May 2025

Tesla is launching cheaper versions of its major cars like the Model Y and Model 3, reportedly from the middle of this year. They'll take some of the more luxury elements out of the vehicles, that aren't needed for everyday driving, like the glass roof, 9 speakers instead of 15, cloth instead of ventilated leather seats etc. The brilliant drive train is the same, so mostly the changes are cosmetic. They may use a smaller battery (batteries are the most expensive part of an EV), but use smaller wheels to retain most of the range. It's a great idea, you're getting the essence of the car without the luxury add-ons. You may have noticed the US hasn't turned into a modern Nazi State, and that the hysterical outrage and burning cars and vandalism have quietened down too, as childish protest politics always does. Tesla make brilliant cars, highly recommended.

Australia follows a pattern also seen in the US and other places. The real tension is between urban and rural environments. The more urban a society is, the more cosmopolitan voters tend to be. Living in cities encourages less extreme views, as people need to learn to live close together. The more extreme views tend to come from rural areas. Australia is rightly considered one of the most sane and pleasant places to live on the planet. A large part of that is that Australia is highly urbanised. The reason Crocodile Dundee was such an enormous Aussie hero was that it tapped into the mythology of Australians, that they all live in the 'outback' (never defined). Nearly everybody huddles the coast, in cities. Those who live outside the cities are usually just current or old outposts of city industries - mines and farms. European Australia never came to terms with the land itself. You can see why the LNP (blues) so strongly opposed The Voice, they mostly represent the places Aboriginal people still occupy.

People over 50 are (on average) rooting for an LNP win, people under 50 ALP. All the Left and Right baloney in politics is hot air. All social decisions are about who controls the status quo. ALP looks on track to win because for the first time in decades there are more young than old voters. The old controlled the status quo, but that control is now slipping.

YouGov polling suggesting Calare will go independent. It doesn't specify which independent (Gee or Hook). YouGov also calling a landslide national victory to Labor, with the LNP to have their lowest ever vote. We'll see I guess.

I encourage you to read at least the 10-point summary here, the expert consensus. It’s a far better guide than ‘what everybody else is doing’. Social media society has replaced expertise with fashion, what’s ‘trending’. Covid is no longer trending, therefore it no longer exists as a problem. That way lies extinction.

I took this yesterday, to capture everybody’s two favourite things. Tesla and local government 😉 (Plus that beautiful blue sky in the building facade.) Spot the wankpanzer revving up through the gears to try to get moving. That’s my Tesla, I came out in the afternoon to find one of the town drunks draped across it, peering through the windows. I asked him what he was doing, and he stood up looking apologetic saying “I was just checking it out, it’s a cracker of a car”. Obviously a Nazi.

Has anybody run self-sealing or run-flat tyres on their vehicle before?

There's a deluge of new renewable capacity coming online, provided no idiot politician gets in the way. 40% of Australia's electricity last year came from renewables. That number is going to climb very fast now, if there's no political interference.

27 million dead Russians probably ended WW2. Just as they stopped Napoleon years before. The same Russians the Americans then turned into cartoon enemies for the next 50 years after the war. Just as they do with the Chinese today. A superpower with the brains and emotions of a child.

I remember when I posted about semi-autonomous driving technology, and many would say that it will never work because humans will always be better drivers.

OK Australians. What outcome are we going to see today? 1. A landslide for the ALP. 2. A minority government headed by the ALP. 3. A minority government headed by the LNP. 4. A landslide for the LNP. 5. A majority non-landslide win for the ALP. 6. A majority non-landslide win for the LNP. I have no idea, but my money would be split between 1, 2 and 5.

Reform UK, the UK’s One Nation, just dominated local government elections there (like our State elections - the UK doesn’t have States). It did that by doing what Trump did in the US, targeting the lower socio-economic status voters which the conservatives always pretended to stand for, but really just fired up with slogans with no substance behind them. Voters finally understood that the conservatives were full of shit. Unfortuately Farage and Reform UK (and Trump) are even more full of shit. None of this helped by a first-past-the-post voting system in the UK, coupled to non-compuslory voting, both of which allow batshit crazy loons to take control of towns and nations. Compulsory, preferential voting in Oz almost always protects us from this sort of rubbish. Parts of the US have at least moved towards preferential (‘ranked choice’) voting. But compulsory voting is the critical thing.

I really admire what Simon Holmes à Court has done with the Climate 200 group. Unlike lobby groups, who line the pockets of existing parties with donations, C200 just offers funds to any independent who wants to promote policies to do something about climate change. C200 doesn’t determine policies, it’s designed to accelerate action on climate change, by bypassing traditional political parties, big recipients of fossil fuel dollars. Climate change is orders of magnitude more dangerous than World War 1 and 2 combined, which we stopped the world to fight. If you don’t believe that, you don’t understand the science, sorry, no matter which half-witted ‘scientist’ you read or saw somewhere, in the pay of fossil fuel companies. It is really the only thing all of our work should be focused on now, if it’s not addressed we’re looking at the end of civilisation itself, it’s that serious. The beauty of action on climate change is that it’s all things that make everybody except a handful of oil-producing countries richer, and removes most forms of pollution (including sound). We’ve burned energy that accumulated over several million years, in only 300 years. It’s fucked up the things that keep us alive.

Australian elections. Got my sausage with onions today.

The LNP’s own pollster labelling them now as only the party of the boomers. And that not being enough to be a government in Australia now, that generation will never again be a majority.

Looking like a romp for Andrew Gee in Calare, with preferences. He quit the LNP over their stance on The Voice referendum. Hasn’t hurt him.

It’s easy to be blinded by politics as a team sport, like watching the footy. Tonight younger Australia exercised its muscles, over older Australia. That’s what the result really means.

Ouch.

SKY Australia is a sewer, and here they are, having almost single-handedly destroyed the LNP by forcing it further and further into the lunatic fringes, claiming it’s all your fault Australia. And that the answer is to go even further into the sewer, into even more ‘culture wars’. Social media is now more dangerous than Murdoch sewers, but both should be shut down to protect our societies.

