December 2024

Pffft, just keep piling on the infections. It’ll make them stop eventually. Anybody want to buy a secondhand car?

Another example of how China does meaningful things, while we go on cruises and to gigs. It took them over 45 years to do it, but they’ve just encircled the Gobi desert, which is the size of Germany, with a 3000+ km ‘green wall’ of plantings, to contain its spread.

I found this story powerfully symptomatic of the times we’re now living in. The total collapse of a ‘public’ anything. People stripping power cables from streets, to sell the copper. Just outrageous, like living in Sierra Leone. Public health and education are in the toilet. Public roads get no funding so are falling apart. There’s zero public housing. Etc. All of this happens when you substitute an ‘economy’ for a society.

I shared the projections of system collapse in 2025 from AEMO here a couple of years ago already. We’re known for years solar would overwhelm the ‘baseload’ power idiots thought was in short supply. Now we have exactly the opposite problem, way more power than we need, and nowhere to store it and industry not re-configured to use it during the day. Because the same idiots blocked action to fix it, when it needed fixing. You can probably tell I’m a bit fed up with all of this. None of this is particularly difficult, but the idiocy that platforms like these now flood the public zone with is preventing anything meaningful happening at all.

My apologies if I miss any comments or messages or tags on this platform. Priority at the FB end is to write code to vacuum every last cent out of peoples’ wallets, not to make basics like notifications work properly.

There's so much focus on the price of gas and electricty in cost of living. But by far the greatest energy cost for households is petrol and diesel. Driving an EV can cut your energy bill at least in half, and by as much as 70% if you use your own solar and/or cheap charging times. You will also have far lower ongoing servicing costs.

Asking ordinary people whether Australia should have nuclear power is like asking them to do their own brain surgery. They have no idea, and it's not a decision they should be asked to make. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-03/victoria-latrobe-valley-weighs-up-nuclear-power-federal-inquiry/104007332

This is social media society. Where instead of each of us just doing the jobs we’re trained to do, everybody is suddenly an expert on everything. And these platforms then aggregate all of our ignorant opinions on things we know nothing about, and give ‘influence’ (power) to the people who generate the most ‘likes’ with their bullshit opinions. That’s what populism means. Where power goes to the most popular. Who are always full of shit.

Our historical memories are so limited. Take today, where China is again leading the world in many ways, in innovation and manufacturing. We’ve been here before, we all know about eating off ‘china’. ‘Fine China’. It’s in the name. At the time the West adopted Chinese porcelain for eating, we were still eating with our fingers, often not even with simple plates.

Richard Hammond says EVs are ‘ boring’, and he much prefers his 1968 Mustang. Probably thinks music stopped in 1978 too. Likes the ‘vroom vroom’ noises (a car farting). To me what’s most boring is people getting to middle-age and not even realising they’re in a mid-life crisis, pretending they’re 17 forever. James May is a mature adult, always a pleasure.

How's a 1.5 million km, 15-year warranty sound? Car batteries are already superb. And they're getting even better every day. People who worry about the batteries are not engaging with the reality out there. https://thedriven.io/2024/04/03/catl-announces-electric-vehicle-battery-with-1-5-million-kilometre-warranty/

As an indication of how fake the 'debate' is between fossil fuel and electric cars. Electric cars use batteries. But fossil fuel is also a battery. Both are the chemical storage of energy. The difference is, 70-80% of the energy stored in fossil fuels is wasted when you burn them. Nearly 100% of the energy stored in a battery is used to move an EV. Or put another way, you get 800 km of range in a fossil fuel car by putting 4000 km worth of energy in it. You get 800 km of range in an electric car by putting 800 km of energy in it.

Just sayin'. https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/motoring-news/legacy-automakers-in-trouble-nissan-stellantis-and-volkswagen-struggle-to-stay-afloat/news-story/5a807368fbf644b7628e3c0902c5d198

This is the sort of rank populism that plays well in our times. ‘Get rid of red tape!’ The problem with that idea is that the people who say it have no idea how things get practically done. ‘Bureaucracy’ is just the detailed work of connecting ideas with reality. Somebody has to implement things. That’s what all the files are for. The more outrageously stupid a political idea is, the more bureaucracy you will need to try to make it work. The most stupid politicians of all, the anti-red tape crowd, are hilariously the greatest generators of red tape. This always was Sir Humphrey‘s point.

Shows how the status quo simply won’t change, unless it’s forced to. It’s been clear for years that electric cars would be the way forward, traditional car companies mostly ignored it. Now they’re having their Kodak moment i.e. facing extinction. You can see that same thing in every human behaviour, for example this morning on the roads probably 80 to 90% of the cars around me paid no attention to the speed limit at all. Drivers won’t follow speed limits unless they’re forced to, they’ll battle for status out on the road instead.

Technical issue on Council's switchboard this morning. I wonder if Leanne's job is posting to FB?

Who's raising your young men, folks? Hint: see below.

I think a very good and not often asked question is why 'performance cars' are even allowed on public roads. It's clear they're designed to use public roads as race tracks. Also sometimes called 'driver's cars', a very revealing term, given that everybody on the road is a driver. But not owners of performance cars, who see themselves as superior drivers. Driving fast is just one driving skill, and not even a particularly complex one. They also use phrases like 'driving to the conditions', by which they mean as fast as they like. The 'conditions' of any road are mostly the other people on it, not the maximum speed you can get around its corners. It reveals the deeply anti-social nature of much car enthusiast culture, for whom other drivers are just in the way. They're freeloading off a public resource. Also why traffic 'jams' so often, because the culture of driving is so self-centred.

Get into it, Bathurst. Everything from BYD Sharks to BMW i4s, BYD Seals, Teslas, Polestars, KIAs, Hyundais etc.

Climate change warnings. We had maybe one blackout in the first 10 years of living in this house. Since the end of 2022, there have been 12. One of the reasons I bought a house battery was to provide some energy security with extreme pressures on the national grid, and it’s come through every time, like again tonight. Seamless, uninterrupted supply.

Murders his own mother for a life insurance payout he organised himself, to feed a social media-driven status lifestyle. Has a history also of crypto, another get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme, used out of desperation to try to rapidly increase his status. We never leave high school means status is what drives lives, as it does at school. We just stop noticing in adult life.

Social media is so addictive because it’s a poker machine for status. Poker machines are addictive not because you can win, but because you’re not sure if you’re going to win, with each spin. That’s what makes you keep spinning. Social media does the same for status. Each post has an uncertain outcome. It might get likes, it might not. People will check in repeatedly to see how many likes, and therefore how much status they may have generated. Our status is our identity. It’s why this matters to us more than anything. We all want to ‘fit in’, and to rise in status in our particular groups. We do it at school, we do it throughout adult life. The most serious grown-up work is still this same status game.

