November 2024

Come on Australia, get shagging. I guess when those of child-bearing age can't even afford a roof over their heads, you're not going to get them to breed.

In 2022-23, Australia exported a record $107 billion of oil and gas. Tax paid by exporters was only $1.9 billion. That’s about a cent in every dollar. Australia is hostage to these companies. Politicians in receipt of big donations from these companies let them do it. Solar and wind kicks these same companies (and politicans) to the kerb.

BYD sold more than 2000 Sharks in its first day of release in Australia. An additional 1000 were immediately ordered from the factory, and even more are being organised. Some suggest it may become the biggest selling vehicle in Australia. This is BEFORE there’s even been an opportunity for test drives. It is way cheaper than a Ranger or Hilux. It’s bigger than them, and the tray is bigger. It has more power and is faster than a Ranger Raptor, with much more sophisticated technology than any of its rivals, and a premium interior. It costs $40,000 less than a Raptor.

All HECS debts should be waived and the entire system scrapped. Pay for it by ditching idiocies like nuclear submarines and nuclear power stations. The younger generation are in critical trouble.

The Zeekr 7x is one to look out for next year. Another full-electric mid-sized SUV to compete with the Tesla Model Y. The Y will have to work hard to equal it. The Zeekr has 636 horsepower (yikes). 0-100 times are as low as 2.84 seconds. Zeekr is famous for luxury interiors, and this one is no exception. It’s also insanely fast to charge, up to 500km of range in as little as 15 minutes. Full range is as high as 600km.

One for you, Julia.

Every day is a new revolution. This technology can even retrofit existing batteries. It will take an EV battery from 0-100% charge in 5 minutes.

A bit more on the Zeekr 7X. I said Zeekr are known for luxury interiors. You can see the 7X’s here, and I can only talk about a fraction of what’s included. All seats (front and back) are available as heated, cooled, ventilated *and* massage seats. You can see the rear seats are also available on electric rails like the front, with reclining backs and even elevating footrests. The car has a 21-speaker 7.1 surround sound system. Fully glass roof with retractable electric shade if it’s too hot. Windows have both privacy tinted glass and mechanical privacy/shade screens that can be used or retracted at the press of a button (can see in the pic). Rear seats can have a solid tray built into the front seat, with even a 13+ inch display for the passenger (also in the pic). I’m sharing this as an example of the astonishing level of tech and spec you get with Chinese EVs. For prices tens of thousands less than what you’d pay for in a Mercedes, Audi etc. Superb build quality too, ‘cheap Chinese crap’ is racist rubbish. The Chinese do most of the world’s high-tech engineering. This car has more horsepower than a Lamborghini or McLaren supercar, to boot.

Bit of an esoteric one except for my Alexander friends. Watched this again on the weekend, and was struck at just how strange it is and why I moved away from AT ideas. Every single moment of this session forces this poor young woman to become obsessively focused on the movement of her body. From a tradition that espouses mind-body unity. Classic Alexandroid transformation. And the stuff about heads pulling back. They don’t pull back, they fall back as a balance reaction, nobody is pulling their head back as a habit. And the little tricks, ‘just bend the knees quite quickly’, something she was already doing. Alexander (an Australian) fundamentally misunderstood what he discovered. Yes the ‘head-neck-back relationship’ is crucial, but what’s crucial is going nowhere near it. And hands on bodies only focuses attention on bodies. What frees the head from the neck and back, and then cascades freedom down throughout the rest of the body is releasing your attention out into the world. That’s a unity, because you then have no body, and no mind. You’re just in the world, in your activity.

Have mentioned Amber electric before. A huge opportunity for ordinary people, but also a risk if they don’t know what they’re doing. Amber allows you to access wholesale electricty pricing, directly. That can be an amazing opportunity, for example wholesale pricing now with renewables is negative for most of the day. It means with Amber you can literally get paid to use electricity, all day. Not just free, the grid *pays* you to use the electricity. However at peak times, wholesale prices can be very (even extremely) high. So without a battery (where you can use stored energy during peak times), or unless you can avoid using electricty at peak times, don’t go anywhere near Amber. Also if you have a very large solar system, you need to be very careful because exporting during the day with negative prices means *you* are paying to export energy into the grid, just like the big coal generators. There are ways to curtail those exports (a battery, or Amber can directly switch off some peoples’ exporting when prices are negative). Exciting times, but caution needed if you go into the wholesale market. An interesting option is to not buy solar, and just buy a battery, then get paid to fill it during the day with the negative prices (i.e. with other peoples’ solar), and then use that stored energy all night for yourself. Batteries are still relatively expensive though, so it can be hard to break even that way.

And still climbing. That’s because there is no “since the pandemic.” We’re still in the pandemic.

There's China, and then there's the rest of us. China, and useless.

Happy Birthday! Maintain the rage, with maybe a tipple ;)

Santos is one of the big gas companies hijacking Australia right now. Guess how much tax they've paid on $38 billion of gas revenue in the past 10 years?

But it's OK for a tradie to pay nothing for their training, and also earn an income while doing it. Dutton couldn't care less, he's using this to try to attract the ute-driving tradie vote, the young men Trump is also courting in volume.

Overhearing a colleague telling their teenager to 'use your gears, not the brakes', when driving downhill, to avoid 'wearing out the brakes'. You won't wear out the brakes. And they're cheap to replace anyway. Revving the crap out of your engine to try to slow down will wear everything out, and that's gonna cost you a lot more. Bring on EVs. You don't need to rev them, and most of the time they don't even need brakes.

This is why so many people are getting so sick and so often now. By allowing ourselves to be repeatedly infected with Covid we’re doing the exact opposite to what we think we’re doing. We’re not building immunity, we’re destroying immunity to all infectious diseases. All of the cells described here are the key cells for your immune protection. Senescence means death i.e. those cells aren’t coming back. Exhausted ones it’s not clear yet if they will recover, so far there’s no sign that they are. You don’t ‘get better’ from this, ever. 

In Australia there have been 4056 Covid deaths this year to August. 851 for flu and 380 for respiratory syncytial virus. You could say 'yes but they were mostly old'. They caught it from people who were young and healthy. That's all of us. We are all directly implicated in these deaths. Meanwhile the virus is destroying the immune systems of the young and healthy.

