February 2025

The sorts of electricity prices renewables are making possible. The red rectangle is completely free electricity between 11am and 2pm every day. The red circle is electricity at only 8c/kWh from midnight-6am, to charge your EV. That’s less than a quarter of the standard rate, and means you can ‘fill’ your car for about $5.

Is Alana King a better leg-spinner than Shane Warne?

The Nerd Reich is well underway. Simpletons still think this is a battle of Left vs Right, like those who think the Bathurst 1000 is still a battle of Fords and Holdens. Decades of slogans on ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’ has cleared the way for the Tech Bros to dismantle our entire democracies, for their own benefit. While ordinary people cheer them on. Everybody hates bureaucracy. Bureaucracy *is* democracy. Without it, you just have Kings and feudal lords. Gangs, and gang warfare.

This person is using Facebook as if Facebook IS Bathurst. That’s the new norm, we live inside social media platforms, we’re not talking about our towns here, this IS our towns. Seamless, people don’t see them as two separate things. The hijacking of societies, at the personal, social, economic and political level. Bathurst’s local government elections and now governance, dominated by who? FB influencers.

The importance of tummy time. Anybody who‘s had babies knows about tummy time, how it helps build essential muscle strength and flexibility in babies. Babies don’t like it at first, they need to learn it. What isn’t taught though is how important tummy time is throughout your life, as an adult too. All of us spend a lot of time sitting. That strengthens and shortens particular combinations of muscles, leading us to get ’bad backs’ and hips, sore necks and shoulders etc. Incredibly tight muscles in those areas. It’s tummy time that self-corrects a lot of that, re-balancing your overall flexibility and strength and removing that tightness and tension.

Kris the actual climate scientist, trying to cut through the ocean of bullshit on social media. Which is where we all live now, so what else can he do?

This plays well because for 70 years we’ve been encouraged by wealthy and powerful people to see public servants (it’s in the fucking name people) as our enemy. The people SERVING the public. Why do wealthy and powerful people hate them? Because they stop them getting even more wealthy and powerful. Gullible people have swallowed this hook, line and sinker. Now paying for public services out of their own wallets, if they can get the services at all. In the US Trump has already begun trying to shut down the government entirely, firing thousands of public servants and handing their work over to his tech bros.

A privatised government is an oxymoron. (Morons might have to Google what an oxymoron is.) Again, to make public servants - people who SERVE the public - the enemy is the obvious end of our public life. By definition. There is no public, without public servants, they create and maintain it. Without them there’s just private firms, gorging themselves on essential services, for profit. You and I will pay for basic services, to make them rich. And business only operates because of public servants as well, they regulate the market businesses operate in. So everything collapses, private and public, a fake distinction anyway.

The night of the long knives, for public servants. I’m sure this will make America more efficient.

Happy Birthday, have a wonderful day!

Feminism won a lot of battles against the degrading treatment of women. Today it’s more focused on the rights of men to call themselves women. And here we are.

Buying slow gutless vehicles that make vroom vroom noises and need constant maintenance and fuel? Each to their own I guess. Bet they’re a hoot to drive at 800,000km.

In the 1950s, people just off-roaded in their ordinary everyday Nazi cars, without all the GI Joe spec pissing contest of the ute and 4WD. Off-roading is a social activity, a way to create and maintain a social group. None of the tech is really much about traversing the terrain.

Privatised public services not only cost a lot more (they’re much less efficient), they don’t even provide the service. This was the reason humans invented government in the first place, to create economies of scale. And then forgot. It’s why we keep cycling through the same dumb lessons, never learning.

In Australia heat pumps (air conditioning we use in homes and many businesses) are not really a debate. Because they don’t really threaten status hierarchies here. In the UK it’s a furious fight, with the sorts of hysterical drivel we see about EVs and wind farms here also dished out to heat pumps. Why? Because heat pumps there threaten status, of those aligned with the gas industry mostly. Britons do a lot of home heating with gas. That’s what high status people and groups do, when they want to oppose change, they start a fight about it. Like Dutton and nuclear and Joyce and wind farms. That fight - the team sports - mobilises voters behind them, and creates an impression the facts are open to question. The same old trick, for every issue, you can’t miss it. Heat pumps a total non-issue here and a bare-knuckle fight there shows what’s really in play. It’s not facts.

The Facebook franchise we used to call Bathurst is furious. Prepare for an ‘onslaught’, apparently. ‘We know who they are’, ‘not a big enough town to hide’! This is the switch in the social media bait and switch. The platforms lock in everybody with their friends, in warm and cuddly ‘connection’. Then they take over everything.