With the insane nonsense of living with a pandemic we’ve encouraged the total collapse in control of infectious disease more generally. The single and only reason our life expectancies are now over 80 rather than 40 is that we controlled infectious disease. I don’t think people have the first idea of what a total fucking disaster we’re now living inside. Whose idea was it to live with Covid in Australia? Scott Morrison, a politician. What does he know about infectious disease? Absolutely fucking nothing.

I don't read as many books as I used to, life is short and there are too many crap books. But Will Storr's book I recommend to everybody. It might reframe how you see most of life. I'd already been studying status through my own observations, and through the works of people like Rene Girard on imitative rivalry, and Gabriel Tarde on imitation. Storr's is a more popular-focused read, a wonderful intro for anybody. Status is the engine room of all of our lives.

The most popular name for baby boys in the UK is now Muhammad. The please explain Paulines will choke on their damper.

Peter Dutton often uses Canada as an example of nuclear power driving down power prices. It made the Canadians laugh with disbelief. He's a dangerous bullshit artist. The fact he's competitive in the next election is a reflection of just how stupid public life now is in Australia.

It’s wet in Australia again. Unseasonably wet. And the main reason is the same, nothing has changed. The oceans are boiling. Heat from climate change has to go somewhere. I find there’s widespread misunderstanding of the difference between temperature and heat as well. An anomaly of only a degree in temperature is a gigantic amount of additional energy, as heat. Imagine heating all that water, by 2-3 degrees. Astronomical amounts of extra heat energy.

A more common driver behaviour I’m seeing now is widespread total impatience. If there’s a line of traffic behind a slower vehicle, and then an overtaking lane arrives, it’s now common for people further back in the line of traffic to not only try to get past the slower vehicle, but to use the left lane to try to overtake other overtakers too, to get to the front of the line. These behaviours tell stories about the culture you’re living in. Not very nice stories. Similarly, few now wait for a vehicle to pass before entering a roadway from another road. They just barge into the flow, often forcing you to brake so you don’t hit them. Very, very often it’s ute drivers.

The roads are a fascinating place to observe. The bigger and more expensive cars have become, the more aggressive driving has become. Huge SUVs and utes are the main drivers (ha) of increased aggressiveness. Humans play status games, and it’s on full display on the roads.

Happy birthday Brett!

BYD’s latest plug-in hybrids will do 2100 km on a tank of fuel. Hybrids will disappear over time, they’re a transition technology for most driving, but BYD is keeping an eye on the ‘range anxiety’ (mental illness) trend to protect revenue in the interim. Worth remembering that hybrids don’t just save you lots of fuel, they have much better performance than petrol or diesel engines alone.

Happy Birthday! 🎊🎁🥳

It’s that time of year again, where women wallop Alan Rickman’s mid-life crisis character, and weep with Emma Thompson’s who says him being a twit makes her whole life a ‘lie’. The bizarre sexual politics of our time, where women define their self-worth around how mature and grown up men are (or more often, aren’t).

9 out of 10 people who go on this show say they’re ‘escaping’ the same thing. Traffic. Cars are said to be for the purpose of taking us places we want to go. But the places we want to go most are places without cars. If we just got rid of cars, and all stayed closer to home, there’d be no need to escape anywhere.

The impression given by Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan is that it’s nuclear vs renewables. Actually it’s nothing like that at all. He doesn’t even deny renewables will generate by far the most electricity into the future, see below, it’s part of his policy. His nuclear plan is just a trick to support the gas industry, which the LNP has been in bed with for years, remember the ‘gas-led recovery’ under Covid which never happened? The nuclear plan is a distraction to slow down renewables, so that the gas industry can generate more electricity. Gas is the second most expensive way to generate electricity, after nuclear. It’s why our electricity prices are already some of the most expensive in the world. The only cheap energy is renewables. There are no other cheap forms of energy.

The CSIRO has done detailed modelling of bushfire risk into the future for each part of Australia. You can plug in your postcode to see. Lithgow is at the upper end of increased risk. This will flow through into higher insurance premiums, amongst other costs. You can deny climate change as a sort of online team sport. It will then come for your wallet, bypassing your brain.

Again, who do you believe on energy? Australia’s top scientists and engineers, or an ex-Queensland cop? Pick door two and you’ll pay out of your own wallet.

Mark is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, talking about a Bitcoin miner buying a major wind farm and re-purposing it for Bitcoin mining. I have friends wwho are fans of Bitcoin, some no doubt reading this now!

Happy birthday!!! Hope you’ve had a wonderful day.

Imagine if it had been an electric bus, I can just see it now, demands that the technology be banned or at least claims that it can’t be trusted. The train Molly came home on last night was a diesel as well. It caught fire too.

Australia is going nowhere with greenhouse emissions. The whole thing is being gamed by the status quo. That red circle is ‘carbon offset’ programs i.e. planting trees and avoiding cutting down other ones. That’s a rort, it isn’t even happening.

The difficult thing about discussing ideas with friends and family is that every idea is actually a social group. Groups which help give people their sense of identity. In the past this often meant the rule of thumb, don’t discuss religion or politics with people you like. It’s much broader now though, I think. It got broader because of social media. These platforms weaponise all ideas, turn them into team sports. It’s how they make money, driving likes and engagement. Societies can’t get a thing done now, because any attempt to do something is met with instant resistance from some social group, nearly always organised through social media. Even worse, people won’t even talk about things that need doing, let alone do them. Talking about them triggers the team sports between rival groups, and peoples’ identities feel threatened. Adult life is now like being perpetually stuck in high school, with its competing groups. Many go down the positivity path to try to avoid it, projecting and even living an image of a life free of all troubles. That’s just dangerously fake, for me, in the ‘let’s forget all our troubles with a bowl of strawberry ice cream’ Malibu Stacey way. The most ‘fun’ to be had in life, as an adult, is tackling adult problems. It’s the only real stuff of life. Anyway, looking forward to retirement because adult life now sucks balls, as teenagers say. Retirement may be some escape from the eternal high school.

This could mark the end of Murdoch sewer journalism, that has poisoned the well of all Anglo democracies for decades. Not even most of his own children could put up with his toxic filth any more.

Who had one of these in the 1960s and 1970s? I still remember the smell when you switched them on.

We’ve moved from the Stop the Boats part of the campaign, to Bash the Blacks. All the old-time favourites.

Me.

“Researchers say it's time for travellers and governments to rethink long-haul travel.” Have been saying this for years. Makes you about as popular as haemorrhoids. Travel is the most stupid and destructive part of our entire culture. Accumulating ‘bucket lists’ of ‘sights’ trashes those locations, and is driven by our total inability to stay home and just be. Stopping the game of travel musical chairs would force us to confront ourselves, as a culture. We’re desperate to avoid that.