Happy Birthday! 🎊🎂🥂

The ALP is sometimes called ‘the natural party of power in Australia’. That’s historically true, and has nothing to do with which party you may prefer. It’s the only party that can and has ever won elections in our lifetimes in its own right. The LNP is a coalition, alone neither the Liberals or the Nationals could get within a million miles of winning a federal election. The Liberals and Nationals have only one thing in common - they hate unions, and Labor. Seriously, they have apart from that almost nothing in common. Both parties arose historically as a panicked response to the emergence of worker politics i.e. Labor. Workers vastly outnumber bosses (LNP) and farmers (Nats). So they will always be the natural majority in Australia. Conservatives in recent decades headed off this reality by developing ‘culture war’ politics, targeting mostly young men with radical fake debates that have nothing to do with the conditions of their lives. That vacuumed up ‘working class’ voters for a while, in the US and UK too. The SKY News-type tricks are now losing punch. Conservatives need to go back to what their name says - conserving things. Public institutions. They took not one policy to the election, only tricks. They were left high and dry.

Real-time energy read out from our solar arrays. Has a Kubrick vibe to it. The red arrow is the shade from the chimney, we got micro-inverters (one per panel) so that this doesn’t matter. If you have a series inverter, one for the whole lot, any shade or dirt on one panel stops the flow of electricty to all the rest. The election victory last night is like a weight lifted, for me. This is the future, now a little bit safer from morons.

I missed this story at the time. Yikes, blows every other deal ever made out of the water. Queen were never the coolest band in the world in their heyday, but the greatest artists create the future, they’re rarely the most popular in their day. Cool is just more high school culture. Think of how often the greatest artists, like a Van Gogh or Kafka or even Mozart, only become truly enormous after they’re gone. Some even die penniless. The present by definition doesn’t understand them, they create the future itself, they’re ’speaking’ to people and societies not yet born. That’s what greatness is.

The official White House Twitter page.

Trump also shared this today. This isn’t fascism people, it’s children playing at being grown ups. It’s social media society.

Something I posted about here a few weeks ago. Ordinary petrol and diesel cars have been getting so quiet in recent decades, they've had to pipe fake engine noise even into the BMW M5, to satisfy those who like the vroom vroom sound. This model is well over 10 years old, so this has been happening for a while. People who say they don't like EVs because they like a vroom vroom sound are a tiny minority of enthusiasts with modified or old vehicles, who are the people you want to tell to shut up when they hoon down your street. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/bmw-m5-generates-fake-engine-noise-using-stereo/

Zali Steggall, when called a 'Climate 200 candidate' by a political journalist, brilliantly replied, why don't you call LNP politicians Gina Rinehart candidates then? Because that is exactly what they have been, for many years now, and the Nats have been the Country Miners Party. Drunk on the Hancock mining donations. My dad spent some time with Gina's dad, the founder of Hancock mining. He was a bastard in most ways a human being can be. His daughter idolised him. The election result was Australians telling the LNP it's time to become a political party again, and not just Gina's team in parliament. She's Australia's Musk (whom she adores).

The recently opened Flyers Creek wind farm, near Orange and Bathurst, produces enough electricity alone to power both towns. Expect to see a dramatic and welcome acceleration in renewables now the LNP have been kicked out of the way. https://youtu.be/x-zcAwHEpKA

If you’re 50 and over, and say these things, do you see it as equivalent as saying your favourite bands and music are the best bands and music ever? If not, why not? It’s the same stage-of-life social status behaviour.

The beaten dog syndrome, when you inherit a pet that’s been beaten by a broom for example, and then for the rest of its life every time you sweep the dog panics and hides. I’ve noticed a similar thing driving the Tesla on the roads. The people who normally drive very aggressively (often wankpanzer utes on the Lithgow-Bathurst run) are very shy of the Tesla. I think their encounter with other EVs has been embarrassing, so now they avoid challenging them. The silent power and torque of an EV is a wonder of the world, you hop out of the car after every trip smiling and sorry the journey is over. It’s not just the experience in relation to other cars, I’ve said before - there are *no hills* in an EV. The car just glides effortlessly and silently up them as if they’re not even there.

Matt does great videos. But I wonder if BYD really need to step in here and start publishing some more information to drivers about how to best drive a hybrid.  Matt getting just over 300 km on a tank as the full range is ridiculous. When you watch the video, I think I can see why, he runs the petrol and battery completely empty and then by the look of it sets the SOC for the battery to 70%, which means when it gets underway again the petrol engine is going absolutely berserk trying to drive the wheels and also charge the battery to that very high rate of charge. I wonder what range he would’ve got if he left the battery at its minimum SOC and drove in parallel hybrid mode, which is what the Shark is designed to do at high speeds. https://youtu.be/cyEsMzo0Qv0?si=INx-TLVzD2gAd_35

EVs aren’t mostly bought by ‘inner city elites’. They’re mostly bought by poorer people in outer suburbs, because they save them a fortune in fuel costs. Together with people in rural and regional areas, they buy well over 60% of the main EVs sold. Also the people who do the most kms every day, range anxiety is another funded myth.

In Australia household solar generates more electricity than all of our coal-fired power stations combined. And it’s still growing at an enormous rate. That was thanks to John Howard, who introduced the subsides for rooftop solar installation. Albanese is now using the same subsidy scheme to do home batteries, starting right now (go out and buy one). It will revolutionise how the entire world sees energy, just watch. It will help flatten the ‘duck curve’ of huge demand on the grid morning and evenings. If the ALP had done this at the start of their first term (as Saul Griffiths advised them to), a million or more Australians would now have effectively no energy bills at all. This will also drive prices down for all Australians, because there won’t be the same huge pressures on the grid, pressures that are enormously expensive to fix. The political debates about electricty prices are ridiculous, for many Australians (me included), you can have as good as zero electricity bills at any time. We haven’t paid a cent for electricity in over 3 years. Now it even powers the car, for free.

Autumn should be called the season of colours.

One of my favourite examples of how suggestible and manipulable people are. When wind turbines first appeared in the Central West, most people didn’t care, while for others councils even built viewing platforms to see them, because they were such a popular sight. Then the National Party, who were losing vast numbers of votes because of their allegiance to Gina Rinheart instead of regional and rural Australia, decided to turn windmills into a fight to give them another debating point in the bush. Suddenly the same people who before either didn’t give a shit, or stopped at these viewing platforms, were foaming at the mouth, outraged by windmills. Turn something into a fight between two sides, like a game of football, and you turn people into lemmings. That’s also social media’s business model.