Happy Birthday Peter :)

People think you’re unhinged when you tell them social media is destroying our lives.

The anti-Tesla mob must be making Evie happy. Once you’re in a mob, you don’t get to choose what it does.

Venice is fighting back against travel culture. It’s not winning. The travel mob is relentless and stupid.

Temperatures in the Arctic this week were 30 degrees above average.

Trump’s lunatic plan is also the history of Australia in only one sentence. Kick the natives out and kill them, and turn their land into a real estate casino.

City and country are not two forms of life. They’re one form of life. Have a look at the UK, the land gets progressively more valuable the closer to London you get. The people who live in the ‘countryside’ see it as a leafy suburb of London. Life in the countryside is just city life, with fewer people and cars, and more trees.

Look at what Trump is actually doing, right now. You won’t believe what you’re reading, but it’s actually happening, right now. It’s been planned for a long time. Ordinary people have been played by slogans about red tape and bureaucracy and inefficent government, read how that ends. Trump has acolytes in our own governments, at every level, including in your local town.

If what the Trump-Musk forces are doing to the US concerns you right now, be assured the Australian arm of the lunacy is geared up and ready to go here too. Social media is their assault weapon. You’ll find many foot soldiers even at the local level of government. How many council elections and debates run on crusades against inefficiency? Many are unaware this is the Trump foot soldiers at work. Social media has given those fringe beliefs a foothold right in the heart of Australian life and government.

I’ve mentioned this a few times here. Not a single policy. Not one. Just a series of slogans. Niki is an ex-LNP staffer, she’s not biased. She sees the danger this ship of fools are to Australia.

Hottest January ever.

The simplest car buying experience I’ve ever experienced, by a country mile. Pleasurable, even. Included a trade-in. Did it all from my couch, on the app. I see Tesla sales are well down globally this month, the big anti-Elon protest. I’m protesting against the incineration of future generations, and the price of petrol.

Did my calculations long ago for the new EV. If we stick with grid power to charge it at home, at full grid price (not special EV price), it’ll cost about $15 a week to ‘fill’ the Tesla. That’s for 300km of motoring per week. If we get a special EV plan, that drops to under $5. If we use solar during the day, that drops to $0. If you do much less kms per week, which is most people, say 50-100km per week, at full grid price that’s about $5 a week, EV plan about $1, and solar still free. And this for a vehicle that will kick the arse power and torque and performance-wise of petrols or diesels. How much are you spending on petrol/diesel every week? And maintenance and servicing? No servicing required for a Tesla, one reason I went with them, in a regional area. If you do have a problem (very rare) they’ll send a technician to your home. Almost nothing can go wrong with an EV. The resistance to EVs must be humanity at its peak of stupidity.

Kyle maybe it was just a bad night.

In the 1970s millions would have called this a beautiful kitchen. Good luck finding anybody who would think that today. What we like is not ‘subjective’, in design, music or whatever. We like something because everybody else likes it. We can be 100% certain it’s our ‘personal taste’. But it isn’t.

Those who think that government ‘should be run like a business’ are now getting their way in the US. And guess which business is running the government? Private equity. The business that hijacks firms, and plunders them for quick profit while destroying their core business. That core business is now the USA.

Happy Birthday! 🎁🎊🎉

Saving the world.

Abuse and defamation can win you a seat in government. Then you have a Spring clean to polish the respectability.

Some worry that they’ll need to replace the battery in an EV, at great cost. EV batteries last for years longer than you’ll actually own a car. A million kilometres or more. They’re even better in real world conditions they’ve discovered than the huge life lab tests suggested. A very old EV will drive the same as a new EV. Nothing can really go wrong with them. They last at least twice as long as a petrol or diesel. Without any maintenance or servicing. @[801418628:2048:Nancy]

What a window into the mess of our ideas about relationships. I love that many are realising that being alone is not a bad thing. But their reasons here are all about personal development, incredibly self-centred. Being a couple and being single are both presented as vehicles for that self-centred development. When you read it you come away thinking that our only two options are a life devoted to our own personal needs. Or a co-dependency with a partner, where you play out stereotypes about married life of denial and total obsessive focus on your other half. All ‘me’, or all ‘you’. Crazy. Both options (single or couple) as described in this article are exactly how adolescence sees relationships. Including the retreat to friendship as some apparently superior form of life. Friendship is a superficial form of life, a training for love. Grown ups with ‘besties’ aren’t grown up. Love is a surrender of your precious self to something bigger than it. Confronting and enjoying the reality of another person, as an ‘other’ in your life, even when it’s difficult. It’s not MAFS, the teen dream of adult life, of ‘cheating’ being the ultimate sin because again that’s teenage life, fighting over ownership. A Gen Z told me it’s about ‘loyalty’. We live in a kidult culture, people playing at grown ups because grown up life was wrecked by the Peter Pan forever young world of high school/boomer culture. We never leave high school, the culture is stuck at that stage of development.