A Covid morning. Phillip worked at NASA and MIT, and is now a venture capital guy working in biosecurity. Or just ignore and get on with 'living your best life' i.e. being a teenager forever.

Emeritus Professor Bruce Chapman invented HECS. He was on radio yesterday saying that HECS debts are now way too high, well beyond how the system was designed. And that repayments kick in much too low, at a salary of $54,000. The orginal design was that repayment wouldn't kick in until $90,000. He also said the Morrison government's insane vandalism (my words) of the system to both lower the repayment threshold and vastly and arbitrarily increase the cost of some of the degrees is still not fixed. Just one more train wreck the country still hasn't recovered from. Hilariously that party is still in the running at the next election. We're too stupid to survive.

First full local reviews since the release of the Shark 6. And it's even better than the specs looked on paper. Hard to see the rest of the segment surviving. The price is staggering. @[783412914:2048:Kyle].

Heh, re-write this headline as ‘Fears Australia will be inundated with cheap, high-quality cars’. The Americans and Europeans are green with envy. NewsCorpse is a rotting maggot-ridden sewer at the heart of all Anglo societies.

20 years ago today Kell said ‘I do’. I’ve been discovering in the fine print ever since that there were a whole lot of exclusions I wasn’t aware of at the time. But I’ll keep her.

The fascinating thing about car suspension is that it has to do 2 important things, which are fundamentally opposed. There is no actual way to resolve that tension. Most of all, a car has to stay on the road to keep you safe. Which means the tyres have to stay in contact with the road wherever possible, no matter how much speed and force and changed terrain is in play. That’s the main function of suspension, though much less well known than function 2. Function 2 is your comfort. To stop your body being strained and bounced to bits by the huge forces tonnes of metal travelling at high speeds creates. The problem is, improving ride comfort (function 2) damages ride handling (function 1). Cars with ‘firm’ suspension are usually designed to be great around corners. ‘Driver’s cars’. But they’re uncomfortable for passengers. Cars designed for passenger comfort tend to feel ‘boaty’ or floating, not great for fast cornering. Engineers try to find a happy medium for the targeted buyers. But it’s a tension that can’t be resolved. Modern cars, like some new EVs, also allow you to alter the suspension depending on whether you want comfort or sportiness. At the touch of a button. That’s probably as good as it’s going to get.

On suspension, some interesting recent examples. Teslas are famous for having bad suspension, by which is meant uncomfortable. They’re ‘sprung’ for cornering and speed, Tesla has a bit of a hoon culture. BYD on the other hand is smarter, in that while cars like the Seal here are equally as much performance cars as a Tesla, their suspension is a more sophisticated balance of comfort and cornering. Tesla was forced to respond, its current newer Model 3 had a major suspension upgrade to make it more comfortable. The Model Y upgrade coming in the next few months will do the same.

Over 300,000 drivers of Fords and Toyotas angry over defective vehicles. If these were EVs, imagine the headlines.

The MAGA movement is the exact equivalent of Brexit in the UK. The fantasy of returning to the glory days of empire. I’m sure my friends in the UK can tell the US how that ends.

It’s funny that some who are horrified at the election of Trump would still vote for Peter Dutton. Dutton is Trump-lite. I thought Trump was going to fall asleep during his victory speech. He’s only in this for personal validation, the poor little rich boy nobody liked his entire life now feels validated. He has no energy or interest in actual governing, like last time he’ll sit in the Oval Office eating cheeseburgers and watching TV, while the country crumbles around him.

There's a bizarre idea that 'bureaucrats' come to work every day, sit down and think hmmm, what new rules can we invent today? All rules happen for the same reason. 1. Because people are demanding. 2. Because people refuse to compromise. You won't find a single law or regulation or policy that doesn't have its origins in 1 and 2. They're tools to allow people to work through 1 and 2.

When you get on a plane, you don't vote for who should pilot it. Scale that up to a whole society, and you can see why elections are such a bad idea. Democracy isn't, and never was, 'the people' running the country. That's populism.

These stars are almost certainly on compounded Ozempic or Wegovy. It's deeply dishonest when they pretend it's all just 'good eating'.

The German car industry is predicted to lose up to 2,000,000 workers by 2035, due to the shift to EVs.

I shared how VW is in desperate trouble. Nissan now too. Toyota has had 8-9 months of declining sales. They all knew the shift to EVs was coming, and did next to nothing. So they’re now probably toast. Like the people who ‘live with’ Covid. Ony catastrophe will shift them too.

One for fans of hydrogen vehicles.

Margaret Court is easily the greatest tennis player of all time. It’s just unpopular to say it. No other player comes within light years of her record. She even played in Wimbledon finals while pregnant.

Here's what I think very few seem to get about politics. When politicians win elections, they congratulate theselves for the victory. Commentators do too. They attribute the victory, to the politician. But the majority of people don't vote for politicians. They vote according to the material conditions of their lives. If things are going well for them, they will generally give whoever is in power another go. If things are going badly, they will vote for somebody else. What determines elections is the material conditions of peoples' lives. A 'landslide' victory should terrify any politician. You won't find any of those that end well. A landslide means peoples' material conditions are seriously bad, and they're looking for somebody to help them. None of these politicians have a clue how to help them. Retribution is then brutal, it's just a matter of time. Mussolini promised Italy a golden age. They killed him and hung him by his feet in a public square, when he didn't deliver.

Today's trivia. What might be causing this? (Hint: it's Covid.) https://newshub.medianet.com.au/2024/11/whooping-cough-outbreak-worst-on-record/75567/

Audi's profits are down 91% in the latest quarter. Maybe people will join the dots eventually. https://www.dawndigest.com/news/audi-reportedly-planning-major-job-cuts-amid-profit-collapse

So many people I talk to about Covid look at me like I'm unhinged, like 'isn't that over?' Yeh, nah. For the second year in a row, our life expectancy has gone backwards. From the public health point of view, this is as bad as it gets. Catastrophe.

It kinda needs to cut through the eternal teen dream of our lives, somehow? Our life expectancies have dropped for the second year in a row. It matters?