The ALP landslide was really the young now finally having more votes than the old. Political parties who interpret it as a win or loss for them personally will continue to fail. The LNP is now toast. The ALP won only a third of the votes. Elections, like everything else, are about humans battling for status. The young are finally winning some of that battle.

Happy Birthday, Ed! 🎂🥂🎈

The ALP will be rubbing their hands together at the thought of either of this pair leading the LNP. Both embarrassing lightweights.

You can see here in an article about Peter Dutton that conservatives deliberately target young working class men, tradies in utes, who historically voted for the ‘Left’ side of politics. Many of these young men have now been turned into a near-cult of reactionary nastiness as a result, violently opposed to any form of social progress at all, be it for women, renewable energy, EVs etc. These cynical bastards latched onto a generation of men who lacked traditional male role models, with the collapse of the male teaching workforce in primary schools, as well as the shift to social media as the cultural space people now grow up, with the likes of Andrew Tate feeding them toxic bullshit.

Every single seat that ran an anti-wind farm campaign showed an increased vote to Labor. The community has spoken to the anti-wind farm loons, and what did it say? Quit your whining, and go away. Social media and its gangs of whinging numpties are not the community.

I was delighted to see the Nats and some Liberals are still committed to nuclear power. That should bed them down for several more terms in opposition, by which time the grid will be mostly renewables. In Lithgow the nukes were as popular as zero alcohol beer, except maybe among some young male tradies, who thought they were the best idea since Pornhub.

Tone and John chewing the conservative fat about how we can still rebuild Australia to be exactly like England in 1788, if we have faith.

The building industry serving the housing ‘market’ is falling off a cliff. It can be saved if it shifts to building affordable homes for government, to use as affordable housing for ordinary people. But it won’t like that, a lot of people got very rich in market-based housing. Marketisation destroyed housing, health, education and energy. The market is a myth.

Top 20 EVs in Australia, sales this year. It’s clear that either the Nazis have invaded, or grown-ups have ignored the bullshit on social media.

Ross Gittins on the building industry. “The recent report by the Productivity Commission has revealed that the musclebound blokes in shorts and work boots – and their bosses – have yet to be introduced to the lovely Miss Productivity. They drive the latest monster SUV utes – all with names like the Bronco, the Wrangler, the Grunt, the BigOne and the BallScratch – but that’s where modernity ends. Over the past 30 years, the productivity of the industry’s workers – the value they create per hour of work – has fallen by 12 per cent. This takes account of the increase in the size and quality of new homes over the decades. And this while all our other industries’ productivity improved by 49 per cent. The report calculated that, had all our industries performed as badly as housing, our average income would now be about 40 per cent lower than it is.”

That’s how to sing. Except for an anthem, hold that last note clean, don’t stuff around finding it. https://youtu.be/WCmk88S2sdQ?si=uWVN8_97ZT68d-mN

Like being at a Council meeting.

John Birmingham. 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯’𝘵 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘱𝘳𝘰-𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘸 𝘢 𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘮 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱 𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘬𝘺 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘪𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘯. 𝘈 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘵𝘰 𝘤𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘶𝘱 𝘣𝘦𝘥𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘯𝘶𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴. 𝘈 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦’𝘴 𝘢 𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯-𝘥𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘣𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘧𝘪𝘵𝘴. 𝘈 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘦, 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬-𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘶𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘭𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘭 𝘧𝘶𝘦𝘭 𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 - 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘵𝘢𝘹 𝘵𝘰 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘴𝘦 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭 𝘤𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘨𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘶𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘭𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘨𝘳𝘪𝘥 𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦.

Australian banks are bastards. Almost the worst offering of fixed mortgage rates in the world. They offload all risk to customers. Nearly the entire ‘cost of living crisis’ is our variable mortgage rates. And petrol and diesel prices. If you’re paying for petrol and diesel it’s entirely self-inflicted pain.

A secondhand Tesla is probably the best value used car out there. This one has done nearly 300,000km and still has 90% of its original battery capacity, and drives flawlessly. It also shows just how much value you get buying one new, you can drive it for 10 years or more and it will still feel almost new. With next to no servicing.

When you’re number 1 in the world. When number 2 is one of the major oil producing nations.

If you burn energy that took 3 million years to accumulate, in 300 years, you incinerate yourself. Even if you’ve never studied science, that basic fact should still be graspable. Also why nothing else really matters, in your work or personal life, now. We fix this, or we’re all dead.

All of those who love the sound of a V8, like Jeremy, always forget that the sound they love is not the engine. It’s the exhaust, a metal tube. Invented to get rid of the truly horrible sound of an engine, to ‘muffle’ it. Thus, ‘muffler’. Exhaust gases *are* an engine farting. Take the trumpet away when Louis Armstrong was playing, and what did you hear? Him blowing raspberries. If you’ve never heard an engine without a muffler, google it. Engines sound hideous, just a continuous series of explosions. Bizarrely, that sound is loved because it became associated with ‘grunt’, with power. When actually it’s the exact opposite. That noise is the wasted energy that the engine can’t use to drive the wheels. 70% of every drop of fuel you put in a petrol or diesel goes straight out the exhaust, unused. THAT’s the sound you hear, that unburnt fuel as exhaust gases, blowing the ‘trumpet’ of the muffler. EVs are silent because all that energy goes straight to the wheels, which is why *they* have such phenomenal grunt. It’s seriously the most stupid last-gasp thing to hold onto to deny you’re getting old and don’t want to change, as many do at Jeremy’s age. That’s what this is actually about. Also the people who claim to love this sound only love it if it’s just them making it. Jeremy moved to the countryside because everybody hates the sound of millions of vehicles making the same noise, in the cities. It’s the passion of a spoiled child, who only thinks of itself.

Most human interactions are imitative rivalry. We copy one another, there’s next to no thought involved, but almost entirely a rivalry, based on our desire for status. It’s not surprising to me at all that AI provides a far more supportive interaction for many than ordinary human interaction. It can be astonishing, even reducing people to tears (as in this article). You can say that it’s not real, but what is real here? AI is just all of humanity, digested and condensed. Again most individual human interactions involve little thought or even empathy, they’re battles for status, often so subtle as to be unnoticed.

