January 2025

This post from an English guy who’s lived in China for many years, comparing it to the UK again on a trip home, shows in stark detail why I post so often about China here. Our thinking about China is based on stereotypes, many of them blatantly racist and from the Cold War, and on an image of the country that’s about 150 years old. China is building the modern world, while in the West where we build pretty much nothing now, people are fishing from bridges to have anything to eat. We go to gigs while they train engineers. Just look around, ask yourself, what are we building or creating here? I’ll wait.

Before Trump is even sworn in, many who voted for him are wondering what they’ve done. You’re supposed to do that wondering before you vote, but here we are.

Beginning another year of work today. As colleagues collapse with increasing chronic disease around me, and ask why I still take Covid precautions like vaccination and masking. Because rich cultures are cultures of teenagers now, they equate being over something, with that thing being over. They were ‘over’ Covid, bored with it, so they just defined it as over. No longer ‘trending’. It isn’t over. It’s getting worse. People ask me how long I’ll continue to take precautions. Simple answer - for as long as we’re in a pandemic. It was never over, far more people died after we declared it over than died before we did that. I’m sorry that people trust modern politicians to look after their health. It’s beyond me why you’d trust them with anything at all, let alone your health.

The annual flag worship is almost upon us, so just a few of my thoughts on Australia Day. I have zero time for any of the debates over the day, they're all fake arguments set up to create division, to harvest votes. I like that we celebrate Australia. What I don't like is that we celebrate a day when Australia didn't even exist. It didn't exist until more than a century later, at Federation. That would be a smarter 'Australia Day'. The day we do celebrate commemorates the setting up of a British penal colony. I also hate all flags. As somebody who wouldn't even exist except for a father fleeing flag-waving Nazi fanatics in Germany, anybody who tells me a flag is an important thing will get the same fuck off every single time. Fuck all jingoism and nationalism, fuck all flags. I would celebrate Australia actually doing anything at all except build terrible quality housing at hugely inflated prices, which is then bid on like a casino for quick capital gains. That we did something, anything, to give life here some sense of purpose except getting on the beers and gambling. The only reason modern Australia exists is the world wars, the only events in our history that made us pause our settler get-rich-quick culture of gold rushes, land grabs, booze and now casino housing. My Australia Day wish this year is that everybody read Bill Gammage's book about what the earliest European settlers found when they arrived here. It might change your view of Australia forever. We still are the planet's greatest and most important mystery, but we're too drunk and busy gambling to even notice.

The champions of the ordinary man, against 'the elites'. The guy with the gold-plated toilet, and his Oz evangelical rapture buddy, ringing in 2025.

I believe all countries are more or less equivalent, all run using basic social rules. Not politics, not economics. Peter Turchin’s work shows the same thing, he’s identified what some of those rules are. Have a read.

One of the most amusing FB trends of the past year or two is the same people who share voluminous details from their personal and social lives here, then locking their profiles to protect their privacy. Because everybody else is locking their profiles. While continuing to overshare the intimate details of their lives.

Happy Birthday (Really) Old Friend!

One of the grandparent acts pulling out of Glastonbury, because he says it's too corporate. Neil Young has an estimated net worth of $200 million. Think he found it in the back of a cupboard. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jan/02/neil-young-pulls-out-of-glastonbury-festival-2025-bbc

I'm a huge Macca fan. But he's making my job here too easy. We've had 70 years of love and music, and the world is fucked. Let's make 2025 a year of thought and action.

I can’t decide if it’s more crazy that people believe you can live with a pandemic, or that climate change isn’t an emergency.

My posts about ‘gig culture’ get bogged down in the offence people take at their favourite acts being criticised. It’s a wider argument about cultural and social change. The 20th century was a century of revolutions. The Russians and the Chinese had at least one each. But we did too, we just don’t recognise it. Or we do, but then we strangely think it was just some nice new songs. The 1960s is widely described as a ‘counter-cultural revolution’. The root of that revolution was ‘anti-establishment’ worldviews, driven very heavily by the musical culture of that time. Music was the cultural launch pad for the young of that time, their way to forge a new adult world. Beatlemania was the dominant expression of this shift, why I use The Beatles so often as an example. The Beatles were brilliant songwriters. But their songs are nowhere near sufficient to explain Beatlemania. ‘Mania’, it’s in the name. They rode the wave of a massive cultural and social shift in society. A revolution. My writing on this time is very much influenced by Edmund Burke, who wrote I think the definitive book on all revolutions. He saw revolutions as a disaster for societies. I think he’s right. That includes our Beatle-led revolution. That’s just the context of my views. I’ll expand more on them in future, but the discussions get bogged down right now in the quality of the music, which to me is irrelevant. Music as a vehicle of cultural and social change is what interests me. Revolutions also interested George Orwell, which is why he wrote Animal Farm, to warn about the same things.

Gig culture, as I call it, was really the emergence of the ‘teenager’ or adolescence as a distinct stage of life. The teenager as we think of that term today didn’t exist before the 1940s. That critical period I often refer to, the first half of the 20th century, when 4 major catastrophes smashed societies (WW1, Spanish Flu, The Great Depression and WW2) was also the time when mass schooling took off. The confluence of those two things led to the teenager. Teenagers owe their existence as a distinct social group to the decoupling of child life from adult life, in schools. In schools kids developed their own separate culture - teenage culture. The first totem or rallying point for that culture was the car, the second was bands and music. Think Grease and its drag races (1950s teens) and The Beatles (1960s). The world we now live in arose from that teen culture then becoming all of adult culture, as teenagers left school. They remade the adult world as a giant high school. Cars and bands became critical adult reference points, popularity (including trends and fads) became the currency of adult life. Social media is this same shift, on steroids. The ‘triumph of youth culture’, as LIFE calls it here. Everybody is a youth now, even the elderly.

“To be honest, IQ levels are higher in China than they are in Australia. Most people in China understand the merits and values of an EV, whereas most people in Australia are afraid of electric cars. It’s true, they’re afraid, they’re not interested in learning things. They assume that because Joe Smith down the street told them electric cars will blow up, they don’t want to go anywhere near them…there’s a lot of education lacking here in Australia, and I think people in general in China are just more educated than people here in Australia.” I think the biggest obstacle in Australia is that cars define too many peoples’ social identities. But I think Sam is also right here, the general level of education in the basics of science and engineering is appalling in Oz, virtually non-existent. Even when I was still teaching two decades ago kids were already leaving science and maths subjects in droves.

China sold 42% of the world’s cars at the end of 2024. 15 years ago it sold 2% of the world’s cars. This isn’t a competition between EVs and ICEs. It’s a competition to see who will build EVs the fastest. ICEs (petrols and diesels) are dead in the water.

Happy Birthday Dan! Nice hot one for you :)

This is the current Holy Grail for Covid, a nasal (mucosal) vaccine. The vaccines we have target the lower respiratory system, they don’t prevent the virus entering our noses in the first place. It’s much more difficult to create immunity at the entry point, not least because the nose is very close to the brain, so you need extreme caution with medicines targeted there. Hopefully this works, it’s 80% effective which is great. You don’t need to stop Covid to get rid of it, just slow it, exponential decay will do the rest. Though if we continue to not control spread of the virus, the virus will continue to evolve to evade all of our immune defences, whether from vaccination or infection. That leads to a very high probability of it then also evolving to an incredibly lethal variant, even for acute infection. And long-term chronic infection with any variant of Covid is exhibiting horrific long-term health impacts.

