March 2025

Australia might go one better. It might elect a halfwit who wants to spend $600 billion (of your money) on foreign nuclear technology that nobody needs. Imagine the roads, schools, trains, hospitals and affordable housing $600 billion could buy.

What modern car nuts (mostly just guys of middle-age who used cars as a way of defining their social group as teenagers) don’t understand is that an EV is really a GT car. A grand tourer, gran turismo. Cars engineered for high performance, but also luxury comfort, refined suspension, for long distance high-performance driving in great comfort and style. The Mercedes 300SL is a classic car of the genre, with its gull-wing doors. Tesla even use those doors in their Model X. Teslas and most Chinese and Korean EVs in general are really GT cars, though because the motoring press and car nuts are mostly middle-aged teenagers, they don’t even see it and wouldn’t understand it if they could. So often they compare them with sports cars, a completely different category of vehicle. Americans tend to have long straight roads, so their high performance cars have tended to just be huge engines (’muscle cars’) with minimal sophistication in the driving dynamics. That’s also an Oz car nut favourite. Rubbish cars mostly, but like the guys doing the dance routine in Grease, they’re all about teen bonding rather than engineering and driving. Take a Tesla or other modern EV on a long touring drive, and enjoy the feeling of effortless, limitless power and torque, in extreme comfort and superb quiet that even classic GT cars can’t match. They’re the refinement of an art form. And now they’re priced for ordinary people, whereas historically GT cars were for the rich and famous only. A revolution happening right in front of you. Get into it.

What is often called a ‘tree change’ is more technically ‘rural gentrification’. For a while it gives an appearance of injecting dynamism back into regional communities. But it’s mostly people wanting a city lifestyle, but with far fewer people and less traffic. Eventually numbers create exactly what they were trying to escape, in the new location. Chasing a bucolic idyll, that is a fantasy and profoundly disrupts the places subject to it. Like tourism. They become theme parks for urban imaginations.

Have been trying Grok AI. I told it all of the details of my energy system at home. It said: “You’re basically running a masterclass in energy optimization here”.

Imagine if it had been an electric boat.

Toby Walsh in the Herald today, saying things about social media that I often say about it. That it’s hijacked our societies, we transact everything from our personal to professional to political lives inside it. That it doesn’t connect us, it splinters us into a proliferation of competing teams continually fighting each other over every single tiny topic. That’s its business model, that’s what the algorithms do. The fights drive traffic, traffic drives revenue.

Hear the dreams here? That’s gig culture, music as a pathway to status and wealth in adult life. A very rare, modern thing in history, from about the 1960s, and now in terminal decline for all but a handful. I would much rather deliver milk than be a rock star.

A bidding war between the two major parties on household batteries is the best news. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/02/labor-backs-household-batteries-in-bid-to-spark-voters-on-cost-of-living-and-climate-worries

There have been many criticisms of 'boomer' culture. Nearly always misunderstood as being about them as supposedly horrible human beings. But it's a *cultural* criticism, about a mindset and attitude. About the substitution of life, with lifestyle. About eternal youth (rock stars in their 80s, ffs). Ultimately about real damage to the very idea of being old. It's the generation that implemented high school culture, as adult culture, the cult of the perpetual teenager. It was all they knew, the adult world had been broken by war and plague. Some boomers get it. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/30/baby-boomers-led-the-cult-of-youth-now-we-should-heed-the-wisdom-of-age

This is a false distinction that I often post about. City v country. These aren’t two things, they’re one thing. Neither exists without the other. They’re a single form of life. There was no country without cities, and vice versa. What this single form of life doesn’t have, is any meaningful connection to the landscape. The city builds all over it, the country clear-fells and ploughs most of it. No conception of place, of any other living thing except humans. Not even of functioning geography, like flowing clean rivers. Meanwhile both city and country folk see the countryside as more of a view, a theme park selling a bucolic idyll. Again, no real relationship with any of the geography, flora or fauna, either killing and clear-felling it or treating it like a sanitised zoo exhibit. The city/country cultural form has no idea about place. It lives on, rather than in, the landscape.

Of course it will. Remember the ‘plan’ is to spend $600 billion taxpayer dollars - that’s ’your money’, as they like to say - to build nuclear plants for electricity. Electricity you can already get for free at home with solar and a battery, and which private firms are rushing to provide for us super cheaply at the grid level, with renewables, at their expense, not yours. Who will be paying Peter Dutton’s $600 billion bill? You. In your electricity bills.

Isn’t social media doing tremendous work? First, live with a pandemic! Now, live with ciggas! Wrap it all in some lame-brained conspiracy bullshit and people lap it up.

This is what's really going on in Trumpland. The tech moguls lining up to fellate Trump are there for a reason, for years now they've had the idea of replacing government with what they call 'The Network State'. Basically (their) software replaces government. It's totally unhinged, they have no clue at all about the complexity of running a country. There it is in the title of one of their bibles, "How to Start a New Country". Really it's just an old-fashioned coup. They're trying to take over a country. Crypto is one of their main tools as well, which is why it's now a hot trend.

The danger of social media isn't the information (and mis- and disinformation) it shares. Societies don't run on information. They run on status and trust. The real danger of SM is that it allows idiots to connect with one another and coordinate their stupidity, to become an actual political force. 'Influencers' quickly gain more status and power than official insitutions developed over decades.

The team sports of social media can achieve such a level of righteousness, that the team becomes a mob. People call this 'changing the world'. Really it's just being a mob. Looting, arson, vandalism. Some even gun CEOs down in the street, because the righteous cause apparently justified it. The Simpsons did a whole episode on this sort of behaviour. Many who watched it and laughed are now part of the anti-Tesla mob, went in one ear and straight out the other. It's disingenuous to say only some take it this far. It's all the one populist movement. This is how populism always ends. Bullies always have a big 'innocent' audience circling the beat up, cheering them on. It's why they do it.

Smart lady. Guess what killed her? Covid.

Humans copy one another. They imitate. Not just sometimes, it’s ALL they do. I remember seeing that suggested, and at first thinking no, it can’t be everything. It really is everything. Everything humans do is the imitation of other humans. And they do it to belong, to have status in some group. Here, the little girl imitates dad to ‘be like a grown up’. The great French thinker Rene Girard noticed that this gets very nasty, very fast. What he called ‘imitative rivalry’. Because when we imitate, we form a group. What I call a ‘team’. And that group then comes into contact with rival groups. They fight for status. Even within each group, this rivalry occurs.

