July 2025

Meet Big Rob. One of the social media warriors taking over governance of our societies. Trump is the godfather of all of these opinionated numpties, their hero. They’re righteous, stupid, and often abusive and violent. Big Rob even goes to the homes of his opponents to film himself for social media, to fire up his supporters against them. He leads a mob of incoherent rage, because rage is the business model, you gotta be fighting all the time, to drive engagement. Likes. Most towns are now driven by similar warriors. Trump devotees, though they won’t advertise that. The high school culture that social media copied is now adult society. Kidult society, a culture of likes and followers. The school playground. All of them claim to be acting for ‘the people’, something that doesn’t even exist. It’s just a FB group or other social media group they’ve set up. You know who invented ‘the people’? Adolf Hitler. His ‘volk’, as in Volkswagen. ‘The peoples’ car’. Hitler was hugely popular, selling the same anti-establishment message. Down with the elites! Also the Woodstock counter-culture kidult message. Figure it out, people. As these warriors like to say.

Happy birthday, sorry it’s a day late!

Know what social media kidult culture hates more than anything? Knowledge. It gets in the way of opinions and feelings. The revenge of the jocks is underway. Again not an analogy, social media replacing society means jocks now never need to leave school. The anger is all directed at ‘elites’ i.e. the kids at school who focused on learning things, rather than dominating social hierarchies.

The interesting thing about this article is that it looks for the origins of 'cool' in personal psychology (it is a psychology journal). The much more interesting question is why 'cool' has any currency at all once you're no longer a teenager. And you know my answer: because adult life is now extended teen life. Cool is a vacuous concept for adult life, deriving from adolescent life where those kids who can create the greatest imitation of adult life are seen as cooler. The fact adults can now be seen as cool as well just means we're now still adolescents in adulthood, superficially imitating adult life.

It's going to be challenging to transport huge wind turbines into the Central West. Who cares? It was challenging to go to the moon too. I'm sick of the whining and complaining of activists. I know people are probably sick of the kidult thing, but I also don't think many realise how truly terminal we are as a community. It's now virtually impossible to do anything important at all, without triggering anxiety and anger and complaining. This is the behaviour of children, and we refuse to see it. Whining toddlers.

Most of what you see in the public domain today (really just social media) got there via an activist. Do you know who the activists are that generate the movements you support? Like those advocating for access to change rooms and drugs that delay the onset of puberty?

In activist culture, what we used to call ‘the public’ is long since destroyed, replaced by a continuous shift in what’s ‘trending’ on social media, where we now live. A more accurate name for activists is gangs, it’s what they literally are, a series of gangs at war with each other. More kidult society, emulating the playground. For every public issue today, trace the origin first to activists who got the issue to trend, and from there find out who funds them. Like the anti-wind farm loons, many are rusted-on Nationals voters who Barnaby Joyce whipped into a frenzy before the last election. Why did he do that? Because his party was on the nose with rural voters, for being useless. And also because the party is now reliant upon big donors like Gina Reinhardt, who despises renewables. They’re winning because they claim they’re the ‘community’ objecting to wind farms. They’re nothing of the sort. They’re activists, gangs, making lots of noise to create the illusion of community reaction. We polled the entire community recently, at an election. They overwhelmingly rejected these gangs. Now governments are falling for it, calling for more ‘community consultation’. Activists love consultation, they hijack and bomb it with propaganda and abuse, it’s one of the ways they recruit.

Until the current bathroom renos I’d never heard of epoxy grout. One of the most frustrating things about nice tiling, particularly in a shower, is how difficult it can be to keep stains and mould out of the grout. Cement grout is porous, and you can seal it, but you’re still fighting a long battle against stains and mould. My brother put me onto epoxy grout, which others may have used. Absolutely impervious to things like mould or stains. Costs more but that’s a lot of years of frustration saved, for the money. Materials science is the cutting edge of the modern world (disclaimer: I’m a materials scientist 😉 )

Like Tom Cruise's brand damage when he jumped up and down on Oprah's couch. Kidults forget, he's now stratospherically popular again. Societies that replace public policy with trends have no attention span.

HBD! 🎊☕

Happy Birthday! Wishing you a wonderful day! ☕👯🥂

That red tape is the stuff they didn't use in the apartments that are collapsing in Sydney and Melbourne.

Lithgow is having one of its annual balls tomorrow night. Will be a fantastic onramp into the school holidays for some I suspect.

An Australian family pays 2% of its annual income to fund Medicare. Right now the same average family is also forking out 4-6% of its annual income, in private health insurance. Do we not see how insane this is? They also pay more in the billions of dollars of annual taxpayer-funded subsidies, to the same private health insurance. Subsidised private health insurance was an attempt by successive LNP governments to undermine Medicare. Just as targeted funding to private schools was designed to undermine public schools. Both are working, both public health and education are on their knees. And it’s not about health, or education. It’s about status. The ‘best schools’ are high status schools. People send their kids there so the kids and parents have higher status. Private health cover allows you to ‘jump the queue’ (i.e. lower status people). Like first class seats. Kidult society folks, this is pure life in the playground. Look. Think.

If democracy means ‘the people’ running things, why is every part of human life still structured by status, like the class system we say we left behind?

Remember this guy? Kenneth Colley. He’s just died. He broke his arm. How did that kill him, you may think? It didn’t. He went to hospital to get his broken arm treated. He caught Covid in hospital. The Covid killed him. I’m sure they reassured him it was ‘just a cold’.

Tesla is one of those rare examples of the design of something breaking through the imitative behaviour of humans. The Model Y became the biggest selling car in the world at a time EVs weren't even close to being a mainstream car for most. Mostly humans imitate other humans. But the Model Y didn't sell hugely because of that, EVs weren't popular. And now Tesla is still smashing it in Australia, despite the deep unpopularity of Musk and all the brainless Swassticar nonsense. It's the perfect car, for most uses. Thanks to the engineers who designed it, not Elon Musk. https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/tesla-demolishes-chinese-brands-in-australia-us-electric-car-brand-posts-best-sales-in?fbclid=IwY2xjawLUH6VleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF1dk5EWGNqdDB1VWJUNDdxAR5URyydSfAKP5vjq1AMiMaRXCa2PMBPt0_Dmj-GTXbKmaCIW56ZtnlzVV4h8w_aem_lHAPLPuyjH14ikTlViNMbw

Japanese car manufacturers have been playing tricks, running lots of stories about how EVs aren’t the future. They’ve been trying to buy time while they rush behind the scenes to catch up with the Chinese and Tesla, on electric cars. We’re starting to see the outcome now. Toyota is releasing a lot of electric models all of a sudden, beginning in China. And now Honda is releasing 7 full-electric models, including this one, the Honda Zero SUV. This isn’t the finished design, but is about 80% there.

I get lots of these from a ‘positivity’ account. I look at a meme like that and I see a genuine mental health problem, the need to be happy. The thing about feelings is, a perfectly healthy person living a rich life has all of them. Feelings are a contrast mechanism, they’re not things in themselves. They don’t exist as separate things, like ‘happiness’. Putin is happy to try to crush Ukraine, cyber criminals are happiest emptying your bank account. Is that ‘spreading happiness’? You can see what an idiot agenda it is, to make feelings independent things to try to have. It’s this sort of drivel that makes people run away from the basic realities of life, out of fear of being anything except happy.

Tattooing another thing that ‘went viral’, in our culture where adult life was replaced by what’s trending - fads and fashions. Many cover much of their bodies in them, total saturation coverage. I suggest that may have been a stupid thing to do.

