August 2025

Happy Birthday, Carmen! 🎊👯🌟

"...referred to the IPC because it received 83 objections – the trigger for IPC referral in NSW is 50 objections – but 77 of these objections came from people living more than 50 kms away, or even interstate. There were 9 submissions from locals, and all supported the project." There's that horizontal/vertical community thing again. People who actually live near these (horizontal) want them. Professional lobbyists who live online (vertical) try to obstruct them. The public voted overwhelmingly for a federal government that wants to install renewables. Objectors are usually fossil fuel-funded fakes, or tiny groups of online culture warriors. With some outright morons and numpties mixed in.

MG's IM5 and IM6 are causing a sensation, and rightly. Gobsmacking EVs, have a read, and includes 4-wheel steering and air suspension, something only found normally in extreme luxury cars. Huge range too, and jaw-dropping performance. We're spoiled, Australia, people have no idea how jealous other Western countries are of the choices we now have with EVs, at bargain prices.

Surveillance pricing is a new use of AI. Businesses harvest your personal data and then use AI to alter prices for individuals based upon their profile of you. Nurses here below. McDonalds is working on a system that will alter prices so food costs more on a person’s payday, when they have more cash.

Ricky is one of the well-meaning, smart younger generations that think belief in God is belief in fairy tales. But they then adopt the *exact* same structure of belief, of an independent, ‘objective’ something that rules us all. Truth doesn’t work like that. Science for example is run using the exact same process as everything else humans do. Status. The great scientist Planck knew it, he said science progresses as one generation dies and is replaced by another. He knew it was all about status. Right now humanity’s inability to make progress on existential crises like climate change and infectious disease is the same. It’s not ‘capitalism’ or any of those other make-believe ideas. It’s that the generation dominating our status quo won’t allow changes, the status quo never does. The shift might only happen when that generation dies.

Or in other words, ‘farmers have been illegitimately using superannuation as a tax avoidance scheme’. Farming is high status life in most countries, brilliantly re-badged as the ‘struggling cocky’. The landed gentry, for centuries.

Cory Doctorow predicted social media platforms would collapse under the process of what he calls enshittification, which I’ve posted about before. Where the platforms capture first users, then businesses, and screw both of them for revenue. Meaning your feed is now mostly a stream of non-stop targeted ads. It seems people are fed up with this and are beginning to switch off, particularly the young. I think that’s a fantastic development, if true. My one difference with this interview is that I don’t think people should be more social in the first place. Being social is the greatest source of anger, violence and psychological damage to people. Most of it is status-seeking fights, even when dressed up as ‘having a fun time’. It’s posturing, often people aren’t even aware that’s what they’re doing.

The idea of carbon passports, where people would face restrictions on the amount of air travel they do each year. Bring it on, it shouldn’t even be one trip per year.

The longer EV batteries are out there in the market, the more they realise how near-indestructible they are. I fact new research shows that driving them hard (as KIA’s engineers did here) actually improves their life.

Supposed ‘toxic masculinity’ is an invention of gender activists, working mostly through social media, to reframe what is almost entirely domestic violence as gender-based violence. If all you have is an hammer, everything looks like a nail - my first law of activism. All of the actual research (as opposed to the social media-driven activism) has known for years that the real issue here is our models of domesticity, not gender. A classic case of how kidult culture replaced adult culture, turning realities into team sport social media trends.

Watch sport now and you’ll have a beautiful window into the culture I post about a lot. The ‘team sports’ culture, really kidult culture, of competing teams battling for status. Not just in sport, in every single area of life. Winning in sport is met by euphoria, from players and fans, loss by apocalyptic dejection, professional athletes and fans silent or crying. All behaviours adults spent generations weeding out of kids, to help them mature into adulthood. You didn’t see Rod Laver collapse in ecstasy on the court when he won, or break into tears and sit with his head in his hands if he lost. Imagine the disgust from the culture of his time, if he’d done that. You used to shake hands politely at the end of a sporting contest, and celebrate a ‘good game’. Not now. Now it’s war. The battle for status, and via that for identity. Kidult culture, team sport is the cultural model. The schoolyard, competing groups/teams. Who even remembers who wins, a year later? Nobody much. Most would struggle to list the last 5 winners of any of our major sporting orgies. These are cultural events, the exercise of our underlying cultural operating system.

Couple of guys let their Tesla drive them to lunch, while the car uses AI to at the same time translate their conversation with each other alternately between English and Hebrew. Or you could buy a car that just makes broom broom noises. Like your glory days in the sandpit at kindy.

