chinese industry to bring rapid changes to market. Historically car makers introduced changes over years, with new models. If BYD gets customer feedback, it brings the changes immediately, sometimes within weeks. The Chinese have most of the world’s toolmakers, the people who tool factories to create products. It’s a wonder of the world.

KIA and Hyundai make superb EVs. They’ve been too pricey until now. But this is really big, the EV5 wil compete with the RAV4 and Tesla Model Y. That mid-sized SUV is a huge segment, and KIA is being aggressive on pricing at last. BYD is bringing the Seal Lion 7 here, which is its mid-sized SUV. It will be cheaper than the lot of them.

I see reports that Tony Shadie died, my old physics teacher. (Hans Stroeve just confirmed.) Many of my friends would have been taught by him too. Nigel were you in the physics class? I know David was, Lisa I think you too? Kieren you were. It was a large class, these days you’re lucky to find 2 kids in a physics class, nobody does the hard things any more. It was an interesting experience, rambling long discussions sometimes only vaguely linked to the physics. Like how Tony only slept under a sheet year-round, while his wife preferred to be smothered in bedding (echoes of my own life there). Loved it, not sure it was the teaching model for everybody there, but was fun for me. I taught with his son Jason at Lithgow High for a while, many people here know and remember Jason too.

This is actually true. We tend to assume that thinking is ‘me’. But you can observe your thinking, you can step outside it. Just as you can observe feelings and emotions. That point you observe from is not you. It’s the universe. It’s not a New Age thing, you can try it any time. Watch your thoughts, feelings and emotions, rather than assuming you are them. You’ll find they are not ‘you’.

First Australian review of the BYD equivalent of the Tesla Model Y (biggest selling car in the world). The Sealion 7. It’s the Seal, up-converted to a mid-sized SUV. And it’s brilliant. What will really make Tesla nervous is that it’s predicted to be $10K or more cheaper to buy, than the Model Y.

One interesting thing to consider when buying a car (which should be an EV of course), is insurance. Teslas for example are expensive to insure. But it’s not an EV thing, becaue BYDs cost about half as much to insure. In fact a BYD is cheaper to insure than a Toyota. There will be a reason Teslas cost more to insure, insurers could tell us. Part of my work is insurance, these rates will fluctuate while the car industry transitions. None of it is really about the platform, whether something is EV or not. Insurance is always a critical window into very interesting things. For example you can’t get insurance for Covid, even though we assume we’re all living with it. Insurers aren’t fools like us, getting something wrong costs them actual money. They’re a brilliant guide to what’s really going on out there.

We’re absolutely determined to pretend Covid is the flu. Even down to when we’re allowed to have vaccinations for Covid (annually), like we do for flu. Covid is not flu. In no way does it even resemble flu. It doesn’t infect in seasons (winter), like flu. It infects all year. It kills and maims FAR more people. The National Cabinet and chief medical advisers who came up with this fantasy have all now run for the hills, into new plum jobs, to leave the country to fester in continuous infection.

A few friends express fears about having to replace an EV battery. You will never need to. The longer these things are out on the road, the more the data shows that they’re even better than anybody thought…“the average EV battery should last 20 years or more. The data shows the average EV battery studied degraded by just 1.8 percent per year.”

They should invite BYD and Tesla to enter a team each in the V8 Supercars. Sadly it won’t happen, not least because the electrics would be half a lap ahead already on Lap 1. And for those wondering how they’d recharge the batteries in a race, you’d just do battery swaps, not charging.

The Bathurst 1000, the race that fascinates a nation. But not everybody in Bathurst.

When they’re not building incredible cars for unbelievable prices, the Chinese dance in the streets. They’re not free like us, or something.

Somebody standing around that yellow arrow (for example) is the reason I think big gigs are not about the show or the music. They’re about people liking being in a crowd. You couldn’t pay me to do it.

If you know somebody whose personality changed significantly after Covid infection, particularly towards dark thoughts and depression, the most likely cause is dopamine senescence. There are neurons in the brain that produce dopamine, a key neurochemical responsible for mood as well as movement. Covid attacks these and causes them to stop working. Dopamine is also heavily impacted in Parkinson’s Disease, it was this chemical Oliver Sacks and others targeted to bring Parkinson’s patients out of their frozen states, at least temporarily, before bad side-effects kicked in. Covid also causes fronto-temporal hypoperfusion, restriction of blood flow to the front part of the brain, where mood is regulated. This is also a key mechanism in the cause of strokes and dementia, two other conditions that have taken off since Covid.