Classic example of a factoid. Something that is wrong, repeated so often that people come to think it’s true. Modern electrical devices are designed to be left turned on at the wall continuously, in fact cycling them on and off at the wall can even damage them. Most would be lucky to use 5c of electricity overnight.

Rory entertainingly asking us to imagine if EVs were the dominant car, and then somebody invented petrols and diesels. This is the point, EVs aren’t just coming to reduce pollution, they’re coming because they’re VASTLY better cars. Petrol and diesel cars are rubbish, literally, from an engineering point of view.

Travel is a classic example of status in action, that again we mostly don’t see because our own culture is invisible to us, as water is invisible to fish. Why do millions now travel? They will to a man or woman tell you the usual things, to ‘see the sights’, to have ‘experiences’ etc. But the origin of mass travel isn’t that. You can see sights and have experiences sitting at home. It became a thing because it was something the highest status people in society did, the aristocracy. The ‘Grand Tour’. Nearly every part of our lives is the copying of ‘early adopters’, and early adopters are high status people, who others then want to be like. Whether it’s travel or what we wear, or how we speak, or what we eat or drink, or how we build and decorate homes - trace every single part of the culture backwards in time, and you will find a high status person or small group started something. Which millions of others then copied, to try to be a part of that status.

Watching UK home shows, so often you see red, blue and pink carpets, which look (to my eye) hideous. I often wondered why these colours seem so popular, and then the penny dropped. These are the colours you find in floor coverings in aristocratic homes, and palaces. It’s more status-imitation at work, people historically emulating higher status parts of society.

Happy Birthday, Markus! 🥳🎈🎉

Elon with his enormous war chest of money is now establishing his own political party, to take on Trump. Terribly confusing times for adults whose understanding of life comes from what’s trending on social media.

Falls are one of the greatest causes of injury and death in the elderly. Ringo Starr here.

All humans are highly suggestible, particularly kids. If you tell them always their mental health is under threat, they will become people whose mental health is under threat. If instead you fill their lives with stories and examples of people overcoming adversity, they will become resilient. Happened in the pandemic, when kids were repeatedly told by dipshits who had no idea that missing school was damaging their mental health. It was a cruel piece of propaganda, which child in the history of the world has found school a great place for mental health? Obvious, motivated lies, to get parents back to work.

Watch any home renovation show and in every case they do 2 things. 1. turn a home into a house i.e de-personalise it, making it more like a hotel. 2. ‘update’ the style to the latest trend, to ‘meet the market’. 1 and 2 are status games. True elegance is timeless, and much harder to achieve. Christopher Alexander tried to find a way to create it in architecture. This isn’t one of his buildings, but there are elements of real elegance here.

Scrubbed up spectacularly nicely. No doubt will become another focus of community whining and complaint.

I posted about casuistry a while ago, to me one of the most important and forgotten human inventions. The idea of case-based reasoning. This outrageous injustice to Oscar Piastri is a great example of why it’s needed. Piastri had a penalty applied right at the end of the race that led to him losing a race he dominated. On the face of it, a ‘10 second penalty’, but the penalty really was ‘stripped of a race win’, in context. In this case, the officials and commentators universally are applying a sort of mandatory sentencing approach to the issue. (Not helped by the fact that most are British, and this outrageous injustice gifted a win at the British Grand Prix to one of their darling Brit drivers who didn’t deserve it.) The rules say ‘do X, penalty is Y’, they say. That’s horseshit legalistic reasoning, absent any context or overall assessment of justice. If you get a neg driving charge on the road, the penalty can vary hugely depending on the context. If you don’t harm anybody for example, you’ll get a fine and lose points off your licence. If you hurt somebody else, the penalty will be greater. Also the role of judges, to apply the context and assess justice. Why populists hate judges, they want black and white hard rules (unless they get in trouble with the law, then suddenly they want context and justice to apply). Each case has to be assessed on its merits, looking at context and the overall justice of the situation. Piastri should have had a penalty, but nothing even close to being the loss of the race, that he’d dominated.

Teenage angst has paid off well. Now I’m bored and old. Kurt Cobain

We can learn to distinguish between timeless elegance, and the following of fads and fashions of what’s ‘trending’. The former is not about what you think, or about what others think about what you do, or about what you think about what others do. It’s not about copying anybody to try to fit in and have a certain status.

When we were designing the kitchen, we wanted something elegant, not something that was just a copying of a current trend. House design is a great example of imitative human life, if you look at what passes for great design, for example of a kitchen, it ends up being the same kitchen as 3 million other people have. People genuinely feel something looks amazing, because of the intrinsic design, but what they’re feeling is conformity with what everybody else likes. That’s the deepest human passion, to conform, and releases all the endorphins. Why rooms designed in that way end up looking like a magazine spread rather than lived-in room. It’s about show, a social game. It works pretty well, for the kitchen. Always start with functionality, all great style and elegance comes from functionality. If it works really well it has style. The bathroom is almost done now as well, where we wanted to reject the bland grey minimalism that is trending, and use colour and pattern in subtle ways to create a more timeless design. I suspect colour will come rushing back in the trends soon, we’ve had decades now of really bland minimalism. But as always the trend won’t be where to find true style or elegance.

Looking forward to trying this.

The health of just about every person I know not taking precautions against Covid is in decline. A progressive decline, people not understanding that what they’re experiencing is damage to their immune and vascular systems, leading to a whole range of other conditions. Every new Covid infection increases the damage and decline further. It doesn’t create immunity, it destroys immunity, to all disease. And the denial is something to behold. People won’t test because they actually don’t want to know if it’s Covid, because that would mean admitting that ‘living with’ it isn’t working. Everything is ‘just a cold’, or ‘hayfever’ or ‘allergies’, or whatever else they can make up out of thin air. Lives are being permanently ruined, and ended.

This room has a timeless elegance. Because its design is about elegant functionality, not showy comparison with other people. None of it is particularly expensive, nor are the furnishings premium. Compare it with the sort of rooms you see on a show like The Block or in the suburbs today, which are about creating a ‘premium’ feel that is a status thing, not a design thing. You can tell the difference in thinking about whether each type of room will age. The showy rooms will go ‘out of fashion’ quickly, within 10-15 years or even less people will say ‘oh that’s so 2020s’, and want to rip it all out and start again. That’s what all home renovation shows do, update to what’s fashionable, not create timeless elegance. This room won’t age.

A contrast, for my thoughts on timeless elegance. A very popular modern look for a bathroom. Superficially I think most would feel it has style, it looks pretty fancy. But does it have elegance? This is where I think you can’t trust your immediate feelings, which will nearly always be based on social comparison. Every part of this room responds to a current trend or fashion. Minimal use of colour, hotel-style basins, acres of tile or stone, with some wood thrown in. Expensive fittings. It presses buttons in us. The question to ask when deciding if you’re looking at elegance or fashion is - will it date? Fashion is about trends, about comparison between people over short time periods, driven by social status. Elements of this room have elegance, but mostly I don’t think it does. It will date. It reeks of social comparison, of showing-off. Of ‘premium’ feels, always a giveaway that social status is at work.

The level of illiteracy in the Trump administration. Also a window into how populism is really a social movement of people who did badly at school (which is always most people), a revenge of the playground against the classroom. Not an analogy, schools create adult life too.

For Alex.

You will hear people say that EVs create as many or more greenhouse emissions than petrols and diesels. If somebody says that to you, tell them to go back to their job frying chicken.