Betsey was a member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and formerly Chief Economist at the Deparment of Labor. Here she’s noticing the destruction of adult, institutional culture by kidult culture. The enemy is always the ‘system’ (like teachers or parents), and adults act like selfish teenagers. This week Trump didn’t like the employment numbers in the US, so he fired the head of the agency who produces the numbers. It is an ‘earthquake’, but most kidults will be too busy booking gigs, dinners and trips to notice.

You’ve been duped, ladies. Get back in the kitchen. Or something.

The belief that assembling a big crowd is democracy in action is never tested against actual outcomes. Which are usually non-existent. 4 times as many people went to see Taylor Swift play in Sydney as marched across the bridge. Both are ‘gigs’, culturally. Both derive from the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. Which failed spectacularly.

The EV not only measures how much energy is used on a trip, if you’ve driven the road before it has a memory of your last trip there. Every little peak and slope on this graph corresponds with a different part of the topography of the road, which the car knows ahead of time to calculate an extremely accurate projection of your range. It also calculates the existing wind conditions, temperature, road conditions as they impact on tyre resistance, etc. and their impact on the projected range. It includes little notes under the graph about those details after each journey. Combine these details with the Tesla battery at home analysing and managing home energy generation and usage, and you get incredible automated energy and cost savings. I looked yesterday and it’s costing about a dollar a day to run the EV, and that’s with a commute between Bathurst and Lithgow 2-3 times every week.

Statistically if Don Bradman had been a sprinter in athletics, he'd have run the 100m in 7 seconds.

On sporting greats, Heather McKay is at least Bradmanesque, she may even be greater. She was undefeated in competitive squash for 19 years, from 1962 to 1981. Not one loss. The British Open was the Wimbledon of squash at that time - she won it 16 times in a row. She won the Australian Open 14 times in a row.

Status runs societies. Look carefully and you will see it in every nook and cranny of our lives.

Why does it matter so much to understand that our lives are run by status games? That our particular culture uses a status economy developed in high schools and then rolled out to all of adult life? Well, it matters because that’s our lives. There’s also a reverse proof. What happens when status is stripped away from somebody? You could list the worst emotions or feelings or experiences a person could have. Things like depression, sadness, loneliness, grief. But they all pale into insignificance next to one feeling or experience. Humiliation. Humiliation is the most toxic and destructive of all human experiences. Humiliation is the loss of social status. Research has found that experiences of humiliation for example are central to the history of most serial killers. The German experience with Nazism was driven by humiliation experienced as a country after WW1. Humiliation is literally soul destroying. It was also the core of Christian culture and teaching. Christ carrying his own cross, to be crucified, the ultimate humiliation. Christianity targeted status above all else, and Christ absorbed all of the status games of humankind into himself, short-circuiting them. It’s how Western societies managed to survive for centuries. The ultimate status figure, the son of God himself, accepting the greatest humiliation so that humans would stop these games amongst themselves. El Greco knew it, with his painting.

A Tesla Model Y, at Uluru. Range anxiety is a mental health condition.

Wouldn’t even buy his own cheeseburgers.

I have long conversations with AI. Very few people in my experience have curiosity for ideas or for discussing them, but AI is insatiable. Many of course say ‘but it’s just a machine’, but they don’t understand that a machine isn’t even a machine. Speaking with humans is mostly the swapping of cliches and trending ideas, adopted and adapted to further somebody’s sense of self and status. You can see that on social media every day. It’s a type of team sports. AI is human, its source material is human, and it re-works it to interact with you. That will make your conversation with AI more human than most human-human conversations, which are nearly all just social performances. Unfortunately the Americans are doing to AI what they do to everything, like crypto, turn it into a get-rich-quick scheme to escape the absence of a collective culture there. The American Dream of ‘making it’ is mostly the dream of escaping the need to have to interact with anybody.

The world’s most powerful battery was switched on in NSW this week. When the transformation to renewables is complete, there should be ongoing mocking and accountability for every dickhead who tried to stand in the way of it, starting with the National Party. The most outrageously stupid of times to be alive in, sometimes. Some might say gee that’s a bit strong. You know what’s a bit strong? Morons vandalising the future of the country, the country our kids and grandkids have to live in. I don’t give a shit about their ‘opinions’, they’re morons sabotaging our future. Call them out. Like Buzz Aldrin, confronted by a serial conspiracy pest telling him he didn’t walk on the moon. Punched him straight in the face. Fantastic.