I share renewables stuff because it saddens me that we’re all living through the greatest revolution in centuries, and many aren’t even noticing. Take this, the other night, those with a battery could sell energy back to the grid for a price that netted them up to $100, in one evening. We pay nothing for electricity every year now. The grid pays us, we make money. You’d wonder why our retailer (Origin) would allow it, what’s in it for them? They do very well out of it too, they take our exported energy at 10c/kWh, and sell it back to other homes for 2 to 3 times that amount. Everybody wins. Except those homes and people clinging to really quite sad and pathetic slogans created by fossil fuel companies, about how wonderful the shithouse energy system we’re replacing is. The same for cars, where those who shift to EVs and suddenly have zero fuel and maintenance bills, in luxury comfort with supercar performance, wonder why the hell they didn’t do this years earlier.

This is a beautifully nuanced song about depression. Brian May talking about his own life, how it goes along well and then ‘the night comes down’ i.e. depression hits. With those lovely descending guitar lines that are pure Brian. Queen is so often far more nuanced and profound than is realised, because the sound itself, the vocals and guitar, are so glorious and distract you. Listen to the lyric: Once I could laugh With everyone Once I could see the good, in me The black and the white Distinctively Colouring, holding the world Inside Now all the world Is grey to me Nobody can see Oh, oh, The Night Comes Down And I get afraid, of losing my way Oh, Oh, The Night Comes Down Ooooh And it’s dark again.

Jupiter, from the Juno spacecraft. It’s thought that it rains diamonds on Jupiter.

If you know doctors who treat Long Covid, you will hear the most horrific, tragic stories. Your chances of having Long Covid increase enormously with every infection.

It’s one of the genius design elements of the Model Y. The glass roof means you still get the big open sky as you sleep. Also incredibly useful if you’re just visiting friends on a trip, you don’t need a room. Some who can’t afford a home now are living in their cars. An EV battery is so powerful it means they don’t escape the comforts of heating and cooling, 24 hours a day.

One of the things that makes me chuckle is just how aggressively Ford and GM (Holden) are developing electric vehicles, in the US. Many of the ICE knuckle-draggers in Australia are the Ford/Holden brigade, completely unaware that Ford and GM are going gangbusters with EVs. It also makes me chuckle because the big orange buffoon just won an election promising to derail renewables and EVs. Some of the biggest industries in the US will be telling him to fuck off.

The country everybody loves to hate, China, has stopped buying Western cars. It doesn’t need them, it has world-leading EVs. They must look at us and laugh, we said the world needed to move to EVs, so they said ok, let’s do that. Except we didn’t do it, because too many people were making too much money from fossil fuels and ICEs. So they did it without us. Now we’re toast. Aston Martin next.

Lithgow doesn’t want pumped hydro. But it probably wants a big nuclear power station.

Harry is a famous UK YouTube presenter, on cars and driving. Noticing secondhand prices on high-end petrol and diesels have collapsed. Because new model petrol and diesel cars are *always* more expensive. A strong secondhand market is a symptom of an industry ripping people off. You get next to nothing secondhand for most consumer goods, because new consumer goods tend to be cheaper than older models. But not petrol and diesel cars. It’s an industry that’s been gouging people since Day 1.

Car enthusiasts will tell you every day of the week that a ‘driver’s car’ is the ultimate type of car. What they really mean by that is a car that is good at going fast around corners. Basically a race car, driven on the road. They will also tell you that they, driving those cars, represent the ultimate in driving skill. Nearly always these cars are manual, and make lots of broom broom noises. In reality they’re teenagers who used cars as a way to differentiate their identity from other people. And then just never grew up. It’s a sad and pathetic attempt to create a status for themselves as somehow the ultimate arbiters of what is good in driving and vehicles. Driver’s cars are nearly always uncomfortable. They’re also lethal weapons on public roads. Manual gearing is an engineering embarrassment. Car noise is a car farting. Driving fast is just one driving skill, and not even a particularly hard one. Try comparing it to sex. If driving was sex, ‘driver’s car’ people would tell you the best sex is the sex you do fast, with lots of grunting noises and being thrown around the bed with high g-forces. (Not coincidentally how a lot of teenagers have sex.) Driving has an enormously greater number of dimensions than this. Above all, it’s a *social* act. The best drivers ‘drive to the conditions’ (another driver’s car favourite), but to them the conditions means ‘other drivers on the road’. Not ‘how fast I can get this thing around a corner’. Genuinely good drivers are also smooth, finding the optimum line and speed for a sort of gliding across the road while maintaining passenger comfort. A great car also has beautiful suspension that increases that comfort, that allows you take in the sights as you drive, not just be tunnel-vision focused on getting everybody else out of your way so you can get there faster.

Happy Birthday, Dianne! 🥳🎈🎉

Something that is everything is also nothing.

I talk a lot about China, because I’ve also said we’re living inside the next Industrial Revolution, and just don’t notice. Did you know China manufactures more than the next 9 largest manufacturing countries, combined? Your entire material well-being, your entire life, is mostly due to the Industrial Revolution in China. That’s why we have cheap consumer goods. Your future and that of your family is being made there, right now.

Most country towns owe their existence to one or more extractive industries. Agriculture and mining the two biggies. I don’t see them surviving with barista coffee and tourism. It also makes the claims that this is ‘outback living’ highly questionable to me, yes these people are remote from big cities and the coast. But these towns only exist because of cities, they’re one half of urban life. It’s the cities that established the towns and kept them viable. Often they attract people who don’t much like people, and want to live away from them. But they still live lives absolutely dependent on the urban centres. Or people who want many of the comforts of city life, but with fewer people and vehicles and more affordable homes. Thus the gentrification of many of these towns. Like permanent holiday resorts.

We're particularly casual about infecting children with Covid. And it's now playing out. In Finland death rates for those between 5 and 9 are up 250%. Deaths of babies 0-4 are up 38%. Australia refuses to even vaccinate kids against Covid, unlike the US. Our strategy is to deliberately infect them, over and over, to build population immunity. Except Covid doesn't create population immunity.

Happy birthday to you!

Happy birthday old friend. How did we get to be nearly 60?

Kyle.