Sorry if you’re bored with the fountain! Another update, they resurfaced the fish pond surrounds as well. Whole thing looks stunning.

Many say to me that people flock to gigs as a mass social event because of the music. But I think this video shows well that big gigs appeal to many people because they like being in a crowd of people. It’s a social event, the music is just background. The band or act becomes the reason to assemble, as a crowd. The focus here is much more on the experience of being together as a huge group, than it is on any of the nuances of the music. That’s gig culture, music being used as a core way to generate social activity. That’s only one aspect of it too, people also look to artists for guidance in how to understand and live life. They’re at the centre of many adults’ lives, they give a meaning to those lives. And the same acts that give that meaning when they’re 17 are still doing that when they’re over 80. That’s historically unique, we just live in these times and forget that.

We could trade our 4-year old Toyota Kluger for a new Model Y Tesla, and the financing of the balance of the trade-in would cost the same as what it costs us to put fuel in the Kluger every week. What we’d save in fuel (and servicing) would entirely pay for a brand new car. Cost to us for making that shift = zero. Our existing Tesla had its first and only service this week. A tyre rotation. That’s it, cost $30. The next service due is windscreen wiper blades, in 2026. There are no regular services for a Tesla, the car tells you if anything needs fixing or replacing.

I often bizarrely get asked if I’m a ‘germaphobe’ because I still mask against Covid. It baffles people, everybody else has stopped wearing masks! Which shows, again, kidult society, where what adults do is just ‘what everybody else is doing’. There’s no thought behind it, it betrays the only principle in play here - copy what everybody else is doing. Like kids do at school, where we call it ‘peer pressure’. That’s all adult life now too. I still mask because Covid is a lethal disease. The fact you can catch it and seem OK afterwards is totally irrelevant. Like I’ve shared here many times, you can catch HIV and it’ll be just like a cold. And then you’ll be dead inside a decade, without treatment. There is no treatment for Covid, which fucks you over in so many more ways than HIV can. It’s coming for you.

The lovely thing about building with steel is that you can create beautifully open and lean structures, which are incredibly strong but mostly air. Like this carport we just had built. No need for any diagonal or other bracing at the joints, to stabilise the structure against shear forces, no need to tie the uprights together to avoid twisting, the steel is so strong it doesn’t need it. Which means the structure almost disappears when you look up the yard, it’s like open space, letting all the light through. The old carport had thick wooden uprights, with multiple bracing at the joints and ties between uprights, to stop the whole thing twisting out of shape in the wind. Wood and masonry structures share that weakness, against twisting (shear) forces.

We’re born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. True adult culture understands this, kidult culture never can, it craves continuous social life. That’s what adolescents do, it’s their appropriate stage of development, but now extended to all ages. That social life in turn is paradoxically violent and harms those who pursue it. All sociality is violence, because the essence of it is imitative rivalry, the battle for social status, that all social animals take part in. True freedom and happiness is being alone, not needing others. Still enjoying the company and love of others, but not needing it. Only then can you truly love, and be a good (non-needy) friend. This epidemic is mostly fake. It’s the imploding of kidult culture, in the face of the basic challenges of adult life. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

‘Mystery’ illness.

This is Tom Keating, master art forger, taken in the 1970s. He forged thousands of works. He's now collectible in his own right, to the extent there are now forgeries, of Tom Keating forgeries. Humans copy, it's their most human act. The distinction between an 'authentic' thing and its copy was invented by copying. There is no such thing as an original, without a copy. The explosion of people seeking authentic everything, including entire lives, was created by the explosion of imitation we now see through social media. Social media is imitative rivalry, people copying each other, in teams, battling other teams.

We worship doing. Buddhists would say all of the busy doing we live, even more so in our recreational time where we always have to be doing something: travelling somewhere, going out to some gig or to dinner etc., is us running away from a basic encounter with the here and now. And they’d be right. We’re running away from ourselves. Real happiness and joy comes from just being. Not doing. If you can’t be happy doing nothing, you will never be happy doing anything. Which will mean you will do even more stuff, to try to avoid that encounter, with nothing. Nothing is a mirror that shows you yourself, and we don’t like what it shows us.

If you need to use any sort of dental device for prolonged periods of time, like a splint, retainer, plate, dentures etc., keeping it clean is critical to stop your mouth becoming a breeding ground for germs. Oral health is linked to overall health in profound ways. Historically people used dissolving tablets containing various cleaning chemicals to do this. But one of these ultrasonic cleaners is best and easiest. You can still use the tablets if you want, just drop them in as well, though the ultrasound will clean brilliantly without them. Don’t bother with the expensive ones marketed as dental cleaners, get one of these basic jewellery cleaning ones, from Target or elsewhere.

Europe went from getting about 25% of its energy from coal, to only 6%, in only 10 years. All the anti-renewables and anti-EV ‘debates’ are fake, stirred up and funded by vested interests in the fossil fuel industry, to try to prolong the status quo. It’s not ‘Greenies’ causing the shift, renewable energy is orders of magnitude cheaper to produce and distribute. It was game over already, long ago. You can stick with your team in the debates, except it isn’t a debate, the debates are engineered and fake, it was over before it started. History will just think you’re a fucking idiot.

To go back to tailoring, another interesting thing is that all clothes were originally tailored clothes. If you couldn’t afford a tailor (though they weren’t the luxury once they are now), clothes were made at home, fitted to you. Ready-to-wear clothes off the rack were a creation of the industrialisation of clothes-making. A really fascinating twist is how they decided on standard sizes, given up until that point clothes had been tailor-made for each person. The industry had loads of data from the US military, about the sizes of its troops, so it used that to standardise clothes sizes. It meant millions ended up in clothes that never really fit them properly.

HBD! 🌟🎁👯

NSW has a rule that potential EV buyers need to know, if they have kids of driving age. It prohibits P-platers driving cars with power-to-weight ratios that are above a certain number. This immediately makes most popular EVs prohibited vehicles, because of their great power. It’s a stupid rule for Teslas, because they have parental controls that can limit speed, acceleration and even time of day younger drivers are able to drive. This is pretty straightforward for any EV. Show me a petrol or diesel that has that. You also always have immediate knowledge of where the car is. Victoria has similar though not as stringent rules. Other States and territories have none. Your child is much safer driving an EV like a Tesla than driving any other car, because of their degree of control and oversight you have of the vehicle.

My first training was as a materials scientist/engineer. Materials more than anything else create the modern world. Like the treatments of glass, Diamon-Fusion in this case which we’ve had applied to the new shower door. It creates a hydrophobic layer that repels water and contaminants and even scratches. The glass looks new with minimal cleaning, for its lifetime.

I know many have long ago dismissed me as mad with daily attention to Covid. I wanted to share the science behind the fantasy we’re living. This is a short excerpt from the Mayo Clinic, one of the top research hospitals in the world. We’ve all been told that we’re ’living with’ Covid because that way we’ll build up ‘herd immunity’ to the virus, as a population. The science for why this will never work is all there, in the dot points. The only thing that WILL work for Covid is what I’ve highlighted in the green. Controlling the *spread* of the disease. Ventilating buildings, wearing masks in enclosed busy spaces, isolating the sick until they’re better etc. Once you control spread, exponential decay in the infection dynamics will do the rest.

‘Range Anxiety’ is a mental illness. The EV wasn’t dropped there by helicopter.