Chinese EVs are increasingly famous for the incredible extras that are bundled with them, like staggering sound systems, for no extra money. The reason is fascinating, and shows just how far behind we are in the West. The two things that make Western buyers nervous about EVs - range and charging speed - have been solved in China. So now manufacturers there add all sorts of extra features to make their vehicles more attractive to Chinese buyers. The Western author of this piece says Western carmakers are ‘cooked’. It’s what every car insider says, after they visit China.

Much of what I post comes from the mostly unknown world of governance. What it is that makes it possible for people to live together. It’s not even art, let alone science. It’s a bloodsport with some core insights practitioners glean from centuries of bloodshed. Nobody respects the knowledge or even know it exists, they assume they know it all because they vote. Like thinking you know how to fly because you were on a plane once, or you’re an expert on education because you went to school. This quote sums up my every day at work for about the past 30 years.

I've posted about the Zeekr 7X. Coming to Australia this year, a phenomenal car at an unbelievable price. The Europeans and Americans look on with envy at what we can buy now in Australia. They're slapping huge tariffs on these vehicles to try to save their useless car industries. Don't you love it, 'free market' countries slapping tariffs on the commies because they have a superior and cheaper product.

Harvard University’s warning to all of us about brain damage from Covid.

Living with Covid comes with a horrendous cost. Because it’s the most ridiculous idea humanity has ever had.

Only catastrophes change societies. Look at how China boomed because of the pandemic, its current accounts surging with revenue as it sold goods to the rest of the world. The pandemic exposed that only societies that actually build things will ultimately succeed and survive. All of our ‘service industries’ i.e serving coffee and travelling the world for ‘experiences’ are no help at all when push comes to shove. China is also struggling economically now, but is rapidly shifting to more exports of its goods, from its juggernaut industrial sector. It literally is ‘the world’s factory’. We made it that, we have ourselves to blame if we don’t like that we’re now the new developing world, who build nothing.

I’ve often suggested here that the motivation for most recreational travel isn’t to ‘see’ places, or even to ‘experience’ them. It’s to tell *others* that you’ve been there. It’s a pissing contest, about status. The location is just a backdrop for social comparison, for imitative rivalry. People try to go to places ‘off the beaten track’, to go one-up in this status game, ‘oh of course *we* don’t go to the touristy places’. Everything is about status. You can see it here happening now with Antarctica, where a huge surge of tourists there isn’t driven by anything about Antarctica itself. It’s being driven by TikTok.

It is a revolution, people. Join in, so you can tell your grandkids you weren't the one arguing for a Flat Earth. Even this Murdoch rag, usually posting anti-EV bilge every single day, is now thinking 'hmm, ok'.

The NRMA have done an excellent debunking of most of the common EV myths. https://www.mynrma.com.au/electric-vehicles/basics/ev-myths

The Swiss were once famous for making beautiful precision watches and clocks. Now Apple’s genius for design and software is in partnership with one country, to produce modern precision timepieces. China. Apple say none of their beautifully-engineered products would exist, without China. Only China has the expertise to bring their ideas to life.

Given freedom to do whatever they like, what do humans do? They copy what other humans do. This simple fact, that imitation is the heart of all human life, is in direct opposition to every idea about democracy that we use.

I’m the only person at work still wearing a mask, and probably the only person among my immediate friends who still does as well. Even before Covid, mask-wearing was common in Asia. They were hit by the original SARS virus in the early 2000s, and the practice then became mainstream and ongoing. That could have been here too, except politicians and popular influencers decided to make that into a team sport. I haven’t been sick in over 5 years. I hate wearing a mask, but in the absence of meaningful action on control of Covid spread and attention to public building ventilation, I’m with Asia on this. The more you learn about infection, the more determined you are to avoid all infections. There are no harmless infections. Common cold virus has been found in the cerebro-spinal fluid of people with conditions like Parkinsons. Infection fucks you up. It’s easiest to go with what everybody else is doing, but infection doesn’t care what everybody is doing. It just likes to kill. And it particularly likes to take its time doing it, after you think it’s gone. You feeling ‘sick‘ is just its on-ramp into your body. Only then does it really get to work, often over a period of years. Once inside you there’s virtually no chance of removing it. Politicians rely upon our everyday experience of recovering from many infections to say they’re even healthy for us and build up our immune systems! Morons. For those who say ’but you have to live your life’, that’s why humans invented public health. To let us live our lives, WITHOUT infections. Public health controls the spread of infection, and usually engineers are brought in to do the heavy lifting. All diseases can be controlled. Public health has now been sidelined by politicians and social media influencers. We’re rushing back to the Middle Ages.

Happy Birthday!!

Facebook is mostly dull humblebrags. It will now become a sewer as well, like Twitter.

If you want a real indicator of the damage social media is doing to societies, go out today and buy a hard copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. Skinny as a regional paper.

This is BYD's Tesla Model Y competitor, that I've posted about here before. The price looks like being amazing, as always with BYD. Australia is now one of the best places in the world to buy a car.

The current waiting time at some accident and emergency rooms in the UK for a bed is 2 DAYS. Explanations given include an ageing population. Here’s one of the most senior people in the World Health Organisation giving a much more plausible reason.

This is the disgrace of Australia’s approach to Covid. Anybody below 17 can’t even get a vaccine. Why is that? For one reason. Your elected politicians decided the best way out of the pandemic was to let children get infected over and over to build up population immunity (which doesn’t work anyway). Just THINK what that means. Covid rarely kills children. But mumps, rubella, even measles rarely kills them either. We vaccinate children for everything else because we don’t want them to be SICK. For Covid? Infect, infect, infect, over and over and over again. Our fucking CHILDREN. Many (maybe even most) will have lifelong health problems as a result. The society disgusts me. So we kidults can go to fucking gigs and travel overseas. And the 12 months for people older than that, between doses? Purely arbitrary, a cost saving, to try to make us think it’s ’just like the flu’. Covid vaccination wears off in less than 3 months.

AI and crypto are the stars of the new Trump team’s universe. Cory Doctorow, inventor of the concept of enshittification, sees it as just the next ‘pump and dump’ bubble. The investor term for artificially pumping up the hype around something, and then dumping your holdings of those same things for vast profit, when the pumping inflates the price.

That’s over 222 days. On most of the other days of the year, the energy draw from the grid was a pittance too. You don’t need to wait for idiot energy wars over nuclear and fossils vs renewables to finish to get free energy.

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you'd have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can't agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it. Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn't follow. At first, it was media companies, whom Facebook preferentially crammed down its users' throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying full-text feeds inside Facebook's walled garden. This made publications truly dependent on Facebook—their readers no longer visited the publications' websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to "boost" their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds. Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of non-consensually harvested personal data they'd stolen from you. Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook's cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue. Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you're a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It's a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a "pivot to video" based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves." Cory Doctorow

The TMJ (jaw) is the most complex joint in the body. And because of that, it can lead to all sorts of problems that aren't often linked back to it. Problems nowhere near your jaw, like in your neck, shoulders, even hips. In your breathing, in migraine headaches, balance/dizziness, tinnitus, etc. A hugely worthwhile thing to try is to get this joint into the 'neutral' position in anything you do. To do that is easy, you place your tongue along the top of your mouth, with the tip behind your front teeth. Then have your jaws gently apart, with lips closed, as you sit or do anything during your day. You might be surprised the huge impact that can have on your body, that one little thing. Those concerned with their posture for example, may notice a profound change to that, just using this one exercise.