Looking at the list of approved new renewable energy projects on the latest government tenders. Number 1, a local. Attracted lots of whining and whinging, until the State Government thankfully took it out of local hands. I think one of the main local objections was that it spoiled the view, I’m guessing of badly eroded dust bowl paddocks.

Trump has given Elon Musk the task of improving ‘government efficiency’. Trump has called the department he’ll lead the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE). Worth paying attention at this point. DOGE is also a Bitcoin flavour, of which Musk is a big fan. Dogecoin. Has a dog emblem, and see in the pic, Musk is clearly linking the two. What both Trump and Musk both mean by government ‘efficiency’ is the complete destruction and removal of $2 trillion worth of the US federal government. Some now call DOGE ‘Destruction of Government, by Elon’. That’s exactly what’s happening. It will make him and the wider crypto and corporate crowd much richer.

Happy Birthday! Enjoy your day! 🎊🎉🥳

Happy Birthday! Enjoy your day! 🎂🎈

Ed is a UK technology and financial journalist. Great breakdown of the carmageddon happening to Western car makers. All their own fault.

China did this not through ‘extensive consultation with the community’. That only leads to lists of crazy ideas from crazy people, and nothing being done at all.

The batteries are coming. REALLY coming.

Observe the culture we live in, and you will always find status driving nearly everything that happens. Whether it’s homes, food, cars, watches, or whatever, there’s an increasing push towards high-status luxury or ‘premium’ items. These status games proliferate when there isn’t a central status hierarchy focused on the public good. Like Victorian England had, with its focus on public works. Without that top-level status game targeted at what society collectively needs, individuals turn every part of their lives into their own separate status games.

While social media wallows in oceans of BS, reality continues on without it.

How EV myths become everyday knowledge, courtesy (as so often) of SKY News Australia and their stable of babbling idiots. In this case, through blatant lies about the NRMA, who said the exact *opposite* to what the babbling idiots claim they say.

There are between 68 and 70 new EVs coming to Australia in 2025. Here they all are. Enjoy the revolution, folks. And it is one, I still meet people who honestly think this is some sort of competition between EVs and petrols and diesels. Petrols and diesels are dead in the water. Battery prices are plummeting, EVs will be cheaper than petrols and diesels, and with much better performance. No car manufacturer (not one) is planning to keep making petrol and diesel vehicles.

The number one rule of traffic engineering. Roads create traffic. Induced demand. Just as dams create the demand for water, they don’t create a supply of water.

Today Peter Dutton releases laughable ‘modelling’ to say nuclear power is the best option for Australia. Do you know anybody who’s ever worked with nuclear technology? I do - me. I can tell you right here, nuclear power woud be the single most stupid decision Australians could make for this country. We should be a global energy superpower with our renewables resources. Investors know it, they’re queuing up to invest here. Not one is looking to invest in nuclear. Because it’s bullshit technology in 2024. Outrageously expensive and complex, and dangerous. Also very thirsty, you need a lot of water. This from the party that pretends it’s for the ‘market’, now committing Australians to hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, because the market knows it’s bullshit and won’t invest in it. Like a Soviet government of the 1950s. You can’t make this shit up. Be smarter Australia. For once in your fucking life, think.

Even Peter Dutton’s own party know what he’s proposing with nuclear is BS. They know it’s vastly more expensive, they just won’t say it publicly. But they’re leaking it to the press. "There's a flood of misinformation out there and political spin, but it's worth remembering that not a single investor is lining up to build nuclear in Australia, but when it comes to renewables, they're practically knocking down the door," said Greg Bourne, a former BP Australasia executive and energy advisor to the Thatcher government. "And globally, 10 times as much investment is going to renewable energy than is going into nuclear."

20% of the projected cost of nuclear power in Australia could put solar on every rooftop, free of charge. And that electricity would then be totally free to the householder too. Unlike nuclear electricity, which would be twice what you're paying now.

The Shark wins car of the year. Hugely deserved, it's reinventing that stupid category. https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/motoring-news/byd-shark-6-ute-crowned-car-of-the-year/news-story/2bf2d4a5d928f45b2e127830b19b19a8

As an indication of just what a disaster the Trumps and Duttons of the world are, calculations show that if the US were to convert its electricty grid to renewables, electricity there would cost under 3 cents per kWh. And that would be only using 50% of the renewables capacity. Right now in Australia electricity costs over 30 cents per kWh. 10 times as much. Nuclear would drive that price significantly higher again, as much as double.

How does spending more than $300 billion of your money to provide only 38% of the grid's power, which private industry is now building mostly free of charge for taxpayers (for all 100%) sound? Insane? Yep. Plus the other listed BS. And that $300 billion figure is way too low anyway, it will cost much more than that.

4 million Australians already have solar panels. Under Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan these panels would be forcibly switched off on many days by the grid operators, to protect the planned nuclear power stations, which can’t be turned on and off quickly. Meaning most of those 4 million owners of solar panels would be forced to buy electricity from the grid instead, on those days, at huge price.

The combined cost of proposed nuclear subs and nuclear power stations, both LNP policies, is close to $1 trillion. All taxpayers’ money. The LNP calls itself the party of small government.

I got my Covid booster yesterday. I was the only person in the pharmacy, they almost seemed surprised when I asked for it. A younger person at work was also surprised, and told me vaccination should be entirely a matter of ‘choice’. An adult population with the maturity and mindset of Kyle and Jackie O. Anglo countries are all infected with the Trump virus, we just don’t see it.

Planning relative energy independence for both the home and cars has been my main ‘bucket list’ in recent years. My ‘living my best life’. I funded it by foregoing idiot selfies in front of world tourism landmarks, with tins of sardines (planes) full of tired and bored tourists, all pretending they’re having the best time. THIS is ‘fun’. And fun that lasts all year. Energy is the main tool of power and enslavement in modern life. Oil companies, coal companies, it’s how they dominate us. The heatwave will be ignored today here, air conditioned away if needed, at zero cost. And I can retire earlier, because our energy costs are near zero.

Well now, amongst all the BS of Trump, some good may still come.

The solution to most of society’s problems is to tell engineers what the problems are, and then to get out of their way. If you don’t believe that, I encourage you to read history much more carefully. How’s an 8 million km car battery strike you? It seems we need to over-engineer everything to ridiculous levels to cut through the thick forest of entrenched stupidity.

Peter Dutton’s only policy is ‘Peter Dutton for PM’. Seriously, he has no other policies. Turns out he’s the biggest critic of his own nuclear wet dream as well, have a quick listen. Only 5 seconds.

Happy Birthday! 🎂🎉

Just saying BYD Auto Australia, if you as the second-largest battery company in the world did for home batteries what you’ve done for cars, offered the same fantastic technology but much cheaper, you would absolutely clean up in Australia.