The excellent rebates people can get for installing rooftop solar are reduced from 1 January next year. Not hugely, you may be about $500 worse off than if you got something installed in 2024. But worth knowing, get in now :)

Yup. Get rid of it, put the money into public hospitals and Medicare. Junk insurance, funded largely by the taxpayer in opposition to the government system. A trick by the LNP to try to destroy Medicare from the inside-out.

There should have been a ban on new gas installations here too, years ago. It'll all end up ripped out.

I still remember this having cachet, as a kid. It meant a car had grunt. Not a V8, but still respectable. Now it’s embarrassing. Many cars with barely 1-litre, 4-cylinder engines on the road have more power than cars carrying this badge now. And anything V8 and above is just recreational burning of fuel, like burning cash to keep warm.

A work colleague went to Coldplay. Came home with Covid. No better living your best life than paying hundreds to fuck your vascular system. Great soundtrack to reduced life expectancy though.

Such a common saying now. Stupidity on steroids, sold as common sense. Technically it's just fatalism, and will get you thrown in jail in any job if used as a guide. Our social lives are a soup of greeting card idiot slogans, used as excuses to never grow up and take responsbility for anything.

lol, sick of getting their arses whipped.

I was so excited a few years back when I found out about ASMR recordings. For years I’d wondered why sound itself could be so profoundly relaxing for me, sometimes the most trivial things, like people turning pages in a magazine, or a clipped, soft voice. ASMR captures a lot of the key sounds that produce these effects, and it turns out in millions of people. I find it more powerful than music often now. A much richer, more multi-dimensional sound. Like the glorious, late Bob Ross. Watching his painting videos soothes many souls.

4 decades of moralising against fat people and telling them they just need to count calories and go to the gym led to precisely nothing. The problem actually got worse. That’s because we hadn’t got to the root cause of obesity. These new drugs are targeting a root cause. Nobody fully understands the root cause yet, but these drugs are in the space of where that solution lies. Being fat has never been about calories or exercise. That’s just drivel gyms use to drum up customers.

I find off-roading usually a bit of a wank. Take the most extreme form, rock-crawling. The thing that always makes me chuckle about this, is if you just hopped out of the car and went on foot, you’d be over the obstacle in under 10 seconds. Off-roading is usually more about trying to get a useless off-road technology, the car, to do things any human can do on a pair of legs from a young age.

The cost of desalinating water has plummeted. So much so that it's now often cheaper to provide freshwater that way than using rainfall and dams. This is another revolution underway, which combined with so much cheaper electricity with renewables can mean potentially an end to water scarcity.

This is really the only story of our age. And we're doing as good as nothing. Total disaster awaits our kids and grandkids. Civilisation is unlikely to survive.

To every teacher raising somebody else’s kids today, because the kid’s parents never grew up, I see you. Thank you.

How many adults do you know whose passions and interests have remained mostly unchanged since they were teenagers? This is the social and cultural core of our time, ‘kidult’ culture. Grown adults have little to any adult reference points for life.

America’s new Secretary of Defence.

Happy birthday Shaz!

SeaLion7 (BYD Tesla Model Y rival) reviews now coming in. A beautiful piece of engineering again from BYD, near flawless. And for the price, just astonishing. Mid-sized SUV with luxury comfort and supercar performance. https://youtu.be/y0ai-606_Sc?si=M65JfDYP4AedzvR6

The BYD Shark ute was put through its paces in some of the most rugged off-roading in Australia. And it kicked butt. Not only totally solid, but they loved the effortless huge power/torque, and the near total silence of that power, which meant they were able to enjoy the great outdoors in a way their noisy diesels had never allowed them to before (their words). https://youtu.be/TVpRN-R0ifA?si=VWHdcAHZkwCs2SgF

Trump is such a moron that the US will now hurtle towards complete global irrelevance. This can be excellent news for Australia, as Americans languish in the 19th century and we hitch a ride on Asia's coat-tails into the 22nd.

Normally a 4WD copes with loss of traction to wheels by locking the diff, so that power is then split evenly between the wheel in the air and the one still on the ground. EVs are much smarter than that, you can see it here in the Shark. Electric motors have infinite flexibility with torque, so the car directs energy precisely to each wheel independently, as required. Notice what he also says about how this creates a blissfully quiet off-roading experience, rather than the loud revving tractor noises of a diesel 4WD. You get to actually appreciate what you’re there for, the great outdoors, while having much more grunt as a bonus.

Watching the V8s (on TV) in Adelaide this weekend. The formula struggles now to find a relevant car, nobody much drives Camaros or Mustangs. They don’t even make the Camaro any more I don’t think. Make it a contest between V8s and hybrids. That will spice it up. I mean it’ll be embarrassing for the V8s, but imagine how much people would love the fight. And top car racing is also always about extending the technology, to flow down to ordinary drivers. You’re not doing that with V8s in American muscle cars. F1 made this shift years ago. Le Mans too.

In the next 30 years, the number of people globally over the age of 65 will double. The number of people of working age will only grow by 20%. How’s everybody’s maths?

Here’s something to vote for.

Is there anything interesting at all about T20 or ODI cricket now? It feels like we’ve reached total saturation, ridiculous numbers of games played all year round, internationally.

I challenge the now common idea that this sort of thing is ‘community concerns’. Having seen this from the inside in local government too. So often it’s a handful of local activists, stirring up shit, usually through social media, and then derailing any sensible initiative happening. Robert Hughes before he died identified the ‘culture of complaint’ we now live in. It gets worse every day. It wouldn’t matter how tiny something is that a local council might want to do, for example, it’s completely overwhelmed by an avalanche of toxic anger and activism. I made the same point about LGBTQIA+ activism. How even within that acronym you have competing groups who despise one another, or who even define themselves in ways that make other letters of the acronym non-existent. And yet the acronym is used to suggest it’s some community of like-minded souls. It absolutely isn’t.

The internet is now 5 giant websites, each filled with screenshots from the other 4. Cory Doctorow

I have several friends who’ve had severe pneumonia this year. Young, healthy people, previously. I don’t think their health is ever going to recover, but I don’t usually tell them that.