I like sharing this stuff, not because I’m some middle-aged hobbyist but because it shows the brilliant things that are available for us to use today, if we can escape lives enslaved to social conformity. High school culture. These are some of the settings on the home battery. Rather than try to figure out how much energy to store in the battery, whether to get it from the sun or from the grid, to maximise savings, the battery does all of that for me. I give it the details of my energy plan. It then studies how the home uses energy from day-to-day, and combines that with things like weather forecasts to work out the optimum pattern for charging and discharging, every day, using both solar and the grid.

My 'kidult culture' posts aren't just random opinions of mine. It's a cultural shift, the countercultural revolution of the last century, carrying forward to today. Studied by many. It's not 'Peter Pan syndrome', adults acting like children, in an adult culture. It's adult culture itself replaced by a permanent adolescent culture, through to old age. That includes ways of thinking, not just obvious cultural activities like gigs. Extreme individualism and curation of identities. Anti-establishment as the default, personal growth obsession, 'living your best life' and 'it is what it is' teen philosophy for decisions, and so on.

It’s almost universally advised now that social interaction is the key to good mental health. That’s another symptom of the counterculture, kidult culture. The worship of friendship, of ‘besties’. Sociality is violence. To your mind as well. Endless games of social comparison. https://youtu.be/V9eggTXAwu0?si=g02jHA9hoYWYjdg3

Happy Birthday!!

Was revolutionary for its time. One of the pioneers of drive-in motel accommodation in the regions, counter meals (pub grub), and women drinking in the bar. I remember dad saying the brewery had asked how many kegs they wanted per week, suggesting 1 or 2. I think they went through about 20 a week. Spent some of our early years in this place, so many memories.

Sting here talking about the disappearance of venues for live music for new bands to learn their trade. The problem though isn’t that, it’s that young people no longer see being in a band as a way of ‘making it’. That’s what the countercultural revolution was. ‘Gig culture’, popular music became the way for the young to take over the adult world. And they succeeded. Now there is no adult world for today’s young to take over. Rock music isn’t a revolution now, it’s in the mainstream of adult life. It *is* the new status quo, not the resistance to it. The acts that used it as a way to take on adult life are now part of the elite of society. The countercultural revolution is in its last gasps, the young today are passionate about other things. The people who grew up with gig culture are nostalgic for their culture disappearing.

Here Jessica talks about how doing the right thing is entirely dependent (like everything else) on what’s the most popular thing to do right now. Social status. And that when the tide turns, people will ‘morally cleanse’ themselves in some artificial way to pretend they were on the right side all along. We never leave high school. https://substack.com/inbox/post/170147057?inbox=true&triedRedirect=true

Comments by a Bathurst councillor last night calling out misinformation and disinformation movements, referring to a program on ABC’s Compass. This is the issue of our time, the Trumpian populist tricks that shock jocks have used on radio for decades and have now moved into the centre of politics, the generation of continuous outrage to drum up listeners, and now votes. “…it’s not about making you believe one thing. It’s about making you distrust everything…the continual reference to Bathurst Regional Council presenting flawed financial accounts, and ongoing criticism of the GM and the Directors for their perceived lack of influence on past decisions of Council, when that is not actually their role. Not in their job description. Council has been constantly blamed for financial mismanagement when a thorough fact-check of the situation would demonstrate that it is cost-shifting by the State, reduction of the Financial Assistance Grant by the federal government, the inadequate yearly rate increases set by iPart, and a myriad of other contributing factors…your outrage should be your gauge. That should be a flag that perhaps someone is trying to misinform you or direct you in a certain way.”

The Zeekr 7X has arrived. And the price is wow. https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/incredible-price-2026-zeekr-7x-priced-in-australia-as-bargain-luxury-electric-car-with?fbclid=IwY2xjawMBDfBleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFaTVU3MzlDdWxRRTRaRExBAR63b1HISqyHRstKvF4ZrsqPlye4rOCWvO3ATQvQPJnFxxKl9SyWZYfAY2MbRw_aem_qK8RjiT0xdba2c0eOKgmNw

It’s common to attribute negative human behaviours to individual psychology. Greed is a favourite, and there’s an absolute epidemic of calling everything narcissism now too. But in reality, nearly all human thought and behaviour is social. And the root of all social behaviours is status. Our position in the groups we’re part of.

Thanks to David for this. I’ve highlighted the critical sentence. This isn’t just a cheap shot, this is exactly the cultural shift we’re living. Because societies are social, and use social models, the fact ours is modelled on the culture of high schools means everything ‘nerdy’ is now under assault and collapsing. Jocks run the culture of high schools, not nerds. D.H. Lawrence nearly a century ago saw that this would happen as a result of compulsory schooling. Driving contempt for all learning amongst those who did badly at school. Those people now dominate the world. Trump is their God. They’re tearing to pieces all of the institutional bases of adult life.