Basic literacy and numeracy would help our public life be less stupid. One in three against something means the overwhelming majority were for it. One in six anti-vaxxers means over 80% of people supported vaccination.

One of the explanations given for why so many people seem so much more sick now, and more often, is that lockdowns caused ‘immunity debt’ i.e. people weren’t getting infected with diseases as much, so their immunity had dropped. Like your immune system is a muscle that needs a regular workout. This was always bullshit, not science. And now the proof is in. We’re into our third post-lockdown year, and the problem is not going away, it’s getting worse. The problem is COVID. It damages your immune system, leaving you wide open to all disease. If you want to see what that’s doing to us, have look at the graph. Our life expectancies are in free fall, the trend is downwards, for the first time in a century. Please, please stop believing that getting Covid lots is harmless, or making you immune to it. Both are *dangerously* wrong beliefs. The fact you might have a ‘mild’ case of Covid is no comfort at all. The damage that’s doing to your immune system is opening the door to ALL disease. It’s just a matter of time. People who caught HIV had a mild cold or flu-like illness. 8-10 years later, they were dead. Every single one of them. And they only caught HIV once, many are getting Covid 2-3 times every year.

Travel destroys another sacred place.

Harsh.

The idea that more ‘supply’ will fix housing prices. If prices drop hugely for existing houses, people who own them are in deep shit. So the idea is, we’ll just build lots more houses for people who don’t have one yet, which will create a glut that will make those new houses much cheaper. Except that same glut would make all houses much cheaper, including the ones already owned. See how ‘supply’ is an idiot nothing idea?

It amazes me people are worried about battery life in cars, they’re already warranted for eight years or 160,000 km as a fairly standard warranty. As the research is increasingly showing and peoples’ experience with these batteries, even at the end of their huge warranty life they’ve still got hundreds of thousands of kilometres worth of life in them.

Another day where NSW will be hanging on by the skin of its teeth at dinner time. Tomorrow as well. Prepare for possible blackouts. As last time, the problem is ageing coal-fired power stations out of commission, the same ones Peter Dutton wants to flog flat out for the next 20 years. What's extra amusing is that he wants to build nuclear power stations *on the same sites* as the existing coal-fired stations, while they're running flat out and falling apart.

"All politicians have to play a delicate game with housing: appear to be trying to make it more affordable because it’s a “crisis”, but not achieve it, since most voters own a house and don’t want its value to fall." Alan Kohler

Tomorrow's forecast demand now added. Ouch. And look at the forecast price, the pink-purple line. Big bucks to try to get generation into the system.

Tesla has some of the best electrical engineers in the world. They're scathing about Peter Dutton's nuclear plan, correctly pointing out that the grid won't function with that much 'baseload' power, and millions of Australians with solar will need to have their systems forcibly switched off almost daily to make room for electricity from nuclear plants. 'Baseload' power, the LNP's obsession, is a 19th century way to think about 21st century energy grids.

EVs were 10% of car sales in Oz in 2024. That number is projected to be 20% within two years. The number of fast-chargers doubled in 2024. We're on the 'ramping up' part of the innovation curve.

In recent history South-East Asian countries bought nearly all of their cars from Japanese car makers. Chinese EVs are now taking them to the cleaners. South-East Asia is hugely focused on reducing air pollution. Obviously petrols and diesels are the cause, not the cure. Together with the Germans, Japanese car companies like Toyota, Nissan and Honda are trying to avoid extinction. For the same reason. They were all too stupid to shift to EVs.

The battle between gig culture and Covid can only have one winner. Ariana Grande has cancelled all her touring for 2025. (She contracted Covid filming Wicked.) Maria Carey has just had to cancel some of her Christmas shows due to illness. Daryl Hall had to leave a stage this year because of illness. Elton John now can’t see because of infection to his eyes that won’t clear. There’s a lonnnng list of others. I made probably zero inroads sharing Covid information this year. You can lead a horse to water. I was asked why I wasn’t going to the staff Christmas party at work. I said ‘because I don’t want fucking Covid for Christmas’. What I call ‘gig culture’ is the broader culture of ‘you have to live your life’ i.e. take no adult responsibility for adult problems.

Plenty of people I know have the same belief as her last sentence, even if their way of arriving there seems less insane. But it’s just as insane.

I wish I got more pleasure watching the reality of Covid come to fruition. Watch this, only very short.

Thought I’d capture some of the corruption and incompetence of council on my way into work today. Video with audio.

Change doesn't happen gradually. Nothing happens for a while, and then everything happens all of a sudden. See if the history below rhymes with changes to transport (EVs) you see today. "In the early 20th century...the incumbent horse-based road transportation industry in the United States was skeptical and outright dismissive of automobiles because there were almost no paved roads, the petroleum industry was in its infancy, there were no fuelling stations, manufacturing capacity and supply chains were limited, the rule of the road had not yet been developed, and almost nobody knew how to drive. Nevertheless, automobiles fully disrupted road transportation in less than 15 years." ReThinkX. Rethinking Energy 2020-2030

I'm going to post about this curve a lot. It explains why experts call renewables not just a replacement energy source for the grid, but a 'superpower' source. Students of economics will recognise it as a marginal cost curve. The marginal cost is the cost to provide one extra unit of something, and it often produces a 'u-curve' like the one below. Showing that once you reach a certain economy of scale, costs fall dramatically and it becomes extremely cheap to produce additional units. In fact the marginal cost can be near zero, which it is for renewables. This explains why we're living in the middle of an almost unbelievable revolution right now. I'll do more posts to show examples of why.

I don’t have much luck convincing people of the essential emptiness of travel. But here’s another way to look at it. The places we most like to visit were built by people who almost never left home. We mostly travel to try to find what it is the people who never left home knew, and we’ve forgotten.

Back to the marginal cost curve for renewables, to one of the miracles of our lives. SWB = solar, wind, batteries. You can see that the lowest cost SWB grid generates between 3 to 5 times *more* energy than our entire grid right now. Not less. That’s why experts call SWB ‘superpower’. The marginal cost of renewables at that lowest point of the U-curve is effectively zero. Meaning you can add capacity at that point and it will cost you effectively nothing. A country can over-build their grid with renewables, to way more than is needed in sunnier months, to cover for winter, and it will cost them nothing to do it. That means they have ‘superpower’ amounts of energy to play with, for most of the year. Way MORE energy than we have available right now. And it costs them NOTHING. 3-5 times as much energy as we have available right now, in the whole grid. For nothing. This is what good solar installers at home do too. Our panels for example for three quarters of the year produce enough energy to power 3 or 4 homes. That’s so they produce more in winter, and we then use that huge surplus to pay for winter, but to also do things like charge cars. That removes our cost of fuel for transport. Renewables create energy abundance, they’re not a replacement for fossil fuel power. Fossil fuel power costs more, the more you use. With nuclear, it costs more in a non-linear way i.e. the costs grow even faster, as you add more. Renewables are the exact opposite. The more you add, the cheaper it gets. Energy becomes free. If you don’t believe me, look at the wholesale price of electricity every day. Often zero, and even negative i.e. they’ll pay you to use it. This is also why no energy companies are building coal or nuclear plants now. It’s like burning money. Even if idiot politicians try to force these technologies on the grid, companies will ignore it. They’ll invest in renewables, because super energy means super profits, for them.