I particularly like their new Health supremo tucking into the healthy grub. America is a clown show. Remember this smiling photo, their lives as well as those of all Americans go into rapid free fall from here.

Can anybody think of a vascular disease that the entire population is now catching multiple times every year? 🤔

The Australian's 'exclusive' story today is the CEO of the second biggest coal mining company in the world, a Swiss company that makes over $30 billion a year from Australian coal, telling Australia we need to use more coal instead of renewables.

It's going well.

If you read nothing else today…

It’s a measure of just how crazy social media society is, that super-powerful and silent cars powered by sunshine are a hard sell.

Nice to see that cash, the stuff people handle with the hands they don’t wash after going to the toilet, or use to snort drugs, or which small businesses use to avoid tax, will still be there if you need it. We’re ticking off the important things.

Australia should use the coal from the mines owned by companies in Korea and Switzerland to power coal-fired power stations it doesn’t have and nobody wants to build, which would be at least 3 times more expensive electricity. Or something. Don’t ask me, I didn’t vote for him. Nobody did, he’s a senator.

Cuts to food and health care for poor Americans to fund tax cuts to wealthy Americans. MAGA. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/18/trump-medicaid-food-stamps-welfare

Nicole Mansion was the previous Deputy Chief Minister of the NT. In that job she fought for fracking rights for Tamboran, a Texan gas company. Now she's out of politics, guess where she got a job. Wake up Australia, foreign fossil fuel companies own us.

When Elon posts the selfie before Donald had his hair on properly.

The EV causing the most buzz globally is one I shared before here, the Xiaomi SU7. Xiaomi makes mobile phones, so this car came out of nowhere. It’s astonishing, even by the astonishing standards new EVs are setting every day now. You can see here it smashed the Nurburgring lap record. But even the production version will do 0-100 in 2.75 seconds. They can’t make enough of these right now, 130,000 have been sold this year alone. No news of any Australian release, it may come though. I’ll re-share the earlier post showing the production version, it’s a beautiful car inside and out. And the kicker? The base model is under $50K. The top model is only just over $60K.

My earlier post about the Xiaomi SU7. Demand for these globally is now through the roof, so no word yet on when or whether they’ll come to Australia.

I know just about everybody I know (and don't know) will maintain a silence on Covid. They all want to believe good times are back, time to move on, 'you gotta live your life' etc. All that greeting card, live as a permanent adolescent horseshit. An entire generation of children. In an already badly ageing society. We're too stupid to survive.

The UK has nuclear power. It costs them a fortune. Guess what's now filling up their grid in super quick time?

The Greenland ice sheet is currently losing about 30 million tonnes of ice every *hour*. Meanwhile the deep ocean circulation in the north Atlantic is slowing, some say it may collpase already from next year. (Melting Greenland ice stops the circulation, with fresh water changing the water density.) That circulation brings warmth to the North, from the South. If that were to occur, the northern hemisphere may enter an ice age, with ice up to 3 km thick over the existing land area.

In 2022, over 48% of all emails sent were spam.

Peer pressure runs societies. We never leave high school. Here's a story that shows it. This is Dan and Fran Keller, from Texas, in 1992. Standing trial for child abuse at a childcare facility they ran. Children from their day-care center accused them of serving blood-laced Kool Aid; cutting the heart out of a baby; using Satan’s arm as a paintbrush; burying children alive with animals; throwing them in a swimming pool with sharks; shooting them; and resurrecting them after they had been shot. Now, you'd look at that and say, wtf?! Sounds like a total fantasy. And...it was. But experts, parents, police officers and the court believed the lot of it. In a disgraceful set of events that is almost identical with modern transgender theory in the structure of status-driven belief, experts became rich and famous peddling dangerous nonsense, claiming this was Satanic ritual. There was no physical evidence, and people were told to 'believe the child no matter what'. In fact they were told the kids were flown to Mexico, raped by soliders there, and returned to the day care centre in time for parents to pick them up, inside a single day. Nobody questioned this obvious fantasy. They spent almost 22 years in separate prisons. They've now been completely exonerated.

There’s a potential influenza pandemic brewing in the US. It’s doing next to nothing about it, and under Trump will do even less. Pandemic influenzas generally kill 40-50% of people who get infected, of whatever age or prior health status. But I’m sure our priorities of travelling and dining out and going to gigs and trivia nights must take precedence. Because we’re all teenagers now, forever. Living our best lives, on a permanent gap year from reality.

In the inevitable transition to electric cars, the existing industry throws up one fake scare campaign after another. Like ‘they all catch fire, or ‘range anxiety’. Or now, ‘they have no resale value’. One of the most interesting things about all cars, of any type, is that there’s a secondhand ‘market’ at all. You don’t find a similar market for most other consumer goods. If you understand why that is, it tells you a lot about car culture. More than any other reason, it’s likely because cars are so expensive, relative to income. You pay a fair chunk of an annual wage, on a new car. Could they be cheaper? Almost certainly yes, and with EVs we’re going to find out how much less, as once battery technology matures there’s nothing left in an EV that is all that expensive to make. The fact that the price of a car relative to income hasn’t shifted much over so many decades tells you somebody is being gouged here. You.

Grid-level battery projects are taking off. Pretty soon your overnight electricty use will come from one of these big batteries, plus from wind power (there’s more wind at night, ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’, as morons like to say). Unless you own a battery yourself. For about three-quarters of the year now we don’t take any electricity from the grid at all.

Combustion clunker fans often say 'EVs are powered by coal-fired electricity!' Even where they are, they use only a third of the energy of a combustion clunker. If we kept coal and gas-powered electricty, and all switched to EVs, we'd save two-thirds of the energy we currently use to fuel vehicles.

Dr Phillip Alvelda (senior research scientist in biotech, used to work for NASA) talking about the mass delusional tragedy that Covid now is, a friend's daughter and her insurance company, Kaiser as an example: "...she’s got a myriad of symptoms and doesn’t fit into their neat stovepipes of medical disciplines. Her brain was attacked by the virus and her autonomic nervous system doesn’t work properly. She’s got heart rate control issues, severe anemia, and sugar metabolism problems that are akin to diabetes, but it’s not quite diabetes. She’s got seizures, muscle tremors, cognitive issues, and vision problems. All these things come and go depending on how her body is stressed. No one in Kaiser is steeped in Long COVID or the fact that all these symptoms come from the original source of a viral infection, just like HIV."