Want a window into the manipulation that social media is? Yesterday I posted about the myths around the lifetime of batteries in EVs (they basically last forever, in real terms). Within seconds this AI-generated anti-EV cartoon appeared in my feed. People believe this sort of BS, this is how opinion is shaped.

Happy Birthday! 🎈🎁🎉

What I really like about Tesla, and a huge reason I went with one of their vehicles (already had the home battery) is in that underlined bit. A ‘fully integrated’ home energy ecosystem, to create energy independence. That’s their genius, and it’s so beautifully done, incredible engineering, both hardware and software. A company that says to its engineers, blow our minds. They’re an energy company more than a car company.

I was talking to my brother about overtourism. Mike is a senior manager in the travel industry. He made the fascinating point that what’s allowed travel to explode to levels of destruction is Airbnb. All of these people need somewhere to stay, before Airbnb cities and locations were simply incapable of accommodating these huge masses of people. This in turn creates near apocalyptic problems for the infrastrtucture of places tourists descend on. That infrastructure historically reached an equilibrium with other local services, because the accommodation providers were part of the local community too. Airbnb, like Uber, and social media, couldn’t care less about any of that.

I’m not a fan of hard flooring. It’s at epidemic levels of popularity in multiple parts of the world now. I don’t like the feel of them underfoot, but even more I hate how noisy they make a house. The echoing is physically exhausting. Another reason I’ve found to avoid them is that carpeting (or a rug) is brilliant at absorbing dust. I run air purifiers sometimes, and in the kitchen, which is all hard flooring, the dust pre-filter is always clogged in super quick time. Compared to the ones in carpeted areas, which have almost no dust at all. I’ve seen allergy sufferers advised to use hard floors. I’m not sure that’s good advice.

So many councils under pressure to raise rates to meet basic costs. I still think it’s a startling fact that the average person spends more on take away food, alcohol, recreation and travel than they do on their roads, libraries, parks, museums, water and sewage.

Got my own fuel bowser in the shed now. Zero cents per litre. SKY News Australia told me this morning that Australians don’t want EVs. Looking forward to watching them donate hundreds to the Saudi Arabia and Texas relief fund in the cold and rain at the servos this arvo, when I drive past.

Thanks to @[1257795447:2048:Christine] for sharing. If you talk about climate chnage, many will pop up and tell you the science isn’t settled. That’s a lie, propaganda that many swallow because they believe what they choose to believe. Have a look at just how settled the science is.

Glad to see even mainstream media now reporting that EV batteries last and last and last, and you can buy a secondhand EV with no anxiety. Battery ranges well in excess of 90% of new, even after 120,000km.

This is the true genius of Australia, not understood much by Australians, and not at all by the Brits or Americans. A genius now being destroyed every day by social media, importing lunatic ideas from the US and UK. The modern LNP (John Howard and beyond) has been trying to replace this genius with imitations of UK and US politics for the past 30+ years. Queen and King and Trump lovers. They’re not Australians, they’re wannabe Brits and Yanks.

Happy Birthday! 🎂🎊🎈

A new reason petrol and diesel fans give for clinging to their clunkers is that they have more ‘soul’, apparently. I think it’s that stuff coming out the exhaust, smoke and noise.

Such a ridiculous idea. Fuel excise doesn't go to roads anyway, the whole thing is a con. If they want extra revenue, cancel the diesel fuel rebate, massive subsidies to utes, and other subsidies to oil and gas and coal companies, tens of billions every year.

Happy Birthday Belly!

Whenever fossil fuel companies feel a threat, mysterious ‘personal’ stories about the dangers of free energy appear. Anybody who uses oil heating instead of a heat pump is a (rich, or soon to be very poor) moron.

AI may end up being the best healthcare many of us can access. Even in a larger regional town, it can be impossible to get into a GP. Mine has a 5-month waiting list, good luck if there’s anything actually wrong with you. We’re an ageing society and all of the wealth of that society is concentrated in the aged. Rather than where it’s needed, to provide basic services for communities.

This is populism. The belief that democracy is elections. The elected should have all the power, and get rid of everything else. That’s a recipe for total social collapse, and fascism. Hitler and Mussolini were populists, that’s how they shut down Italian and German society, for their own ends. They used popularity to do it. That dreaded ‘red tape’ of ‘bureaucrats’ is democracy.