“Ordinary Australians will continue to slap solar panels on their roofs to escape the entire drama and decide the future without Canberra.” The energy problem is already solved. You can live it right now. You don’t have to vote for anybody to do it. We haven’t paid for electricity in over 2 years. Soon won’t be paying a cent for petrol or diesel either. Thanks to China, and their fabulously cheap and high quality renewables technologies.

Social media is where people go to argue with strangers about things none of them understand.

More marginal cost curve for renewables. At the bottom of the u-curve, an increase of investment of only 20% creates up to 200% more power. That’s ‘superpower’. With that extra 20% investment, the energy produced can expand to a whole range of other industries, not just electricity supply (bottom blue bars). Same as for your household solar. If you install a big system, it’ll not only power your house, it’ll power your car, for only a tiny additional cost for the extra panels.

VW is in the top 3 car companies in the world. Its current debt is $240 billion, one of the largest private debts in history. Their existence is in the balance. All because they didn’t shift to EVs much sooner. They won’t be the last big car company to be smashed.

In August, 100 notable ‘creatives’ (writers, musicians etc.) boarded a ship in the Arctic circle, for a 15-day cruising adventure through the Arctic waters. Over 50% of them contracted Covid, on the trip. Some are now bedridden with Long Covid, taking a cocktail of medicines to stay alive and barely functional. When people believe Covid is over, they mean it in the way that Milli Vanilli is over. No longer trending. That’s what adult life now is, fashions and fads, battles for our attention. No objective reality attached at all.

The Japanese car industry is in free fall, as is the German car industry. Honda and Nissan now looking to merge to survive. Though merging 2 companies with virtually no decent EVs between them just makes one bigger company with no decent EVs. Meanwhile VW is 240 billion dollars in debt. And Mercedes is announcing tens of thousands of its workers to be fired. You won’t survive as a car company, selling petrols and diesels, no matter how many idiots on social media think that.

If you wonder why we ended up 'living with' a pandemic, when you read Scott Morrison's true passions, it'll become clear to you why he wasn't focused for one second on the basics of running a country. Like disease control. His was a mission of evangelical rapture. Not governance.

Colour is a seductive thing. Combine it with sugar, and stand back.

The Zeekr 7X is confirmed for Australia next year. This is a very special car. Mid-sized SUV, so competes with the world’s best-selling car, the Tesla Model Y, which is about to have a new model within the next few months. But the 7X is a more luxury offering, is a better off-roader, uses the world’s best EV battery and will have a range up to 700km for the long range version, and even has air suspension. A magnificent car, watch for it.

They’ve openly admitted nuclear energy does nothing to lower prices (it actually would make prices go up hugely). So they’re scrambling with a gas backup plan, which was always really what the nuclear plan was about (the gas industry are big LNP chums). To delay renewables so they can drill a shitload more gas wells. Since 2015, Australian gas production has tripled. Gas prices have also tripled. At this point it really is a matter of how dumb you are.

Just look at these numbers, from Australian actuaries. A public health disaster. Ask anybody in the street, and you’d think life was back to normal.

Rock stars in their late-70s announcing their new album, with their luxury mansion and own soccer field as background, is about as ridiculous as our culture gets.

New Zealand’s new government came to power with a tired old cliche about freeing everybody from dreadful government. They cut the guts out of public spending. Now their economy is a train wreck. There is no such thing as an economy, it’s a political myth. All productivity and economic activity is driven by government. Just as all affordable housing, education, health care, roads etc. is. None of these things will spontaneously appear in a ‘market’. The only markets that exist are also created by governments.

Second family Christmas ruined by Covid now. Thankfully not here in this household, but the extended family celebrations now wrecked. I wonder how many more years of this stupidity people will tolerate. I’m not sensing any shift in direction in anybody’s thinking. Alarming numbers of people even look set to destroy the country’s entire future, getting behind fantasies about nuclear power.

Pretty standard day in the warmer months. Used no grid power at all, exported enough to run 3 or 4 other homes. Maybe you got some of our electrons. That’s a few hundred kms of EV driving also, in just the amount we exported, we actually generated more than another 20 kWh on top of that, which we used to power everything at home and charge the battery.

You’ll see this in many new EVs. It’s a monitoring camera to check if the driver is falling asleep. Just one more safety technology that is desperately needed for driving, so many accidents are related to fatigue. Humans are appalling drivers, even (and especially) those who pride themselves as great drivers. They think it means how fast they can go around corners.

Solar is a breathtaking revolution. A juggernaut.

This person has Covid. But we’re supposed to pretend it’s over. So now they can’t even understand how sick they are, because it’s not allowed.

Jeff is the Chief Scientist at Google. Sharing the stats on Waymo self-driving cars. Humans are hopeless drivers, but geniuses at self-delusion. They’re also hopeless at flying planes, which is why most of the time, they don’t.

I added the price of electricity in red, for EV drivers.

The maths of stupidity. The Granville train disaster killed 83 people. It’s still commemorated. Tens of thousands of people have died (and are still dying) of Covid in Australia. Our attitude to that? It’s ‘just a cold’. This is what politicians have done. None of the infectious diseases we fight every day of every year ever killed most of the population. We still controlled them, because we didn’t have this crazy new maths of ‘it isn’t a disaster unless it’s killing the entire population’. If you think it’s not a disaster because you’re still alive, after your Covid infection(s), firstly the people who die catch it because people like you keep spreading it. And Covid’s real damage happens longer term, to everybody who carries it.

I find this ridiculous. That desperate clinging to an eternal youth from that generation of bands, the nostalgia now ramping up exponentially with guest appearances at each other’s shows etc. Like a last gasp effort to deny the passing of time. There are aged care homes with younger people in them.

They’re installing one of these 25 kW heat pumps right around the corner from my desk on Monday, and I’ll be a pig in shit. I’d rather watch that than lie on a beach in Bali. Heat pumps are semi-miraculous modern wonders, we’re so blasé.

I worked with somebody who told me it didn’t matter how far off in the distance a car was, they had to speed up to catch them, because they couldn’t bear anybody being in front of them on the road. That’s probably about 80% of all overtaking, a status pissing game. Also why people being overtaken so often speed up. They see somebody going past as a loss of status on the road. Top dog is being in front of people. Just one more way humans are hopeless drivers. Traffic would flow beautifully if everybody did the speed limit, that’s what speed limits are mostly designed to do, space out traffic. It will never happen with humans in charge behind the wheel.