The poor World Meterological Organisation. The experts on weather. Issuing another Red Alert. All the numbers say the planet will be unlivable for humans unless something is done, drastically fast. It won't be. We'll go to gigs instead.

I think this generation is clearly on its cultural death bed, and the more they feel the cold grip of mortatlity approaching, the more an enormous bubble of nostagia is inflated, with gig revenue to match. A particularly challenging time for this generation, because more than any other it defined adult life as an eternal adolescence. It won't go quietly into the light, and it leaves a legacy of no succession planning for society as a whole.

Kell told me she saw a BYD in Lithgow yesterday, describing it is a very nice looking sedan. A Seal. You can tell she doesn’t read my FB posts ;)

This is what the Bathurst Tesla superchargers still look like most days. Not because nobody owns Teslas in Bathurst (there are lots), but because fast-chargers are used mostly by travellers, not locals. Unlike petrol and diesel clunkers, most 're-fuelling' for an EV will happen at home. You don't need to wait for lots more fast-chargers to buy an EV. Most of the time you'll never use one.

Two clear things here. Full-EVs are still only a small part of the Australian market. But that rate of growth tells the real story. Many are hesitant to be an early adopter, for any product, and that's a sensible risk approach. However the prices are now so cheap and the performance (including range) so much more than most drivers actually need, that there's a very low barrier to being an early adopter.

I was looking forward to this cricket Test series. But we’re already seeing the impact of the monotonous drudge of never-ending hit and giggle cricket. What a pathetic day of unprofessional batting, from both sides, they’ve lost all sense of the discipline of the craft.

Why do monarchies and churches exist? The answer has been forgotten, but is still there. They were human inventions to prevent violence. Left to themselves humans will *always* fight each other for status, in groups. That applies at every level of society, every tiny sporting team or at school, or in the workplace etc. Even amongst friends and family. Humans figured this out in ancient times, and churches and monarchies were their solution. To place all status within a single hierarchy, to prevent us all fighting about it all the time. Of course we still fought, but much, much less. We only exist today because we did this.

A ‘cost of living’ post. By this time of year, mid-Spring, we’ve already generated enough surplus to pay for all of next winter’s heating. That’s heating the entire house, 24 hours per day. We also still have some surplus left from last Spring and summer (the blue circle). The final credits will be far higher than the predicted. We can also air-condition all summer for free. And several months of huge production still to come. We end up cashing hundreds in as pure profit, direct cash into our account. If you’re waiting for $600 billion (of your money) to build nuclear power plants in 20 years, to bring your power bills down (and they’ll at least double your bill, in reality), there’s no helping you.

You know EVs are taking off when you see them driving in Lithgow. I saw an Xpeng G6 this morning, fabulous mid-sized electric SUV. One of the most advanced EVs on the market, but still around that $60K mark. A steal for that money.

KIA are doing a fantastic job with their EVs. And not expensive. This is their EV5. More than other electric car makers they’re creating a more seamless transition to EV driving, including more conventional buttons inside to go with the touchscreens. Superb build quality all-round. Tuned brilliantly for Australian roads. Higher models significantly cheaper than a Tesla Model Y.

Origin is another energy company offering amazing electricity rates to EV owners. 8c/kWh, that’s about $5 to fill the ‘tank’ of an EV. Have a look at the difference, it will cost you at least 15 times that to fuel a petrol equivalent. How’s $120 a year sound, for fuel? You can also see why EV owners mostly charge at home, charging at a fast-charger costs almost 10 times as much.

We will probably buy a Tesla next year. Because I finished school almost 40 years ago, I don’t play the “we don’t like Elon so you should all avoid him” games. This video is a great set of reasons (there are others) why it’s a smart thing to do. Note it was published before the Chinese invasion, there are also other great alternatives now. Here are my top 10 reasons to get a Tesla. (But get any of the other top EV brands too, you won’t be disappointed.) 1. Tesla has mastered the electric drivetrain. Their EVs are always super efficient. 2. The integration of their unbeatable software with driving and things like your solar and battery is world-leading. 3. Their supercharger network for longer trips has no rival. 4. The Model Y in particular manages to be the perfect family car, with supercar-like performance, while also having some basic off-roading capability. 5. The storage in the Model Y is miles ahead of any rival. 6. I like spending less than $100 a year on fuelling my car. 7. I love, especially in a regional area, that no servicing is required for Teslas. And if you need assistance, they send a technician directly to your home. 8. There are now lots of examples of Teslas running completely problem free for hundreds of thousands of km. They can literally be an almost forever car. 9. Their functionality is fun and innovative, like dog mode, camp mode and sentry mode, and being able to remotely control your vehicle for things like temperature and even to summon it to drive to you. And having surround cameras as ‘dash cams’ for your every trip. 10. Teslas are designed for great driving performance, while still remaining practical family cars. You will leave most other non-EVs in the rear view mirror behind you, even expensive sports cars.

I have 2 hybrids. Brilliant cars. But when you own one, you quickly crave full electric. The petrol component just feels like a noisy dead weight. Ask an F1 engine designer (also hybrids), and they’ll say the same thing. Their number one wish to improve the design is ‘make the petrol component smaller’. People rushed to buy hybrids because the mental illness fantasy of ‘range anxiety’ was so successful in the car lobby propaganda. We bought them because they were literally the only cars available in the early pandemic. Beautiful cars, but we’ll go full-EV shortly.

If everybody would just follow the bloody speed limit, traffic congestion would be dramatically reduced. Speed limits act as a spacer between vehicles, if everybody is doing the same speed traffic can’t form, nothing bunches up. Barely 2% of people I see on the road follow a speed limit, and if you maintain a gap to the car in front some dipshit weaves through the traffic as if the gaps are there for their benefit. Humans are terrible drivers, mass transport can’t work with individuals having so much control.

My favourite demonstration of the acceleration of an EV. Look at that banana, stuck to the seat by g forces, under acceleration. It must be embarrassing to still be a petrol head, about all they have left is the sound. Which is their engines farting.