It's winter in LA. I'm sure some will tell us again that 'the climate always warms'. Yep, last time it was this warm, dinosaurs roamed the Earth, about 200 million years ago. Dinosaurs were reptiles. We're mammals. The heat will kill us. Trump blames Greenies for the fires. Must be that they stopped burning down celebrities' homes to make the homes immune to fire, or something. The world is doomed.

Who honestly thinks the US is a better ally for Australia now than China? The US does nothing for us. China has bankrolled the entire Australian economy for decades. And it's not run by Trump, that's a slam dunk.

Just one sporting ground in the UK. This is climate change, they're no longer even denying it. This particular ground has flooded 8 times in the past year alone. Many big clubs are not confident they will survive. Climate projections suggest one in four of all homes will be at risk by 2050, along with 46% of the road network, 54% of the railway network, 34% of water pumping stations and 18% of agricultural land.

Can’t wait to see these out on the roads. Over 5,000 sold already apparently.

Imagine feeling threatened by wind turbines.

Just one of the LA fires, seen from the sky.

Chesterton pointed out that those who stay home and read about distant lands, will get closer to the reality of those places than those who go there to visit them. This is what travel culure can’t understand. You can see Chesterton’s point by thinking about a celebrity. If you stay home and read about that person, and look at pictures, you can get some sort of understanding of them as a person. If you go to see them, directly, you’re just like the paparazzi. You are physically close to them, but a million miles away from the real person. You won’t understand a single thing about them, even though you’re only centimetres away from the ‘real’ thing.

My posts on travel are explorations of the idea of 'being there'. There's an automatic assumption that going somewhere brings you closer to the 'real thing'. Proximity as authenticity. I argue the opposite. 'There' is not proximity. Take Jupiter. We send probes there, and they send back glorious images like this. Would you 'experience' the 'real' Jupiter by being there? Absolutely not. Firstly it's completely uninhabitable, you'd be crushed and boiled/frozen alive. But it's more than that. The diversity of things Jupiter is would completely escape any visitor to it. You can experience a lot more of Jupiter by not going, and looking at the images and other data. The same applies to travel destinations. Being 'there' takes you further away from the 'real' location. You can experience that location in a hugely more rich way by not going, and reading about it, looking at pictures and videos etc. There is no 'there' in the way travel culture assumes, no more authentic experience or access to a more real place, by being physically present. Even more, you being there changes what 'there' is. This is why locations are being transformed into theme parks, caricatures of their actual identity.

Very close to the reveal of the new Tesla Model Y. A big event, the world's biggest selling car. Autocar has done this rendition based on leaked photos, it should look pretty much like this. The Model Y to me is a masterpiece of design, in all sorts of ways. There's a reason so many people buy them.

Actual picture from Tesla now of the new Model Y. Nice job.

Couple more of the new Model Y.

Happy Birthday to you :)

There’s no water to fight the LA fires. That’s because an urban reticulated water system isn’t designed to fight massive fires across thousands of homes at once. Another example of the catastrophe of climate change we’re sleepwalking into. Nothing wil be done until it’s far too late, at which point there will be no justice against the idiots who ‘do their own research’ on social media, obstructing windmills and electric cars and solar panels, and anything at all that might slow down this catastrophe unfolding. They will perish in collapsing societies, in fires and floods and out of starvation as agriculture collapses too, but so will the rest of us. All together.

Mazda is one of the major Japanese car makers that has been bullshitting us all, telling us that it can continue to make petrol and diesel cars, no need to shift to EVs. In reality, like all the other Japanese car makers, in the background they’ve been panicking, forming partnerships with Chinese EV makers, to try to catch up with EVs. The new Mazda 6e (eZ6 overseas) is one result. Lovely-looking car, as an EV it’s OK without being remarkable. Remember there is no competition between EVs and petrols and diesels. Combustion engines are dead. The competition is who can build EVs the fastest. The Japanese are WAY behind. The Germans know how to make great EVs, but they’re far too expensive. The Americans are actually making great progress, not just Tesla. The Chinese and to some extent the Koreans will soon make most of the world’s cars though. They saw this coming, they acted.

Oceans absorb 90% of the heat produced by us burning fossil fuels. They’ve hidden just how bad the warming is. Here’s the temperature of the top 2km of water in the oceans, since the 1950s. To give an indication of just how bad things are, between 2023 and 2024 (past the end of the graph) alone, an extra 16,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of heat was added to this top 2km. We’re adding 6-8 atomic bomb’s worth of energy to the oceans every SECOND. The water vapour produced by evaporating oceans is itself a potent greenhouse gas, accelerating the warming even more. We’ll be boiled alive.

lol. Metal isn’t what it was.

Imagine if this was the road toll, or drownings, or food poisonings. Hundreds dead every week, from preventable causes. There’d be an outcry. Then ask yourself why you’re happy for these deaths to be Covid deaths, and for you to keep catching it and spreading it, and for nothing to be done.

Most have swallowed the PR that there’s nothing that could be done about Covid, that we just have to ‘live with’ it, ‘like the flu’. (We don’t live with the flu, we spend billions controlling it.) Because of such widespread ignorance of public health, most think there are two alternatives. Either we ‘lock down’ whole societies, or we just let everybody get infected over and over. Lockdowns were emergency action. What *always* follows that (until Covid) is disease control. Where a whole range of methods are used to control the spread of a disease. Some still catch it, but it’s not spreading widely. True for any infectious disease: measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, flu, etc. Those are all being controlled, 365 days of every year, you just don’t see it happening. Here’s an example of the main control measure we need for Covid. This is the CO2 reading for my workplace. It’s an outstanding reading, meaning even though there isn’t an opening window in the entire working area, lots and lots of fresh air is still getting in there and old stale air is being removed. A superb air conditioning (HVAC) system. This was what made Florence Nightingale famous, the importance of fresh air. If I take this device on an aeroplane, it will read over 2000 ppm of CO2. Appallingly bad air. It will read well over 1000 in many public buildings too, particularly schools. There is simply no excuse for this. We know how to provide fresh air inside. Engineers have stopped most pandemics. For Covid they haven’t been allowed to because pathetic politicians want to play team sports with it instead. Scott Morrison wanted to go to an election pretending the pandemic is over and that he saved us. We’ve been living that disaster ever since. Over 20,000 Australians died of Covid in that election year alone, as a result. As a minimum, if you have kids in school and their teacher isn’t opening the windows, demand that they open the fucking windows. ALL YEAR. In winter they can run heating at the same time. Schools are the main breeding ground for Covid, and for most infectious disease.

Happy Birthday :)

Ignoring all of the Elon Musk distraction around Tesla, their engineering is superb. Like the new Model Y, when you build a car all of the component parts have to be bolted and welded together, which takes time and a lot of money to build the robots and train the people to do it. The new Model Y took an underbody that used to have 70 component parts (top pic) that had to be put together, and replaces all of them with one part only. The bottom picture. Which is cast aluminium. They literally stamp the underbody in one piece, from a mould. Not only does this save huge amounts of time and money in production, it means the car has no parts that can move against each other to come loose, and make creaking and rattling noises. It makes it much stronger and quieter. Using this sort of innovation, Tesla rolls a new car off the production line every 13 seconds.