On Council meeting duty tonight. Or as I prefer to call it, the cage fight between Facebook and democracy.

Companies now get away with not even advertising a salary for positions. A lot of young people won't have the confidence to nominate a fair salary, and employers know it. It's a reverse auction by the company to see who bids the lowest.

A motoring writer used AI to try to understand the drop in Tesla sales. The AI said 'with 70% certainty' that it was the introduction of the new Model Y, the most popular car in the world, and the delays in changing the Tesla production lines over to the new model. Can't buy a car that isn't yet available. Of course in social media world, this is a much less popular explanation than 'Swasticar' memes. People say AI is a terrible risk for society. It was the only voice of reason here, unlike the rampant uncontrolled mob rule of social media.

Great to see the Shark rocket into the Top 10. The RAV 4 is a tired hybrid, you'd be mad to buy one over a Sea Lion 6 for example. And dual-cab utes are literally the worst cars ever built. Hopeless as utes, hopeless as passenger cars, guzzle fuel, dangerous in accidents, aerodynamics of a brick. But they sell, because they're a status marker, not a vehicle.

"Hello? Hi, my house is in the path of a cyclone, and I forgot to insure it. Can I insure it now please?" People have GoFundMe for brains.

Beautiful Lithgow.

Clearly people want to shift to EVs, but range anxiety is still an issue for them. It's why there's such a surge in hybrid sales. Range anxiety in nearly every case is an actual mental illness (it's in the name), deliberately engineered with propaganda from the old car makers and fuel companies. There are now 88 full-EV models you can choose from in Australia. I can guarantee that if you buy a plug-in hybrid, you will almost immediately wish you had a full-EV, every time the petrol engine kicks in.

I'm genuinely curious what all the those who support the anti-Tesla protests have to say about this. There's no washing your hands of it, no half-pregnant membership of the mob. 130,000 employees and millions of Tesla owners are not the enemy. This is more of what social media is doing to our societies. Turning every issue into warring gangs, looting and burning. Violent adolescent mindsets, with no clue how to change the world except to smash it to bits. Every chuckling dickhead who posts memes about 'SwaSSticars' is fuelling this disgrace.

What Musk is trying to do with Trump in the US, Australia already did, with Robodebt. He wants to take over government departments and replace them with software. For that, Tesla property and Tesla owners have become targets. Let me ask the moral vacuum I see out there now. Is that how we should have approached Robodebt? Burning down LNP offices, targeting LNP supporters, threatening them and their propery to force them to vote for somebody else? No? So have a look in the mirror at what you support. Mob rule and vigilantism are indiscriminate. If you back it when it’s for a cause you believe in, your ‘team’, how will you feel when it turns on you and the things you cherish and believe in? Because it will. It is incoherent rage. You don’t get a little controlled amount of mob violence, once this begins as normal behaviour, it’s game over for everything. Looters are indiscriminate, ask shop owners when basic civic orders breaks down.

To give a bit more of the flavour of insanity that passes for public life now, you'll see these Foxtel dishes all over Australia. They're owned by Rupert Murdoch. If you think Murdoch is a cancer on democracy (and he is), should we go and rip the dishes off peoples' roofs, or burn them? Or threaten them with violence if they don't do it themselves? Please don't do any of those things. And not to Tesla, their infrastructure or their customers either. Grow the fuck up.

This has nothing to do with me owning a Tesla. It's to do with mob behaviour. How many carmaker CEOs could people actually name? Do they know their political positions on things? Do they happily support the brutal Saudi regime, every time they queue up for petrol? Are they still shopping at those evil supermarket 'duopolies'? This is classic social media 'trending' behaviour. Nothing at all to do with saving anything, just the desire to imitate what the rest of the mob is doing, because otherwise you might stand out from the mob. Completely selective attention, go read about Saudi Arabia to give your righteousness something to mull over next time you fill up. And Australia still doesn't have access to the new Model Y at volume amounts. The biggest selling car in the world. That's a huge contributor to those dropped sales. AI sees it.

The best help you can be for cyclone areas is to go to the GIVIT page and see what's actually needed. Not to copy the saviour-influencers in another bout of mob imitative euphoria. We really don't need another mob.

The free speech warriors only mean their own speech.

The autopsy findings in the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife are interesting. Hackman died of natural heart problems and advanced Alzheimers. His wife died of a hantavirus, viruses you get from mice and rats. The chronology suggests she may have died several days before her husband. The fact he didn’t report it maybe suggests his Alzheimers meant he was alone in the house for days not sure what was going on, with his wife dead on the floor. Always kill rats and mice as soon as you see them in your house (sorry Jenni!) An indoor cat very useful there. A cat also recommended by an elderly friend to stop parrots from eating the fruit out of your fruit trees!

Trump and Musk’s cuts to ‘red tape’ include staff who provide weather forecasts in the US.

Electricity is still very cheap in America. This is cost per kWh. In Australia most people pay at least twice these rates, sometimes triple. Why the difference? It’s mostly the last place people expect to look. Australia’s energy system was privatised, by idiot politicians who told us it would make it all more efficient and cheaper. They also banked the revenue from the sales to pay for election bribes, while their cronies in the power generation system made a fortune. The American system, home of the free market, is still mostly run as public utilities, that control the system, including prices.

Tesla sales in the UK surged by 20% in February. Overall EV sales there are up over 40%. The Tesla Model Y is the second most popular car in the UK, the Model 3 is the 3rd most popular. Sales also surging in Korea and China. When the monkey-see/monkey-do mob obsession with anti-Tesla memes and burning things to the ground fades and its attention moves to its next meaningless target, normal service will resume. Do people not notice this pattern? How the mob picks a target, you get a few months of pile-on, then it gets bored and picks another one? Supermarkets not long ago. Men, under #metoo. Insurance companies. Once the mob’s bored attention shifts, little has changed and life returns to how it was before. Like a Mexican wave at a cricket game.

Filled up the hybrid this morning. I drive hundreds of km every week, split 50:50 between the Tesla and the Toyota hybrid. The hybrid cost me $100 in fuel for the fortnight. That’s a hybrid, it’d be $200-$300 for a full petrol or diesel. What did the Tesla cost me for its half of the fortnight’s commuting? $9. And it was brutally, gloriously powerful and silent, extreme driving enjoyment.