This Modigliani nude sold for over A$235 million. The art market is an ocean of fakes and forgeries, trying to cash in on the enormous money a tiny handful of works attract. Modigliani is one of the most copied artists (he died in 1920 at 35, penniless). The art market tells us everything about human life. Nearly everything in it is a copy, an imitation. Often there’s no way to tell a copy from an original. And that’s where it gets interesting, because if you can’t tell the difference, why does it matter? McLuhan said that the whole idea of an ‘original’ only exists after there are copies. This is a chicken and egg question with an answer. The copies come first, then the original. How else could it work? Without copies, there’s not even a concept of original. Something just is. Social media now runs our societies, and it’s an imitation/status machine. The economy of likes. Thus the simultaneous epidemic of yearning for authenticity. But there is no more authentic life to find, it’s an artefact of all the imitation.

That last column is a disaster. Multiple generations will now never afford a roof over their heads. We turned housing into a speculative status-driven casino, even the ridiculous TV shows that egged it on reflect what it's really about, the 'property ladder'. That ladder is a status ladder, renovation and building shows turn ordinary homes into ridiculous 5-star hotel rooms, in a pissing contest to see who can have the most 'premium' home. Like kids buying expensive sneakers to be cool, kidults now do it with housing and utes.

Matteo Mancuso is one of those one-off talents. Playing gypsy jazz in the kitchen.

The irony is that these memes are shared on social media, a technology infinitely more dangerous than AI. How do we not see it? It's invisible to most now, just how they transact their entire lives, unthinkingly. These are not neutral spaces to share and connect, as they sell themselves. They capture entire societies, weaponise the interactions for profit by converting all social interaction into imitative rivalry, and thus destroy communities. They change who we are as people.

Trump and many people I know used to call Joe Biden 'Sleepy Joe', because he's old and seemed sleepy. Here's Trump 'signing' an agreement with Saudi Arabia yesterday.

It's only in popular music that fights over 'originals' really happen. Symphony orchestras and jazz bands dine out on almost nothing but 'covers'. It's not a musical thing, it's a social thing. Popularity culture always produces at the same time the desire for authenticity, for distinguishing all of the copies from the original. Except it's all of the copying that produces the original, there is no such thing as an original, without copies. You can see the same things happening with everything social media now touches. More 'authentic' or 'natural' health care ('natural' is a juggernaut right now). Or politicians who 'say it like it is', like Bob Katter or Trump, loved because they're supposedly more authentic. But there is no more authentic or natural anything. It's an artefact of popularity culture.

Another big neon sign that the adult world is now populated by kidults was the criticism of Joe Biden, which nearly entirely revolved him being old. That was it. The man was an enormous force for change and reform in the US. Read the full extent of what Trump is doing with the job instead. It's not just the jet, it's corruption on such a monumental scale that even his own side are flabbergasted.

This is an adult, 2025. Actually a kidult. An adult who sees and understands the world as a teenager. That’s the model of adulthood we now use. This started in the 1960s, and social media has now entrenched it.

Tom Cruise is an interesting cultural thing. Currently marketing his latest movie, and genuinely charming and professional and gracious with his time. And yet he’s a global leader of a cult. (He also can’t act, but it doesn’t tend to matter in the movies he’s in.) The world has spent months going to town on Musk’s bizarre salute. Everybody forgets Tom’s.

Those who won’t buy an EV because of range anxiety are the people who buy a truckload of food if the shops are going to be closed for a day. It’s a genuine mental illness (it’s in the name - anxiety). Australians drive on average 33km per day. Also you do nearly all your charging at home, you rarely go to a public charger. They’re not servos.

The Shark is now available in orange.

HBD! 🥳👯🎈

Happy Birthday! Enjoy your day! 🎊☕🥳

I'm over people saying 'cheap Chinese shit'. Apart from it being the gutter-level racism you'd have hoped Australia left behind in the 1950s, it's also factual bullshit. China is the world's factory. If something made in China is cheap shit, it's because somebody not in China who wants to make a quick buck commissioned cheap shit to sell. China makes the most advanced quality engineering products in the world too, if somebody commissions them to do that. Most of your phones and computers, for example. They have most of the world's advanced toolmakers (Australia has as good as zero). Often the 'cheap Chinese shit' comes from a ute-driving moron, driving what in my childhood would have been called 'cheap Jap shit'. Grow up. But it's a kidult culture now, you expect everything to be at high school level.

It appears Musk instructed his AI platform (Grok - it's fantastic) to say white South Africans are victims of genocide. I love that the AI not only happily told the world it had been tampered with, it also wouldn't agree with what it was told to say.

You are going to meet status. And most will refuse to see it.

In countries not living on and run by social media, people still control infectious disease. Including Covid.

The only true joy is understanding, I learned that from Spinoza. Everything else we see as the best things in life - love, happiness, experiences, fun, family, friendship, music, travel etc. - all of these are just inferior subsets of understanding. All of these proxies for true understanding - for joy - eventually collapse into misery, without understanding. I realised about halfway through my working life that this is why I never wanted any sort of career, a petty, pathetic trajectory of personal goals. In everything I do, in all of my life and work, all that interests me is understanding. A job that gives me no room to understand things is one I leave. I took a massive demotion in these autumn years of my working life just to be able to focus more on understanding things. Travel bores me, most music now bores me, most of what is sold as fun bores me. All captured by human status games, hiding true understanding. When I retire, it won’t be a retreat from work. It will be to take this progression even further, into even more understanding. To be free to do that all day, every day. No empty global tours, taking in the meaningless ‘sights’, like a permanent adolescent gap year from reality. Mostly a quiet life of reflection, creating the only true joy, and the only true freedom.

Exhibit A, Patrik. A grown up. Exhibit B, Kevan. A social media kidult.

At a time the young will never afford even a home, it’s a great comfort to them to see older generations on permanent jetsetting holidays, agog at the beauty of the world, while lamenting the poor services they get from the working poor young in hospitals and restaurants.

Happy happy birthday! 💐🥂🎈

Nobody cared about energy until social media politics turned it into one more 'debate' to generate fights, to generate votes. The comments on posts like this show how the simple-minded were vacuumed up.