Storm time. Batteries are so fast to respond that you don’t even notice the grid going down. Also true for grid-level batteries, which unlike gas turbines and other backups, respond in milliseconds.

I mean, this should scare people. Danielle is a neuroscientist. Covid attacks the neurons in the brain that regulate dopamine. Dopamine issues are behind conditions like dementia and Parkinson’s Disease. Danielle predicts a huge wave of these degenerative brain diseases even in the young. I’ll share separately something that shows this is already happening. It’s not some way off in the future thing. Like all things Covid, peoples’ response? Crickets.

Australia is deeply infected with the ‘car bloat’ virus. “For the people who love big cars, owning one can be integral to their identity, reflecting very specific ideas about American individualism...it’s very easy to see how having a big SUV or truck is a marker of a whole host of other ideological associations. A majority of truck owners go off-roading at most once per year; they didn’t buy their pickup for practical reasons. Image is intrinsic to its appeal.”

Happy Birthday! 🎊🎂🎉

The brain damage Covid causes, even in the young and healthy? Have a look at the blue bars.

‘Dynamic pricing’ is a growing rage in commerce. Meaning prices that can be changed quickly to reflect changing conditions. For example if lettuce is getting a bit old, the price quickly made cheaper to get it off the shelves faster. Or concert tickets that explode in price to control demand for popular acts. In reality of course it’s a licence to print money. Uber apparently at one stage had something in its algorithm that knew whether the phone you were using it on had a very low battery level. If it did, it knew you were desperate to hire a ride, and so it inflated the price, knowing you wouldn’t have a chance to hold out for a better one.

Social media drives families and friends apart, and splinters public life as well. When we say ‘society is divided’, it isn’t really. That’s just social media’s business model. Its algorithm.

The catastrophic collapse in birth rates around the world is usually attributed to the young not having enough money to raise families. It is that too, but there’s a fascinating extra bit. We’re in a ‘relationship recession’. There’s a collapse in the number of people in relationships. Initial analysis shows this to be heavily driven by women, and their use of phones and social media apps to do something called ‘cultural leapfrogging’. In other words, organising a better cultural deal for themselves than what society has presented them to date. And I’m sure that’s a major driver. And great for women. The more worrying underlying trend here though is that social media is encouraging us to become a world of 8 billion individuals, individually planning our ‘best lives’, a life made up of ‘experiences’. Life as a Contiki tour. And those experiences are not really about experiencing anything, anyway. They’re about negotiating our position in imitative status hierarchies, back home. We live a permanent adolescent culture of comparison and pecking order.

The feed-in tariff for solar is how much you get paid for exporting to the grid. In Victoria the proposed minimum rate retailers have to pay owners is now only 0.04 cents per kWh i.e. effectively nothing. Down from over 10 cents per kWh in 2020-21. In NSW you can still get 8-10c, though 5c is more common. This isn't as bad as many think. Far and away the most money you make from solar is in replacing energy you use yourself, which costs over 30c/kWh. And shifting your heavier usage then to daytime wherever you can. And buy a battery, to store during the day and use at night. You're still miles ahead. Why has this happened? Because solar and wind have been so successful, electricity is now not only free during the day (wholesale) in most places, they will actually pay you to take it. So there's no way distributors want to buy even more off you.

Today's Sydney Morning Herald is the thinnest I've ever seen it. Feels about a dozen pages. It costs $4.80. Nobody is getting value for money there. Social media is hollowing out all of our established institutions and replacing them with fads and fashions and bullshit. While fracturing communities and families, because that generates even more revenue.

Happy birthday!

I mostly stopped drinking alcohol years ago for health reasons (it can trigger arrhythmias in me). But I rarely miss it, and what I do miss in taste is rapidly being caught up by non-alcoholic alternatives. Alcohol is very much like cars. A lot of our behaviour around it is social, and not about the thing itself. We drink certain things and in certain ways to fit in, and to differentiate ourselves from others. Older adults still think it's a rite of passage, which it was for them, socially. The young increasingly see no point in it. Just as many of them have no interest in driving, another rite of passage for older adults, which they mistake for how things are for everybody.

The price war is escalating, and Australian consumers should be excited. We’re the luckiest car buyers in the Western world. BYD has just reduced prices on its models by thousands, vehicles that were already at almost impossible to believe prices.

Last year at work somebody said ‘aren’t you worried that when you eventually take off that mask your immune system will be weak?’ This is scientific nonsense pretty much universally believed now, that we all need to be infected with lots of diseases to give our immune system a workout. Like it’s a muscle. It’s a deliberate confusing with the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, that we should all play in the dirt as kids because it gives us useful microbes (that’s true, those are ‘commensal’ or good microbes). Never ever should we deliberately get infected with pathogens, diseases, which are very very bad microbes. We’re seeing the result of this nonsense now. It is bullshit, people, extremely dangerous bullshit. People of all ages constantly sick, and not getting better. It will get much worse still. Read what the experts say below. The last time in history we let everybody get infected by everything all the time, 50% of kids died before they were 15.

On the same theme, a recent study looked at the ‘immunity debt’ nonsense. The idea we all need regular infections to be healthy. Just think even for one second about how stupid that is, the idea that what makes us healthy is being sick with lots of infections. You’re being conned by politicians and their wealthy backers, who just want you at work, sick or not.

I'll wait for the articles about how how buying a standard petrol or diesel is doing your money, because there's no resale. Heh. Interesting that in a 'cost of living' crisis people still are prioritising new cars over secondhand. Gotta keep your place in the status hierarchy.

Putnam is one of the main people who identifed how societies are now structured like high schools. His work is also a bit famous for showing that smoking and being a social outcast are about equally as damaging to peoples' health. On that latter point, I think it really depends on how a person understands the importance of social connection. What social media has shown is how uniquely toxic social connection can be as well, I would say far more toxic than being alone. Aloneness is only a problem (paradoxically I think, using Putnam's ideas) from inside culture as a high school. Of course it's going to seem terrible, from that perspective. We are all really alone, life is about arriving at the point where we understand that. It's also the only basis for healthy social connection.

What I see every day with utes, including with trailers. This class of vehicle is some of the ugliest driving out there. Had one of these behind me (with a trailer) in a queue overtaking a truck the other day, flashing his lights because apparently him wanting to overake it doing 150 was incompatible with me overtaking it at 110.

I have many conversations about how FB should be used. That FB is where people mostly go to update each other on what they’re doing in life. Like an interactive set of social pages from the old local newspaper. And that if you want ‘engagement’ here, that’s what you should target. Here’s a gratuitous picture of me at Christmas time. Those types of posts are certainly far and away the most popular. You could post about taking a crap here and it would get a lot more interest than your passion for beekeeping, or whatever. It’s like a platform to peer through everybody else’s windows, a universal busybodyness. But. The big but. Social media is not social networking, it long ceased being that. Connecting people was the bait, in a bait and switch. We’re now many years into the switch, now peoples’ personal and social lives are locked in here. The switch is horrendous, and in my view the end of our societies. That sounds a big claim, from something so cuddly and harmless as just sharing what we’re all doing. But these platforms take that, and use it to make money. And they do that by weaponising your personal and social life. By driving people into various teams, who then fight one another. That drives ‘engagement’, and then revenue, for the platforms. People are literally living their lives, through these platforms, they can’t look away. Everything becomes a curated part of a feed, your phone is the link, which you carry with you everywhere. The phone transforms your ‘real life’ into social media life, and social media and its ‘fight fight fight/compare compare compare’ algorithms then shape your real life in return. It’s a vicious bubble.