Why is everybody so sick, all of the time now? Covid damages the immune system, leaving it wide open to other infections. Here are the increased risks currently known. There will be others. 1.40X means 1.4 times more likely, after Covid infection i.e. 40% more likely. Viral infections are 340% more likely. Sequelae (side-effects) of infectious disease conditions - shingles is an example - 1360% more likely. Etc.

People should be in jail. Starting with members of NSW Cabinet, who lead the total indifference. You should never go to hospital for treatment and contract a potentially lethal infection while there. With things like golden staph there is at least an attempt to control infection.

A 'mild' Covid infection can take 4 years off the natural life of your kidneys. Living (much shorter lives) with Covid.

The new Vauxhall (Europe's Holden) Frontera is launching next year with the petrol and EV versions exactly the same price. EVs now arriving at price parity (they'll then become the cheaper option). Which in reality means the EV is already far cheaper, because it will have almost zero maintenance, and will cost much, much less to 'fuel'.

Europe's car industry is under assault from much cheaper (and better) Chinese EVs. You can see here the often reported drop in 'demand' for EVs is actually Western governments removing subsidies for those vehicles, because their local carmakers can't keep up the supply to meet the enormous demand. China is doing all the heavy lifting to beat climate change. We're doing nothing. It will smash some of our biggest industries in the process, like energy and transport. We have ourselves to blame, for not doing a thing.

The early BYD Shark ute reviews are starting to come in. I knew it would be good. I didn't realise just how good. It's a Ford Ranger killer. (The Ranger is the current gold standard ute.) Twice the power and also bigger tray and interior. More kit in the interior, and more luxury trim. Same towing capacity as the Raptor. It's faster than the Raptor. It will be between 20-30 thousand dollars CHEAPER than a Raptor. I've seen serious motoring journalists say they're genuinely thinking this ute may destroy every other manufacturer in the segment. It does all of this while costing zero dollars in fuel for up to 100 km of motoring on every charge. With 840 km of range when driving as a hybrid.

He says ‘This is Bad’ because (watch it) he’s saying the Shark is so good, it will destroy every other ute. The ute is a totem in Australian (and US) life. It stands for everything in both of those societies that is resiting urgently needed change. The previous PM evoked them regularly, as a dog-whistle to a certain type of attitude about Australia. The Shark should torpedo this entire wankpanzer culture. I say should, because it’s so superior to the other rubbish on offer. But that culture is resistant. We’ll see. If people have tens of thousands spare to keep the great Aussie totem alive, well…fools and their money.

The new BYD Shark I’ve been mentioning has a 2.5-tonne towing capacity. This is a deliberate choice by BYD. It has nothing to do with ‘grunt’. The Ford Ranger and other utes for example will tow 3.5-tonnes. The BYD Shark has twice the power or grunt of those utes. The reason its towing limit is set to 2.5 tonnes, is the same reason the Ranger Raptor limit is 2.5 tonnes. They’re sprung for road use. BYD looked at the data and realised the vast majority of Australians never tow anything with their utes. So they chose coil springs for the suspension, for a much better road driving experience. The same thing the Raptor does, for the same reason. (This will also make it better as an off-roader in many situations.) You still get 2.5-tonnes, which for many is plenty anyway. Leaf springs (on the left) are useful really only for heavy loads and towing, they don’t move much so it stops the load bouncing up and down. They’re terrible for most driving. BYD will however be releasing a whole range of Sharks, including some for heavy towing, with leaf springs. But unless you carry a lot of heavy loads and do a lot of very heavy towing, go for the coils every time. Your teeth and spine will thank you. (I forgot to mention this first Shark will do 0-100 in 5.7 seconds. Bye bye, Raptor.)

Staggering stat.

If you've been getting strange illnesses or just not feeling well, take your pick from this smorgasbord of Long Covid symptoms. Notice how they get worse with repeated infections.

It's a great time to be Australian. The new BYD Sealion7 (their response to the Tesla Model Y, the world's biggest selling car) *starts* at nearly $90,000 in the UK. They haven't released pricing for here, but it will be tens of thousands less than that. Many Americans are also furious they can't access BYDs at the prices we get in Australia. They slapped big tariffs on them to protect their useless car industry.