1 year of free fast-charging. Tesla offering 5000km of free fast-charging on run-out stock of the previous Model Y. Incredible bargains out there. In the UK not only have EV sales surged, petrol and diesel sales have plummeted. None of it is reported, because existing media have such deep connections with fossil fuel and car companies. Why you see nothing but made-up ‘nobody is buying EVs’ stories.

The public have been told that Covid has become ‘endemic’. It’s a lie, it will never be an endemic virus. Endemic means it’s always there, but at very low levels, with occasional small outbreaks. Covid is and always will be an epidemic virus. This is the UK data, the red is current infection rates. Classic epidemic waves, infecting millions of people. I’ve added a line in blue for what endemic would look like. Again, Covid will never be that. There’s a feeling that Covid will eventually settle down to the endemic low level. But smallpox as a comparison remained epidemic for over 300 years. Only a vaccine stopped it. The current vaccines won’t do that for Covid, it’s far too immune-evasive. Look at the UK red line there, it hasn’t budged since 2019, wave after wave after wave. It will remain an epidemic killing machine.

Grok is a new AI platform. It sees what Covid is and does. Social media calls it a cold.

I had hoped this bullshit would skip Australia and NZ. But the glory of social media is that one idiot doing something is quickly imitated by other idiots, who I actually don't think even believe they're changing the world. They just love the excuse to be part of a mob.

Mob rule is the addiction to moral panics. Look around and you'll see these appear continuously, at the moment it's Teslas and Elon Musk, a while back it was supermarkets and Qantas, etc. There will always be a moral panic now, which will last a varied amount of time. Sometimes days, sometimes weeks. The real function of moral panics is to find a scapegoat for a current social tension, and by destroying it (or trying to), to release that tension. That doesn't end anything, a fresh moral panic appears straight away. Rinse and repeat, forever, especially with social media. https://spsp.org/news/character-and-context-blog/puryear-social-media-doomscrolling-moral-panic

It’s politicians who approve building on flood plains and who do nothing against climate change. They need a distraction, and insurers are always it in natural disasters now. Queue the next mob pile-on. Heck it may even stop people threatening Tesla owners. Or maybe we can run two mobs at once.

The righteous wear thongs. It would be good if a leader of some description came out and said 'um, we don't take the law into our own hands and vandalise innocent people's property'. But they don't have the courage any more to actually lead anything. I imagine this guy is about to be on the receiving end of righteous violence himself, if the police don't find him first. That's what mob rule is.

The Sealion 7 is now for sale in Australia. Like most BYDs, you're getting a LOT of high quality car for a small price. This is BYD's Tesla Model Y challenger, though it's not as hard to challenge Tesla in the current environment. This was originally on my list of possible buys, it's a beautiful car to drive in, luxury huge interior, and awesome and quiet electric power. The thing that ultimately sent me Tesla's way though is the efficiency. The BYD uses about 1.5 times the electricty the Tesla I bought does, on a trip. Though you'll still be paying way less than you would for petrol or diesel.

A starter motor. I love that you can't even start a combustion engine, without an electric engine. Same reason you have to idle the petrol, or diesel, burning fuel, while you're stationary, like at the traffic lights. I sit at the lights listening to some diesel ute idling next to me, sounding like a tractor. Nothing says better what rubbish technology combustion engines are.

This is why no matter how many times you catch Covid, you won’t become immune to it. Covid creates no lasting immunity. Ro is a measure of how infectious a disease is, a Ro of 18 means one person can infect 18 others. While the first 4 diseases listed can create lasting immunity if you catch them, Covid won’t. It’s also almost as infectious as measles, the gold standard for massive infection. When a politician or even doctor tells you we’re all developing ‘hybrid immunity’ (vaccination + infection) to Covid, they’re lying. Covid is the ultimate killing machine. If you’re celebrating that it gave you only ‘mild illness’, that’s it tricking your immune system. It’s why it creates no long lasting immunity. It can infect you over and over and over, damaging you more every time.

The mob is turning on Coldplay a bit now. Bands becoming less ‘cool’ is the group of people who follow them losing some of their social status. This is the point I make about ‘gig culture’, bands were used to help define peoples’ social status and identity. You can see it clearly when the band loses cool. It’s brutal for the artists, Phil Collins for example never really recovered from the mob turning on him.

Buying a fragrance because a high-status person is associated with it (I doubt they wear it) is about as dumb as life gets. But it sells. This is pure peer pressure, team sports life. Adults doing what teenagers do, trying to be high status by copying the people they see as having status.

The thought of the MAGAs now buying Teslas to emulate the Great Leader amuses me. The thought of even more social media mob zombies heading out with spray paint doesn‘t. It’s like living in a childcare centre for adults, all sides as stupid as each other. Maybe they can go and deface Coles or Woolies, or Qantas, except they’ve already forgotten those mob outings. And the banks! Nobody keeps track of the total absence of change from any of these mob outrages.

This was a major reason we ended up with a home battery, even more than the cost savings. It was to have reliable power even in disasters. It’s already saved us multiple times, in only just over 2 years, while streets around us had no power. The Australian grid is fragile, because of the vast distances. A home battery creates a micro-grid if the main grid goes down. If you have solar with no battery, your solar turns off too when the main grid goes down. Right now the battery is also allowing me to run the house entirely on solar, and low-or-zero cost grid energy, because I can charge it whenever I choose. Even ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’, for the mental midgets.

This is more like it, the days when gym machines were our slaves and did all of the work. Some very intense rubbing from some of these, I bet they were popular.

A President doing an infomercial for his largest donor, with the White House as the backdrop. The US is over. Buy a Tesla, they're phenomenal cars. They'll survive much longer than Musk or Trump. Not buying them won't get rid of either of them. Buying them will accelerate their demise.

Posted before about this (Australian) revolution in artificial hearts. The plan is to be able to use these indefinitely, rather than have to get a donor heart. Right now it's already giving people with heart failure an option, who are waiting for a donor heart. Very often none becomes available. (P.S. the guy in the headline is fine, they found a donor heart for him, but he coud have kept going with the artificial heart, we won't know how long until they try.)

Yep. You won’t get it until you experience it. It’s night and day.