When humans gather together in groups of any size, they play status games. First within the group itself, for status within the group. Then between groups. Paradoxically (for many) this means that the more we ‘connect’ societies, the more violent they will become. Social media is a connection technology, and now pretty much runs societies. It’s why they’re increasingly tribalised and violent, with a proliferation of groups battling each other for status. And it means no matter what you try to do now, simple stuff like upgrading the electricity supply or upgrading transport with more modern technology, a bewildering array of groups will appear to oppose it. Humans live for their status. Their status is their identity. They get that from the membership of their groups, and their identity feels threatened when their group is threatened by other groups. I obviously spend a lot of time observing this with cars, but you can look anywhere. I can look at the car a person drives and usually guess almost exactly what their views are on most things. Their car is often central to their chosen group(s) and their identities.

Australia being an unreformed prison colony has always made it infinitely more interesting than all the Queen and country flag-waving shit.

VW to slash 35,000 jobs to try to stay in business. Those close to the industry say it won’t be enough.

Meet Romney. Be quick, God may ‘crate’ him 6 feet under the ground, in a box.

“There is nothing so much like God in all the universe as silence.” Meister Eckhart (probably drove an EV).

Christmas is the worst time of year for many. People with depression often hate it. The homeless, the poor, sometimes those who share custody of children. Etc. If you enjoy Christmas, you’re probably doing OK in life. I think it’s worth remembering and pondering that, because the true meaning of Christmas always was the transformation of the evil in the world, into joy. How much of that did we do this year? And how much did we just have ‘fun’, and is our Christmas festival now just that same fun, turned to 11?

John Deacon (bass player in Queen) is considered a bit weird, because he refused to have a single thing to do with rock n roll after Freddie Mercury died. He wanted to go home and spend the rest of his life with his family. He's an example of the sort of 'adult' mindset I often post about. His was by far the most sane decision, only in gig culture would it seem weird. He wanted to be a grown up, something being a rock star wouldn't allow him to be.

Sometimes it just takes a moment to pause and reflect. I don’t transact personal life much on here, because I think it’s profoundly unhealthy that these platforms have captured our social lives. Increasingly all of our lives is being transacted in one way or another, through these platforms. Personal, political, economic. For example sharing pictures of Christmas goings on in my life. Seems the most innocent, happy and fun thing to be sharing here, right? That’s the bait and switch. These are not public service platforms. They’re businesses. The bait was to offer us all a place to socially connect. The switch is to then get us all locked in here, with all of our family and friends, becoming the venue we create our sense of community. And then to progressively monetise those connections. And not just by flooding us all with ads every time we mention anything at all, it’s much more sinister than that. The deepest mechanism here is to generate likes and traffic by creating conflict. To tribalise all of our friends and families into different teams, on every public issue. And then to have those teams battle here, which generates lots of clicks, and therefore revenue for the platforms. It’s how people create status, and therefore identity. This is what the term ‘enshittification’ means. To first capture our entire lives, and then to progressively ‘enshittify’ those social relationships in favour of one thing only. Revenue and influence, for platform owners. It’s Australia’s word of the year. Thought is not an Australian activity to any great degree, so I doubt many will make the connection, and will continue to use these platforms as an open window into the most intimate part of their lives. Posing and posturing, curating online personas in the relentless status games/team sports. These platforms are poker machines for status, and the revenue all goes one way only. (Not to us.) Society is not ‘more divided’ than ever. It’s just infected by social media platforms. That division is the status games, the revenue algorithms.

Can’t post this as a reply to the other thread about John Deacon, so will post here. Nigel Kyle Adam

The new Prado a good example of why petrols and diesels tend to ‘keep their value’ better, for now anyway, in secondhand sales. It’s $10,000-$13000 more expensive than the previous model. (It’s also not a great car.) Secondhand cars have historically held their value because new petrols and diesels are always (often a lot) more expensive than previous models. You’re being ripped off.

Sorry that I don’t do Christmas cheer (or Anzac Day commemoration, or even much of birthdays or other life events) here. A few have taken that as evidence that I’m not living a full life, which I flip by asking them why they’re living their life through social media. I’m living a full life, just deliberately not through a social media platform. Make 2025 the year where you reverse the capturing of your personal and social life, by these platforms. Then we may get actual community back, outside these platforms, rather than the performative status games that we mistake for community here.

In 1215 King John signed the Magna Carta, a truce document with his nobles about the sharing of power and wealth. It went on to become a foundation for most modern democracy. Project 2025 is Trump’s operating manual for his current term. Really it’s just a new Magna Carta, he’s surrounded by top US billionaires (the modern nobles), all fighting each other and Trump for supremacy. The beauty of studying history is that you see the same patterns repeat, and you then know what they mean.

Insurers in Australia now have let people know that replacing an EV battery is cheaper than replacing a petrol or diesel engine. Battery prices are plummeting, and EV prices will go below the prices of petrol or diesel. 2025 will be an exciting year for the revolution that many refuse to even notice. If you buy a new car now and it’s petrol or diesel, I wouldn’t hold your breath on resale when it’s time to trade in.

Elsa Dreisig is a wonderful French-Danish soprano. Opera singers are extraordinary, physically what they do is harder than most elite sports, plus they have to play a role as an actor, as well as have advanced music knowledge, and be able to speak multiple languages. I’ve been lucky to be able to chat a little bit with Elsa in the past couple of years about the behind the scenes craft of opera singing. She brings such wonderful intelligence and personality to any role. This beautiful song is from Gounod’s opera, Faust.

Sheep join the protest against unsightly windmills. Or maybe they appreciate not being incinerated by the ‘beautiful countryside’.

Anyone working in local government will chuckle reading this one. All the ridiculous idealistic rubbish about ‘community’, in complete contrast with how people actually behave together. Societies are status games, not communities. All that brings them together is catastrophes - wars, plagues, natural disasters. The rest of the time they just battle for status. Christmas Lights turned into a pissing contest for status really fast, years ago. The idiot spoilers throwing eggs and beer bottles are just late to the same status game. It’s their team’s way of being visible.

Just as Trump makes satire impossible, everything he says and does is beyond satire, it’s incredible really that Spinal Tap is now reality. All the things they mocked in the music industry went on to become the normal way of doing things, and much more bizarre again. People in their 80s are now in bands, something I’m sure the Spinal Tap guys would never have even imagined was possible.