A 'wit' shared this with me the other day. Loving the Tesla, loving sailing past poor combustion clunkers madly down-shifting and revving, trying to keep up. Loving no fuel costs, no servicing, loving the 17-speaker dual sub-woofer sound, the ability to run heating or cooling for hours if you have to wait for something, without having to turn on an engine, while watching Netflix or Youtube. Etc. All of it. I share EV things because society works via imitation. People will change, if they see others doing things. Facts don't change minds.

An international pandemic expert put this together, for those who talk about the pandemic in the past tense. We’re still ‘during’ Covid, it was never over. The greatest mass delusion possibly in human history.

When people have moved on from the current trending fad around Tesla-hating (and they will, it’s just a fad), I encourage anybody to explore the full Tesla ecosystem. Extraordinary creativity and engineering. Here, filling the car with free energy. See the ‘Live Camera’ mode beneath, where you can monitor the surroundings of your car remotely on your phone in 7 different directions, including inside, and the car monitors any potential threats and records them. It does the same when you’re out driving, automatic 6-directional high definition dashcam. You can even make the car fart at people walking by, if you’re a bit immature like me. There’s a philosophy of fun behind the design, not fascism, and incredible functionality with it. And they add more every week, with free over-the-air upgrades. Other EV makers are copying this now too, time to ditch your social media team sports and try one out.

The irony of the 'range' ICE crowd is that the quoted range of petrols and diesels is often a lie. Often a very big lie.

The top level of the Tesla app showing the solar, house battery and car all currently being charged for free by the sun. The app has many more layers and functionality, the best software I’ve ever used.  Feels really good to be filling your car with free sunshine. Sharing this so people can see the sort of integration that Tesla offers for all of your home energy uses. 

This is what’s really happening in the US, and in Australia too. Competitive status games, mostly carried out on social media, are taking over democratic institutions, and weaponising them for their competitive team sports. The article calls it competitive authoritarianism. But team sports is simpler, all status games are ‘authoritarian’, they’re about who is top dog. That’s the basis of all human society. Only those institutions ever act as a brake on these status games. All modern populist politicians target the institutions for exactly that reason, they hate the due process checks and balances they impose on them. They call it ‘red tape’. The gullible cheer on the destruction.

The law is all Americans have to save them now. And the knives are out for it.

“What’s this button do?”

I have no energy bills. And that increasingly includes for running the cars, a household’s biggest energy cost by far. Much of the Australian population could be the same. But they‘re stuck in fake wars against EVs and renewables, set up by fossil fuel companies. They would rather go into bat for their team, usually on social media, against the only Australian sources of energy. Solar and wind. FREE energy. Most other energy in Australia is owned by foreign fossil fuel companies. Who fund these fake wars to fire up the gullible, always with new slogans, like ‘EVs catch fire and have no range’, ’the sound of a petrol or diesel is real grunt’, ‘windmills destroy farming and kill whales’, blah blah blah. All total bullshit. Then ordinary Australians pay thousands out of their own pockets, to the people playing them like puppets. Remember the old jingoistic Made in Australia campaigns? Renewable energy is the only Made in Australia energy. Why are we paying thousands out of household budgets every year to make Arabs and Texans rich? And now some want to spend hundreds of billions more importing nuclear energy technology. We’re too stupid to survive. I’m going outside to plug the car in for more free energy from the solar panels on the roof.

This week the American Vice-President criticised Europe for being too woke, for not having enough ‘free speech’. The US ranks 55 in the world, for press freedom. Pretty much all of Europe ranks above it.

The American writer Noah Smith capturing here what I also believe about societies. Everything we call politics is a lie. Left to themselves, humans do one thing only. They fight each other for status, usually in teams. Why I call it ‘team sports’. Then when everything breaks, it forces some collective effort to fix it. Once fixed enough, the team sports start all over again. Repeat ad infinitum. Social media pours petrol on this process, dramatically accelerating and intensifying it. Humans are always 100% social, never economic or political or even personal. Everything is social. Even taste in music or food or anything else, is social, even if people don’t realise they’re imitating others.

After firing the people who oversee the US nuclear arsenal, then realising uh oh we need these people, the Trump team now struggling to rehire them because they also deleted their email access. The war on ‘red tape’ is always as stupid as this.

I have a couple of ex-good friends, who spend quite a lot of time on social media trying to convince everybody that vaccines are bad for them. We no longer talk. Get every vaccine you qualify for, for every disease. The cross-protection for many other serious conditions is the huge added benefit. Get a flu shot every year, for example. Drops your risk of heart attack and dementia substantially.