In all my years of working I’ve noticed the same patterns. The more senior a person gets in an organisation, the more the focus of their work is ‘restructuring’ their area to offload their work to somebody else. Usually sold as a ‘strategic’ change, a clear red flag word for work-dumping. Also the more senior you get in most organisations, the further you get from actual hands-on work. You spend your days discussing the ‘big picture’, which is really just drawings and big words on bits of paper, these days with lots of fancy data added. Then you ‘drill down’ through all that mountain of baloney, to supposedly get back to where you started i.e. the hands-on work. I’ve never had or wanted a career. But I did make a decision to end my working life going in the exact opposite direction. To go back to hands-on work. The distinction between the specific and the general, the micro and the macro, is fake. You will never be closer to the universal truth of your organisation than when you’re solving everyday ‘operational’ problems.

The idiot memes about broken windmills never mention that in the past 2 years, there hasn’t been a single day when one or more of our coal-powered generators hasn’t had a breakdown. The nuclear ‘plan’ for Australia relies upon these to keep going well past their use-by date too. It would be a disaster.

The Welcome Stranger nugget is the largest alluvial gold nugget ever found, in 1869 in Victoria, over 70kg of gold. What I find most fascinating about it though is how it shows so well that what we value is socially defined. It was buried beneath only a few centimetres of dirt, under a tree. Aboriginal people no doubt discovered it some time before, but had little to no interest in it. Most of what I post to FB is about these social behaviours. We covet what others have, we imitate or emulate it when we can’t directly take it. The value is not in the object itself, we do exactly the same thing for things made of paper. Value comes from the social status the object allows us to have.

The genius of the renewables transition is that everybody wins. (Except foreign fossil fuel and nuclear companies.) For example, with OVO's supercheap overnight rates, and free energy between 11am and 2pm every day, combined with the solar we're paying nothing at all to power both the house and car. So we're big winners. How does OVO win? Renewables make wholesale electricity so cheap that OVO makes money both with the cheap overnight rates, and even giving electricity away for free during the middle of the day (the grid pays OVO to use it). And then it also gets our exported solar to sell to other customers, at a markup rate of nearly 1200%. Anybody who isn't shifting their household to renewables and transport to EV may as well be burning cash to keep warm. Anybody voting for nuclear power as a way to get cheap electricity has a mental illness.

We believe what our gang or team leader says we should believe. Nobody is paying any attention to the actual details. It's all team sports, your team against somebody else's team. The team leader can say completely opposite things from one day to the next, and the team will be right behind them, saying that was their view all along. "Former Fox broadcaster and now Trump booster Sean Hannity, a relentless critic of “woke” EVs, also went out and bought a Tesla Model S Plaid, which he boasted could get from 0 to 100 kmh in just two seconds." https://thedriven.io/2025/03/12/trump-and-right-wing-pundits-buy-unusable-teslas-in-pivot-to-shore-up-musks-ev-company/?fbclid=IwY2xjawI_KRJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHTRQvCQhdVSU1HkuoxMdA0xFP4yqRhvgEvyxM2CBs7WvEdK6uzBs0YzH0g_aem_6IYm09ccDR-a26O7AJ9i5A

If only there was a way to have no electricity bills. Or petrol or diesel bills...

Incredibly powerful way to see so much about Australian life. - we’re one of the most urbanised nations on Earth, though we pretend we all live in the outback (which we can’t define) - that level of urbanisation is what makes us such a peaceful and pragmatic place. Urbanised communities tend to be more peaceful and cosmopolitan. It’s nearly always regional and remote areas that breed the most toxic politics - we don’t live in Australia, we live on it. We’re tourists in our own land, that vast expanse that is barely occupied is not much more than tourist destinations, farms and mines for us. Nearly all ‘country’ towns owe their existence to some extractive industry, and still do.

A whole street, yesterday afternoon, people sitting in their stationary petrol and diesel clunkers with the windows up, engines and air con running. That’s the stupid of old energy thinking in one 4-second clip. Lovely noxious exhaust fumes for the kids to breathe in as they come out of school too, bonus.

Toyota, which has pretended that we don’t need EVs only because it was caught with its pants down (in the background they’ve been in panic mode trying to build them). Its bZ4x is OK, this new C-HR+ looks much better. Good power and range and features. All copied from Tesla, you’re still better off buying one of those, or a Chinese EV. But any EV is better than a petrol or diesel shitbox.

Angus is looking more like Gollum every day.

Rio Tinto is Australia's largest user of electricity. Not least because it runs aluminium smelters, which use huge amounts. It's just announced it will be powering these using solar, wind and batteries. The reason? Nothing to do with being 'Green'. It said renewables and batteries are much cheaper and are far more reliable.

Temperatures in Greenland are 20 degrees above average. The ice covering much of Greenland if melted has the potential to stop the major ocean currents that transport heat between hemispheres.

When governance is your job, it’s a bit like how everybody thinks they know about education, because they went to school. Everybody is a supposed expert in government, because they vote. Most don’t have a clue. For example, the two most ‘authoritarian’ regimes of our lifetimes. China and Russia. How did those regimes start? As democratic revolutions. Using ideas imported from the West. ‘The people’ uprising. The sort of thing people out there burning Teslas think is social progress. The rubbish 1960s-style activism has sold to us for decades now as the path to freedom. Are we noticing that Trump is like Lenin and Mao?

A brilliant idea. And even if you’re not a renter, it’s a brilliant option to buy a home battery and tap into the super cheap and even free rates some retailers are already offering, even if you don’t want to install solar. Combine the two and it’s money for jam, right now we have 9 hours a day where grid power is either entirely free or as good as, and I top the battery up with that if needed, while pumping out the solar to earn feed-in money too. Most days I have so much free energy to play with, I’m not sure what to do with it. I’m praying for clouds! Air conditioning or heating the entire home too. And people want us to spend half a trillion dollars on nuclear plants, ffs. The entire house *and* car are running for free, there’s even a profit in it. Both major parties will likely offer subsidies for home batteries at the election, but I wouldn‘t even wait, that might be another year of free energy you miss out on.

Happy 40th!

Internal Liberal Party polling suggests 52% of women now prefer Peter Dutton as a possible PM. Now I can understand men thinking that, God gave us a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time. And several million years of evolution and we define ourselves, as men, by the ute we buy. But ladies?