Millions will defend travel as the having of ‘experiences’. The funny thing is that everybody seems to go to the same places, at the same time. Almost like they’re copying other people, like buying shoes, phones, cars or watches. Or some deliberately choose to not go to these places, because they’re even more focused on what everybody else is doing. Most modern travel is a jet-fuelled excursion through social media feeds. People don’t actually leave home, it’s a game of imitative rivalry within their social media groups and feeds. People who never post here suddenly discover the post button, on their European trip! A wonder ;)

I still recommend Bill Hero, the automated price comparison service for all your energy bills. It will automatically take all your gas and electricity bills and compare them with everything else on the market, to make sure you're on the cheapest. Every single time you get a bill. You don't need to do a thing, they email you if they find a cheaper option.

My name is now 'Dee' for the same reason teachers aren't allowed to post under their real names. Public (and other) employees are often forbidden from making public comment on public issues. Often by the same politicians who win votes championing 'free speech'.

Insurance (big part of my job) is going to collapse in our societies, because our 'small government' politics doesn't solve any of our collective problems, dumping all the responsibility back onto individuals. Who can't solve them. And whose only protection then against the damage the problems cause is insurance. But the collective problems are still there, and keep getting worse. So...insurance will collapse.

Propaganda and hysteria now dominate public life. Anti-renewables propaganda, sponsored by fossil fuel companies, encourages Australians to believe that vast areas of Australia will need to be covered with windmills and solar farms, to replace our coal-fired power. All of Australia’s electricity could be generated by wind and solar farms in a rectangle 30km by 40km. That’s smaller than Blayney.

I think it should seem strange to us, that at the same time the ‘world has never been more connected’, through social media, we have an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. That seems like a paradox, but it isn’t when you throw away one basic assumption. That people being connected makes them and the world a better and happier place. Like Rene Girard, I believe the opposite, that the more connected and social we are, the more angry and violent societies will become. I call modern cultures high school cultures, because that’s literally the social model we’ve built them around. Within that culture, togetherness and being social will seem an intrinsically good thing. Nobody wants to be the ‘loner’ at school. But connecting people causes violence. It does that because humans when acting together focus mostly on one thing, their status within a group. That status gives them an identity. Without it, they’re literally nothing, as far as the group and wider society is concerned. And then their group clashes with thousands of other groups, trying to do the same thing. What I call ‘team sports’, or some call status games. We know the purpose of team sports is for one team to win. And even players on the same team want to differentiate themselves from other players on that team. The more we allow social media to dominate every aspect of our lives, and team sports is its business model, the more violent and dysfunctional societies will become. The more connected we are, the more angry and violent and lonely we will be. I think we’re seeing that every day. We all went to school, we all saw and lived the tensions of this continuous battle for identity and status there. That’s now all of our lives. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

It’s nearly election silly season again, and I don’t play those team sports. I often criticise the modern LNP (as do many who have left the coalition) because they’re not a political party, they’re now entirely a lobbying group for vested interests. (If you disagree, show me one policy Peter Dutton is taking to the election. Just one will do. Not a slogan, an actual policy.) This one made me chuckle. Australia will never have a nuclear reactor for generating electricity. Check back with me when Peter Dutton retires, I will guarantee not one nuclear sod will have been turned.

Cars are a cultural thing, social groups align around them. They talk technical, but it's really about keeping the group together. Also why a major change to car technology triggers such resistance.

“The Fab Four's music endures because it mirrors an era we still long for, says Adam Gopnik.” Yep, nostalgia. There’s a new Beatlemania right now, major films from Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese and now Sam Mendes. Major world tours from surviving Beatles. We live in a rapidly ageing society, and this is their idols. That’s my greatest objection to gig culture, full of millionaire (billionaire) rock stars now in their 80s, pretending to still be 17. In the 1960s and 70s this was youth’s way to force a space for themselves in a wider adult culture. It’s ridiculously naive to think it was mostly about music. It did that, but now those same youths are in their 80s they’re using this same format to maintain their now high status in the culture. What about today’s young? One of the responsibilities of age is passing the baton. Doing things that better reflect your stage of life and responsibilities to society. And that doesn’t mean having new bands and new acts. That cultural space is the space of 60 years ago now, that revolution is long over. No changes come to societies now from singing songs. The problem is there is very little adult culture left, for them to take over. The transition to an adolescent culture replaced adult life with teen life. These same octogenarians said, in their youth, that they hoped they died before they got old, and some actually did. It was also a culture of eternal youth, and still is. Others said it would be ridiculous to be rock stars beyond 60. Then they got to 60, realised eternal youth was incompatible with ageing, and just kept going. It’s all they knew, the boomers were the first generation to try to re-make adult life with teen culture, that they learned in schools. Ironically the same refusal to grant a place in adult society that fuelled the band-driven revolution of the 1960s, is one that generation now seemingly refuses to see in its own young. Complaint or claims of injustice are met with condescending sneers, and outrage at any criticism. Nothing changes really in history. The disaster is that previously children entered adult life, without being allowed to be children. Now adult life is child-life, nobody is allowed to be an adult.

This again is gig culture. Teen culture. There’s a disaster, and our only thought to what could be done is to hold a concert. There is literally not one other suggestion on the table. The old Woodstock model, still being reproduced today. Gig culture is not something ‘boomers’ did, they were just the first cohort through it. It’s the extension of high school culture to all adult life. Separating schooling from adult life did that. A cultural, social shift.

For most of history, children were not thought of as a separate group. They entered the adult world from a very young age. When universal schooling arrived, we flipped the world in the complete opposite direction. As that schooling continued, we replaced adult life, with the culture kids learn in schools. It’s all they know, and what they then re-built adult life with. Now instead of everybody living and working in an adult world, we all live and work in a child’s world. An adolescent culture. ‘Living your best life’ culture. Societies are now on permanent gap years from reality, because there is no adult world left for kids to enter. It’s high school forever.

Twitter and Truth Social Trump deciding on TikTok. If you don’t think social media now not only runs the world, but is our whole world, look a bit harder.

The price wars continue, again what a beautiful time to be a car buyer if you’re Australian. Sucks to be a European or American right now. Hyundai have slashed the price of its brilliant EV the Ioniq 6 by $20,000. 20 thousand! Limited stock available, so it’s a get-in quick situation. This is in response to BYD and Tesla having even better cars, for much less money.

The real genius of Tesla is its software. It uses software to integrate technology into a person’s life in all sorts of new ways. The functionality and design of the software is unmatched in the industry, nobody else comes close, not just for its cars, but also its home batteries and Starlink broadband. They pioneered the use of software upgrades to change the actual physical performance of a vehicle. This removes the need for most servicing, while adding vast new functionality over the air. The genius here is taking our data-driven world and connecting it to a car, so the two interact. The car then integrates with your home battery too, as well as with any online service. Your vehicle becomes a mobile hub inside a vast network.