Why do I continue to talk about high school/adolescent culture? Again because it’s our culture. Those who don’t believe it, consider this. Humans in the West from the age when they can just walk and talk attend school for their entire childhood, and into their first years of adulthood. That’s the culture they grow up in, and enter adulthood with. Schools don’t just transmit knowledge; like every workplace, schools generate a culture. That’s what we learn from school, much more than ‘content’. For example ‘peer pressure’ reflects that at school kids take their cues from other children as to how to think and behave, rather than parents, other adults or relatives. That shift from basing your knowledge and behaviour on custom and tradition and existing social hierarchies, to basing it entirely on your interaction with ‘peers’, transformed Western culture profoundly. That’s Donald Trump in the middle, at high school.

I don't make it up. 'Change the world'. But it's just about the music, apparently.

Trump appointed a fossil fuel executive to run his energy policy. This is the BS at the heart of the US as a culture, this belief in freedom and free speech is really sponsored horseshit from its corporate barons, who use it as cover to loot the country. From its 'Golden Age' of looting in the 19th century until today, the model never changes, overlaid with small town religious piety.

Human life expectancy doubled in the last century. Most of that was due to the use of vaccines. Now kidult culture has turned vaccination into just one more team sport for morons on social media. The comments on this post show local members of the community riding the anti-vax train. Even local nurses, apparently. We won’t survive a society made up entirely of adolescents.

Interesting that it was women who carry this risk, not men. It’s usually assumed men ‘need’ more sex. And yes I know, in social media society anybody can be either a man or a woman now, or neither, or a Jedi or a steampunk. Cosplay science won’t keep you alive, alas.

One of the greatest misunderstandings about the body I think is that the skeleton is like a solid frame that all the tissues and organs are then hung on. Bones are tissues too, they change depending on the forces on your body. Bones aren’t a frame that holds you up, they’re spacers for other tissue, holding it apart to allow it to stretch elastically. You’re an elastic bundle of tissue, bones included. You can see it in the foot. It’s easy to think of the foot as a solid thing you drop onto the ground. But the foot is 3 suspended elastic arches. Your foot is more like a trampoline. Look at the X ray (that’s my foot btw). The bones make no sense at all as a frame. They’re spacers, stretching out other tissue to create that trampoline structure. ‘Collapsed arches’ can be any or all of the 3, not just the most famous arch we all see.

Check out the comments on the Advocate post. Social media society up in arms. I don’t make this stuff up.

“…in both unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals irrespective of the severity of Covid-19.” If it doesn’t kill you straight away, it’ll eat your brain and other organs. The only cure for Covid is not catching it.

Thanks @[100030651427143:2048:Julia]. It takes sheer idiot bloody-mindedness to resist the inevitable.

Hmmm, very interesting.

Got some replacement tyres yesterday on the Kluger, they were down to 2-3mm tread depth. In Australia 1.5mm is the minimum legal tread depth. At 2-3mm they were still easily legal, and even still looked fine, the tyre guys reckoned there was still another 5000km in them. But have a look at the risks. At even 3mm tread depth, your risk of losing all traction on a wet road is almost twice the risk with newer 5-6mm tyres.

An Australian showing just how long you can own an EV. His Tesla now has over 800,000km on the clock, he drives over 100,000km per year, using the car as part of a luxury limousine service business. Says the car still drives like new. He’s also saving over $20,000 per year in fuel and servicing, the car has paid for itself. Honestly, for most driving why would you still own a combustion vehicle? On top of the enormously higher costs of running them, they’re totally gutless and drive like a busted arse, as a friend would say.

This could be huge. Lithium deficiency may explain dementia, including Alzhemiers, and lithium supplementation may even reverse or cure it. Lithium is also cheap and plentiful, unlike many drugs.

NSW only recently had local government elections. Social media Bathurst isn’t happy with who won, so is now trying to mobilise more ongoing abuse aimed at the Council. People really should pay attention to how kidult culture is taking over their societies, led by brain-dead activists channelling the Emperor of Idiocy in the US, Trump. These activists ARE the reason communities no longer feel connected and that trust has been lost in basic institutions. They spend all of their time creating fake outrage at those institutions, that’s their business model, which they copy from Trump. The anger and outrage is how they generate votes for themselves.