Societies where reality TV stars battle rock stars and film stars for supremacy aren’t ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘fascist‘, or any of the other dumb -isms we believe in. They’re giant high schools, where permanent adolescent culture has replaced separate child and adult cultures. You literally now never leave high school. That’s what I mean by ‘gig culture’ too. Rock stars are major influences on adolescents, ways they shape their identity in the world. It’s just that now that process never stops, rock stars are now over 80, adults worship their favourite bands into their elderly years, flocking to gigs. Not just to enjoy music, it’s their main reference point on adult issues. We saw the birth of that in the 1960s, Woodstock politics. It never ended. I speak to many adults whose response to a complex public issue is to tell me to listen to a particular song, because that’s their point of view. Social media has now entrenched adolescent culture at every level of society, from the most intimate personal, to the professional and political. Social media is the schoolyard, a culture of trends and likes and followers.

All major change is the same, we saw the same with the introduction of cars over horses. The status quo will whine and whinge and invent all sorts of fantasy ‘technical’ reasons they shouldn’t have to change. Eventually they get run over in the rush. It’s about people and their identity, not the engineering. The engineering already knows the future.

Here’s the Don again, not reading Mein Kampf. He’s listening to Tay Tay.

Two of Australia’s most popular cars, the RVA4 hybrid, and the Ford Ranger ute. Under new vehicle emissions standards coming into effect on 1 July this year, the price of the RAV4 could jump by $10,000. The Ranger could be $15,000 more expensive. Worth remembering Australia is the only country in the world, apart from Russia, who doesn’t already have vehicle emissions standards. Manufacturers dump their crap vehicles on us. Now you’ll have to pay big dollars to own the rubbish. Also a warning to those rushing to plug-in hybrids because of ‘range anxiety’. They’re not exempt, they still have that rubbish petrol or diesel engine in them. This ‘tax’ is really a very late catch-up for the free pollution these rubbish vehicles have been pumping out for 150 years. No other business is allowed to pollute at all, let alone for free.

Remember the term ‘superpower’. Understand it. It’s not about comics, it’s the technical revolution solar, wind and batteries (SWB) are introducing. SWB doesn’t just replace our existing fossil fuel energy, it floods the world with super abundant near-free and clean energy. They install enough SWB to meet the ‘inelastic’ peak demand (the maximum we need in a year), but by doing that they install enough to produce far beyond that, at a marginal cost of near zero. That not only provides an amount of energy well beyond what we use now, for free, to do things like provide widespread abundant water by using desalination (imagine that, limitless water!), but it also stops the power politics of energy where a handful of places own all the energy reserves and dominate everybody else. With SWB, everywhere on the planet can produce its own energy, for a marginal cost of near-zero. This is the greatest revolution in human history. You’re living inside it.

Covid didn’t end. We’re just ignoring it, as kidults we got bored with it disrupting our ‘fun’, so we decided to let it maim and kill millions instead. Nothing exists in social media society unless it trends. Not much trends for more than about a day. This is also just respiratory deaths, it ignores the vascular pathologies Covid is multiplying, like strokes and heart attacks, as well as the explosion in non-respiratory infections, with peoples’ weakened immune systems (T-cell exhaustion). People don’t see any of this, because they don’t want to see it. They’re living inside social media, the eternal high school.

Kids don’t need lessons in how countries run. Countries are just social media now, and kids are already expert in social media. It will allow them to be kids for the rest of their lives.

The Nationals destroyed the Liberals at the last election with their Gina-funded anti-renewables nuclear lunacy. It’s hard to see how the Coalition survives this. The average Coalition voter is a white man aged 70. The average Australian is a woman aged 37. Reality bites.

There are still people who think we overdid it for Covid (people who don’t understand exponential growth and pandemics). If a pandemic influenza emerges, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Killing machines, mortality rates typically over 40%, and often attacking the young worse than the old. The Bible talks about plagues a lot because for thousands of years humans understood you can’t ’live with’ a pandemic. Social media society doesn’t know its arse from its elbow.

City and country aren’t two ways of life. They’re one way of life. Originally what we call ‘rural’ coexisted in the cities with more urban dwelling. But then they ran out of room and needed more resources, so farming and mining in particular expanded out past the outskirts of cities. Here in country NSW, farming and mining are the reason every town exists. Nothing to do with a love of the countryside, the ‘country’ is just the outer edges of the city. As these original extractive industries became unviable so too did ‘country life’. The towns now struggle to find a reason to exist. Like ex-colonies of empire, they become tourist destinations, bucolic theme parks for bored people who need something do on the weekends. That gentrification in turn pushes prices for everything in these areas beyond what the locals can afford, which eventually hollows them out and leaves ghost towns, when the tourist dollar gets bored. And it’s easily bored.

If you give enough anti-vaxers keyboards, eventually they accidentally type the definition of vaccination.

Pick any country town, and you’ll find in nearly every case it was originally farms and/or mines.

Air purifiers are relatively cheap, off-the-shelf devices that should be in every hospital ward and school classroom. I've had one at my desk at work for over 4 years. It will protect you against all airborne disease, not just Covid. I haven't been sick in 5 years. Dirty air is the world's greatest killer. Why would you choose to be sick with anything if you can easily avoid it?

So interesting to see how many people had bundled their farms into super, to milk the big tax breaks. High status people sponsor an entire industry in tax minimisation and avoidance.

It’s worth remembering that what we call farming has its origins in settler culture, which in turn derives from aristocratic landholding in the UK and Europe. Sometimes called a squattocracy, because the origin of nearly all farmland in Australia was outright theft of the land, by settlers acting as squatters. The struggling cocky is a triumph of PR. ABARE farm owner income averages below. This after all farm costs are considered (it’s not farm income, it’s farm owner income). Our farming neighbour would buy a new BMW or Mercedes every year. This doesn’t even include accumulated wealth (as opposed to income) that accrues to farmers as holders of large acreages, usually running into the millions, nor does it include the near slave labour employed on many farms (visa holders of various kinds), to keep costs down. The inevitable comeback is ‘well, if you want to eat’…over 70% of our agricultural production is exported, for profit.

I posted a few times here how the Liberals and Nationals have almost nothing in common. Here we are. Historically they represent rich industrialists and pastoralists, desperate to oppose working people having power. That’s all that united them.