When covid began, catching it gave you about 80% immunity from the disease, after one year. That immunity is now only 5% after 1 year. I know hardly anyone getting vaccinated now, against Covid. idiot politicians told them their initial 2 shots were ‘fully vaccinated’. Because they don’t die, they think it’s fine. They feel OK because Covid suppresses their immune response, which is the thing that normally makes you feel sick. It’s how the virus colonises your body. They’re wide open doors to the virus, which then fucks over their vascular system.

Saving the world one haircut at a time. Probably all selling their Teslas now too.

The massive shift to private schooling in Australia in the past 20 years was a deliberate policy decision of the Howard government. And what made that shift successful was that it targeted status. That’s what conservative ‘aspirational’ politics is all about. To shift from a collective, public-focused society, to a society of status-seekers. It’s also why when others criticise things like inequality, conservatives will immediately call it the ‘politics of envy’. They know that the poor are more interested in status than they are in justice, and will vote for anybody who offers them a fake step up the status ladder. It’s why parties of the ’Left’ keep losing, they keep offering polices to ‘help’ the poor. The poor (rightly) hate being patronised like that. They see themselves (again rightly) as the equal of the rich. They want to be offered status, not assistance.

"This fiasco is perfect example of how crypto’s big promises always seem to end in short-term scams. For years, crypto has pushed a fake dream: decentralization, financial freedom, and a revolution against traditional banking. In reality, it's the same story over and over: pump-and-dump schemes, insider profits, and regular people left holding the bag." Gil Duran

Social media is not part of society. It has become society. It hijacked it. We transact everything from our most intimate and personal lives, to our businesses and our politics inside it. It's owned by American and Chinese billionaires, who use it for political ends, including to fracture communities and make them fight one another in teams. Nobody cares.

Social media is turning the whole world into a violent self-righteous mob.

Bill Gates has made more money in the quarter of a century since he retired, than he did in the quarter century beforehand when he was creating and running Microsoft. He’s done that by ‘investing’. Investing is the modern gold rush, where people flocked to the countryside to try to get rich quick, finding gold. You can invest to build things, but modern investment is often smoke and mirrors, based only on ‘returns’. Like real estate, where decades now of heavy investment in housing hasn’t led to more or better housing. It’s just led to more expensive housing, the houses have been used as casino chips. Much modern investment is ‘speculative’, which is another word for gambling. Some people get very rich and very fast, attracting the gullible. Like any gold rush. Ultimately the whole thing collapses, because it’s not based on anything in reality except returns. Nobody is building anything. Even basic compound interest is unsustainable exponential growth. Doesn’t it ever strike others as strange that when you invest you basically do nothing, just sit there and gather in the returns?

McCartney is everywhere at the moment. There’s an obsession with The Beatles again now. I’m sure it’s because the closer actual mortality looms for the forever young generation, the more they compensate by amplifying nostalgia, to try to pretend just one more time that they didn’t get old.

That’s Lithgow to Bathurst. It’s one of the main reasons I went with Tesla, that efficiency almost unparalleled in electric cars. Most of them struggle to do less than 20 kW hours per hundred kilometres. The Tesla did it in 13.

I could never go back to a combustion car. The physics says it all. Look at those flaccid torque and power blue and red lines for petrols and diesels. You spend most of your time revving the shit out of the thing (what gears are for) to try to keep it at the top of the droop. The EV has maximum torque at every speed, on tap, precisely titrated to what you need. There are no hills in an EV, the car glides up them as as if they aren't even there. Mindblowing acceleration not just from a standing start, but at every speed too. It's effortless, linear power, getting back in a petrol or diesel feels like getting back on a horse. The idea of 'grunt' comes from the noise petrols and diesels make. They're gutless. That noise is them straining to generate any torque or power at all. How that ever became confused with grunt is hilarious, it's the exact opposite. If two people are lifting something, and one grunts and groans and the other does it silently, which do you assume is the stronger person?

We've had another couple of weeks with wide reporting of a 'stalling' in demand for electric vehicles. All bullshit, to make people think they'll do their money buying one. This is the 6th reporting of a collapse in demand for EVs I've now seen in recent years. All 6 were bullshit. Now major long distance routes in NSW have new chargers too. You only need fast chargers for long trips. As an example, I commute about 600km a week. I never need a fast-charger.

If you add dots to Donald Trump’s signature, it looks like a Klan rally.

The new car sitting at the bowser, filling up at 0c/L. This is where you’ll mostly charge your EV, at home. Ignore the hysteria about there not being enough fast-chargers. You’ll hardly ever need them.