Rock stars are the aristocrats of our time. People still think it’s about music. Some of them even buy the exact houses previous generations of aristocrats lived in, they’re landed gentry.

Volcanic lightning at Mexico’s Colima Volcano. Photo by Sergio Tapiro.

The US began this rot, the idea that the population somehow magically runs the country. There is no such thing as ‘the people’. Every person is attached to a variety of status hierarchies, groups of any kind don’t think or act collectively. ‘The people’ isn’t being taken over by ‘authoritarianism’ or by ‘oligarchs’ or ‘autocrats’. The only time a PUBLIC exists (entirely different to ‘the people’) is as a constructed, analytical assessment of collective good, by government officials. It’s populists who use the term ‘the people’. Hitler’s ‘Volk’. Really they just form another status hierarchy, opposed to ‘the system’, and then attribute it to the population. It’s a con.

As the big bands of the 60s and 70s reach the end of their own lives, it’s generating an explosion of last-gasp gigging and nostalgia, with astronomically lucrative returns. In my youth it would have happened in local RSL clubs. Now it happens in stadiums. They refused to grow up and give way to the young, and will do until the day they’re gone. The counterculture always was only teenagers trying to be teenagers forever.

The 40th anniversary of Live Aid is everywhere online at the moment. Live Aid, where the Western world looked at the catastrophe of human starvation, and did what? It put on a gig. That’s what gig culture does to try to fix adult problems. We’re still doing it today, 40 years later. Still living in gig culture. There was no big gig for Covid. Covid destroys gigs culture. It’s why gig culture (adults never leaving high school) refuses to fight it. Some think I’m attacking music itself when I talk about gig culture. It has nothing to do with the music, or with attacking anything. It’s about understanding our own culture. From about the 1960s onwards, our favourite music became the way teens forged a path into the adult world. It already was the way they helped shape their identity, their favourite acts are a sort of tribal thing. But the countercultural revolution, the Woodstock shift, took this into adult life too. To ‘change the world’. It’s the only way teen life can understand adult life. A big, impotent, inarticulated, protesting mob, ‘the people’, as the Americans say, who began this cultural shift. That conceives adult life as dark forces doing bad things, that have to be opposed. Like parents, or teachers. They even tried to ‘ground’ us all, in ‘lockdowns’!

I’m seeing a lot of Model Ys now, even in Bathurst and Lithgow. Like when it was originally introduced, it sells so well because it’s engineered so brilliantly to cover so many needs. Its inside space is huge, a genuine Tardis thing, because on the outside you’re sure it couldn’t possibly be that big. This is a 65-inch TV somebody bought and was transporting home.

Happy Birthday, Christine! 🥳🎈🎉

‘Systemic infection.’ Gig culture is taking on Covid, and losing.

“Irish musician Bob Geldorf said that 40 years on from Live Aid the concerts inspired people to feel that ‘the individual was not powerless’ and that they could change the world.” There’s the constitution of gig culture, in black and white. It didn’t change the world, except Bob got a knighthood. Sir Bob. Status games with guitars are kidult culture.

Being determined to keep paying Saudi Arabia and Texas a big chunk of your weekly pay for fuel instead of plugging your car into free Australian wind and sunshine is a special kind of stupid. Nearly $30,000 saved in 5 years.

Sharing my own data. This is what it cost to charge the EV in June. An average of $5.50 per week. That’s 2-3 return trips to Bathurst every week, 1-2 return trips to Sydney a month and everyday driving around Lithgow. On days when not at work that cost drops to zero, the home solar charges the car. Even now people spend more on a cup of coffee than it’s costing us to run the car all week, with big kms. Also zero servicing costs (there are no services). If you’re somebody who drives mostly around the town you live in all week, you’d only need $1 -$2 a week in ‘fuel’ for your EV.

Happy Birthday, Louise! ☕🌟

This made me laugh. I've decided that 'gig culture' is too abstract a term for discussing this topic, the basic argument is that the countercultural movements of the 50s and 60s are now over, and those that led them are now the high status parts of society they protested against in their youth. That's how all revolutions go. The French Revolution generated Napoleon. The Chinese revolution gave us Mao and now Xi. The Russian Revolution gave us Stalin and Putin. The countercultural revolution gave us The Beatles and other 'legends' of rock. Each replaced an old status hierarchy with a new one, with them at the top.

The most important room in Bathurst. Council’s records archive, dating back to first European settlement. This is the ‘red tape’ opinionated windbags complain about, that actually runs societies. Without this room Bathurst would be like a body without a brain or nervous system. A place without memory, doomed to repeat the same day over and over without any chance of accumulating hard-won knowledge and experience. This room is full of breathtaking treasures and insights. (Not open to the public, though people can request copies of files, just part of what I do every day is fill those requests.) Much of this material is now digitised, and is used every time you visit, ring or email Council, to shape what action your query will prompt, based on past precedent. That’s what bureaucrats do, stop us all living a permanent Groundhog Day of making the same decisions and mistakes over and over again. More than anything else it’s this room that gives Bathurst a functioning history. That gives the thousands who have come before a voice and influence even today, with the things they learned through often brutal and bloody experience, as they now lay in their graves. Bureaucracy is the past and future, acting in the present. Without it we learn nothing, living purely in fleeting fads and fashions. On what’s ’trending’ enough to disturb our temporary attention and boredom. Social media society. Elected folk who come to power through the fads, fashions and trending of social media, through their evanescent empires of likes and followers, openly question why Councils need to spend money on things like this. That tells you everything you need to know about the two worlds in collision here, and how social media society is doomed to destroy itself.

Happy Birthday, Sam! 🎂🎊🌟

Happy Birthday, Keily! 🥳🥂

Happy Birthday, Lisa! 🎉🥂👯

Tobacco plantation owners were some of the high status, wealthy people of their day. Every era has its high status positions, that generate wealth and power. The counterculture we’ve all lived since the 1960s is the same. For the first time in history it made popular musicians rich and powerful. That’s what ‘gig culture’ means, the counterculture that created a new status hierarchy, with an adolescent cultural form, the rock star, now a powerful and wealthy part of the adult world. That culture is now coming to an end, with the death of the generation that created it. As it ends that culture is launching a last-gasp gigathon, I see The Smiths are now back on the road too. This is a million miles away from rock being a way for teenagers to rebel against the adult world. It’s teenagers being the adult world.

The NSW 'Pattern Book' for house design is a great idea, getting you an architect-designed home for about $1, and fast-track through the planning system. It won't fix expensive housing, because that isn't caused by 'supply', no matter how many people on all sides say that. And how do people live without fly screens in Australia? Always seemed a triumph of style over substance, to me.

"...nearly half of Americans in their 60s and 70s play some form of PC, mobile or console video game every week, as do 36% of people in their 80s." I know, I know, but this IS kidult culture. Where adult life is just an extension of teen life, where there's minimal difference between what people do at every age. Adolescence replaces all life stages. Because that's the culture.

Name something today that has that sort of collective excitement and vision. Public life now is people queuing up to complain and protest about everything. Like children, because that's what the culture literally is.

NASA routinely transported space shuttles along city streets. Huge crowds would gather to look and cheer. Trees, signs and lamp posts had to be temporarily removed or adjusted. The route required levelling the streets and raising power lines. Try to do the same with a marvel of modern engineering, a wind turbine blade, and every whining kidult will vomit an unceasing torrent of abuse onto the socials. This is how societies have changed, and again I don't think we see it. No adult, collective sense of progress or ambition, just endless nitpicking complaint.