Some Renoir to start the day.

Before his first term Albanese said Labor needed 3 terms in government to make meaningful progress against the catastrophic damage inflicted upon Australia by the Howard-Abbott-Morrison-Joyce faction of the LNP. It looks like he may get that. The ALP split in the 1950s over communism. It kept them out of power for decades afterwards. The LNP is now facing a similar fate, there may be an attempt to kiss and make up before the next election, but the damage seems terminal for now.

I posted a few times last year about the persistently high ocean temperatures off Australia, the cause of our seemingly never-ending torrential rainfall on the coast. The oceans are enormous heatsinks, absorbing much of the heat we create by burning fossil fuels, 6 to 8 atomic bomb’s worth of heat every second. They now can’t absorb any more and are starting to release that heat back into the atmosphere. That will supercharge already almost unlivable temperatures in different parts of the world. It’s killing marine ecosystems as well. Meanwhile it’s becoming increasingly difficult to provide clean drinking water because of never-ending blue green algal blooms. This is what happens when you burn energy that took 3 million years to store, in only 300 years.

When you burn energy that took 3 million years to accumulate, in only 300 years.

How does this not horrify people? Why aren’t we angry about this?

That's over 320,000km, for the metric nations. And is also true. Petrol and diesel cars have always had a deliberately designed obsolescence, which makes people go out and buy new ones regularly. Find me another consumer product whose price has gone *up* over the years. They go down because of economies of scale. But not cars, the car companies are on a good wicket. Until now. EV prices go down as economies of scale kick in, which drives down the prices of cars, new and secondhand. You can drive them for a decade or more with next to no maintenance, which kills the business model of ICE carmakers, who rely upon you coughing up big dollars every 3-5 years on new models, and paying people to service them regularly.

William Mulready's The Seven Ages of Man, depicting Shakespeare's 'All the world's a stage', from As You Like it. The idea that humans go through seven life stages. It's this idea of stages that has now collapsed, into what I call eternal high school. Adolescent culture is now extended across the entire lifespan. Social media entrenched the shift. The way we see, feel and understand the world is through the lenses of an adolescent culture we acquire in schooling. It goes well beyond the sort of activities we like to do (gigs, permanent travel etc.) There's an underlying 'shit happens' fatalism to crises (classic teenage thinking). "It is what it is", an epidemic of that phrase. No sense of differentiated responsibilities and roles as humans age. Just permanent 'living your best life'. A rejection of ageing, even the old don't object to the mass slaughter of other old people in aged care by Covid, because to make a fuss would be to admit they too are old. Botox and fillers and 'natural' anti-ageing rampant. Rock stars are older than my grandparents lived to be. Etc.

We think we're living with Covid only because we're ignoring it. It won't let up, it will trash your immune system and fuck over your vascular system. Just like HIV did, it took 8-10 years to turn into AIDS, was 'just a cold' when you first caught it. 8-10 years later, you died.

The tax cuts Trump is gutting US public healthcare to fund. Using Scott Morrison's favourite line for tax cuts, 'it's your money!' And it is, but it's not going to you, just to Trump's level of society. The legislation is called "The One Big Beautiful Bill". I kid you not.

Van Gogh. That magical sense of light.

Awesome.

This one will be shared a lot. It’s a game-changer I think, showing that the criticisms of the Shark off-road seem mostly to be reviewers who don’t have a clue how it works, or how to drive it. Some of these hills are as steep as the hills other videos show the Shark ‘failing’ on, and are also very muddy here so even less traction. The Shark eats them alive, now there’s a genuine professional explaining how it’s done. https://youtu.be/4jdHsrn4nM0

Ute and other 4WD fans threw every insult and criticism they could at the BYD Shark when it came out, particularly claiming it wasn’t a proper off-roader. It turns out it needs a professional who actually knows how to drive off road and understands the engineering to show people how to do it. ‘Magic’, he calls the vehicle. @[783412914:2048:Kyle] https://youtu.be/4jdHsrn4nM0

In case this matches your own experience and nobody can tell you why.

You can still choose to believe climate change isn't a catastrophe. Insurance companies don't agree.

I feel that people are starting to feel the damage travel does, sort of. It's not stopping them doing it. Some of the world's most beautiful places being destroyed by our eternal kidult gap year lives.

Happy Birthday, Libby! 💐👯🎉

Happy Birthday, Simon! 🎉🎈🎁

When I say adult life has been completely replaced with adolescent life, politics is a good example. We look at politics the same way we watch a State of Origin game. Red v Blue, even the colours are the same (we use the same in V8 Supercars). Societies aren’t run by politicians. They’re run by institutions. Like the laws and universities, and public health, and air traffic control, and taxation etc. etc. etc. In the US Trump is taking on the oldest and mightiest of instititions, the law, and universities. For now they’re refusing to bow to him. It’s impossible to say who will win here. Public health as an institution was swept away by the a global idiot tide of social media-driven adolescent life, whinging because it wanted to go back to gigs and recreational travel. But for now, US law and universities are telling Trump to go fuck himself.

Nobody paid to run the country will ever tell you, just a heads-up that Covid numbers are on the rise again, a new variant. It’s not a good idea to catch Covid, ever.

These columns on the Pantheon weigh 60 tonnes each. They were quarried in Egypt, more than 2000km away. They were then dragged across desert, and put onto barges, to float them to Rome, along rivers and across the Mediterranean. This is all centuries before there were engines to help. Imagine carving one of these, transporting it and then standing it up like this, wonders of engineering. Now the Chinese do most of the world’s engineering, and we hate them for it. We just drink coffee and travel. They think we’re Philistines.

Australia subsidises utes and SUVs to the tune of $250 million a year. That’s a big reason lots of people drive them. It’s time Australians went back to driving sedans and station wagons. Both utes and SUVs have the aerodynamics and handling of a brick on wheels. They’re crap cars to drive, the whole thing is a status game, the ute and SUV is the car everybody has to have, because it’s the car everybody else has. We never leave high school.