Scrolling the FB feed, have a rough look at how many posts the algorithms now show you that are actually from your friends, compared to the number that are product placements, or ‘suggested’ things you might like based on some idiot thing you accidentally clicked on (I’m currently inundated with windscreen wiper blade ads). This is what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification. The platform first gets you here, connected with all of your friends. That gives it inertia, people don’t want to lose those connections. Then it bombards you with constant advertising. At the same time it sells this direct product placement, to the advertisers. Once they’re hooked, it then siphons off their revenue to FB. I’ve been trying to think of a phrase to describe the FB experience now. I think it’s like being stuck on a Danoz Direct marketing channel.

Who would have predicted this? Outstanding. When I was at school, quite a lot of people did subjects like physics. Even people who weren’t really all that ‘academic’. The baseline of expected knowledge seemed much higher.

At the current rate of infection, the entire US population will have Long Covid inside 4 years. Australia is infecting even faster (we don’t vaccinate kids). 8% of that entire population will never be able to work again. Many, many more will be battling ongoing chronic disease with no available treatments. An example from work. A young (early 40s) healthy mum caught Covid from her son about 6 months ago. Since that time she’s developed pneumonia, serious strep throat, and is now off again with a serious infection. All in only 6 months. Covid damages your immune system, leaving you wide open to attack from everything. That damage is likely irreversible. The more times you get infected, the worse the damage is. It leads to no immunity, it destroys immunity, to everything.

Happy birthday buddy! Have a fantatsic day, looks like a great day for it.

My favourite shopping strategy.

Have we lost the cricket yet? I can't look.

Hopefully we get through this fine. I know we personally will, our air conditioners will be running all day to cool the house walls for us when we get home, and won’t use one electron from the grid doing it. We’ll be sending power into the grid, enough to power 2 or 3 other houses, and if the grid goes down, the micro-grid at home kicks in. 4 coal-fired generators are currently out of action, that’s why they’re worried. Our coal stations are falling apart. If we vote for a nuclear fantasy, those stations will need to keep running for years more, well beyond their life. It will cost an absolute fortune to try to stop them collapsing. It’s hard to live in stupid times.

Take a front-row seat to the collapse of the Western car industry. Or at least of those companies who don't build EVs. The Germans and Japanese are in all sorts of trouble.

Hmm.

Now's our chance to ditch the US and align with China. The US and UK are failed States, time to get back to Asia, as Paul Keating always wanted us to do.

The US is the same as here. The people who love voting to get rid of immigrants never have a clue that without immigrants there's nobody to do the work.

I shared this word here a few months ago. I've chatted to Cory in the past, I think the concept is much more important than even the brilliant word. It's the world social media is making for us.

One to keep in the back pocket in case you need it, while we keep infecting the kids so we can go to gigs and Bali. How proud are we to be one of the only developed countries on Earth that doesn't even vaccinate kids, against Covid? That decided to make our public health policy 'let's infect all the kids and they'll then act as a barrier against Covid infecting us?' (Which was never going to work, it was an idea from a libertarian free-market think tank, not science.)

I had a look at Origin's new subscription model the other day. Very interesting, you get to trial any car they have on their list, and can switch it with 30 days' notice if you want to try another one. Gives you an opportuinity to try a whole range of cars (particularly EVs) that you otherwise wouldn't be sure about, without commitment. You can even buy a car if you love it, after 3 years, or just keep switching to new cars with only 30 days' notice, if you want. Given that people are often paying off cars anyway, subscribing to a whole range of new cars is better than paying off one new car only. With Origin you can then also access super-cheap EV charging rates for your EV, 8c/kWh. Makes 'filling' it cost about $5, $120 in fuel for a year of driving. Like novated leases the subscription can also cover most costs of ownership, like rego, insurance, servicing, tyres etc. You will probably pay more this way, but you do get things like as many car swaps as you like, no need to ever try to sell your old car etc.

The next Covid wave is coming, timed to coincide with Christmas. Give the gift of lethal and debilitating infection, has a ring to it. All those Christmas parties, the virus will be rubbing its hands.

One of the most damning indictments of the idea of 'toxic masculinity' is the actual statistics. So much violence against women is domestic violence. Domesticity is the causal factor, specific strains on specific (small) subsets of homes that will never be understood with laughable education programs targeted at all men. Toxic masculinity is another social media creation, a legacy of the team sports there.

That peak mid-afternoon has the government and AEMO a bit worried. Ordinary people and organisations asked to cut electricity use. "About 6 gigawatts of coal-fired power station capacity remains unavailable, including about 3GW that was not previously scheduled. Many of Australia’s coal plants are nearing the end of their design lives, requiring more frequent and more costly repairs to keep operating."

Spot wholesale price has now reached its maximum of $17,500/MWh in NSW. Meaning there's urgent calls for more power in the grid. That's $17.50/kWh. Most people pay 20-30c/kWh, showing just how much the grid is now offering generators to bring in more supply. If you had a battery right now and/or were operating in the wholesale market more generally to sell your solar power (as ordinary people can do through Amber Electric for example), you could make well over $100 before dinner.

The orange circles are the 'interconnectors' between grids in each State. Orange means they're all maxed out.

Snapshots from the kidult culture we live in. This is Bathurst’s new animal rehoming centre, its new ‘pound’. Fabulous facility. But now closed to animal drop-offs, because it’s completely overwhelmed by abandoned animals. People would not believe the avalanche of abandoned animals now coming forward. That’s another symptom of a culture where not enough grown-ups are doing grown-up, sensible things. Kidults, not adults. ‘Living their best lives’. The pet was bought on a kidult whim, then got in the way of a lifestyle, so it has to go. You were put on this Earth to live a life, not a lifestyle. That will mean warts and all, not perpetual fun.

Some say 'but China still burns coal, it's the problem'. Approvals for new coal plants in China fell 92% in 2023. In the first 9 months of 2024, 86% of all new power sources added to the Chinese grid were renewable. In contrast, if Australia doesn't dramatically accelerate its renewables rollout, it will need to look at building emergency coal plants, at public expense. No company will do it, it'll be a stranded asset. Only one superpower is doing anything meaningful to try to save our civilisation from being incinerated. As a bonus it's driving the prices down dramatically on renewables and EVs for everybody else too, including us here in Oz.