A RAM parked next to me today. The size of a tank. I saw the label on the side and remembered when a high litre number meant something interesting or even exciting. Now it seems embarrassing. For comparison, my Tesla has more power than this RAM, and about the same amount of torque. The RAM wll use about $30 of fuel for every 100km it drives. The Tesla costs about $1.50 for every 100km it drives.

When everybody transitions to an EV, this hilarious farce will be over. They don’t overheat because they don’t explode volatile liquids to drive pistons moving in a completely different direction to where you want to go, which then has to be mechanically translated through about 250 pieces of metal to turn the wheels.

Look at every person in that crowd, and find me the one who’s really ‘there for the music’. They’re there for the crowd, the appeal is to be part of a crowd. Hardly anybody you see in this pic is actually listening, they’re focused on the singer whipping them into a frenzy, and on each other. It could be a football game and the crowd would look indistinguishable. Gigs are social events much more than they’re about music. The gigs people go to are increasingly the ‘trending’ gigs, the social aspect of the event begins long before the actual day. I should say, to know your culture is not to criticise it, it’s just to recognise it for what it is. Then what’s good and bad about it can come into focus too. Humans didn’t suddenly develop such an enormous enthusiasm for music that tens to hundreds of thousands of them packed into stadiums to listen carefully to it. This is a social movement, mistaken for appreciation of art. It’s how the youth of the 1950s and 1960s ‘mobilised’, and we repeat that today without recognising it. Kidult culture.

"The “alt-music” image of a counterculture is a 20th century affectation; an evanescent form produced by radio and television, by Hollywood and the music industry. Those cultural forms are the empty vessel that 20th century counterculture was poured into... ...The same degree of youthful societal engineering is still there, too, only this time the youth have been able to seize the medium of communication (the internet). The end result is something that we haven’t seen before—a counterculture so huge that it feels like a part of normal culture because it can go toe to toe with its parent culture and win." James Horton, missing that it's not that youth have control of the internet, it's that the adults there are also youth. 'Online' was built using adolescent culture as its model. The smallest kids and oldest adults are sharing the same culture. https://jimhorton.substack.com/p/wait-is-woke-the-new-counterculture?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Some scholars say World War 2 ended with The Beatles. The early 1960s, when the huge surge of babies born after WW2 were coming of age, as teenagers. The Boomers. A mass of humanity looking for a way to remake the world, through ‘peace and love’ (Ringo Starr’s motto still now, at 85, in every interview). That’s what the counterculture of that time was, the Boomers looking to dismantle the ‘establishment’. It was The Beatles who were the catalysts for that shift. To this day even they probably think it was their brilliant songwriting that caught up millions in a ‘mania’. But they were just the soundtrack to a social movement. 1950s rock n roll culture had made popular music a rallying point for teens, with acts like Elvis, but The Beatles were the tipping point where rock stars became the de facto leaders of this vast mass of teens. Peace, love, anti-establishment, individual development etc. The ingredients of the counterculture. A movement led by its music. Most adults today still look to their favourite musicians as guiding lights in their lives. That’s our culture, now coming to an end. Rock stars long ceased being the pathway for the young to rebel against the old. Now they’re fabulously wealthy members of the same establishment that they once wanted to dismantle. Youth today are less rebellious not because they’re more timid, but because their parents and grandparents joined them, as permanent teenagers. They have nobody to rebel against. The whole idea of the young rebelling against the old was invented by separating the young from the old, into two separate cultures. School and work. Before that youth were just mini-adults, in a single adult culture. Kids went ‘down the mines’. Now we’ve flipped it completely, and there’s only youth culture, independent of age. It replaced the adult culture.

HBD! 👯🎉🎂

Billion dollar plus tours are not uncommon today for the legends of pop music. People refuse to see how fundamentally different this is to how this industry began, as kids trying to ‘make it big’ in the world, as the culture kids used to force themselves upon adult culture. Their rebellion, their revolution. That revolution ended years ago, these artists are now the elites they once sang against. The counterculture became the culture, the new status hierarchy. That’s just a literal description of what happened, not a judgment of what happened. Those who grew up in this culture are often still deeply, emotionally tied to it, and resent any suggestion that it’s about anything except music. The numbers tell the story, this is a full cultural force, not just music appreciation. It’s the victory of teenagers over adults, the transformation of the adult world into a teen world.

When Rod’s not busy getting very rich being a permanent teenage rock star, he’s being a permanent little boy, building model railroads, and complaining to his local council about potholes in the roads to his vast estate.

I’m too old for false modesty. I’m extremely good at music, which might surprise some who see me post so often about music today. Music is one of my gifts, as we all have gifts, it comes as easily to me as breathing. But growing older with that gift, I’ve realised a lot more about it. I realised that my earlier love of music was really a love of sound. Music is the tiniest subset of sound. I spend more time listening to ASMR or to things like brown noise (and no, it’s not people sharting) than I do to music now. Because they connect me to much more complex, multi-dimensional experiences with sound. And I now think music is a bit of a modern tyranny. It drowns out the extraordinary richness of sound, with its repetitive refrains. Nothing but earworms, that have the same function as birdsong, to create territory. Many days driving in the car I can’t think of a single song I want to put on, because once you directly feel the structure of music, as territorial refrains, it can begin to bore or even annoy you. Remember Bellbird Hill, on the drive to Sydney, where people stop to listen to the Bell Miners? That sound is actually the sound of an ecosystem in ruins, Bell Miners are bullies, driving out all other species. And that’s like music. It takes sound, and regiments it into repetitive refrains, that drive out the noise. If you listen to white noise or brown noise, for example, many would say ‘that’s just noise’. But it is infinitely changing sound, impossible to control, you can get lost in it in a sort of meditation in the richness, there are whole universes there. Compare that to the way a song for example can compel people, even thousands at once, to sing it. That’s what refrains are, bullying, repetitive, territorial commands. Like military marching music, but that’s the model for all music. Sound marshalled in that way marks territory and demands a repetitive ‘ear worm’ response. Meditators actually know this. One of the most profoundly calming and relaxing things you can do is to sit and to just listen. And as you practice that, you will begin to notice the entre universe of sound out there, in every situation, that is suppressed by the repetitive refrains of the endless music in our lives and in our heads. It opens your entire being out to an experience of the wider universe.

Just look at the beautiful engineering of electric motors. Simple, super efficient, incredibly powerful. And how they’re getting even smaller and more powerful over time. Michael Faraday invented them in 1821, they’re now over 200 years old. Not much changes in the design because the principles are so simple and elegant. We had 100 years of the loud, filthy, inefficient combustion rubbish the Italians and Germans invented and the Americans and Saudis fuelled with their subsidised cheap oil. Let’s go back to the original and best motors. Silent, effortless, clean mega-grunt.

You can’t make it up. By definition ‘Forever Young’ isn’t ageing gracefully. It’s refusing to age at all. It could be the kidult anthem.

This is what caused the global pile-on, on J.K. Rowling. Her querying why ‘people who menstruate’ isn’t ‘women’. I saw this in a news article about cervical cancer screening. The sentence could easily say ‘you’re eligible if you’re a woman aged between 25 and 74, and have ever been sexually active.’ But that would exclude the men who want to identify as women. People seem OK with this. The biological complexity and challenges of being a woman have been a core part of the struggle women have faced for all of human history. Now that’s being erased by a social media culture that allows people to create an identity from anything - you can be a Jedi, or cosplay a superhero, or whatever. Also why I included the second image about Harry Potter, because this shift is happening everywhere. Even with Rowling’s own work. The line between reality and fantasy is gone. This is kidult culture too, adolescent fantasies become lived realities. Identity goes from being playful within boundaries to being essentialising, and chosen at will. And social media gives this a home.