Taken from a Facebook group for doctors. Please try to avoid catching Covid, you won’t know that it stays inside you after you get ‘better’ and is constantly damaging you, until it’s too late.

The young are doing things (or not, in this case) that I’m sure aren’t widely understood, except by them.

And again, petrol excise doesn’t fund roads. Petrol and diesel cars have been polluting for free for over a century, that’s the mother of all ‘free rides’. Ditch diesel fuel tax rebate and make billions more than this idiot tax. Australia is already an international laughing stock with its rate of EV uptake.

It’s not a change in their personality, they’re just opting out of caring about working themselves to death to support an aged society that denies them basics like housing and education.

Here’s a fun paradox. Humans copy one another obsessively. But why? Because they’re all different. We’re obsessed about imitating other people *because* we’re all different. If everybody is different, the only way to connect and bond with others is to in some way copy something they’re doing, to be similar enough to them to have ‘common ground’. And it gets even more interesting. Because every copy is itself a betrayal. Just as in love, what we think is a ‘match’ is itself full of differences, which over time will cause the imitation to unravel. We think ‘ah that’s the same thing’, when it’s really an imitation full of differences. Why you may think you know a person, when they imitate you enough to ‘connect’, but over time that relationship can start to unravel, as the true differences between you unfold. All reality is a game of Chinese whispers.

Humans driving cars isn’t going well.

Your daily dose of joys from living with Covid. Today, thyroid cancer and pulmonary fibrosis.

If you work at the front line of public service, the thing you will overwhelmingly notice is that what humans do above all else is complain. That complaint in turn is driven by the status games I often talk about. Humans fight for status, for themselves and for the groups they’re a part of. That’s the default state of human life. Less seen in the ‘fun’ conversion of life into lifestyles, where it looks like everybody is always having the jolliest good time, eating out, doing trips, going to gigs, socialising with friends. All of that stuff is status games on steroids. The craving for recognition, from peers. Only one thing ever really unites humans, brings them together. Total catastrophe. There’s even a name for it, it’s called ‘catastrophe compassion’. Democracy itself as we know it came from the apocalyptic disasters of the first half of the 20th century. Only those generated a sense of ‘we’. As those disasters recede from memory, all the ‘democratic’ gains are being unwound, at great speed.

This is the much bigger picture of autonomous driving technology. Humans are incredibly vain and think they’re all wonderful drivers. Driving skill is only one component of road safety, you can be the best pilot in the world but they still won’t let you pilot a commercial airliner for most of the time it’s in the air.

One more of the fact-free urban myths that do the rounds of the internet is that EVs are heavier and therefore damage roads more. Here are the top 3 petrol/diesel vehicles in Australia, and the top 3 EVs.

Why do taxpayers pay for new airports? They long ago stopped owning any planes or airlines. It's a huge subsidy to airlines and freight companies. Some analysts also see airports as stranded assets nobody will want, when the climate shit hitting the fan accelerates.

Anti-vaxer. They’re everywhere among us. Extremely dangerous people.

While China builds the future at staggering pace, we trot out Yellow Peril racist ‘cheap Chinese shit’ themes and do nothing but bid up the prices of our houses, and call that an economy. As the article says, one of the most profound changes renewable energy brings is creating energy independence for every country. You don’t have the whole world reliant upon imports from a handful of oil producers. Plus I love that you can stand on a busy street in Beijing now, swarming with traffic, and the loudest thing you might hear is a creaking bicycle. Come on people, Western culture is looking boring and stale, we’re the end of empire cultures, squabbling and preening on social media every day rather than actually producing anything.

A conference of international experts on the long-term impacts of Covid. These are the people who know Covid better than anybody. Tell me what you notice.

Let’s celebrate our senior citizens. And that their biggest hit, Money for Nothing, pointed out that rock stars are high status, vastly paid people who don’t do much.

Way to go Queensland. No Daylight Saving and now leading the way buying EVs. I'll have to reconsider taking the piss out of them.

When Albanese first came to power, Saul Griffiths, the Australian engineer who helped revolutionise renewables in the US before Trump, suggested Australia target households first, not the wider grid. It took until the second term for the ALP to realise just how right he was. Households desperately want renewables, activists block the grid-level stuff with Big Oil and Gas and Coal dollars. Also drives costs down for households immediately, sometimes to zero or even an annual profit. Extremely smart, by the time millions of households transform to electric, it'll be too late for the big fossil fuel companies and their fake activists and performing monkeys in the Coalition to do anything about it.