China already has fully self-driving electric buses, that operate 24/7.

In China, social media is heavily regulated, and some platforms (like this one) are not even available. Our patronising hubris in the West says that’s because they’re ‘authoritarian’ and ‘censor’ speech. Read what these platforms do to countries and then ask yourself if (again) China is a much better role model for us than the US, the home of most of these wrecking ball platforms? China isn’t censoring speech. It’s censoring oligarchs. Musk and Zuckerberg regularly tell our elected leaders to fuck off. Nobody elected Musk or Zuckerberg. They’re the next Rupert Murdochs, running the world and hiding behind free speech to do it.

No, they won’t buy the cars they want. They’ll buy the cars everybody else wants. That’s how humans work. This ‘don’t tell people what to do’ is more libertarian nonsense we hear all the time, from the same people who demand we wave flags on Australia Day, and stop other people trying to do what they want, like buy EVs and put up windmills. Telling other people what to do is their passion.

Many, if not most people, hate their local Council. Abusing it and its staff is like sport. I think we need to look in the mirror at our attitudes and behaviours. Loved this exchange, the bile and abuse went on for many more comments. And then the arborist posted.

Personally I think they should close all social media platforms. We’re trapped inside their bubbles, while the world crumbles around us as we play status and identity games, that drive their algorithms. Society is eating itself.

Trump will be a train wreck even before this term is over.

In my childhood, the old were not the wealthiest part of society. They were the people buying Iced Vo-Vos for a weekly treat at the supermarket. We refuse to notice or acknowledge the fundamental re-writing of society’s rules, in our own lifetime. Society’s hardest and most important work is young adults raising the next generation. That’s where wealth should be concentrated, to afford that work. Historically that was the case. Not today. Now these same parents can’t even afford to rent. That wealth became a booty for the old, to live fabulous, eternal lifestyle retirements. It’s not the fault of the old. It’s because we abandoned the idea of ageing. Nobody is ‘old’ now, nobody passes the baton to the next generation. All of us now ‘live our best life’, to our last breath. There is no longer a circle of life. We’re all eternal adolescents, rock stars can be over 80 years of age.

We moved very quickly from sage nodding at ‘when something is free, you are the product’, to ‘without social media my life is over’.

A stat for fans of ‘baseload’ power. In the past decade, households have used nearly 5% less total electricty. The cost of this electricity grew by more than 70%. This is coal and gas-fired ‘baseload’ electricity.

Humans never agree on anything. They always battle for status, and status is identity. They do it in groups, or teams as I call it, at every level of society, from school through to government and social media. All that interrupts these status games is catastrophe, like world wars. Alan Kohler notices this, this morning. Now the wars are long behind us, we’re back to the battles for status. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-20/donald-trump-dark-side-productivity-and-growth/104830730?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link

I still do everything I can to protect my family and myself from Covid. I refuse to take part in the craziness of trying to beat a pandemic by infecting our way out of it. By basing what I do on ‘what everybody else is doing’, because that’s easier than making waves and going against the crowd. Fuck the crowd. The crowd know only one rule, just do what everybody else is doing. If that means killing, then everybody will follow everybody else in the killing. Like lemmings over a cliff.

Something happened overnight that shows the hijacking of America by social media. In one of his last acts as President, Joe Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci, the leading public health figure in America. Fauci has done nothing wrong, it’s a ‘pre-emptive’ pardon, to prevent the Trumpians coming after him. Fauci has spent a lifetime trying to protect Americans from infectious disease. When that protection, simple things like masks, threatened fat profits by wealthy high status Americans, they went to war on Fauci, mostly through social media. Trump is the social media President. Twitter got him there, and when he was booted from Twitter, what was the first thing he did? He set up his own social media network, Truth Social. Social media is society eating itself, populist fools like Trump use its sugar hit to gain power. But populism always ends one way, a society splintered into rival gangs, with would-be leaders the first casualties. Like much of South America already.

Exhibit B for social media hijacking societies. The social media billionaire bros at Trump’s inauguration overnight. Seated ahead of his actual Cabinet.

If you haven’t seen somebody for a while here, wait for them to go on a trip, or to a gig. That usually gets them hitting the post button again. We know why.

Club Crypto is backed by all the good people, hey @[783412914:2048:Kyle]? ;) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/20/donald-trump-meme-coin-price-melania-token

Trumpism is a ridiculous personality cult fad that will be as good as over in 2 years, by the time the next mid-terms happen. None of his own party now owe him any allegiance, he's toast after this term, so they'll have the knives out early. Most of his lunatic ideas will fail and create massive conflict within the US, which nobody will thank him for, as the chasm between the BS he promised and reality hits home.

This is morons trying to win social media wars, rather than running a country. China will be pissing itself laughing, and US automakers will be furious, they've invested billions. The US and the UK both accelerating towards total irrelevance on the world stage.

Just look at this amazing technology. America is toast, nobody will want to buy junk US vehicles.

The Economist published a fascinating piece on the refusal of boomer culture to grow up. It defines that culture, a Peter Pan cult of eternal youth. Will share bits. Today, STIs.

Part 2 of ‘boomers think they’re 17, even though they’re 80’. Don’t hit me, I don’t make up the data, it’s from The Economist.

How’s ‘authoritarian’ China looking to everybody this morning?

“Last Friday, Trump launched a meme coin that reached a market capitalisation of $4.8bn inside of four hours. A former Obama administration ethics adviser assured the Washington Post that “this may represent the single worst conflict of interest in the history of the modern presidency” – ironically, a statement only ever likely to hold its value for the seconds it took to say it. Indeed, by Sunday, Melania had launched her own meme coin too.” Marina Hyde Not bad for 4 hours of work, hey Adam and Kyle? I’m feeling the grift ;)

KIA have done an incredible job with their EV3 and EV5. And with an established dealer network, those with some EV anxiety really should look at these models. Even their software is now world-class. And the price is extremely competitive.

Dick Smith is sponsoring this, another one of his fact-free crusades, like Dick Smith peanut butter. What does nuclear mean for Lithgow? Nothing. Australia will never build nuclear reactors for electricity. Nobody will be that stupid.

People who are 80, pretending they’re 17, Part 3.

Probably the first time a manufacturer has re-invented a market segment with a vehicle at their first try. You can do most of your driving in this car at full-electric, never needing to spend a cent on fuel. About 80km of full-electric range. And 800-900 km of range when using the hybrid system built in. Superb and refined ride and acceleration (quicker than a Ranger Raptor), with luxury interior. For 10-20 thousand less than its competitors. There’s really no reason to buy any other dual cab ute. Except for extreme off-road types who want a rock crawler. Other utes will tow 3.5 tonnes (the Shark does 2.5), but no dual cab should be towing 3.5 tonnes anyway, it’s dangerous madness. BYD is calling that out, putting engineering ahead of marketing. As a family car far better appointed and comfortable than any other dual cab as well, with fantastic off-road capability to boot.

Online culture warring loons hate Wikipedia, because its excellent editing weeds out the idiot conspiracy and other rubbish the loons take as fact. People are very dismissive of Wikipedia, but it’s been empirically proven to be at least as accurate as ‘reputable’ sources, and often even more, with a much greater range of topics. It’s the only thing I regularly donate to, I encourage you to as well.