Almost done, just the skirting tiles, splashback on the vanity and mirror to go, plus reconnecting the split system for heating. The brushed copper tapware now all added. The colour scheme is the faintest pinks and greens (the floor terrazzo has flecks of green too), with the faintest pinks (painted walls and bath splashback in terrazzo).

Heh, ok 🤔 Here phishy phishy.

For those with range anxiety. Brisbane to Bathurst and return, Tesla Model Y.

While most line up for repeated infections for the fool’s gold of hybrid immunity (an impossibility for Covid), give me this. And Australian too. Let’s hope clinical testing shows the same results. Those convinced Covid is just a cold might also wonder why researchers are still working so hard on this. Maybe experts know Covid kills, fast and slow.

The official White House page. I don’t see how America ever recovers its reputation globally, it will always be a joke to others now. This stuff isn’t fleeting, or an authoritarian takeover. Americans elected the idiot twice. It’s a deeper cultural problem it doesn’t understand.

2023. And 2025. Covid is happy to do you slowly.

The range EVs already have now, with current batteries, is equal to or greater than the range of the cars most of us grew up with. The things we forget. What’s even more interesting is that the range of combustion engined cars hadn’t changed since the 1930s. Ford’s Model C Ten in 1934 had a greater range than just about every Falcon or Commodore in our era. 500-600km of range has been the standard for nearly a century. You can get to 700-1000km of range with larger fuel tanks and by using diesels and turbos, but you always run into the upper limit of about 30% efficiency for a combustion engine. Newer EVs are already 1000km of range and above, using only a fraction of the energy.

There was some outrage (everything is outrage) at Grok’s answer here. But actually as an AI it was doing exactly what was asked.

AI is a brilliant tool for summarising whole areas of research. Like this one, a discussion a few of us have been having here, about the role of popular music in the countercultural revolution, the dominant culture of our lives. What I call ‘gig culture’, for this reason. Kyle, Mark, Lauren.

I like to share the everyday experiences of owning an electric car, because for most all they hear is the battle cries of various competing pro-and-anti EV teams. For example, in my drive from Lithgow to Bathurst every day, the car is so efficient that it uses only one percent of its charge to get me from Yetholme to Bathurst.  At full highway speeds, including overtaking. Masive, glorious, cruising grunt. That may surprise some who are told that you can barely make it around the block in an EV without needing to charge up. 

A national disgrace. Wipe all of the debt. Boomers taxing education is one reason the young despise them.

Where does a phone call happen? I remember asking that question a few times. There is no simple answer, which is the point of the question. There is a ‘presence’ to the conversation that isn’t located anywhere in space as we think about it. It’s why the telephone is sometimes called a tele-presence technology. This loops back to what I often write about travel. I’d call our culture fundamentalist about ‘being there’. We feel we are closer to something - more present to it - if our physical body is located next to it. So we think the real ‘Paris’ can only be found by flying there. This is wrong. In many ways you are further from the real Paris by being physically there, than by reading a great novel or watching a great film about it. Both technologies that can create a virtual presence of the real Paris. Sometimes we say they ‘evoke’ real Parisian life, which means the same thing. Your can spend weeks in Paris and never get close to that sort of presence. SImilarly look at this couple. Are they ‘closer’ to each other because they’re sitting next to each other on a couch? They look a million miles apart, in the presence way. Many couples find a much closer presence as a couple, by creating more physical space between them. By having separate bedrooms, even living for times apart. It ‘rekindles’ the presence, that undefinable reality of connection. We fundamentally mistake presence, for ‘being there’. They’re absolutely not the same thing. Take celebrity, do you get ‘closer’ to a celebrity by queuing up for a selfie with them, by being in the same space with them? Selfies reveal this fundamentalist part of our culture, the belief in ‘being there’. In fact you’ll be a lot closer to them in a presence sense by reading something they’ve written, something that gives you a presence to their inner thoughts and feelings. Why I sometimes say I share a lot more about me by sharing my thoughts here, than I would by sharing lots of selfies and photos of what I do every day. Social media is infected with the same ‘being there’ fundamentalism. The dominance of selfie-type sharing is actually socially motivated, it’s status-seeking mostly. A selfie is how others see you, not how you see yourself. A few lines about how you think is infinitely more ‘selfie’.

With the new federal rebate many wil be buying home batteries for the first time. This is a great thing. However a word of caution, don’t be suckered in by thinking bigger is better. New modular batteries allow you to add enormous amounts of storage, like in this ad. The most important thing to remember is, you need to be able to FILL the battery from somewhere. There is no way an ordinary domestic solar system for example will ever fill a 40 kWh battery, in a regular, usable or useful way. And in winter you have buckleys. The time of year when you might generate huge amounts of excess solar will often also be when you need less energy in the home anyway. Less heating etc. There is also a limit to how fast your inverter (which converts the DC generated from solar into the AC your house or grid uses) can actually deliver this energy, either into your home, or exported to the grid to make money. Usually you’re limited to 5kW or 10kW at a time.

Bathurst Our Town doesn’t celebrate the lives of great engineers or teachers or nurses or tradies who die. But musicians, yes. Because they’re like our gods. Kidult culture. What Bathurst Our Town does most is give Council a kicking. That’s the same anti-establishment culture. Replacing adult culture, with rock stars. The counterculture we grew up in and still live in, that people don’t want to see.

Imagine if this pans out. I see the anti-vaxers are all over the comments.

The feels, as I call it.

Bureaucracy is the only democracy. Everything else is just a pissing contest, for status.

Sudden death of an ex-student this week, early-40s, with lung cancer, barely a week after diagnosis apparently. No symptoms. Appeared otherwise fully healthy. Covid is a potent trigger of cancer of the lung. These are the dangers everybody is facing.

As the boomers have aged, their enormous demographic clout has gradually removed all of the public services they benefited from, for free, in education, health care, energy etc. That’s what the privatisation push was. Once they’d milked the rest of us for those free benefits for themselves, they also wanted to avoid tax as they aged, to pay for ongoing public services. The pension age is of course next. Many of them retired at 55, on a full salary for the rest of their lives. Not those who came after. This is also kidult culture, folks. Me me me is the countercultural revolution. This is Woodstock culture, which was always full of shit, preaching world peace and love and equality, while becoming far and away the richest generation in world history, gorging themselves on the institutions they affected to despise in their anti-establishment youth. Youth have crazy ideas, you just expect them to grow out of them. The young today are like peasants, priced out of basics like housing, hammered for basics like education. While their elders are on permanent recreational gap years, travelling the globe in lifestyle retirements with enormous tax-free super nest eggs. This is what happens when you replace stages of life, with mutual responsibilities to each other, with ‘living your best life’ permanent adolescence. It’s a culture. The individuals are lovely people.

If you’re getting solar, do a shade analysis before buying (good installers will do it for you). For example this mighty tree in my street was factored into our system. By 3.30 most winter days, it shades our entire roof. Without it we’d have solar production until dinner time. I’m a big fan of trees, and this one is magnificent, but also now far too dangerous. I’ve asked Lithgow City Council twice to think about removing it, a sister tree to this one fell in a storm last year and took out power to the entire street, while destroying the neighbour’s fence and also kerb and guttering. And it was smaller than this one, which if it fell could smash the front half of ours or the neighbour’s houses. Its base sits in a tiny bit of nature strip barely a metre wide, overflowing it and ripping up the concrete. It’s dangerous, a huge tree totally out of proportion to its context. Replace it with something more sensible as a street tree.