The US and Europe looking at tariffs to try to save their car industries. It won't work, and they know it. Those industries are facing extinction. They've run every scare campaign imaginable, like EVs catching fire, having no range, that the cars are spying on you, blah blah blah. It won't save them. What would have saved them was shifting development to EVs about 30 years ago, as the Chinese did.

If the BYD Shark is a Ranger/Hilux/Navara/BT-50/Amarok killer, the BYD Sealion 6 is a Toyota RAV 4 killer. The RAV 4 is a huge car internationally. The Sealion 6 is so much better it’s embarrassing. The motoring experts who review it call it a faultless car. They can’t find one fault with it, see the video below. It will do 92km all-electric driving, before you even need the petrol, something the RAV 4 won’t. In other words you can drive it as a full EV with no fuel costs, for most everyday driving. Its acceleration of 0-100 in 5.7 seconds is way beyond the RAV 4. Its fitout is luxury, and even has a full glass sunroof with motorised shade. It costs $10,000 less than a similar spec RAV 4 hybrid. It costs $25,000 less than a similar spec Mitsubishi Outlander. (And when I say similar spec, there is no similar really, no other car in this segment comes close to the technology or luxury on offer, even in their top spec variants.) BYD is even giving buyers $2500 cash back. BYD is a revolution for Australian car buyers.

An estimated 3 billion people had Covid in the past year, who don’t know it. This isn’t Covid being ‘mild’. It’s Covid being immune-evasive. Sneaking its way in.

A study in Spain found that 56% of men who had Covid had erectile dysfunction, 12 months later. It's a vascular disease, it will attack blood vessels wherever you have them.

Just to add another contender for best EV (there are many new Chinese cars coming to Oz, we're very lucky). The Xpeng G6. A competitor to the Model Y i.e. mid-range SUV. Superb quality, much bigger than it looks in pictures, loads of room. And like BYD a jaw-dropping price (even the top spec version is less than $60K). Better configured than the current Model Y, though new model coming early next year. But won't be this cheap. And unlike the Model Y, all the fancy self-driving technology is included in the price (you pay extra for that in the Model Y).

'I/you got this' is one of the motivational phrases used a lot now. Turns out it doesn't defeat metastatic breast cancer.

Happy Birthday!

Here's the bind Western carmakers made for themselves, by not building EVs much much sooner. Superbly engineered and amazingly cheap Chinese cars may destroy the Western car industry. The West will try tariffs. But who's the biggest market for the West's own cars? China. We're dumb. So dumb.

NZ'ers discovering that the new BYD Shark ute is $24,000 (that's 24 THOUSAND) dollars cheaper than the Ford Ranger Raptor. And it's faster than the Raptor. And a much higher quality vehicle, in the engineering sense. And uses no fuel for everyday driving, and less on long trips. The Shark is projected to be even cheaper in Australia.

Indian stone-carved window.

The Germans at least tried with EVs. But they’re way too expensive. Most German cars have been for years. Asia figured out how to do German quality for about half the money, decades ago. Welcome to the Asian century. The new Industrial Revolution.

The joys of owning an EV.

Here a Western analyst tries to show people just how mind-boggingly staggering what’s going on in China is, that we don’t have the first clue about. The next Industral Revolution started years ago there already, it’s now knocking on our doors in ways we won’t be able to ignore.

A new composition, Pom Pom Tree (Snowball Viburnum) through low-emissivity Viridian double-glazing, with Belgian UPVC frames. Bit of a mouthful, but it pleases me.

I think the Shark may sell big. Really big.

BYD again are incredibly fast to respond, with their vast toolmaking and engineering resources. The Sealion 7 is their Model Y competitor, to be released in Oz early next year. (Doesn’t it look great). They’ve upgraded the battery even further, to give a range of maybe over 700km (Tesla is rumoured to be doing that for the Model Y being released early next year too). But whereas it took Tesla 4 years to upgrade the Model Y, BYD has done this in weeks. BYD is also incredibly responsive to feedback. In New Zealand when there was an issue identified with emergency braking in one of the BYD models, BYD flew engineers out within 8 hours to fix it.