They can now recycle and re-use every square millimetre of an EV battery. How much petrol or diesel can you recycle in a vehicle? None. 70% of it doesn’t even move the vehicle, it goes straight out the exhaust as heat, and noise and gas pollution. Rubbish technology.

Another urban myth. Citronella candles are useless against mozzies. DEET is the gold standard, like in Aeroguard. Roll or spray a bit of that on, forget the candles. This is starting to really matter even in temperate areas, becoming almost sub-tropical with climate change. A tourist died just recently in this area from Japanese encephalitis, carried by mozzies.

I haven’t followed Rick Astley‘s career closely, which hit me most seeing him sing AC/DC while drumming. Strangely compelling.

How’s everybody’s autumn going?

Listen to this very short clip of the chief vehicle engineer and chief designer at Tesla explaining how they design cars. The genius of what they’ve done, and why I ignore the pile-on moral outrage on Tesla right now. The outraged have been driving Saudi-powered vehicles for decades, and haven’t lost a wink of sleep. What’s the genius? Previously cars lived in segments. Performance cars, electric cars, petrol cars, diesel cars, family cars, sports cars, super efficient cars, grand tourers, affordable cars, luxury cars etc. Tesla’s genius was to say hey, why don’t we make cars that are all of those things, at the same time? At a price ordinary people can afford? And they did it, a wonder of modern engineering. Their cars are used by families, are the safest cars in the world, while also having some of the best performance, are also super efficient and luxury. All in the one vehicle. You’ll see self-appointed guardians of all the old segments criticise them from within their segment, which proves Tesla nailed it. It exploded the segments.

US influencers by follower numbers. Red is conservative, blue Democrat. There’s a lot of angst about mis/disinformation today. Societies don’t run on information, they run on status. They’re not a huge crowd of people swapping their ‘free speech’, they’re hubs of influence creating closed universes of meaning for their followers. The loudest voices for free speech are the leaders of these hubs, usually already the only voices being heard.

America doesn’t have much of a functioning public sphere. So everything there sounds like an Avengers movie. If you want the government out of your life, maybe move there? It’s going well.

Seeing this in the US now, people with duelling cameras on sidewalks, filming each other in Western-style standoffs. Then they mace the other if they get too close. This is the idiot world social media has created, do stupid thing then get millions of others to imitate the stupid thing. Like burning Teslas. Then one of them calls the police, who then have to adjudicate between the morons. Not unlike a day working in local government. Society is a high school.

Let’s say people decided that those who drive petrol and diesel vehicles are supporting the authoritarian Saudi regime and causing dangerous climate change, so others should key their cars, set them alight and abuse the drivers, to force them to stop buying petrols and diesels. How would that be? No? Do people not see how outrageous this behaviour is? How social media turns ordinary people into zombie-mobs of righteousness? Like the morons who light fires in summer, because they see other people lighting fires. Why are there no statements from leaders or police? I know why, because politicians are gutless and scared of going against the mob. Some probably even cheer it on. What a world, life in eternal high school.

Now now.

The greatest and most misguided prejudice of human thought is that small things are simple, and big things are complex. It’s the other way around. Microbes are far more complex than humans, for example, in fact humans are just microbes. They build us and live in us.

The car lobby is also the parking lobby. Nothing exercises Bathurst more for example than parking spaces. What causes increased traffic and increased need for parking, is new roads and new parking spaces. It induces demand, just as building or raising dams doesn’t increase water supply, it increases demand for water. The only thing that fixes both traffic and parking is fewer roads, and less parking. Only that can force a shift to different solutions.

Ultra-conservatives realised they can vacuum up votes of young men with a steady diet of angry social media and radio. Trump's success is largely that. Dutton is emulating him, with some success.

My experience with EVs is that rather than feel frustrated that they may be slower to charge than it takes to put petrol and diesel in, it's actually hugely refreshing to have an extra 5-10 minutes to stretch the legs and relax. Particularly as you don't fast-charge for most driving, only for long trips, where you need the break. I've only used a fast-charger twice, and both times it was for the novelty, I didn't need to. And unlike a fuel bowser, you don't have to hold anything, the charger is hands-free, so you can wander off and do anything you like. When fuelling a petrol or diesel you have to do all of the fuelling first, and go in and pay for it, then come out and move the car, before you can do anything else. If anything often you end up spending more time doing all that than for charging an EV.

Ooops.

Social media had a big Bathurst victory yesterday. You’ll read about it in Council news in the coming days. Meanwhile in the US a social media cult destroying America is under assault from a social media mob destroying America. The sharp-eyed will see the common thread there - destroying America.

Apparently somewhere in Denmark. It’s funny, but old-fashioned grown ups would see an accelerating collapse of basic human decency and civic order. Frat boy culture, soon to be Lord of the Flies.

The Chinese have nicknamed Trump 'The Nation Builder'. The nation they're talking about is China.

The survey of Germans which last week showed that no Germans would ever buy a Tesla again, now shows that nearly 70% WOULD buy a Tesla. Nearly half a million respondents now. The anti-Tesla mob hysteria will pass. Just as the supermarket hysteria passed. And the bank hysteria. And the Voice referendum hysteria. Why can't we have hysteria about an actual problem, like Covid?

lol, yeh this is where we’re at.

And this is where we are. Nothing is more dangerous than mass, righteous stupidity.

Bathurst is going to awaken every day to the consequences of wanting to spend more on dining out, take away food and recreational travel, than on its civic life.

I can't comment much on Bathurst issues, but see this mistake all the time. 'Management' of local government i.e. full-time Council staff, don't make the big decisions about what happens in a town. Those decisions are made by elected councillors, and are then implemented by Council staff. When a Council is 'sacked' it's the elected councillors who are sacked, for this same reason. Not the Council staff.

Two Australian Tesla owners discussing their car servicing. I honestly do pity those bogged down in social media anti-EV (and now anti-Tesla) tripe.

In the UK the social media idiocy is focused on split-system AC. The fossil fuel industry there sponsors the BS, just as they sponsor a lot of the anti-EV BS here. You can see how how they shape their strategy by country, nobody gives a flying fig about reverse-cycle AC here, but the English are awash with ridiculous gas boilers to heat their homes and water. So they sponsor anti-EV rubbish here, and anti-AC rubbish there, to scare the simple-minded.