One of my mini projects is to explore how all human behaviour is people copying other people, driven by the desire for status. You can explain pretty much everything using that framework, it’s the periodic table of human life. Status is the ‘atoms’ of human thought and behaviour. Take towing. Towing, like utes and SUVs, has become a a heavily trending thing in Australia. The origins of towing are to rescue things that are broken or can’t drive themselves (tow boats), or to haul freight. But now to tow is a high status thing, to tow your boat or caravan or trailer. Let’s be brutally honest about towing. It’s probably the most universally rubbish driving experience it’s possible to have. Doubles (or more) your fuel consumption. A literal lead weight attached to the back of your car, several tonnes of ballast that stops any sort of driving enjoyment. You hold up the traffic, the wind is your enemy, the whole experience is shithouse. And hugely dangerous, if you see a ute towing 3.5 tonnes for example, pull over for 5 minutes and let it disappear up the road, it may save your life. (No ute should be towing 3.5 tonnes, that’s a marketing rather than engineering figure.) I avoid people towing anything. But people love it, because…everybody else is doing it. They’re imitating others, because that then gives them status. Objectively they could save a fortune staying in one of the thousands of cheap good quality regional motels, rather than towing a van for example. People pay up to $100K or more for a caravan. The things we do for status. We never leave high school. (I was a high school teacher btw, I’m saying what I see.)

Few will join the dots here. You won’t see what you don’t want to see. Top performers also tend to have elaborate anti-Covid measures, but they don’t give a shit about the same for fans. Just happy to vacuum up their money, and let them mass in their tens of thousands in an infection soup, to applaud and adore the artist, who craves the attention. Kidult culture.

Another aspect of kidult culture is the explosion of influencers and their idiot podcasts. I suggest Joe Rogan get tetanus, which will permanently shut him up. Look at the inked and ripped sage here, filling peoples’ heads with anti-vax bullshit. Maybe having been a teacher makes me even angrier about this, the generations of hard patient work that went into educating communities about things that keep them safe, being torn down in months by idiocy like this, and the platforms that give them an audience.

The kids drove back from Sydney last night. They didn't charge while down there, and when they got to Katoomba they were already below 30% charge. But the car told them they'd have 22% charge when they got home. And that's *exactly* the charge they had when they drove up the driveway. This is the genius of Tesla engineering, ignore the CEO. They realised to get rid of 'range anxiety', you just make the car super smart at knowing how much electricity is available. That's incredibly hard to do, temperature and topography (how many hills) make a huge difference to range, and going downhill actually boosts your % too. But the algorithm in the system knows to an unbelievable level of accuracy, I've never known it to be wrong. It gets even better because the car will also tell you where to go to charge up if you're going to be short, and how to get there. And you can even nominate a % you want to have available when you arrive home, and it will calculate all of that and route you to chargers and control how much you need to put in, to arrive with that %. You will never be in danger of running out of charge, the car does all that for you.

5000 Australians died of Covid last year. More than two years after we celebrated Covid being ‘over’. That’s more than 5 times as many die in a bad flu year. If you didn’t die but had Covid, you helped Covid reach those it killed. It will be back for you later (it’s living inside you). Arijit is a leading Covid researcher. Why do I still talk about Covid, when everybody wants to ignore it? Because I was raised to think that killing people is bad. But you do you, hey.

Look at what’s trending.

Buy a car designed to maximise aerodynamic efficiency, something with a really low drag coefficient. You can see why, here. This is why we used to drive sedans, until utes and SUVs became kidult status games.

Status is the key that unlocks human thought and behaviour. Once you see it, nearly every part of life suddenly unravels in front of you.

Look at the red circle. The national strategy for Covid was to protect the ‘vulnerable’, so the rest of us could go back to our meaningless adolescent lives of recreational travel, gigs and dining out. That’s quarter of a MILLION infections, in aged care. It was a lie, there was never any protection. And we’re all vulnerable to Covid anyway. Somebody extra vulnerable to Covid was always going to get it from somebody who isn’t, unless we locked them all up for the rest of their lives. This is what i mean about a kidult society of permanent teenagers. Nobody cares. ‘It is what it is.’ ‘You do you.’ ‘Living our best lives’. The old don’t even fight it. Because nobody wants to admit they’re old in a society of teenagers. Those of aged care age not in an aged care home don’t want their recreational flights or gigs curtailed. The Department of Health has the hilarious gall to badge the release with ‘Be Covidsafe’.

I thought this was the scariest story in the news today. Schools are the thin line between civilisation and collapse. Much of this is the same kidult culture I talk about, kids raised by adults with the maturity of adolescents. Ask teachers how much parents are now an even bigger problem than their sociopath kids. Even where parents are great, they’re fighting a losing battle against the sewer of social media.

The comments on this post show the terminal damage social media has done to public health.

I shared this before. Humans copy each other, to attain status in groups. This also means it’s easy for the tiniest handful of bad faith actors to create havoc. For example, installation of wind and solar farms has been stalled because of ‘community opposition’, just as Covid action was shut down for the same reason. Bullshit in both cases, it was a tiny number of bad faith actors who generated the community anger. The community couldn’t care less about energy, unless it’s *led* to care less. The good news it also means it’s relatively simple to shut down bad faith actors. There will only be a relative handful of them. Social media platforms could do it in a day. No need to ‘educate’ the entire community, societies don’t run on information, they run on status. Social media won’t because the owners of the platforms are themselves bad faith actors, who want control of societies.

Sea temperatures to the West of the UK are currently more than 5 degrees (!) above average. Hot seas in the far North are massive alarm bells, due to their proximity to the Greenland ice sheet.

Estimates of payback times for home batteries. The more electricity prices go up the more these payback times go down. Worth remembering too that a battery isn’t just useful to save money on electricity, it also gives you a stable power supply with interruptions to grid power. The software that comes with batteries also gives you a huge amount of data that you can use to understand your own energy use, if you want.

I plan to avoid this coming variant of Covid as I’ve avoided all the other variants of Covid. People lining up for a fresh dose can let me know how ‘razor blade throat’ feels, sounds intriguing. Do you reckon people catching Covid all these times and it not stopping them catching it again will make a lightbulb go off at some point? No, I don’t think so either. 

I spoke with Hayley (the reporter) about this last year. My mum went to hospital for heart and lung issues and caught Covid there. No precautions were taken. Politicians direct health departments to minimise Covid because they don’t want political blowback. It’s unjustifiable that hospital is now one of the most dangerous places for sick people, but that’s adolescent culture for you.