While I think much of nutrition science is a waste of time, one thing I do think is true and is only slowly becoming mainstream is that sugar is pretty horribly bad for you. It’s still so common for people to be victims of generations of hysteria about fats (witness the explosion in popularity of air fryers), whereas the whole time particularly older types of fats were not only not the problem, they were vital and healthy. But sugar is a highly artificial, relatively modern food that wreaks real havoc on your body.

The Autumn Blaze Red Maple is a wonderful tree that grows very fast, up to 1.5m per year. At that speed you can have a spectacular established tree in not very much time. They’re deciduous, so you do get a lot of leaves in the autumn.

Rousseau said a society has all of its habits at once. When we destroyed public health by ‘living with’ Covid, we destroyed all of it. Vax rates down for every disease now, and millions convinced they can infect their way to good health. Also, this isn’t just lower vax rates for flu at work, it’s damaged child immune systems from Covid, under fire from other viruses. Nothing will be done because in kidult culture you’re on your own, ‘living your best life’. Public health puts restrictions on all the supposed fun of travel and dining out and gigs, and won’t be tolerated. The entire next generation under continuous assault now from infectious disease. And we’re here posting homages to drugged out moron rock stars, and sharing vacuous selfies of our sightseeing world trips.

There was not and will never be a ‘Concert for Covid’. Think about that. Up to 36 million people are thought to have died, so far, from Covid. That’s up to twice as many as died in World War 1. Why won’t there be a concert for it? Because gig culture knows public health against infectious disease destroys its business model. What did rock stars do when Covid hit? Fled to their multi-million dollar estates to hide from the disease. Many hit the socials hard from there, whining about how their gigs had dried up. Public life is not compatible with kidult/gig culture.

EVs reduce exhaust emissions to zero in cities and towns. And they also reduce the amount of brake dust by up to 83%. EVs use regenerative braking rather than brakes a lot of the time, meaning the electric motor spins in reverse to slow you down, acting as a generator and re-charging the battery. Teslas have the best regenerative braking, I barely use the brake pedal. Both exhaust emissions and brake dust are absolutely toxic to human health. More people die of this pollution than from car accidents. Diesels are particularly toxic, but brake dust is the worst of the lot. What's on that guy's finger in the pic is also in your lungs and bloodstream. The industry has been allowed to belch this filth into the air for free for over a century, with no penalty. No other industry would get away with it, and this is one of the ways combustion vehicles are hugely subsidised by the taxpayer. If standard fees applied for this pollution, petrol and diesel vehicles would be completely unaffordable.

I encourage everybody to read these findings. You don’t want Covid, and you certainly don’t want to keep getting it over and over. Long Covid is not just having a mild form of ongoing Covid for a while. It means things like diabetes, heart disease, strokes, obesity, immune damage leading to constant ongoing infections, and cancer.

Dave has done multiple jobs for us, and they’ve all been superb. So professional, such patient attention to detail. A master craftsman.

Many people tell me that ‘capitalism’ is the cause of our many problems in the world. Others think it’s communism, or authoritarianism. Did you know none of the -isms are even real? All societies are functionally equivalent, and run on one thing alone? Status. All societies are social, because humans are social animals. Status is the currency of all human life, because status gives you your identity, as a social animal. Without status you are literally nobody. If you don’t believe me, here’s a fact for the day. There is no, after more than a century, agreed definition of what capitalism even is. Or any of the -isms. That’s because none of them are real. They’re team names in status battles, branding for different teams. Russia and China have never been run by ‘communism’, the West never by ‘capitalism’, and what’s happening the US right now is not ‘authoritarianism’. It’s all just status games, with differemt names for the teams.

Renewable energy is Australia’s superpower. And we have bottom-feeding scum like the federal Coalition actively campaigning to knee-cap that advantage purely to score pathetic points and votes in the social media culture wars. Name one other natural advantage Australia has that could be an alternative, if you disagree. It’d be like Saudi Arabia saying it should never have drilled for its oil and sold sand instead.

BYD offers full self-driving for free on its cars. Have a look at how it does. All fully autonomous driving is technically supervised, just like a pilot supervises an auto-pilot. This stuff is already scarily good, you don’t really need much more. It’s much less likely to kill you than human drivers are.

I think it’s important to close the loop on social media hysterias, because in the middle of them no thought is going on at all. And then afterwards nobody takes stock of what a delusional and hysterical situation it was, so it happens again the same way the next time. Like the ‘Swassticar’, Tesla-Nazi pile-on earlier this year. You can see here Tesla just had its biggest sales month in Australia *ever*. While that hysteria was going on people were righteously declaring Tesla was over, the company is evil, blah blah. Where are those people now? Swept up in a viral hysteria then, silent now. If you don’t want to be called a kidult, don’t act like one. Think instead of following the mob, as if you’re still in high school.

Nearly all car reviews are produced by people with a very limited understanding of the engineering design that goes into the making of anything. Ben Vallack’s review of the first Model Y is a great example of somebody who understands how engineering design works (he’s an engineering designer). You can see here the number of things he looks at that you rarely if ever see in other reviews. His conclusion, that it’s the best engineered family car in the world, is one I share. And the Juniper is much better again. https://youtu.be/YIOm_76OdHk?si=NGh0WqmrXxpou1IV

Gaza bewilders, how can Israel continue what it’s doing? It can because despite all the guff about Anglo countries (dominating the grey in the pic) being democracies, no country is actually a democracy, in the way we mean that (as government by ‘the people’). Despite centuries of apparent battles between Church and State, when the rubber hits the road Anglo nations are still Judeo-Christian status hierarchies. Gaza reveals it. AUKUS does too, the fake war against China isn’t economic or political, it’s the same Judeo-Christian status hierarchy taking on the supposedly godless commies. The US has been a clear theocracy for years, under cover of guff about democracy, which is an empty, unworkable, meaningless idea, in the way they describe it. Status runs societies. Our oldest status hierarchies come from religion, which built our societies.

Philip worked for NASA and MIT, and in Biotech. He’s an expert. Most will be more worried about losing their social lives and/or doing something different to what everybody else is doing, to make any changes. That’s kidult culture, sorry.

Another interesting piece from a couple of years ago about the engineering innovation in both Tesla vehicles and also in their manufacturing of vehicles more generally, where they’ve innovated hugely. I’m not a Tesla fanboy at all, I’m very critical of a range of things they do, but as an engineer I think the genius of a lot of what they’ve done also gets missed. “Taking the skin off the (Tesla) Model Y, it was truly a work of art,” a Toyota executive told Automotive News. “It's unbelievable.” https://www.drive.com.au/news/toyota-tesla-model-y-work-of-art-report/

AI is us, the idea it could be against us comes from watching too many Terminator movies. It’d be like thinking your left hand and right hand are at war. Given that collectively humans mostly engage in pissing contests for status, we’d be better off with many things taken over by AI anyway.