One of the common fossil fuel-funded criticisms of China and India is that they're the ones with the most emissions. It's offensive bullshit. The USA is an absolute carbon pig, and always has been, and will get far worse under Trump. And this really matters, because emissions don't stay within US borders. They're boiling us all alive. Australia is also a carbon pig, per capita. We're shitting in everybody's soup.

The battle for status is the organising principle behind all human life, at all ages. Status is also identity. Without status, you’re nobody. Also why the fundamental act of a human being is to copy, or imitate. We imitate those with the status we admire and want. We do it in groups or teams, aligned behind the high-status individuals. We copy other team members (peer pressure) to create our membership of the group. Teams then battle each other, for supremacy. Imitative rivalry. Look around. You can’t unsee it. It’s everywhere, it’s all human life. What car you drive, what band you love, what clothes you wear, who you vote for. It’s all team sports, status games. It all feels exactly like an NRL or Premier League competition, because it is literally that, that’s our universal social model. It’s the organising principle of this and all other social media platforms too, on steroids. Even the most basic share of ‘what I’m doing’ is a status game.

I get exhausted even watching the curated lives helicopter parenting creates for kids. Trying to create ‘enriching experiences’ for the kids etc. The kids nearly always overly anxious and precious about everything, because they’re so coddled and their lives so planned. They grow up so bored by everything, they’ve never had to amuse themselves for even a day. Their endless activities more a marker of status for their parents (who post them to social media as part of their own adult status games) than anything about them. Our own kids did only a fraction of the sorts of enriching activities many others did, growing up. But how are they now? Tough as nails. Independent. Not swayed by ‘what everybody else is doing’. Not anxious. We kept them out of the usual child and adult status games as much as possible, which could be tough at times. But the payback is immense. I agree with the DH Lawrence that pretty much the best thing you can do for kids, in life and in school, is to leave them alone. Leave them to contemplate life, and find their place in it.

How to dramatically accelerate EV adoption. As Sam says, none of it would happen under Peter Dutton, who he describes as ‘mental’. https://youtu.be/lzpcwwE8ei0?si=I_GdBzpdyrxfWaYP

The new Model Y. One of the most aerodynamically efficient cars in the world, which is the actual reason for its sleek design.

Venice is one of the few cities on Earth where you can still live the truth of this. Cities aren’t loud. It’s combustion engines that make them loud. Venice is eerily and beautifully silent (though now overrun with millions of tourists). The combustion engine destroys every town and city eventually. If you watch a show like ‘Escape to the Country’, overwhelmingly people aren’t looking to escape cities. They’re looking to escape cars and trucks, the noise of them. Which is combustion engine noise. The noise some love, if it’s just their car. Multiply it by millions of cars and you have endless racket.

It’s not how powerful or wealthy people are, or how famous, that drives humans. It’s their relative rank, to other people. Their status. Status gives them an identity, they are ‘nobody’ without it. Begins in childhood, and never stops. Look around and you will see this, the organising principle for our entire lives, in every detail. Even the most ‘subjective’ things, like the music we like, is status games. Some say they escape it by living a more simple life, away from devices, fashions, lots of healthy outdoor time etc. That’s even more of a status game, all contrarian movements are even more obsessed with status than proud status-seekers. Those movements take *all* of their cues from the status-seekers, it’s their guidebook (they just do the opposite). Opposite isn’t freedom.

The new Model Y. The aerial view shows some of the design not as visible from ground level. There’s a reason this is the best-selling car in the world, its design is literal genius in multiple ways, capturing the needs of families as well as those who like power and speed. As well as being a virtual hub connected to all of our information networks in society. If you hate Elon, applaud his thousands of engineers instead.

Would rather wrap a star picket in rusty barbed wire and insert it into my bum.

Go the Shark. On the Australia Day weekend, a good question is why we’re tourists in our own land, none of which we have a clue how to live in without destroying it. That would be a fun Australia Day contemplation, ‘being a tourist in your own land’.

Trump is a bone-idle, entitled old white guy who spent his first term eating cheeseburgers and watching FOX News. The secret to defeating Trumpism is to make him actually do some work, and pile up society’s problems on his doorstep every day, and demand he solve them.

Happy Birthday Chels!!

I do get that Elon Musk is putting many people off Tesla in any form. But Tesla is 130,000 brilliant people, doing urgent things the world needs. For example way bigger than its cars is its provision of battery storage at both grid and home level. That’s going to change the world, and become probably its greatest revenue earner. They also provide broadband to the most remote parts of the world now, through Starlink, that nobody else could be bothered providing. Even here in Australia, people in regional and remote areas will often get far better broadband from Starlink than they ever will from the NBN. The NBN even admits it, they quietly advise those people to get Starlink.

The First Fleet was a convict transport. Ask those convicts if they’d celebrate this day. ‘Australia’ began in 1901, more than a century after the First Fleet. We don’t even know our own history. I have zero interest in all the ‘Change the Date’ stuff too, I’m not on that team either. I say ditch all national days, nationalism is a disease. This crowd couldn’t give a shit about anything except winning votes by starting fights. Flag-waving patriotism is a European disease, which they then exported to the US as well. It’s never been Australian, until now, when so many people live on US-saturated social media that it’s their only reference point on the world.

One of the most compelling reasons to get a home battery. Grid supply is going to become more and more unreliable, and every Flat Earther out there protesting against windmills and solar farms is going to make that even worse. Likely the first to complain when their lights go out, too.

I’m sure many of you saw the relentless stories about declining demand for EVs, in 2024. All made up, complete propaganda. World demand for EVs grew 25% again, in 2024. Sam has had enough. These platforms are a sewer of unending bullshit. Watch this powerful vid from Sam.

This is the car Kell and I just bought. Not the actual car in the picture, but the exact same model, colour etc. The Model 3, Long Range. People know I spend a lot of time looking at all the EV options out there. What swayed us to this in the end is that the Model Y is a family car, and we already have one of those. The Model 3 is pretty much the most efficient EV in the world, and you can get 600km on a single charge, about 100km more even than the new Model Y. Its aerodynamic efficiency is almost 0.2, which is remarkable, it slices through the air. It’s also about 300kg lighter than other comparable EVs, and Tesla’s electric drivetrain is the most advanced in the world. All of that make it incredibly efficient, while also having amazing performance and handling (0-100 in 4.4 seconds, great suspension for cornering). Plus it integrates beautifully with our home battery, Tesla software is incredible. And of course buying a Tesla gives you cheaper and integrated access to Tesla superchargers, far and away the best fast-chargers available. This car will charge at up to 250kW, which is about as good as you can achieve in Australia right now. And it has a 17-speaker, dual sub-woofer sound system, which is a highlight for Kell! Should arrive in a week or so.

Happy Birthday Tash :)

130,000 brilliant people work for Tesla. This is the bullshit that happens when people decide to become a mob. I’ll never be part of a mob.

So many 4WDs ‘getting away from it all’ that the beach becomes a parking lot. Human life is mostly people imitating one another, with no idea why or even awareness of it.

I’m looking forward to firing up the car-solar-battery-home integration in the fascist app. I might invade Europe with it.

I wish my dad was here to share stories of life under the actual Nazis, and their fascist electric cars and batteries. People need to grow up.