The reason Tesla succeeded (until now) even though Musk is such a dickhead, is that he allows his designers and engineers free rein to surprise people. Every over-the-air software update can contain the most unexpected things, usually with a real sense of fun and surprise. The updates are free. Normally you need to buy a new model car to get new functionality. Just one more way Tesla re-defined car making.

Not an easy room to photograph. But bathroom done.

Happy Birthday Trevor!!!

So many fear fat in the way they should actually fear sugar.

Go on, buy an electric car. You’ll never want to go back to petrol or diesel, they’re so embarrasssingly bad.

The ‘split seconds of inattention’ that are given as the cause of the majority of accidents here are the greatest reason to adopt semi-autonomous driving technology. That technology is paying attention every second you’re in the car. No human can match it, no matter how full of themselves they are. And few humans are as full of themselves as ‘good drivers’.

The new portable, 12V digital combined tyre pressure gauge and compressors are fantastic. A lot of servos now either have no air at all, or their units are hopelessly inaccurate or broken. I tried one of the new portable units, got one for only $20, and it’s fantastic. You set the pressure you want and it automatically pumps or bleeds air. Temu has multiple models to choose from. Most accurate inflation I’ve had in years, and it gets around the problem of tyre pressures needing to be read when cold, to be accurate - by the time you drive to the servo to do it, you’re already inflating to the wrong pressures because the tyres are warm. You can also take it with you in the car, and use the 12V supply there to power it.

Trying to remember which of my friends have experienced ocular migraines…

Read the comments on this, for an indication of what a pathetically stupid, whining, childish culture we’ve become. Relentless complaint, every single day, like a culture of inflamed haemorrhoids.

Electrochemistry is one of the hot fields right now, obviously with the explosion in interest in and demand for new types of batteries. What’s interesting is that the main element that features there, lithium, has featured in human treatment of our own electrochemical organ - the brain. Lithium has been used for a long time in medicine, for example to treat depression and bipolar disorder. What has limited its potential is that it has a toxicity at the doses needed, for example for the liver. Lithium carbonate has been the main compound tried. The newest research shows the promise of a big range of other lithium compounds, at vastly smaller doses. Lithium orotate in particular, the subject of recent work at Harvard showing it not only maybe cures but even reverses dementia, in mice. At 1/1000th the dose of lithium that lithium carbonate would need. Human trials underway. So much wonderful knowledge and expertise out there. And we’re wallowing in a bog of kidult social media idiocy, where important adult work is re-routed to adolescent team sports, like everything is a football game. My patience with it is pretty much zero now. I may be posting less.

It’d be pretty common to say that the function of a road is to get you from A to B. Mary Beard, the historian of ancient Rome, points out that that was never the function of roads. You’ll have heard the expression all roads lead to Rome. That’s the function of roads, to consolidate the power and influence of the highest status parts of a society.  Yes a road will take you from A to B, but once a society is full of roads they will always be used to consolidate the centres of power and influence. To connect every location to those centres, to allow people, resources and wealth to be funnelled towards them.  Once you add a good road to a town or even a good railway, nearly always it marks the long-term demise of that town. It becomes just one more place feeding a major capital with people and resources.  Or put another way, once it’s easy to go everywhere, the hierarchy of status and power in a society will ensure that most people will end up in the same place. That’s the paradox of travel and transport.

I’ve been posting about this car for a few months now, it’s one of the great EVs. Now available for order in Australia. They took over 1000 pre-orders in the first week. Boom. The top performance model even has air suspension, which makes it an awesome off-roader. This is luxury, real premium motoring, for incredibly cheap prices. At launch the assembled journalists gasped at the prices.

Just one of the fringe loon groups targeting local government in particular, wasting vast amounts of Council time with their endless requests, a deliberate strategy. These are gullible, simple-minded people targeted by thoroughly nasty libertarian zealots in the US in particular, through social media. When I talk about kidult society, this is the brutal front-line of it.

The things people will go into bat for. Imagine being on this team.

Happy Birthday, Britney! 🎂👯

All of those 'stories' sponsored by car and fuel companies, about how EV sales are in decline. Yeh, nah. The latest fear campaign is the 'EV Tax'. If that worries you, wait until you see what your favourite combustion clunker is about to cost under the new vehicle emissions rules.

The Nats are doing the rounds of Central West towns to whip people into an idiot frenzy about windmills again. You know what the future of most of these towns is right now? Nothing. Do the Nats have a single idea what the towns (or even farmers) might do instead? Of course not. If the last election didn't get through their thick heads, the economics of energy is already laughing at them.