At least 10 new Chinese EV companies are looking to come to Oz. Australians have no idea of the smorgasbord of riches coming our way. I post about it a lot, China’s EV industry is creating family cars with supercar performance and luxury European quality. For less than the cost of Toyotas, Subarus, Hondas etc. Here’s another. The Zeekr X. A smaller car (but actually relatively large on the inside). Hugely powerful and fast, and premium luxury comfort on the inside. And very funky design. This is where our current car brands are going to struggle to survive. There will be so many amazing cars at incredibly cheap prices on offer. Cars that cost next to nothing to run and maintain.

This is great fun. Set in the happy gentle hedonism of the 1980s, with soundtrack to match. About celebrity and TV and class and sex (lots of sex). The decade of your formative years can shape your life I think. The 90s were dreary and depressive. The 60s were full of hippie rubbish. The 70s, I rate the 70s, like the fun of the 60s but without all of the transcendental hooey. Have alway been glad to have been an 80s teenager.

Every couple of years I share this tip from San Francisco water engineers. One of the main reasons we’re living such long lives now is that we have clean reticulated water. The price for that though is use of chlorine and cholaramine, to kill nasties in the water. They don’t taste or smell very nice. Easily the cheapest and simplest way to deal with that is just crushing half a regular 500mg tablet of vitamin C into water, I make up 10 litres at a time and have it on a dispenser on the bench. (Half a tablet is enough even for 10 litres.) Ascorbic acid reacts immediately with both chlorine and chloramine, removing it from the water. It tastes amazing. I grew up on sweet rainwater, from a tank. The problem with tanks is that birds, bats and possums go to the toilet on the roof, which ends up in the water. As well as all manner of dirt and other residues blown onto the roof by wind. And animals often die in the tanks, which you end up drinking. You can use water purifiers, though those can be pricey and need regular maintenance. And many won’t remove pathogens. Having mains water is like the best of both worlds, if you can remove the chlorine and chloramine before drinking. Vitamin C is super cheap, and it’s very easy to do.

The whole nonsense around housing. ‘Supply’. Explain to me why any developer or builder would suddenly start flooding the ‘market’ with cheap houses, to undercut other houses (which they also build).

This is a stock image, the sort of thing billions of people share. How happy everybody looks! Because they’re socialising. ‘Living their best lives’, as we now call it. There’s an uncomfortable truth about socialising though. Most socialising is based on comparison and status. On the continuous assessment of yourself in relation to other people. We know this from school, we forget it in adult life. It’s no coincidence that the advent of social media has at the same time led to an astronomical growth in ‘mental health’ issues. Social media allows us to socialise all day and all night, every day. It’s very useful to show the underlying mechanism in play, in socialising. It flushes it out. It’s about status and identity, the now never-ending assessment of where we ‘fit in’.

Heh. This is the stupid place we’ve landed.

Bil Hero is an outstanding company. They compare every single electricty/gas bill you have, and find what is the cheapest available from other providers. They let you know, so you can switch if you want. They’re not a comparison site, they do all the comparing for you, to maximise your savings. For $20 they’ll do the switch for you every bill, if you want. https://www.billhero.com.au

My RDO today and I’m on school pick up, sitting watching a whole line of wankpanzers with windows up and engines running, to run AC. On a glorious Spring day. Says a lot about the whole culture of those vehicles.

Another story from the Industrial Revolution underway in China. China has 45,000 km of high-speed railways. (45 thousand!) Here’s a short clip from inside one of the trains, carrying people in luxury at 350 km/h.

It’s rumoured that the world’s biggest selling car, the Tesla Model Y, is going into first production of its new version (‘Juniper’) from tomorrow. The picture below is just somebody’s guess how it will look, based on some road-testing espionage. (It’s considerably bigger in real life than it appears in pictures, isn’t it Suzanne?) The pressure is on Tesla, the Chinese have produced rivals to the Y that are cheaper and at least equal in quality. The Y is a genius car in many ways, a family car with supercar performance. What sets it apart is the design, the large range of features, not just the performance or quality.

For me our fundamental misunderstanding of what love is is shown by how we see jealousy as a negative. When it’s actually the root of all love. The only healthy part of love in fact, the part that remembers that the person we love is an other. That recognises that their love for *us* is a choice we don’t make. How some react to jealousy is why it gets such bad press. It’s not jealousy that causes that reaction, it’s their misunderstanding of it. Their partner always chooses them, no matter how long they’re together, and they can’t control why. There is a happy jealousy, in fact, once you understand it. It’s what made you desire the person in the first place. They seemed a mystery.