This year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Have we learned anything as a result of it? I don’t think so. Why did the Germans do this? Modern team sports claims it was ‘anti-semitism’. But the Germans are no more anti-Semitic than any other country, it was a convenient scapegoat hobbled together by the Nazis and then marketed to its own population. Germany did this because it was humiliated after WW1. Humiliation is the most toxic personal and collective emotion. Nearly all serial killers have a history of some form of humiliation in their lives. Societies are the same. The Germans were deliberately humiliated after WW1, which was the direct cause of Nazism in the decades that followed. Humiliation destroys status, human’s most prized asset. Without status they have no identity. A key to peace is gracious victory. Look at Trump right now, and his campaign of revenge on all his enemies. He in turn was deliberately humiliated by Obama and others. It’s a self-reinforcing spiral of escalating violence and genocide. I make one exception for the Ashes, where England should be humiliated until the end of time.

This will achieve exactly nothing, just like painting swastikas on Tesla buildings. This is the sort of performative rubbish social media has encouraged us to think changes the world. Really it just makes us feel good about doing nothing. If you want to change the world, buy an EV (including Teslas, nothing will fracture the Trump team faster), cut right back on your travel, insulate your house and add solar panels, don’t vote for nuclear power stations that will never happen, and stop transacting your life through social media.

82 people have died of Covid in aged care in Australia, in January. They all caught it from us. The same number who died in the Granville Train Disaster. How are our ‘principles’ going?

Crypto, AI. The big grifts in MAGA land. The Chinese as always now disrupting the bubble of bullshit-filled hot air of both.

Picked well. My chariot for my fascist conquest of Oz.

There’s an emerging business in blacking out the ‘BYD” at the front of the BYD Shark, by people who love the ute but don’t like to advertise it’s from BYD. For many, their car is a huge part of their identity, which is why utes are also so heavily spec’d up. Like a grown man’s GI Joe set.

Can you, from standing, cross your feet and move smoothly to sitting cross-legged on the ground, without touching anything with your hands for support or using your knees for support? And then get smoothly up again, without using either your arms or knees for support? This is the sitting-rising test. A test often used in the old to see how flexible and stable they are, as people know falls are a major cause of injury and even death for the old. But people as young as their 30s can struggle to do this test without use of support from their hands or knees. I score a 9, I can do the sitting part but need one hand briefly for the rising. But anybody can work on this and improve their score to 10. 8-10 is considered a good score. People often get very stiff around that mid-body region (hips, thighs, lower back) as they age, particularly if they spend a lot of time sitting. Generally they’ll be advised to try to stretch that tightness away. I think that’s a mistake. Tight muscles are not tight, they’re your brain holding them that way. They’re you doing things out of balance, and your brain compensating by tightening muscles to keep you stable. The long-term solution is to just be present to the things you do, in the moment. That will coordinate your balance and body effortlessly. Not straining, straining is you trying to be somewhere you haven’t arrived yet, in space or time. Like trying to ‘get up’ out of a chair, while you’re still in the chair. You’re trying to fast forward to standing, while you’re still sitting. Or straining while sitting at a computer, trying to ‘hold yourself up‘. You need to take your attention off what you’re doing, to do that. Put your attention back on what you’re doing, and the strain disappears. Our body aches and stiffness and tensions are simple, they’re us not being present to what we’re doing.

Here you go, for people who live by their ‘principles’. Especially when that principle is doing what everybody else is doing.

I saw this created a bit of a fuss online. I think it’s another perfect illustration of how our music is just one more thing we use to form our social groups, to define our status and our identity. It’s what we do with everything, the cars and clothes we buy, the bands we like, the foods we eat, the medical treatments we use, who we vote for, etc. Social media is driving this mechanism into every nook and cranny of our lives, the continuous comparison of imitative rivalry between rival social groups. Society as a literal high school. Team windmill, team nuclear, team The Voice, team Tesla, team anti-Tesla, team salute the flag vs team change the date, team ICE vs team EV, etc. The team sports never end. Look around, you can’t unsee it.

Years ago now I posted quite a bit about the emerging terrible damage that sugar does to bodies. At the time that was considered a very marginal view. But I was reading the science, and now it’s really becoming mainstream. This work shows the truth of it in a fascinating way, those kids who went without sugar because of war rationing ended up having far better health in their adult lives.

Great test of the new BYD Shark under towing. Summary: it’s a monster tower. So good the one criticism was there was so much power, it was difficult to keep it under the speed limit. The other fun thing about this video for me was the window into how towing is one more social bubble or team, like big boys’ GI Joe sets. At one point they’re dragging a RAM also towing, while the RAM driver videos (while driving) from his phone. It’s all about the gear, and the identity people get from their particular choice of gear. Dual cab utes are one of the most intensely contested social spaces in our societies. Look at the range of speccing-up available. None of that is about actual function.

Expect to see that red grow. The DNA of Europe is war, because nationalism is top-level team sports, and those always lead to war. Europe invented nationalism, and exported it everywhere, a disease we can’t shake. Before we had nations in the 13th century, we were one united world.

Humans imitate each other. Not just every now and then, it’s pretty much all they ever do, at every age. And why do they imitate? To achieve status. To belong, to have an identity. Imitation gives you membership of any given group, it’s what makes you recognisable as a member of one group rather than another. Look around and you will see this *everywhere*, in all parts of life. Cars, clothes, food, music, language, ideas, beliefs, body shapes, etc. The conflict in our world is the clash of all of these imitation-driven groups. Imitative rivalry, as Rene Girard called it. Where statuses collide. Social media has swamped the world because it targets this exact behaviour. Things ‘go viral’. It’s the most addictive thing humans have ever created. The most basic ‘here‘s what I’m doing’ post is nearly always imitation of some kind. Like wearing a puffy jacket, or travelling to Bali. The world outside social media is increasingly shaped by it, we’re living in its bubbles. Because imitation leads to rivalry and conflict, this also means social media is making the world much more violent, at an accelerating rate. The more social or connected we become, the more we copy each other and the more violent we become. Ask the kid on the fringes of groups at school how violent this all is. They know.

Fascinating to watch this cultural shift play out in real time. This is WAY more than just technical arguments about cars. This is society changing at its roots.

We can shake our heads in disbelief at this. But Peter Dutton isn’t far away from this sort of culture war nonsense. Both creatures of social media society.

I’ve watched the entire Women’s Ashes series, including tonight, and it’s so disappointing to see the pathetic crowd at the MCG. This team is far more ‘The Invincibles’ than Bradman’s was. Astonishing performances, in every single game. Total domination.

Humanity’s greatest ever achievement was doubling its life expectancy in the 20th century, through public health measures. Trump is going to war on that achievement. The impact will be catastrophic. People defend him because he won a vote. Who remembers the most popular people at school being useful for anything?

Trump and others hate what they call the ‘Deep State’. Sounds scary! All it means is the professional civil servants that actually run countries, who annoy popularly-elected dickheads who can barely tie their own shoelaces. All those years of slagging off ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’ are coming in to land now. That’s what the cost of living crisis, the public health crisis, the collapse in education and our environment, in our roads and other transport, are. People are going to discover much too late to save them that ‘red tape’ is what was making their lives peaceful and prosperous and healthy. Without the red tape, people just go to war with each other. That’s my job every day, watching that up close. Nobody goes to work to create more red tape. The red tape comes from trying to stop people fighting each other.