The lifestyles of rock stars reveals the true function of gig culture. To create a fast-track to high status life. Old aristocratic villas in Europe are lived in by rock stars. Being in a band wasn’t really about music. It was a pathway to social status. Every band dreams of ‘making it’. And the ‘it’ isn’t music, it’s success. Status in society.

Model Y pricing announced for Australia. Best car in the world, and biggest seller. $1000 cheaper than the old model, a total bargain. Or you could not buy one because that horrible 'Elon' isn't on your bestie list, and live like a teenager forever. That's very on-trend.

Glaciers are essential to the water and food supply of 2 billion people. We’re melting them.

The Los Angeles Times calls what’s happening ‘troubling’, while people here cheer on the destruction. The Times notes this is an American disease. I’ve worked for organisations with toxic senior leadership. It never once occurred to me or any other good people in those organisations to destroy the organisation, to get rid of the leadership. Social media is spreading this insanity globally. The American disease of targeting institutions, for problems caused by individuals.

The thing most populations now are completely addicted to, social media, is destroying their societies as they use it. This Lithgow experience is shared by councils everywhere. If you think ‘attack’ is too strong a word, come work at a Council for a day. It’s an escalating all-out assault on public institutions. Incoherent rage and righteousness. Which cynical local politicians say is ‘the voice of the people’. It’s nothing of the sort, it’s gangs of thugs mobilised via social media.

It’s so important to remember the magnitude of both the ambition and the material achievement of this organisation. The Chinese have copied it, Tesla was the trailblazer. You can see some of the actual material outcomes of this achievement in the video, these are acts literally helping save civilisation itself. It’s this that there is absolutely no need to destroy, just because our schoolyard modern populist politics is based on personal like or dislike of individuals. There are far smarter ways to decouple Musk from Tesla, than destroying the organisation itself, that’s utter, social media (childish) insanity.

Batteries too now. The great tide of zombie-morons marches on, smashing everything in its wake. Backed by locally-elected champions from social media, who mobilise the morons.

Trump wants to be free of the rule of law entirely. Democracy isn’t elections, it’s parliament + judiciary + executive power. Elections aren’t even in the top level. But populists like Trump tell people elections are democracy, and anybody ‘unelected’ is just getting in the way. The same bullshit people elected to councils say when they assemble a FB group and then say they’re the ‘will of the people’.

I’m at an age where the body often stiffens, and the doctor and physio will advise regular stretching to keep it loose, to stretch out those stiffnesses. To release tensions in the body. The problem with this though is that everything in the body is connected to everything else. Nobody really takes that basic fact seriously. You can stretch one part of you, but that will then tighten other connected parts. None of it makes sense. Or my Alexander friends will talk about ‘releasing the neck’, or ‘letting the neck be free’. But the neck is connected to your head at one end, and to your torso at the other. Your neck can’t be free of your head or your torso unless it’s chopped off. A free neck absolutely does correspond with your body being free everywhere else, because we evolved from worms and where our head goes, the rest of us definitely follows. So how do you free your neck, and therefore allow your whole body to be free? There’s only one way. You take your attention, centred on your head, out into the world around you, and allow the rest of your body, including your neck, to follow it. You ‘release’ YOU, into the world. Then that release cascades down your body, as it follows that attention out in the world, releasing the whole of you out into your activity, in the world. Your attention leads, then your head, neck, torso, hips, legs etc. all follow it, in an articulated cascade, every moment. There’s no tightness or tension because everything is releasing from everything else, out into the world. That’s how you’re designed, like a giant worm. Some wonder, so what keeps you up, if you’re not down in your body with your attention ‘holding yourself up’? The ground underneath you, pushing up into your body. We don’t fall down with gravity, we’re pushed up by it. That feeling of your contact with the ground is a pushing up, not a falling down. That pushing stretches all of you at once, your tissues are elastic and store the stretch. It’s that elastic stored energy you then release, as your body follows your attention out into the world. We’re gravity-powered.

I get some snide remarks at work about still masking. Often from people coughing between their chortling. I see firsthand their health falling off a cliff, a day at a time, as their immune system gradually shuts down. People with hives, pneumonia, persistent coughs, bloody eyes, dangerously low heart rates, dizziness, breathlessness etc. etc. Your ‘mild’ repeated cases of Covid are its genius, it tricks your immune system, so that it barely responds. Then it gets to work. It will end your life much earlier than you would like. Not today, but that day will arrive well ahead of how long you’d have lived, without those infections. If you feel more comfortable just doing what everybody else is doing as your guide to health, and let’s face it that makes for an easier life, just be prepared that reality doesn’t give a shit what ‘everybody else is doing’.

Remember when elderly people bought Smokey Dawson chairs? Do you reckon rock stars realise they’re now elderly?

Community doesn’t want higher rates. Council cancels events and services to save money instead. Community outrage at cancelling of events and services. Community funds alternative events, using money it won’t pay in rates. Bring on retirement.

Listen to the almost nervous, long justification he gives for buying the car, and you’ll hear how the choices we make on cars (and everything) are entirely about fitting in to this or that social group. We never leave high school.

Another aspect of gig culture that is bizarre, but is missed because our own culture is usually invisible, as culture, is the idea of music being ‘performed’. A tiny number of musicians, on a stage, performing music to thousands. Imagine painting, or sculpture, or photography, or ceramics, performed to a stadium full of people. It would seem ridiculous, art as performance. Gig culture is an encounter between music and the theatre, in this way. Theatre is performed. That’s the secret sauce to understanding gig culture. We watch theatre to imagine ourselves in the situations being performed on stage. Gig culture is the same. Not so much about music, but about the worship of celebrity. That’s what’s on show, what we imagine ourselves as in theatre terms. The music is a soundtrack to that worship, of fame and social status.

Reading the real life (joyful) experiences of people who bought a Shark reinforces even more strongly how changing a car culture is like deprogramming somebody who's been in a cult. Unbelievably strong forces of peer pressure, the visceral fear people have of going against the crowd. None of it ever has to do with actual engineering, or driving. It's 100% people still behaving like they're at school, and trying to be in the 'in' group.

I used to wear Crocs, and became notorious for it because they were considered socially 'out'. Now they're all the rage. If you look, you'll find everything in life, child or adult, follows this same basic mechanism. Science, politics, cars, business, music, relationships etc. It's all the same mechanism, of peer pressure, with people joining a group or team, and using it to define their status and therefore identity, in battle with other teams. What I mean by 'we never leave high school'. That is literally true, and most often we don't even notice we're doing it.