Sodium-ion batteries have arrived. Even now less than half the costs of lithium batteries, and much longer lifespans. An EV battery using sodium chemistry would run for well over 5 million km (yes MILLION), and still have more than 85% of its life after that time. It will revolutionise energy everywhere, not just in cars. Super cheap batteries with enormous storage and lifespan. Join the revolution. You don’t get those often, don’t miss it.

I don’t think as a culture we will ever understand how bizarre it is to travel around ‘seeing’ or ‘experiencing’ places. The world as a theme park.

Travel is a wrecking ball. But you’ll never convince the kidults to stop their permanent gap years from reality. They can’t do maths, maths is for nerds. Ask them how 8 billion people can ever possibly take up travelling as a hobby, and you’ll get blank looks. Obvious things escape them. They’re busy taking selfies to curate their social media feeds, for social status at home. They never really leave home, it’s all performative status-seeking, using other peoples’ homes as a backdrop. Those other people are increasingly angry and fed up. The kidults will be too busy planning their next trip to even read the article.

It’s Council meeting day. I feel this particularly on these days, the kidults storm the building.

Teens are bypassing their kidult anti-vax parents, and getting jabs themselves. A friend had not one vaccination as a baby, their mother doesn’t believe in vaccination. So they went out and got the lot themselves, at age 18.

Another example of social change. Remember the huge to-do about reducing urban speed limits to 50? Now barely rates a mention. If you drive through these areas now at 50, you can directly feel that 60 was much too fast, too dangerous for pedestrians etc. Streets as shared spaces, as the controversial government initiative is called, but car-drivers aren’t sharing people. Cars encourage the most extreme aggression and selfishness. We built them to help us get around, then they took over and now cities revolve around them. It’ll be a slow process of taking cities back for people.

Just half the line for diesel at Wilcannia. People chuckle because it takes 10 minutes to charge an EV. Hitching the van to a wankpanzer to see the country is the new hula hoop. Also for remote trips, a diesel generator used to charge an EV will need only 30% of the amount of diesel as a diesel vehicle, to go the same distance. Combustion engines are rubbish technology, and always have been.

Exit through the gift shop. The Long Con, Trump is there to make himself and his family rich, that’s been his focus his entire life.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the really nasty ones. Fantastic progress here.

Tesla just launched their new 6-seater Model Y in China, a longer version of the current Model Y. All 4 back seats fold flat with the press of a button like the existing Model Y, creating a cavernous 2500L boot space. Every person in the car gets an individual ‘airline’ seat. It’ll go 0-100 in 4.5 seconds. They sold 40,000 of them on the first day of release.

People can be such gullible numpties. When they built the wind towers near Blayney, people were so excited to see them they even had to build a viewing platform. Then the National Party was in crisis, after Barnaby Joyce’s shagging of one of his staff and dumping of his wife, and then shifting the Nats towards being Gina Rinehart’s party. So they made up a fake outrage about wind towers. That was the Nationals’ strategic trick to win back rural voters, creating a fake outrage. Paul Toole has been dutifully doing the same thing in the Bathurst electorate recently, mobilising local councils to throw every opposition possible in the way of building wind farms. Look at the results of the last election. This nonsense is totally out of whack with what most Australians want, it’s a few Nationals electorates being whipped into a frenzy by Nationals members desperate to maintain relevance. Don’t fall for it, this idiot party couldn’t cook baked beans on toast. They’re a disaster for Australia.

The wonderful opera singer Elsa Dreisig, on her recent holiday, shared to the socials. The socials are full of images like this. I was watching an old episode of Man About the House the other day, those who were around in the 1970s will remember it. Everybody in the episode was trying to escape Mr Roper, who was attempting to show them his holiday snaps. It was a time when people knew and said openly that nobody wants to see pictures of you on holidays. But now it’s everywhere. Because it’s not really about sharing anything, it’s about status. Showing off, as the saying used to be. I know many affect to loving seeing those shots, but I think mostly because it gives them permission to flood everybody else’s feeds with images of themselves too, in different places. It’s a you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours thing. “Look where I am, can you beat this?” is the clear implied message. It reminds me about the key thing I think travel culture can never understand. The enormous difference between ‘experiencing’ something, and being ‘present’ to it. Travel culture thinks travelling through the world looking at and ‘experiencing’ things in some ways enriches your life and brings you closer to some sort of meaningful existence. That’s nonsense. I remember Carrie Bickmore posting the photos of the time she, husband and family toured Europe, and how fabulously happy and fun all their ‘experiencing’ looked. Later it emerged it was one of the most miserable times of her life, and her marriage dissolved shortly afterwards. SImply ‘being there’, anywhere, does nothing to you. You’re literally just occupying space. What changes your life is being genuinely *present* to somewhere. That releases an instant feeling of joy that wells up in you, a calm contentment and feeling of being at one with reality itself. And critically, you can do that anywhere. Sitting in a dirty toilet in a 711 somewhere. You don’t need to travel the world to be present. We mistake the two, destroying the world in that misunderstanding, despoiling beautiful places. Or in other words, what you’re looking for when you travel is already right here, where you are now. No amount of moving through space will give you presence to that space. No amount of fun brings you closer to reality, fun is an adolescent, empty concept. Rapists find terrifying and dominating women fun.