For the rest of us to live with Covid, healthcare workers have to die from it. It reminds me of the line from Gandhi’s family, that it cost them a fortune to keep him in poverty. The people continuously getting Covid will also die from it. It’ll just take a bit longer.

Simon looks his 83 here. McCartney only less so because of extensive ‘work’ he’s had done. When the old pretend to be young, it favours only the very wealthy and privileged amongst them. For the rest it means nobody gives a shit about their stage of life, because ageing is no longer a thing.

Every time I see a little Trump-wannabe here in Australia, determined to turn Australia into Trumpland (wave to Peter Dutton and Clive Palmer), I remember that Australians have the 7th best life expectancy in the world. The US is 55th on the list, and falling. I also remember there is no legally mandated annual leave for workers in the US, and the leave people do get averages only 10 days per year.

Public and domestic sewage systems are now continuously blocked by people using wet wipes instead of toilet paper. These then create ‘fatbergs’, enormous balls of fat and other wastes which block even main sewer lines. At the same time more than half the population suffer from haemorrhoids, a terrible chronic problem for many. Both of these problems have a common origin. People are not taught how to wipe their bums. It’s why many use wipes instead, to try to fix the problems their absence of skills here cause in the first place. Good on this proctologist for putting it out there. The whole problem (watch him) is the idea of wiping in the first place. If your first action after a number 2 is to wipe, you’re going to smear a lot of mess down there, which will then need a lot more wiping to clear up. That large amount of wiping in turn sandpapers your anus, a major cause of haemorrhoids. The solution? The anus is a very small sensitive area, which only needs to be massaged with toilet paper with gentle pressure after a number 2 to remove most waste. A tiny wipe to remove the massaging paper is all that’s needed to finish the job. If you’re already damaged down there, and need to use a wet wipe for a while as he suggests, NEVER put it down the toilet afterwards. Apologies for what for many will be a taboo topic. Better than suffering in silence, and much better for poor Council workers spending their days removing fatbergs.

To put the public health clusterfuck we’re currently living through into perspective, more than 4 times as many people died of Covid in Australia in 2022 alone, than have died from HIV since the 1970s. As many people are still dying from Covid every year as have died from HIV, since the 1970s. We treat Covid as if it’s a cold. Meanwhile HIV is more or less cured because we made a deliberate decision NOT to ‘live with’ it. .

Cats are amazing animals, many people viscerally hate them, I'm never sure why. They're quiet, super clean, and not emotionally needy like dogs. I see horrific dog attack cases at work. As well as the endless number of noise complaints from dog barking, another territorial pack behaviour. I've never seen a report of a violent cat. I still maintain that people mistake pack loyalty and submission for love, in dogs. They do love to hunt and kill, for sure. They're predators. One of the reasons they're terrible as outside animals in Oz is that our fauna lacks predators. But they're good if you have a snake problem, as the video shows. Snakes don't stand a chance, the physicality of a cat is breathtaking. Another way to see the difference with dogs is to compare with their wild counterparts. Wild dogs are nearly always nasty, filthy pack animals. WIld cats on the other hand are some of the most superb, noble animals on the planet.

On the way into work yesterday, one of the local politicians was doing election shots in the park. My attention was drawn more to the glorious, colourful corruption and incompetence of Council, on display in the flower beds. I was reading feedback from visitors to Bathurst for the 12-hour race. So many blown away by the beauty of the place, how ‘neat and tidy’ the town is etc. The fact the town is run well is right there in front of everybody’s faces. The social media/FB crowd aren’t having it. There’s votes in kicking the Council. One said this week that peoples’ faith in Council has never been lower. Perhaps because that’s the business model of getting elected through social media. ‘Give the Council a kicking’.

No queue at my servo. Just me. Price never changes either, always close to zero. When you pull on that bowser handle, can you feel the money emptying out of your wallet, ready for its trip to Texas and Saudi Arabia?

(He said yes, just to get that out of the way.) I’ve worked in places where I thought senior management and a Board were criminally incompetent. But I still thought the institution and the people working for it were wonderful, and would have recommended its products to others wholeheartedly. Tired of the childish team sports social media is transforming the world into.

The only thing stopping Ford’s bankruptcy is its sale of big utes, Rangers and the F-series utes. BYD is targeting both. As Sam said, it’s going to be a bloodbath. Far superior technology, for about 40% less dollars. The only thing that sustains me through the idiot debates online about cars is that reality ignores all of them. Petrol and diesel car companies are dead. Meanwhile Trump has decommissioned more than 8000 already existing EV chargers in the US, and has slashed all support for EV technology. He’s signing the death warrant on the American car industry. The only thing sustaining them has been sales to China. China doesn’t want their cars now, except Teslas. It thinks they’re rubbish. It’s right.