Watching the netball, and it was another example of how partisan crowds now are. An entire stadium fell silent because the home team lost. I’m sorry, even when I was growing up that would have been called appalling sportsmanship. Childish. And that’s what it is, adults acting like children, even though they hate being told it. Politics is the same. Partisan team sports. The opposing team isn’t just a team, it’s the enemy. No such thing as gracious losing now, only vengeance and retribution. If you don’t notice the spread and escalation of this schoolyard behaviour I think you’re blind to your own culture. Social media amplifies it hugely, its whole business model is team sports. It’s modelled on a schoolyard. I also remain disgusted when professional (or amateur) athletes cry when they lose. If I’d done that as a kid, I’d have got a kick in the arse, and deserved it.

Kidult culture is also name-drop culture. The death of or publicity for a legend of kidult culture has others madly sorting through even the merest contact they may have had with them, so that the post can be about the poster, not the person in the news. Status whoring, the endless battle to have and retain status, piggybacking off those who do as well. I see this with unknown musicians a lot. They met somebody famous once, or did one thing that got a bit of public attention, and then they live off the fat of that for the rest of their anonymous career. It reveals what this culture is about at its root, what all culture is about. Status. Getting it, keeping it. ‘Making it’, where ‘it’ is attention and status. In our adolescent culture era rock stars are a major fast-track to that status and attention.

Noah’s distinction here between horizontal and vertical communities is the most crucial defining feature of our lives today. When the two collide you can get real hostility. A lot of what passes for ‘local’ issues, like the current opposition for wind farms, isn’t that at all, but rather a symptom of a vertical community at work. Vertical communities are also kidult culture, because by definition adolescent culture is decoupled from the physical infrastructure of adult life. I know many assume ‘kidult’ is an insult, but it’s a purely descriptive term, of an adult living in an adolescent culture.

Have been posting about this for years. Using a fireplace to heat your home is like putting a diesel ute in your neighbours’ lounge rooms, with the engine running all day and night. Developing countries try to move away from the filth of wood smoke, in the West we burn it recreationally, for the glow of a wood fire.

Diamond’s Solitary Man is a bitter, hurt by love creation. Solitary to avoid more betrayal, in love. But we’re all alone, in love or in friendship. All love is betrayal, we love our idea of another person, and they love their idea of us. And our friendships are about fitting in socially, not about our individual nature. That’s the lesson life tries to teach all of us, but it’s rarely learned. The greatest friendship and love comes from those who are solitary, not needing others. Everything else is co-dependency.

These AI baby vids are hilarious. In recent weeks I’ve had various people repeat to me every dot point of this bullshit, not realising it all cascades down from the master bullshit artist himself. Whole communities now are like Trump-zombies, passionately believing this is all their own ideas and feelings.

Trump thinks Beyoncé and Oprah should be arrested. Easy to laugh, but also instructive to note who he sees as his enemies. Rock stars, celebrities. He’s the Twitter President. Kidult culture.

I’ve had a day with multiple reminders of the kidult bullshit those at the front-line of actual provision of basic public services have to deal with. I know it annoys some to speak of kidult culture - well folks, come spend a day in the trenches with the medical staff, teachers, emergency services, local government staff etc. who have to deal with a nation of kidults. Whose only idea of adult responsibility is ridiculous, impotent hashtag ‘look at me’ stunts like this. Thank you police for acting and putting a stop to nonsense like this. And my condolences to the teachers today dealing with whining kidult parents, and nurses dealing with entitled and whining kidult patients and anti-vaxers, and police and local government staff asked to arbitrate and fix the mess caused by the explosion in kidult pile-ons. These people are on the receiving end of a relentless tidal wave of vile abuse, every day, from spoiled children aged 17-100.

A retired couple who own a $2 million home and with other assets of nearly half a million dollars would still qualify for an annual aged pension of over $41,000 per year. And look at the growth rates along the bottom line, in the past 30 years, all nearly 300%. This is often described as intergenerational inequity. But socially it’s much more interesting than that. This is the old refusing to be old and to adapt their expectations and lifestyles to that change in life. Forever young. For comparision the maximum a university student can receive in government payments to help them live while studying is about $17,000 per year.

BYD now has a home base in Bathurst. This is a huge step forward I think, in helping people make the transition. They want their local support.

This child behaviour, fighting over toys, really is the root of all human thought and behaviour. Neither really wants the toy, it’s a sideshow. Each wants it because the other wants it. It’s desired purely because somebody else desires it. That same principle applies to everything - ideas, music, cars, the people we desire, etc. That’s also why humans then imitate or copy one another, obsessively. They imitate what others desire, which in turn leads to rivalry between the imitating group, and with other groups who desire different things. Possessing that object becomes the source of social status. Again the object itself is irrelevant, anything can be made to ‘trend’ as the apparent object of desire. Your favourite car, band, clothes, beliefs and ideas, hairstyles, politics - everything is this same process. Everything is a battle for status and by that identity, through the copying or imitation of others, and rivalry with others copying.

Loved this government response about average speed safety cameras to one of the many boy racers who see public roads as personal race tracks. No doubt he 'drives to the conditions' (i.e. speeds indiscriminately, everywhere). Mate if you can't walk and chew gum at the same time, take a bus or train.

My plumber commented the other day that he loved our bathroom ‘because it isn’t all just greys and whites’. This isn’t our bathroom, but I like the use of colour here. The minimalist greys and whites in home design are surely reaching the end of their current trending life, colour will be back. But just ignore all trends and go for timeless elegance. What we like is shaped mostly by what other people like. We think it’s our personal taste, a ‘subjective’ thing, but what we love is driven by how much we’re conforming with what others are doing. It’s not about the thing itself. The same for the people we find attractive, the music we like, what cars we drive, what clothes we wear, what ideas we believe in - everything. That’s the deeper desire in us that goes unnoticed, our desire for social status, in a group.

You can only ask your friends and loved ones to avoid infections. There are a million life-saving reasons to avoid all infections. Yes you’ll survive a lot of them, at first. But you don’t go around crashing your car once a week because modern safety technology helps you survive the crashes. We look after our cars much better than we look after our bodies. I’m sorry, that makes us a kidult culture.

Meanwhile in the loony bin of social media society, people spend every day genuinely believing that things like electric cars and renewable energy are some sort of lifestyle choice. Playing team sports with the extinction of our entire civilisation.

I see this argument a lot. All laws can be got around. Hardly anybody follows speed limits on the road, for example. This is now 2-3 generations' worth of anti-establishment counterculture, still going strong. Yes, just more kidult culture.

Of the total fossil fuel energy used every year for every purpose, 63% is completely wasted, leaving just 37% of the original energy actually used to do things. In money terms that's $4.6 trillion of wasted energy, every year. $600 for every person on the planet.

Australia has next to non-existent standards for wood fires. The Chair of the Standards Committee overseeing this? Also the head of the home heating lobby that promotes wood heaters. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-07-31/uleb-wood-heaters-emit-less-pollution-smoke-particulate/105544358

China is doing breathtaking things. Have a watch and compare it with the dull, argumentative nothing of Western life now, where nothing gets built, and there’s no vision for anything. Just trapped inside social media bubbles vying for status and attention.

China is planning to send astronauts to the moon by 2030. Meanwhile in the West, which pioneered lunar flights, people live inside social media bubbles where we never even went to the moon, and where we live with pandemics. Are we seeing yet what permanent adolescent social media society has done to us? (Piece of trivia: that hill behind the astronaut is 4.6km high.)

The sooner we learn this, the sooner life gets better. Step off the status treadmill. Leave high school, once and for all. Learn to see status in every facet of life, where it’s often cleverly hidden.

They wanted a car to drive on the moon, so what did they send? An EV. Nearly 60 years ago. Time for many to catch up.