“We are about to witness the greatest disruption the automotive industry has ever seen. There’s a perfect storm brewing right now. And most people are completely unaware of what’s happening. Every single legacy automotive company is about to be hit, and hit very very hard. Because none of them realise just what China is doing, what the endgame is. Just what these massive, powerful, efficient, high-tech vehicle brands in China are about to do to the West. It is going to shatter the West in many ways. It will never, ever be the same.” Sam Evans

This is the cultural shift that’s almost impossible to talk about without people of that age taking great offence. (People identify themselves individually with demographic groups, but these are cultural rather than individual psychology questions.) The Woodstock generation arrived at the time not long after the world had sustained 4 major catastrophes: two world wars, a horrifying pandemic, and the Great Depression. Those catastrophes suppressed or destroyed society’s status hierarchies, and created ‘the public’ as an idea to help rebuild after those catastrophes, with a focus on the collective good of all (because without that, nothing was going to keep running). Just as that rebuilding had really started to pay off, the massive wave of young people born in the euphoria after the last war began to enter adult life. They’d never known those 4 catastrophes, their parents had wanted to spare them that world. But what this did was give them an idea of life as an endless set of opportunities. What I call the shift from life, to lifestyles. They hadn’t known real tragedy, so they invented their own baddies, overwhelmingly ‘the establishment’. Counter-cultural movements, looking to upend the very fabric of societies. Society began to eat itself. That fabric *was* the delicately re-built world post the 4 catastrophes. They were going to war with the most basic institutions and habits that keep societies running. They still are, to this day the dominant politics that emerged from the Woodstock era is small government, anti-establishment ‘freedom’ politics. And wafty idealisms about love and unity that never produce either. And musical acts became not just entertainment, but the organising principle of these new lifestyle tribes. Singing of revolution while accumulating vast fortunes, becoming the organising principle for adult life (Woodstock did alert us to the fact music was going to play this political role, for this generation). Those same acts are still occupying centre stage in modern popular culture, that lifestyle generation will never go quietly into the night to make way for the young. The young are being smashed on every measure of modern adult life, from education to housing. The old still see themselves as the young. There is no circle of life now, we reach adolescence and that’s where we stay, until we’re dead, ‘living our best life’. Not just boomers, that shift is now all of us. Not because individual boomers are horrible people, but because they were caught up in a cultural shift that decoupled social life from the brutal realities of what maintains peace and prosperity.

The industry has known this is true for years, it’s why these plants are being shut down, often even before their projected lifespan. There’s not a single element of Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan that is anything except a disastrous fantasy for Australia, destroying our greatest advantages, at vast expense.

Another example of the huge chasm between the reality of the world out there, and the crazy opinions on social media. The largest solar companies in the world already easily dwarf the amount of available energy for the world that fossil fuels have available.

That fixed distance? Will NEVER happen with human drivers. Semi-automated cars? Easy.

Have others noticed how smoking has made its ugly way back into films and TV again? At the turn of the century it had been virtually eliminated from TV and film. Now whole films and shows are like ads for smoking. You can never take the collective foot off the neck of the tobacco industry, look at what those bastards did with vapes, hooking an entire new generation onto smoking.

4WD culture carries an assumption of getting closer to ‘nature’ (whatever that is). When in reality it’s using the landscape as a theme park for cars. Doing terrible and increasing damage as it goes, and grows (and it’s a current fad, growing exponentially). Most difficult 4WD tracks are easily traversible on foot. 4WD-ing really shows how useless cars are if you don’t have a serviceable road. You’re not getting closer to nature, you’re building roads into it to have fun in cars. The framing is all about ‘taming’ the landscape, beating it into submission with big diesel engines and wheels.

Probably the most telling thing about the idea of a ‘Big Lap’ for me is how much like the old Blighty days of empire the idea is. Like you need to accumulate the entire continent, in one trip. It’s about collecting or owning the spaces rather than having any meaningful relationship with them. And it betrays a lack of connection we have as newer Australians to *any* of the spaces, they’re all interchangeable ‘sights’. Travel porn, no real ongoing relationship, just looking.

Imagine places are people. Which of course they are, too. We had these Time Life books as kids, and I’d sit and look at different locations in the world, for hours. Now people just go there. They travel. Let me argue how stupid that is. Again, if places were people, we could sit and look at books or magazines with beautiful people in them, that we admire. If we then travelled to the homes of those people to try to get a more ‘authentic experience’ of them, what would that be called? Stalking. That’s what travel is. Geographical stalking. We feel the right to not just admire other places, but to possess them, to stalk them. We have no such right, and worse, it destroys those places when we do it. Let each part of the world be beautiful, including our own. And admire the beauty in other places, from afar. There’s no need to invade everywhere else to ‘experience’ that beauty, doing that destroys it, just as stalking destroys the lives of people. I know very many will disagree with this. I will always ask them, why is travel only good when nobody else does it? How many people should be allowed to ‘experience’ the world in the way you like?

Something I think many vegans (and others) don’t understand is that the best way to protect the diversity of life, is to eat it. If you eat a wide variety of plants and animals, then it’s in your best interests to nurture those same plants and animals. This is what Aboriginal Australians did, engineered the landscape to be favourable to the many plants and animals they ate. Which created a rich and diverse landscape. We on the other hand farm huge monocultural wastelands, which empties the landscape of all but a handful of living things. We idolise our native animals, for example, but rarely eat them. So they’re all rapidly becoming extinct, because eating them would mean nurturing the landscape to support them.

Fernando Pessoa.

Why do I persist with attention to Covid? This graph helps explain why. What’s not widely known is that we had a global pandemic through most of the 20th century. Heart disease. Some really bad science made us think that was due to bad diet and lack of exercise. It wasn’t that. Look at when heart disease took off. Immediately after the Spanish Flu pandemic. Heart disease has been in free fall since the 1960s, which corresponds exactly with the dying of those who lived through the Spanish Flu pandemic. There was a huge surge of it from 1920-1950s, and then it started to fall off a cliff. There was no widespread heart disease before the Spanish Flu hit. The Spanish Flu created ongoing chronic health problems, including a mass epidemic of heart disease (look at the graph!) that nobody saw as an infectious disease problem, because we only pay attention to the short-term acute effects of having an infection. Just as we’re now doing with Covid.

In a culture that now defines a woman as anybody who cares to identify as one, we shouldn’t be surprised that all the gains women have made in the past 100 years are being rapidly wound back.

Every ’stunning’ home on this show looks pretty much like every other stunning home on the show. And like most homes on most shows on TV, about houses. Polished concrete, big windows, open plan living, stone and wood and copper etc. When we find something beautiful, so often what makes us think that is entirely social. We love it because other people love it. That then starts a status bidding game, towards luxury, the continuous escalation of a status war around the same basic housing elements. Beauty is not in the object, it’s in the competitive imitative rivalry between people. For example, I will bet that the next shift in housing design will be back to the colour and play of the 1960s and 1970s, at which point all these ‘stunning’ homes will look brutalist and dated. Those 60s and 70s homes look dated to the current modernist/brutalist/minimalist fans. But they will suddenly find them stunning, just watch.