I don’t remember giving permission for them to film us @[100011634545260:2048:Tod].

For people with the debilitating condition of range anxiety, more real world examples. To drive to Sydney from Lithgow with an EV battery at 100% to start, you arrive all the way over on the coast with a battery still at 80%. If you were driving from Bathurst it’d be about 70% at destination. That includes extensive high speed freeway driving. You can easily do a return trip on one charge. One of the joys of an EV is that it generates power as it goes along too. It’s like a petrol or diesel that produces fuel as you drive. You can end some trips with more charge than when you started.

Ouch.

More real world numbers for people thinking about making a switch. My weekly commuting in a petrol or diesel cost $120. With a hybrid I got that cost down to $70. With an EV that cost is now $3.60. Per week. That’s without even charging the car with home solar, which costs nothing at all.

So you know who you’re voting for. Gina is Peter Dutton’s greatest champion.

Those who have endured the corporate body searches of one or more of the big consulting firms will feel that was a romantic date, compared to Trump/Musk’s America.

You don’t perceive how much our thoughts and tastes are shaped by our desire to belong to a group, until something goes ‘out of fashion’ and you suddenly find it ridiculous. At the time you definitely didn’t find it ridiculous, you needed that hair with a passion, to belong. You thought it looked amazing. What we take to be our most intimate, personal likes and dislikes are shaped by our desire to belong to some social group. What music we like, what ideas we find compelling, who we love. All the striving for belonging, for identity. For status. And then very rarely something breaks through that peer pressure bubble. Usually some catastrophe, personal or social. Right now there are bubbles like this operating all through peoples’ lives, that seem like ‘the most amazing thing ever’, and which in a few years will seem ridiculous. Kitchens that look like white sterile mortuaries. Wankpanzer utes. Hard flooring. Puffy jackets. Taylor Swift. Combustion engines. And so on, and on and on.

Conversation usually reinforces the status games of our lives. You don’t want to say the wrong things, wrong being what violates the spoken and unspoken rules of what keeps your social groups together. The author here suggests violating some of those rules, to bring out more of the real people you’re with. This is what I’d call a more generalised flirting with people, being unexpected, rather than just being an ‘asshole’. Social media tries the total arsehole approach, and it only produces more team sports. Go beyond polite conversation, but with a twinkle in the eye rather than confrontation.

Have been watching some 1990s shows. It was such a dreary time, the palette of colour and design. The cars were so often just flat, featureless panels welded or bolted onto the chassis. And it was the transition from the bright and bold colours of the 60s and 70s to the washed out pastels of the 1980s, through to the ‘functional’ (hideous) colours and patterns of the 90s.

For those who stick to their loon idea that ‘the private sector is more efficient’. How can it ever be more efficient, if it has to provide the same service *plus* extract a profit? In reality the profit is protected and increased by providing less service, at higher prices.

The view out my window on late-summer mornings. We call it ‘Daylight Savings Time’ (DST), but no daylight is saved. It’s stolen from the morning, to give to the evening. It should be called ‘Dark Morning Time’ (DMT). Soon to be lifted, then we’ll get a month or two of sunlight to wake up to again, then winter returns dark mornings. Our circadian rhythms have no idea what’s going on. That really matters for your health, but nobody cares.

My $3.60 in electricity for a week of commuting between Bathurst and Lithgow was based on an estimate. I re-did the calculation using actual data from the car this morning. It's $2.40. Per week. If I was working in the same town, the weekly bill would be less than a dollar. At this stage the only thing standing between an EV and your garage is how much electricity is actually firing in the neurons in your brain.

The latest EV scare campaign, this time driven by lawyers desperate for work. The same happening in Australia. For years the government has sponsored test labs to debunk range claims on petrol and diesel vehicles too, which can be up to 40% overstated. My EV does exactly the range the car says it will.

I've watched many business people try to get involved with politics. It's always a disaster, because government is way, way more complex than business, and more ruthless. The ones who 'want to run the town/country more like a business' fall the hardest, clueless. Right now Musk is being used as a patsy or fall guy by Trump, to implement the nonsense the MAGA folk say they want. It will be a disaster (already has been), and by staying at arm's length from it by getting Musk to do it, Trump is using Musk as a human shield. He'll take credit for any apparent successes, and blame Musk for the mass failures. Musk is too vain and stupid to know this is what's going on.

Free to every Dutton fan.

Electric off-roaders with an engine on each wheel. Try doing this with a petrol or diesel.