Our current fossil fuel energy system is like having a shower you need to run 24 hours a day, just dipping in and out of it occasionally as you need it. Ridiculously wasteful, stupid engineering. That’s what ‘baseload’ means. Renewables is moving us to a world where we just make and use energy, as we need it. A shower with taps in it. https://reneweconomy.com.au/baseload-coal-and-peaking-gas-paradigm-no-longer-fit-for-modern-grid-says-aemo-chief/

Genius Chhinese engineering is now creating SUVs that can convert to utes, at the press of a button. (And vice versa.) Have a look. As always, superb quality. And cheap. A revolution, people. Get with it.

lol, Australians already live in some of the worst houses in the developed world. The surest way to turn us into even more the arse-end of the world than we already are, on just about every metric, is to elect these clowns again. https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/10/21/building-code-housing-dutton?ahe=662efd944398edbb2d8f4d85736c4bb830fa6116abf076eb6d8317fd70698f95&acid=3260892&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020241022&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Adestra&lr_hash=

Yesterday was a new record for Australia. 75% of our daytime electricity came from renewables. For those who say 'yes but what about the night', well you have water even when it isn't raining, hey. Storage. In fact a lot of extra energy was thrown away yesterday because there was nowhere to store it. That's why companies are falling over themselves to build big batteries and pumped hydro.

Hard to verify, but it's claimed Trump uses these pads under the front of his feet to prevent him falling forward.

An electric Landrover Defender lasted 5.5 days off-road, on a single charge. Its petrol equivalent lasted 2 days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugj_wEEtZZY

Happy Birthday :)

The kitchen Mozart grew up in, in Salzburg. If those walls could talk.

Cliff is 84. There were no 84-year-olds touring big venues when I was a kid. Our culture repeats the same adolescent life now, over and over, right until the end of life.

They were talking about cars today. I tried an experiment, asking people if they would ever buy an EV. ‘Why would anybody do that!’ ‘The batteries cost a fortune when you have to replace them!’ ‘Even when you charge them, the electricity comes from fossil fuels anyway.’ ‘They catch fire.’ ‘You have to charge them all day to fill them.’ A laundry list of the common slogans about EVs. Every single one of them just plain wrong. This is public life now, circulating slogans. Sponsored by vested interests determined to head off change. It’s like talking to zombies.

The privatisation of Sydney’s roads is a story of epic corruption. Some locals are paying $150 a week in tolls. There is not one example of an essential service that has been privatised that isn’t a complete disaster. How stupid would you have to be to believe otherwise? How would it not *always* be more expensive to run an essential service for profit?

Off-roading is one of the key arguments used against EVs. But an EV off-roader can get almost 3 times the range of a petrol or diesel equivalent. The reason is pretty simple. I’ve shared lots of times, that petrol and diesel engines produce virtually no power, unless you rev them hard. They’re gutless. Off-roading needs a lot of power and torque. A petrol or diesel off-roader needs to be in a high-rev, low-geared, high fuel consumption zone almost the entire time. Whereas an EV will give you maximum power/torque from a standing start, using no more energy than at any other time. It will also give you that power or torque instantly. And infinitely fine gradients of it, titrated exactly to need. If you watch or do off-roading, you’ll hear a lot of revving going on, with petrols/diesels, to try to find the right amount of power for each bit of track. The EV doesn’t need any of that, it’ll calculate *exactly* how much is needed, every second, and give you just that. So they use almost 3 times less energy, to do the same off-roading. Like the test I shared yesterday, where an electric Discovery lasted 5.5 days on a single charge, off-roading. The petrol/diesel equivalent - 2 days.

Because most anti-EV morons take their queues (knowingly or not) from the Prime Orange Moron, I see this as the end of hydrogen cars. Hooray for that.

This shows the percentage who get RE-infected every year, with Covid. Makes a laughing stock of the idea of 'hybrid immunity' governments are selling i.e. that everybody catching it is making us all more immune to it.

Volkswagen is in serious, serious trouble. (Note VW also owns: Å KODA, SEAT, CUPRA, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche and Ducati.) The 3rd biggest car maker in the world. This is a story you'll see repeated with other major manufacturers too. VW made about 50% of their revenue selling cars to China. But China's EV industry is so colossal now, that pretty much everybody in China drives Chinese-made EVs. So VW's sales to there have been cut in half. The company is on its knees. Meanwhile global EV sales have jumped 31% in the past year. VW's EV sales have dropped 10%. It can't match Chinese EVs on price or variety. It's all bad news. People are in total denial about the realities of the car/bus/truck industry now.