The Trump team imploding before he’s even sworn in. Those looking for entertainment closer to home could do worse than watching how local social media stars are faring in local government.

15 years ago China had 2% of the global car market. Look at it now. And what cars does China make? EVs. Game over. That percentage is still climbing, and fast.

The UK uses nuclear power. The latest estimate to clean up the waste produced by its nuclear reactors is $526 billion. Plus another $107 billion to build a new waste facility to process new waste. That’s about $640 billion. For that money you could put free solar power and a battery on every household in Australia, with $433 billion in change.

“And you can’t think of anything, any luxury holiday or anything that could possibly compare in its potential to give you the fullness of joy, than just dipping your hands in soapy water and washing some dirty plates.” John Butler, talking about discovering presence in every moment, using the example of washing dishes.

Just look at the staggering scale of engineering innovation happening in China, and compare it with what we’re building here at home. What are we building? Nothing. Except vastly overpriced and crap quality homes, which we use to bid against like a casino for quick capital gains.

Discussing ‘baseload’ power yesterday. One of the most misleading and misunderstood concepts. Baseload power is NOT about supply of power, it’s about demand for power. It is NOT the baseline amount of power we need to keep the lights on. It’s the amount of power we all need to *use* (the ‘load’ on the grid), to prevent us having to shut down huge coal-fired and nuclear-powered power stations every night. It’s extremely expensive to turn a coal or nuclear plant on and off, and they can’t operate like that anyway, it breaks them. So they have to run 24 hours every day. The ‘base-load’ is how much we all have to USE, to prevent them needing to be switched on and off. ‘Operational demand’, in the graph below. You can also see that the minimum operational demand (base-load) of about 5000 MW, below which the coal stations have to be turned off, is already about to be breached in Australia by the availability of a tidal wave of solar, the yellow. Right now the regulator deals with this by turning peoples’ solar off by force, to protect the coal plants. Curtailment. A ridiculous situation, where massive amounts of free power is turned off, to protect massively expensive broken coal power. That’s why the regulator and companies are falling over themselves to build storage, like batteries. Then they’ll turn the coal plants off, forever.

Happy happy birthday! 🎈🎁🎉

Happy Birthday, Shannon! 🥳🎈🎉

The Great Divergence, where economic benefits are flowing overwhelmingly to the old, is the flip side of eternal youth culture. Part of the ‘circle of life’ is a passing of the baton to younger generations, including wealth and opportunity. Now the old live like the young, their entire lives. Retirement went from being the old filling their shopping trolleys with Milk Arrowroots and Iced Vo-Vos, to them now sailing down the Rhine on luxury cruises. If you don’t see or understand this, and you’re older (as I am), I’d advise extreme caution dealing with the young now and in years to come. The anger is visceral.

Social media floods the world with shit. ‘Misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. But that’s only a symptom. Its real destructive power is to destroy trust. To encourage everybody to think they’re an expert on everything, and to stop trusting all of the hierarchies of expertise that humanity has established over millennia. Opinions are like faeces. Everybody has them. Nobody cares what you think. All that matters is which of those thoughts are actually true. Social media’s method of deciding what is true is who gets the most likes and followers. Populism. That’s a fast-track to civilisational collapse. Classrooms are organised with a clear hierarchy of expertise, with the teacher at the front embodying centuries of hard-won wisdom. Social media turns the classroom into this image. Classrooms are a microcosm of society itself.

“Palmer told Business Insider that delaying transitioning to EVs in favour of selling hybrids was a “fool’s errand” and warned that automakers doing so risked falling even further behind Chinese EV companies. “Hybrids are a road to hell. They are a transition strategy, and the longer you stay on that transition, the less quickly you ramp up into the new world. If you just delay transitioning to EVs by diluting it with hybrids then you are more uncompetitive for longer, and you allow the Chinese to continue to develop their market and their leadership. I honestly think it’s a fool’s errand.” Andy Palmer was Chief Operating Officer at Nissan, and then CEO of Aston Martin.

At the same time the public has been glued to years of reality cooking programs, home cooking has actually fallen off a cliff. The same has happened with things like gardening, where lifestyle homes and garden shows rate hugely at the same time as you’ve never seen a sorrier state of home gardens. Any walk through towns will show you that now. You’re more likely to see a car parked in a yard than see a plant or mowed lawn now. Another window into how our lives are driven by status. People love these reality shows because they feed their desire for imitative rivalry, team sports. At the same time home design has been completely sidetracked by ‘luxury’, ‘premium’ offerings, turning ordinary homes into imitations of 5-star hotel rooms. More status games.

A while back Peter Dutton promised people ‘small modular’ nuclear reactors, a sort of cutesy, calming idea of little emissions-free power units. They don’t exist. Not in a commercial way, and the experimental ones that do exist are even more expensive than the large reactors.

The Lithgow West brigade doing good work extinguishing yet another combustion engine fire.

New Scientist reported on an emergency meeting of 500 scientists about the melting in Antarctica. There are nearly 6000 comments on the post. Most are like this one.

We don’t need yet another enquiry into why petrol is so expensive. It’s always the same reason - fossil fuel companies are arseholes. We already know how to fix that, the NRMA would be doing its members and us a favour by advocating to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles. Meanwhile none of us need to wait for that to happen, you can buy an EV right now and be free of high fuel prices forever. Or, just keep making Arabs and Texans rich by sending 60 billion Australian dollars offshore every year, to fund their 24-carat gold-plated palaces. Can anybody think of better use of that money, here at home?

May 2025 be a year when we actually do something about the problems facing us all right now, rather than flock in our millions to wallow in nostalgia about life 70 years ago.

The Pacific is one place on Earth you can still sometimes feel like life is timeless. Swimming in the Pacific is one of my pleasures.

lol ‘dance like nobody is watching’, and then post it to social media for millions to watch.

In saying Happy New year, I’d like to focus on the Happy part. So often in history the times of their lives when people found the most purpose, meaning and often even happiness was when they were confronted with a genuine threat to their existence. Like wartime. Horrible to live, but people often later missed the sense of solidarity and resilience that came from the threat to their collective lives. I’d love that to be a model for our lives today. Rather than the ‘kidult’ model which is much more about finding diversionary, distracting ‘fun’ experiences to avoid dealing with any sort of difficulty. I see that everywhere, even in workplaces that organise compulsory fun activities to try to bring staff together. I never take part in those, they’re childish. What brings people together is meaningful work together, against real challenges.

I prefer to see it as just one of many of his age who provided a glorious soundtrack to the West spinning down a self-absorbed toilet. Asia trained engineers while we went to gigs. That divide is going to get greater, faster every day, we’ll become the new ‘developing’ countries.