The Guardian calling it out. None of the 'teams' in the gender wars has it right. They're using peoples' bodies and identities as ammunition in a social media-driven battle for status, led by activists. Lives are being destroyed, you won't find a more violating example of how social media is a wrecking ball through societies and their people.

M3 = Model 3 Tesla. For those suffering from range anxiety, notice he drove Brisbane to Bathurst with no issues at all. And it’s true what he says, the driving is so pleasurable you almost hate getting out of the car at the destination. Most would never go back to a petrol or diesel, the experience would be just too frustratingly awful.

If highly remunerated senior managers aren't implementing an organisation's strategy, what are they being paid for? Not just singling out CSU here, this is very common. First senior managers remove themselves from operational work, to devise supposedly brilliant strategies. Which they then get somebody else, often consultants, to write for them anyway. Then they pay somebody else to implement them. The great genius of MBA-driven management is to vastly increase what a senior manager gets paid, while vastly decreasing the meaningful work they have to do.

Imagine lapping up every scare campaign that politicans and big firms throw out there, as if it was something you always believed in. 2 years ago these people wouldn't have known what a wind turbine is. They still don't know.

"The company has 20,000 R&D engineers, and submits an average of 45 patent applications and 20 patent licenses every day." (BYD)

The biggest story in the world yesterday, that was barely reported. PNG turned off social media. It’s had enough of these platforms trashing its society. But just wait, it won’t last. Ordinary people and businesses there are so addicted to Facebook, they’ll demand it back. That’s what ‘enshittification’ means, Cory Doctorow’s idea. These platforms hijack all human groups, and transform them into warring gangs. That fighting generates revenue. That’s why everybody is now arguing about everything. Every single public issue is now a war between social media teams, including things people didn’t even know about before, let alone care about. Like energy. Just look, you can’t miss it. That’s the social media business model, destroying your world.

In Bathurst social media warriors are outraged that Council has a single electric truck. But it’s an open question whether towns even exist now anyway, or whether they’re just a collection of social media groups. (And by the way, truckers who try electric trucks are like people who drive EVs. They swear they’d never go back to combustion engines.)

Happy Birthday, Miffany! 👯🥂

HBD! ☕🎉👯

I saw a local politician complain about windmills being 'as tall as Sydney Tower!' as a reason to reject them. The reason they make them so tall now is because of morons like that politician. A few tall ones means fewer windmills in total. It also allows windmills to access wind undisturbed by wind shear nearer the ground, from trees and other objects. Few know that some of the earliest large structures in European Australia were windmills. All over Sydney, to provide flour for the settlers. There was no social media then, so morons weren't running the country.

Many Australians believe the car industry is a competition between ICEs and EVs. There is no competition, ICEs are being phased out globally. Not one car company is planning to keep building petrol and diesel vehicles, long term. Both European and Japanese car makers may not even survive. 108 car factories in Europe alone, under threat of total decimation from Chinese EVs. BYD sales in the UK grew 550% in January.

Status runs societies. People who glory in anti-establishment protest in their youth fall over themselves for knighthoods in their autumn years. Fake wars against the establishment are one of the fastest routes to status, within the establishment. Just ask The Beatles, or any of the bands of the 1960s now living in country estates. Or local councillors who sweep to power bashing councils.

Wanted to reshare this for those who still question whether human activity is causing a dangerous change to the climate. People have seriously no idea of the magnitude of the emergency.

The greatest superpower a human can have is to be comfortable being alone.

Sickness in NHS staff, UK. The blue arrow marks the point where the world decided to ‘live with’ Covid. Meanwhile millions in the UK now have Long Covid, adding further stress to a broken health system, with an ageing population to boot. Societies will not survive this. But people won’t be told. Too many gigs and OS trips to pack in. Kidults, living their best (short) lives.

He left out ‘way more powerful and a total hoot to drive’.

The delicious irony of this is that Musk became unpopular only when he started championing the anti-government views of people like Jeremy Clarkson. Both men are knobs.

Thoughts? How will we fund roads?! (Sorry, another anti-EV myth, that EV drivers don't fund roads. Fuel excise doesn't fund roads, and this shows it.) The only thing I buy at servos is packets of chips.

The ALP is offering $150 electricity bill rebates, and the LNP 25c off every litre of fuel. It's a great example of how big the savings are by going electric. With 25c off every litre of fuel, at current prices of around $1.70 per litre, that's about 15% off your current fuel bill. If you drive 800km on a tank, that means the saving will give you about 120km for free, each time you fill up. Over the year, say you fill up every fortnight, that'll give you just over 3000 km of free motoring. With the $150 electricity rebate, I can put 1,875 kWh of energy into my EV. The EV averages about 14 kWh for every 100 km. That means I can drive about 13,500 km, on that one rebate of $150. That's a lap of Australia.

No outcry from me. If you're against windfarms, you're a moron. Brutal times need brutal truths. Completely exhausted all patience with stupidity.

Daylight Saving Time (really Dark Morning Time, no daylight is saved) is a pointless thing to fight against, it’s way too popular. And what’s popular now wins. People even think that’s democracy. Until what’s popular is Trump, then they wonder what went wrong. Seriously people, who enjoys getting up in the dark every day, starting already in summer? You expect it in winter, but now the majority of the year many have to get up in the dark, every day.

Murdoch is society's cancer. Social media is that cancer metastasising. Start fights, fights generate teams, teams generate votes. Always the same business model.

No builder wants to build cheap homes because they’ll send them broke. No gas company wants cheap gas for the same reason. This is primary school maths. The LNP has also stopped talking about nuclear, because they know it’s a ruinously expensive fantasy, that all experts and even the public now see through.

This UK car dealer bought a used Tesla with 350,000 km on the clock. Listen to him explain here what servicing had been done on the Tesla in those 350,000 km. (Summary: virtually nothing, except changed tyres and wiper blades.) It still drives like new today.

This is how clickbait works. When you read the Yahoo poll this story comes from, they only surveyed MAGA loyalists in Red states i.e. people who hate all EVs, don’t own one and never plan to buy one.

Vera Kober.

Given that access to quality medical care is increasingly near impossible to get, and that even health staff are caught up in delusional fantasies perpetrated by social media like anti-vax, and ‘living with’ pandemics, AI may be a great friend to many. Social media is a far greater threat to the world, than AI. We’re hysterical about the latter, and addicted to the former.