Many kids growing up dream of this moment, being the band striding to the stage in a stadium full of thousands of adoring fans. It’s not really about music, it’s about the desire we have from the youngest age to be recognised and admired. To have status. Popular music became that dream short-cut to recognition for so many, after the 1960s. We don’t see how this is a social and cultural thing, not music. Music would exist without it. The stadium show is the culmination of social impact, where you get a huge chunk of society ‘recognising’ and supporting you. You’ve ’made it’. This is the gig culture I talk about. Where music is hijacked for social ends.

This is one of the Bibles of the Trumpian revolution. A how-to guide for super rich people to avoid regulation and taxes. This is also why crypto is so huge now, because those super rich see it as a way to get around State taxation. There is no such thing as a sovereign individual. They're freeloaders on civil society, pretending the freedoms they have are just the natural state of the world, which government restricts. They have it completely backwards, without governent there is no individual freedom. None of them choose to live in countries with no or weak governments, because your life expectancy there is about 3 days.

You despair of the public having any memory at all. It was cutting of the public service by the Morrison government that led to the rorting by big consulting firms, brought in to do the work of the sacked public servants. At many times the cost of those public servants. Now this clown is in the running to win the election, promising to do the same thing all over again. Only 3 years later. We have the attention span of goldfish.

You'll never see a clearer 'vote to protect the status quo' graph (noting that the blue is in the lead, overall).

Trump’s video posted today of his vision for Gaza as a new Trump resort is as batshit fucking crazy as anything you will ever see.

I have a few friends here who use OVO (myself included now). With an EV their overnight 8c/kWh charge is fantastic (AGL offer similar). They also give you completely free electricity between 11 and 2 every day. You may wonder how they can do that. There's a flood of free renewable energy in the middle of the day, so much that the grid will pay you to use it. So retailers like OVO can offer you free electricity, and still make money, they get paid to use it. I now can also charge the home battery in winter in the middle of the day for free, and overnight at 8c/kWh, to top up any daytime solar to use for heating. This is all so gloriously easy and amazing. I'm totally fed up with the sponsored bullshit that is running so many peoples' lives. Social media zombies.

The genius of Covid is to give people a ‘mild’ illness, so they think it’s ’just a cold’. That mildness is the virus bypassing your immune system, to gain easy entry to your organs and blood vessels. The immune response is what makes you feel sick, so if you don't feel very sick, it just means the virus conned your immune system. Once in you, it fucks you over. It 'does you slowly', as Paul Keating would say, or sometimes not even that slowly. I’ve been unsuccessful at convincing just about anybody to save themselves from it. People are scared of doing something different to what everybody else is doing. Death is therefore now trending. This was the probable cause of heart disease in the 20th century too (it wasn't eating fat), the Spanish Flu pandemic destroying peoples' hearts over the following decades.

As somebody whose job is helping to run democracies, I’d say maybe 60-80% of people have no idea what it even is. They think it’s elections. See that ‘unelected’? That’s populism, the belief that democracy = a popularity contest.

Look at the headlines major media outlets are now writing. Shit is hitting the fan. Amusingly, the ‘alarmists’ were doctors and scientists, while 5 years ago we all followed the advice of politicans and social media influencers instead. ‘Living with the virus’, ‘just like the flu’ and other fan favourites are all fantasies invented by politicians and social media influencers. Billions of people will never fully recover.

The beauty of a home battery is that you get to control your energy costs. As an example, I program the battery to top up if needed between midnight and 6am, when we get super cheap electricity from the grid, and also between 11 and 2 during the day, when we get electricity for free from the grid. That will be useful in winter, if we have long dark days and less solar. It will mean in those darker periods we can still use cheap power stored in the battery. Even when the sun isn’t shining. You can see here also the overnight top up of the car. My trip to and from Bathurst yesterday, plus some driving within Bathurst, cost us $1.70. Many ute egos were harmed during that trip too. They were a bit cute with all their revving and gear-shifting, as they disappeared into the rearview mirror.

It appears many of those refusing to buy Teslas are...people who were never going to buy Teslas. 'Huge demand'. The Model Y is (deservedly) the biggest selling car in the world, genius design and engineering, with a new model out at the beginning of this year. Much of the reported collapse in demand for Teslas is people just waiting for the new model.

We have one high efficiency gas hot water heater, and one hybrid petrol vehicle left. Both are on the chopping block, to get the parasites in the fossil fuel industry out of our lives forever. Getting them out of your life will save you a fortune, and set you free. It’s also great for your health.

As once big acts descend on tiny regional towns to try to get any gigs, while acts in those local towns increasingly gravitate to themed cover band type shows to attract audiences, you can’t help but feel gig culture is over. A social model over 60 years old, very tired and now a bit ridiculous.