To give an indication of how remarkable the Model Y is as a car, it’s the biggest selling car in the world even though Tesla does next to zero marketing for it, or any of its vehicles. It’s word of mouth, people buy them and rave about them to their friends. It’s not ‘Tesla fanboys’ either, you don’t become the biggest selling car in the world with only fans buying. And this story. People know the new Model Y is coming early next year. Even knowing that, the Model Y trounced all opposition in Europe in September. Not just other EVs, *all* other vehicles. A market with some of the strongest legacy car brands in the world.

Like I’ve been saying for several years. Just saying. Best place in the world now to be a car buyer.

A ‘cost of living’ story. After heating the entire home for 24 hours every day, through winter, at zero cost (in Australia’s coldest town, on average), we’re now already piling on the credits to fund next winter. (Green ‘CR’ means the retailer is paying us.) With a couple of hundred left over as pure profit. The projected credit at the end for the bill will go far higher, as the sunny days continue. Plenty to spare to cool all through the summer if needed too. All without choking the neighbours with toxic woodsmoke from fires, a favourite cheap heating alternative many use. (Smoke from home fireplaces is considerably more toxic than cigarettes.)

EVs are already achieving ‘price parity’ with diesel and petrol vehicles. And that’s just on purchase price. They’ve been much cheaper the whole time, when you factor in zero fuel costs, and virtually no maintenance.

Yes they do, they explain it all the time. Australian electricity is so expensive because it uses so much gas to generate it, and our ageing coal plants cost a fortune to maintain. And gas is now hugely expensive. If you want to see electricity get REALLY expensive, build nuclear plants too.

KIA have done a fantastic job with the new EV5. Beautifully engineered, with suspension perfectly tuned for Australian roads. Refined inside and out, good range, and the most important thing for many - it's not expensive. You no longer need to pay more for an EV than for a petrol or diesel car. And it will last you a lot more years, cost you almost nothing to fuel and maintain, and give you much better driving performance. Gone are the days when family cars and muscle cars had to be separate things.

So encouraging to see women now feeling secure enough to share photos of themselves topless as part of a publicity campaign. You can't make this stuff up. People love affliction now, it gives them infinite scope to talk about themselves.

Freddie Mercury recording in 1982, in Munich. I was living in Germany that year, and saw him live with Queen only a few months after this shot was taken. Sharing it here for a different reason though, it was on the tour that followed this recording that Mercury most likely contracted HIV. The only symptom was something like a bad cold. 9 years later he was dead. For about 7 of those 9 years many had no idea he was even sick. Live Aid was only 3 years after this shot, years after catching HIV. His live performances peaked in 1982, and deteriorated after that, I suspect because HIV was starting to destroy his body from the inside. Again nobody realised. It took Freddie 3-4 years to even notice. This is what chronic infection does. It’s what Covid is doing to many of the world’s population, right now. They’ll feel fine for a while, as Freddie did. Perhaps even years. Until they suddenly don’t, lots of things will start going wrong with them. And then catastrophically wrong.

F1 hybrid engine. Hybrids are the fastest race cars in the world, both F1 and also sports cars. Hybrids were introduced at Le Mans in 2012. They've won every race since. When you drive a hybrid though, you very quickly wish the petrol part would go away completely. Every time that combustion part kicks in, it's disappointing, the clunky noise. When Mercedes F1 engineers were asked how they'd like to improve F1 hybrid engines, they said 'we'd like to reduce the size of the petrol part even further.' All engines converge upon electric as the optimum technology. Everything else is just a detour to that point.

Another reason BYD has settled with 2.5 tonnes of towing for its upcoming Shark ute is that the 3.5 tonnes advertised by other ute producers is dangerous rubbish. The GCM (Gross Combination Mass) for towing with these utes is vehicle + load + towball weight. If your trailer/caravan (or whatever) is 3.5 tonnes, the GCM limit means you'll be lucky to have 300 kg left for the people in the car and any luggage, tools, extra fuel...whatever. In other words, you'll easily go over, and be a fast-driving killing machine on the road. I steer well clear of most utes towing big loads for this reason. A 3.5-tonne load is a truck load. Not a ute load. 2.5 tonnes is the upper limit of what any ute should be towing. It matters, several tonnes of high-speed metal out of control kills people.