10% of global marriages are between relatives.

The attempt to do this in Bathurst led to community outrage. I mean everything leads to community outrage now, that’s the culture worldwide.

My Brit friends might be able to tell me why so many Brits seem to have an almost visceral fear of ground-floor bedrooms? Watching lifestyle shows from there, where people select new houses, and bedrooms on the ground floor is just a complete no-no for many? Or even living in a single-storey dwelling full stop? Is this some remnant medieval castle-and-moat fear of home invasion thing?

The ‘cost of living crisis’ and problems with domestic violence are really the same problem. They’re the social model of the nuclear family under strain. The nuclear family is the expectation that children will move out and establish their own independent households. Historically this wasn’t the model, families often lived together throughout life, and status and wealth in societies was concentrated in family ‘lines’, like you can see in the picture. What broke up that old model was actually the Catholic Church, with its targeting of incest. There was significantly more incestuous inter-breeding in history than we have today, but as I posted yesterday, still 10% of all global marriages are between blood relatives. This splintered the old extended families into multiple nuclear units, the model we use today. That also removed some of the safeguards against violence, with an extended range of people overseeing each other’s welfare now replaced by couples isolated in independent homes. Why I react against modern social media gender wars and their Star Wars concepts of ‘toxic’ this and toxic that. There are material, social explanations that are much more nuanced. This kinda works while every nuclear family can afford to live independently. But as we’re seeing now, when decades of debt that supported that model are coming home to roost, the extended family is making a comeback. Kids often live with their parents well into adulthood. They can’t afford anything else. Wealth is heavily concentrated with parents (and particularly grandparents now), returning us to the old family line model. Agatha Christie novels are so often about these family battles for a share of the family wealth. Those are the times we’re returning to. This isn’t a better or worse way to live, it’s just a different way, which we miss with nonsense ideas like ‘the economy’.

'What's this button do?' government has begun.

People have been encouraged to believe nothing can be done to prevent Covid, so we all just need to 'live with' (i.e. catch it) now. That's just political bullshit. For every pandemic in history, you know who ended the pandemic? Engineers. Like here, in Chicago, dealing with the raw sewage that went into the river, spreading cholera there in the 19th century. We know what spreads Covid, infected air. While we had restrictions and lockdowns engineers should have been asked to improve air quality in all public buildings. Why weren't they asked? Because we had governments run by fuckwits who think society is an economy, who couldn't care less about public health. We went straight from lockdowns, to 'personal responsibility' public health i.e. look after yourself. Like you can dodge viral particles in the air. The collapse in public health will destroy the economy too. Idiots, as well as fuckwits. Pardon my language but these people should be in jail.

Lots of people hate Elon Musk, and fair enough. But have a look at this for the magnitude of the engineering achievement at Tesla. Who cares who the CEO is.

The NSW grid nearly went down this week, and as the article says, the conditions were relatively moderate. We’re not even in summer yet. The reason? Nearly half of our coal plants were offline, being repaired. They’re falling apart. Only renewables kept the lights on. If you’re one of those hysterical community groups opposing every attempt to modernise the NSW grid, go and buy some fucking candles. You might need them this summer. This is the reason we invested in solar and a battery, to have energy security at home, insulated from the mass hysterical stupidity and useless NSW Government, sucking the dicks of coal and gas companies rather than looking after our kids’ futures.

I’ve seen people bring newborns to a workplace with people there infected with Covid. Public health is dead, we have the foot on the accelerator rushing back to the Middle Ages. No doubt the same people will tell you ‘you have to live your life’. Grow up.

I think status is what drives all our lives. Starting at school, with kids negotiating their status there in different groups - peer pressure - and then right through adulthood. The overwhelming thing that drives humans is status, and often they’re not even aware they’re doing it. (Social media is absolutely saturated in it, humblebrags and other status behaviours. Even a basic selfie.) The flipside of this is that the most lethal thing you can do to a human is to humiliate them. Humiliation is the destruction of status. Even worse than physical violence, which often at least passes. This is true both individually and collectively. At the individual level, serial killers are nearly always people who have been deeply humiliated in their lives. Collectively, take Germany as an example. A wonderful, sophisticated country. And yet of course it had the catastrophe of Hitler and the Nazis. How did that happen? Quite simple, Germany was humiliated, after WW1. Deliberately, by opposing powers. The resentment this caused led directly to Nazism and WW2. Or take the modern day. Why did Trump originally decide to run for President? Those close to him say because Barack Obama publicly humiliated him. Every ounce of MAGA reeks of revenge. Tell me you don’t see it.

Again, look to China for where we’ll be going next. Car dealerships from legacy Western brands in China, like BMW, Mercedes etc are closing in their thousands. 2000 per year in 2021, 2022 and 2023. 4000 in 2024. That’s 10,000 dealerships closed, in the past 4 years. 17,000 of the remaining dealerships are losing at least half a million dollars per year (which is huge, as dealerships tend to be smaller in China). The home companies have been pumping hundreds of millions into the dealerships to try to keep them afloat. It hasn’t worked. And why? Because nobody in China wants a petrol or diesel car now. They’re an embarrassment. The only Western carmaker doing good business in China now is Tesla. For many legacy Western carmakers, this is also potentially their end. They sold 50% or more of their cars, to China. Not any more.

John Lennon, who wrote All You Need is Love, was worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the time of his death, and has an estate worth almost a billion today. Maybe he meant all you need is love, and a billion dollars. McCartney recently called out the BS of the song’s message. The 60s was the birth of an era where nothing was done to solve the problems of the world, except to get obscenely rich writing songs about the problems. Rock stars are mostly people who never grow up. We’re supposed to grow out of them.

The Economist and I disagree on pretty much everything. But not on this, it’s just so obvious.

Happy Birthday! 🎂🎊

Updated Covid vaccine available from 9 December. In time for Christmas, which is good. Just about everybody should have had 5 or 6 Covid shots already. I doubt many have had more than 2. Using infection instead of vaccination for Covid is suicide in slow motion.