Household electricity use is actually quite a small component of household budgets. A much, much bigger component of those budgets is what it costs for people to fuel their vehicles. That’s also part of your energy bill. People like SKY Australia won’t talk about that, because they want to attack renewables and EVs, things that fix both problems at the same time. They’re acting for the fossil fuel industry, not for households.

Measles outbreaks in Western Australia and Victoria. Tthe world’s most contagious disease. The cause is 100% people using social media to run their lives, with Vitamin A and other ‘natural’ bullshit, instead of a vaccination. Here’s a bit of science.

When you paint flowers, you create flowers made of paint. Not a likeness of flowers, but actual flowers, made of paint. If that sounds bizarre, think about how bizarre the idea of a resemblance or likeness is. How would paint ‘look like’ something else? Paint and flowers are different things. If something looks like something else, in some ways it is that something else. They share common properties. Otherwise you have to make up some magical way that a painting can ‘capture’ a likeness. What could be captured? (Another painting by Vera Kober.)

The English countryside is one of the great attractions in the world today. The interesting thing about it is that most people know that it’s almost entirely man-made. But when they look at the Australian landscape, they only see wild ‘bush’. The Australian landscape was created over tens of thousands of years, by human design. The ‘bush’ we see today is that astonishing creation, falling apart. There’s a mystery about Australia, the greatest mystery in all human history. How that landscape was made, and how humans lived in it for tens of thousands of years, when other civilisations all collapsed inside a thousand. You can feel that mystery, when you live in Australia. But you have to be attuned to it. The place feels genuinely ancient, way beyond the historical time of other places, like Europe. Something astonishing happened here, and we don’t quite know what, and we may now never know. Continuous civilisation for tens of thousands of years, it’s almost impossible to imagine it. What we laughably call ancient history, with things like the pyramids, is all modern compared to Australia. Australia is the greatest thing, by far, that humanity has ever created. Australia was CREATED, it was made. It’s not ‘nature’. We look for machines as evidence of civilisation, and buildings. But a landscape is a far, far greater engineering achievement. Nobody knows how they did it. The earliest European accounts of Australia were of a place of wonder, of almost impossible beauty. The blatant racism and God-given superiority complex of European colonialism couldn’t fathom that the local black ‘savages’ could have done it. They assumed it was all nature, and the ‘blacks’ just hunted as primitives, and ate berries and witchetty grubs, inside this nature. You know when people are asked where they would go, if time machines existed? For me Australia pre-1788 would be the only thing on the list. To see firsthand the wonders we’ve now mostly destroyed, with farms and fences. To see how the then locals had cracked the code of permanent civilisation, something no other people have ever done.

As an Australian, when I see pics like this, I don’t ooh and ahh about what a beautiful place it is, or about what a great place that would be to take a holiday, or to churn up with a 4WD. The last thing I want to feel is a tourist in my own land - Australia, the Theme Park - but we don’t have many other options. I feel an ancient presence in Australia, that I’ve not felt anywhere else in the world. Just pitching a tent in the outback won’t give you that feeling, that’s one of the delusions of travel, that ‘being there’ somehow brings you closer to the reality of a place. It’s why I think Australians travel so obsessively, to try to connect with the place via accumulation. “I’ve been everywhere, man”. But that’s just movement and accumulation, not connection. There’s something deeply, darkly mysterious about here. Humans here confronted the deepest parts of reality, and understood something that has probably now been lost forever. But some of that understanding survives in the landscape. It’s an eerie presence, which we try to capture in the hopeless idea of ‘the outback’. Nothing is more complex than a landscape, we pride ourselves on building jumbo jets and computers. They’re toddler toys next to building a functioning landscape. This isn’t ‘nature’ you see. It’s a constructed feat of engineering.

Mercedes debunk the myths around the need for always faster-charging EV times. As they say, the average petrol or diesel fuelling takes 10-12 minutes already. That's as fast as fast EV charging needs to be (and already is), and for most use cases you don't even need anything like that. And most EV drivers *never use fast chargers*, except on long trips.

The fascism/Nazi rubbish on social media, in relation to both Trump and Tesla, is historically ignorant (no surprise there, this is social media), but even worse misdagnoses fundamentally what's happening in the US, and what to do about it. Trumpism is the return of feudalism, not fascism. Trump is like Henry VIII, not Hitler. Those are entirely, fundamentally different things, with different solutions. Ask the man himself. This is his own social media post.

The piece Waleed Aly wrote about justice 6 years ago is still so important. Do people notice the increasing, even violent righteousness that is dominating how we respond to things now? The Tesla attacks are a great recent example. This is the world of social media, now taking over everyday life as well. "We're forgetting how to hold our anger in tension with anything else". Beautifully said. 'Outrage culture', are we tired of nothing but outrage, about everything? Come work at a Council, feel the searing heat of this outrage, every day. The incoherent, righteous rage. A pandemic of righteousness, about everything.

Guy in Hilux parks in a Tesla, and doesn’t realise it’s recording the whole thing, including his rego number, as he keys the car walking past. How’s it feel to be part of a mob? Oh you just meant a friendly, law-abiding mob? What a surprise that it’s a Hilux driver. Could have been a Ranger too, or Triton, or BT-50, or RAM etc. Cars define social groups. Utes are full of men with little willies who feel threatened by change, so spectacularly boring as humans that they need a car to define them as people.

Two friends of friends in their late-30s/early 40s had heart attacks last year. One had two, in one year. Previously perfectly healthy with no heart problems. Doctors baffled! There’s no mystery, as Peter says, an international expert, Covid is a ‘thromboembolic’ virus i.e. it causes blood clots. Clots that can cause heart attacks and strokes. Here responding to a social media moron suggesting it’s the vaccines, a common accusation now that living with Covid is ending so badly for so many. You can’t really predict the future. But in this case you can, you can predict how you will die, if you keep catching Covid. You will die of Covid infection. That may manifest in all sorts of ways, like a heart attack or stroke, or multiple organ failure, etc. And you will die much younger than you otherwise would have, even decades younger.

Let me ‘obsessively’ (i.e not just talk about myself or my holidays) try to help save peoples’ lives, again. Let these stats sink in. Stop catching Covid people, if you want a long life. Stop making health decisions based on ‘what everybody else is doing’.