The social basis of technology was my postgraduate work. It’s one of the reasons I talk so much about cars. Vehicles are central to our culture, and to our identities. Take the modern ute. Useless as a ute. Useless as a passenger vehicle (which is what they’re mostly used for.) Useless driving dynamics. Useless aerodynamically. So why do we buy them? Because it gives us an identity, as part of a social group or team. You’re a Ranger person, or a Hilux or RAM person. Etc. Then you ‘spec up’ the ute, the way kids spec up a GI Joe or Barbie. You’re building status, in your team, opposed to other teams. Then you might add a boat, or caravan, to tow. Towing is high status, big swinging dick stuff. People do like boating and caravanning, of course. But it’s much more about the gear. Running to the hundreds of thousands. We never really grow up. We’re still playing with our GI Joes.

Gav (from NZ) does some of the best vehicle assessments in the world, certainly some of the most entertaining. This is a short excerpt from his look at the new KIA EV3 (full link below). He’s talking about how revolutionary electric car technology now is, watch this short clip for the funny ending. KIA is showing that EVs are now mainstream, price parity with petrol and diesel, and negligible fuel and maintenance costs means you lose money by not buying electric. The EV3 is a brilliant car, just watch if you want to see how they’ve ticked all the boxes. https://youtu.be/0spx7b3uX-U?si=l6HLj_PrjKfVii93

One of the profound changes EVs bring is the degree of remote control and diagnostics drivers have. Tesla pioneered this with the extraordinary Tesla app (which if you have a Tesla home battery also integrates with your car). KIA have now done it with their EVs, the phone app allows all sorts of things, like activating heating or cooling remotely, or the car camera for security or to monitor pets or kids etc. EVs with their big batteries don’t need to be ‘on’ to do all of these things. You don’t need to have them idling like in an ICE, there is no idle in an EV. With these apps you can tell the car (for example) what time you want to go to work in the morning in winter, and it will have the windscreen, windows and mirrors defrosted, and the car, seats and steering wheel heated waiting for you. Or cooling, if it’s summer. You can also get tyre pressures and other mechanical information.

Grandpa Simpson: “I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was.” There is an alternative to clinging to your teenage years your entire life. Growing up.

Happy Birthday! 🎈🎉 I hope you’re allowed some quiet non-dog walking time ;)

One of the genius design things about the Model Y is that it looks kinda small. Here it is next to the KIA EV5. In fact it’s bigger than the KIA EV5, it has almost twice the luggage capacity just for starters. It’s a bit like the modern version of the VW Beetle, in appearance. But much, much bigger. You won’t necessarily realise that until you get in it, or stand next to it.

I think I read every word Shaw ever wrote in my teens and early 20s. When I criticise ‘living your best life’ ideas of life now, this quote is what I mean. The current idea that life is a lifestyle, that life is about you getting as many happy and fun experiences out of it as you can. Like a package you buy from a travel agent. Bollocks to that. Life is about having a wider purpose.

Good on Gav. The argument I make about combustion engines can be seen in a single picture. Ridiculously complex, needing constant maintenance. And after all that work, they can only use about 20% of the energy you put into them. Absolute rubbish technology.

BYD employs over 110,000 engineers. Crikey.

Fuel bowsers should be in units of energy, not litres. Then people would see that a petrol or diesel vehicle uses about 10 times as much energy to achieve the same range, as an EV. 1 litre of petrol is about 9 kWh of energy. That means a typical fuelling of a standard petrol car (say 60-80L) is adding 540-720 kWh of energy to the car. An EV only needs 60-100 kWh. You can see just how appallingly inefficient petrol and diesel vehicles are. They’re rubbish.

The interior of electric semis are much nicer places for drivers to be. Without the need for a huge lump of an engine taking up most of the cabin, it becomes almost a mini-house. The driver can get up and stretch their legs without leaving the truck. Plus they don’t need to spend all day changing heavy gears up and down.

From the UK. Note not one single concern for the health of the teachers. This farce continues unabated, everywhere that prioritises travel and gigs over human life.

Imagine being a journalist told to write a story about how prices going down is bad for consumers.