Worth reading this short thread, about ‘living with’ Covid. And the conclusion, which is also my experience, masking.

One of the great myths of democracy is the idea of ‘the people’ or ‘the community’. There is no such thing. A tiny handful of activists stir up trouble, and then attribute that trouble to ‘the community’. We see that right now in local government too, where social media activists get elected claiming to speak for the entire community. Humans never act as a group. Tiny numbers of people ‘influence’ them to act in certain ways. People skilled in governance for centuries have known this, and have often ruthlessly eliminated trouble-makers for this very reason. For example anti-vax, anti-renewables nonsense could be shut down in a day, by targeting the handful (probably a dozen at most) of major social media accounts that organise that supposed ‘community resistance’. It’s smoke and mirrors. The Australian electorate just smashed the anti-renewables cause at a full election. All these protestors need to be told to piss off, they’re gullible numpties swallowing propaganda they see on social media, usually from the US. Shut down the rubbish they’re reading on social media and they’d go back to leading normal lives.

Kidults of the world, reckon we should do something? Some of those symptoms are symptoms of lifelong organ damage, including brain damage.

Here’s one for your social media-educated friends who tell you EVs use more resources than petrol and diesel clunkers.

Today’s historical trivia. Henry VIII executed 3% of the entire English population during his reign.

Have mentioned Bill Hero (https://www.billhero.com.au) here a few times, the bill comparison service that will automatically check your personal energy bills every month (it does very detailed calculations, using your actual bills) and tell you what the cheapest options available are. It will even switch you over, if you want. Costs less than $50/year to be a member, saves you hundreds. Electricity prices go up another 10% in July. If anybody wants to join use this code, it will give you two months of the service for free, to trial: bh11110-nmp1733123995

Nearly everybody moans about 'red tape' and 'bureaucracy'. That's because people are mostly pretty dumb. Right now that red tape and those bureaucrats are giving Trump the kicking that's needed to save American society. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/28/us-court-blocks-trump-tariffs

Bowel cancer is now the leading cause of death in people aged 25 to 44 in Australia. Eat porridge (my advice).

Temperatures in parts of Europe are currently 10-16 degrees above average. The catastrophe is accelerating, amazing that some can still pretend it isn’t happening at all.

The thing that is most popular on social media, sharing information about yourself and what you’re doing, is also the thing that is most damaging to you and others. Some of it is obvious humblebragging, like people who only ever post when on holiday in some exotic location, or when the kids win an award at school. But even the most well-meaning ‘just keeping up to date’ posting causes damage. Humans are social animals, and social animals function by comparison, which is the battle for status. When we allowed these platforms to become the actual location where we now transact most of our societies, we gave that comparison mechanism - our deepest desire, it’s absolutely addictive to humans - an enormous steroid boost. It’s not only damaging our individual mental health, it’s destroying our collective society. Trump remember is the social media President, it’s how he got there and how he stays there. People will swear just looking at what everybody else is doing every day is the most harmless, happy and healthy thing. It’s insidious and continuous, the exponential increase in social comparision, infecting every tiny detail of our lives. And I’m old enough to remember a time in history to compare it with, before social media. The most excruciating bores were people who shared details of themselves and their family’s lives all the time, in humblebrag Christmas letters, or slide nights (groan), or even just in conversation. Talking endlessly about yourself was always considered a social no-no. But social media has normalised that now as baseline everyday behaviour. We’re not seeing it, nor the terminal damage it’s doing to ourselves and our societies.

Business people all over the world think government is inefficient and needs good business brains to fix it. Musk is easily the world's most successful businessman, given a chance to fix all that 'red tape'. It's been a total disaster. Government is vastly more complicated than business.

Look at that huge surge in productivity that came when the pandemic forced employers to allow staff to work from home. One of the justifications for ending 'lockdowns' was the belief it was bad for business. It was the best thing that ever happened for business, and workers.

In New South Wales, in the past week there was an increase of 29.2 per cent in COVID-19 notifications, an increase of 25.9 per cent in influenza notifications, and an increase of 9.7 per cent in RSV notifications.

Small business is an object of worship in most countries. It's a terrible model to use as a model for an entire economy. Scale brings economies of scale, meaning cheaper prices, and easier lives. You won't find many small business owners living easy lives. About 75% of small businesses fail inside 5 years. The Australian building industry a case in point. Australian construction firms with 200 or more employees generate 86 per cent more revenue per worker than Australian construction firms with five to 19 employees. The building industry is going backwards, because of the shift to contracting, with smaller firms. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-27/construction-small-businesses-cut-productivity-raise-costs/105342166

Some Monet?

Happy belated birthday Ken!

Happy Birthday! 👯🎈☕

Happy Birthday, Ken! 🥳🎈🎉

Had to do a quick trip to Sydney today, and it reminded me again of how human life is all about status. Driving that Tesla is a wonder of the world. Supercar levels of performance, totally silent gigantic torque on tap, I gave it a bit up River Lett and it was like launching a rocket into space, uphill. No revving, silent earth-shattering power. And brilliant handling. 12 speakers of astounding sound. I listened to the Queensland Symphony Orchestra do a live recording of Strauss, and I was in that hall, the sound was astonishing, it gave me goosebumps. And this is the view through the roof. And many would never buy one, because “I hate Elon”. They wouldn’t buy any EV, because their friends don’t buy them, and they don’t want to be different to their friends. Imagine wasting your adult life with that high school shit. The return trip cost less than $3 in electricty.

“Glaciers in Switzerland have lost almost 40% of their volume since 2000, and the loss is accelerating, according to the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research. Record-high summer temperatures in 2022 and 2023 caused a 10% glacial ice loss in the country.” The permafrost is likely melting, underneath these slopes.

A couple of kidults doing the ‘natural’ thing. Run a mile from anybody talking about ‘natural’ health, or ‘authentic’ anything.

I’m sure Australians will respond with the time-honoured public health strategies of more gigs, more flights overseas, and sending kids to school sick and coming to work sick to cough all over everybody else, because you’re out of sick leave. Remember the belief that by all catching Covid lots, we’d become immune to it and it would go away? How’s that going?