It really does pay to talk to your pharmacist. Often I'll ask them which of a couple of options they have on the shelves is better. Sometimes they say 'o you don't want those, they're useless, you want some of this stuff from behind the counter. Should clear it up in a day.'

This is the Xiaomi SU7. Xiaomi make gadgets, like phones, TVs and washing machines. Their car is an indication of how astonishing the Chinese EV car industry now is. The CEO of Ford loved the car so much he had one shipped to the US, where he drove it for months and didn't want to return it. Its cost? Starting from $45,000. That's a small car price, for something with Supercar performance and big sedan size. You can't buy it in Australia yet, the company can't support the demand for it.

I know people love to feel old. It’s nearly a quarter of a century since the Sydney Olympics.

Jim toured China. What he saw there is what I often try to share here. A revolution. He was blown way. Now he and Ford are scrambling to try to catch up.

This bullshit review was always going to be a whitewash. The Brit’s review interrogated everybody from politicians down, grilled them. Ours was like free fellatio for all the main players. The headline is an example of the BS in the review. It’s like saying ‘Australians voted for political party X in a landslide, it’s unlikely to vote for any other party ever again.’ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-29/covid-response-review-released/104531920?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link

60 grand, drive away.

The Stop, Revive, Survive campaign is based on research on driver fatigue. You’re supposed to stop and have a break of at least 15 minutes, every two hours. Think about that in relation to the need to spend 30 minutes recharging an EV every 4-5 hours of highway driving. How was the range of an EV ever a problem?

Spain just had 343mm of rain. In 4 hours.

A pharmacist reminded me of something important this week. Generally we think that what we buy at the pharmacist is either prescribed by a doctor, or over-the-counter much less powerful drugs, like cough syrups or paracetamol. But S3 (Schedule 3) drugs are behind the counter drugs the pharmacist can prescribe for you without a doctor, if you ask them. Usually much stronger and more effective. Like Kenalog, the drug I got this week for a mouth ulcer caused by some dental work. I grabbed a couple of over the counter options from the shop, and the pharmacist said ‘you don’t want those, they’re hopeless’. And offered me Kenalog, saying ‘this should fix it in a single day’. And it did. Worth asking if there’s a Schedule 3 option for what ails you!

That idea we had and all seem to support of repeatedly infecting an entire generation of children with a lethal virus, so that the rest of us can go to gigs and dine out and travel, is going well.

Within a year, for some. If you notice changes in your friends or family, or even yourself. Sense of smell is one of the key indicators.

I have zero interest in Halloween. I have no problem at all with others loving it, I don’t dislike it. I just don’t understand the interest in it at all, not my thing. Find it boring. It does interest me how it became such a passion for so many Australians, so quickly. Often it’s adults who are more passionate even than the kids.

Volkswagen’s 3rd quarter profits were down 42%. Toyota has had 8 straight months of declining profits. These are the big players in world car production. Ignore social media nonsense, EVs are destroying the traditional car industry. It can’t happen fast enough.

Artist’s guess at the appearance of the new Tesla Model Y (biggest selling car in the world.). I don’t think it will look quite like this, but they probably have key details right. This is a family SUV, with the performance of a supercar, for the price of a Toyota. No fuel costs, no servicing.

Trump’s spray tan is so bad now that it looks like an episode of the old Black and White Minstrel show.

Freddie Mercury decided to live with the threat of HIV, for a while. He thought he needed to ‘live his life’. The parallels I see with the widespread attitude towards Covid now fill me with despair. Most people probably dismiss me as some obsessive deranged loon. Every day I urge people to act now, before it’s too late. I get all my Covid info from the researchers and doctors working at the frontline of this lethal disease. It doesn’t feel lethal when you get it. HIV doesn’t either. EBV feels just like ‘glandular fever’, until it kills people with MS.

The pandemic made many people rediscover the most important place on Earth again. Their own home. For many that will lead to lasting change, society is only just beginning to figure this out. The obsession to be always going somewhere, to be always doing something, is a disease. People afraid to stop because then they may have to meet themselves. All this hypermobility and hyperactivity is classic avoidance behaviour. People sometimes ask ‘what are you DOING on the weekend’? I usually say ‘nothing, I spend all week doing things.’

C'mon people, join the 'wtf' team with me. That's 1 million dollars per DAY. Living with the virus.