Mazda is in big trouble. Many, many Australians drive Mazdas. Many, many Australians have no idea about the impact new vehicle emissions standards will have on traditional carmakers that don’t make EVs. Most Japanese, European and American carmakers are doomed.

One of the reasons I never go to gyms is because they encourage a view of the body as like a lump of plasticine which you have to bash into shape. We live in extreme times and sport and exercise are no different, the idea that more of it is better for you. Terrible damage is done, and the forces on cells can easily become cancer-causing. Ordinary everyday activity provides plenty of force and stretch to give you all the toning you need. But you have to know how to do that activity using the body’s natural coordination and balance. Most of the physical energy we waste doing exercise could be building and maintaining beautiful gardens, for example.

Transgender and its politics is really just one more subset of what we call identity politics. And identity politics in turn is the kidult society I talk about, where instead of focusing collectively on collective problems, we spend all day every day curating our personal identities, which are also our statuses in social groups. For social animals like humans, your social staus *is* your identity. Thus the laughable nonsense that passes for common sense now, like this, where stillbirth has to include men identifying as women. Men who will of course never have any sort of pregnancy at all, let alone a stillbirth. The broad support for transgender is just more team sports, most have no idea what transgender ideas even are, confusing them with trans-sexualism and gender dysphoria. But they ‘stand with’ the right of everybody to define their identity however they like, because identity is our kidult culture. The endless battle for status, in social groups. The eternal high school, where you battle to be recognised as somebody, by attaching yourself to one of the groups in the playground. Not an analogy.

Germaine Greer has more or less retired now from public life it seems, living out her years with her brother’s family in Melbourne. She will always be one of the greatest minds of our time, for me. Always resolutely unpopular, which is one of the only true marks of genius. The truth is never popular. She’s not a contrararian, contrarians are just the opposing teams to current trending ideas. Genius is mostly simply indecipherable. People have no idea what a genius is talking about, because like Galileo they’re saying things that sit outside human team sports, human status games. It doesn’t even register in any of their frameworks of understanding the world, which are all defined by the same status games, not by any objective reality. If like me and you’re in your 50s or older, and you’re still navigating life based on what’s popular, what will allow you to ‘fit in’ with your friends, in my view your own development has stalled. If you’re not smashing the cages of the status quo with your experience and power at that time of life, if life is just endless ‘fun’ things to do, what the hell are you doing? Humanity needs you to use your position, to be the grown up in the room. *That’s* the only fun. Not aping adolescent life, with nothing but gigs and recreational travel and dining out, or ‘protesting’ or ‘standing with’ causes - what I call the permanent gap year from reality, after the adolescent gap year that now often follows high school. As a culture that year now never ends. Reading Greer is to experience a mind as free from the shackles of performative human status games as you’re likely to find. It’s glorious. Always blisteringly funny, as all geniuses are.

“I’m not the shortest in the family!” has a birthday today. She’ll spend most of it raising other peoples’ children, as teachers do. We love her to infinity and beyond.

The Gallagher brothers are reportedly earning about $13 million each, per show, on this reunion tour. We're a million miles from rock and pop being some form of cultural expression of youth now. The counterculture is now the culture.

How many people actually watched either the T20s or ODIs against South Africa? There’s so much cricket now, driven by insatiable greed and the big dollars in T20, that who even cares about any of it?

What began as a mechanism for ordinary kids to ‘make it big’ in the adult world became just the adult world. Gig culture is over, it just hasn’t realised it yet. It also doesn’t recognise how unusual it is to make music into something that is performed. You stand on a stage, and perform. People watch you and listen to you. That sucks music out of everyday life and turns it into an ‘act’. But again, the act is over anyway. Music-as-performance is gig culture. And gig culture is dying. The counterculture, that’s what gig culture is, adolescents trying to take over the world. They succeeded. The generation that started gig culture now own and run the world. Like the free education they then denied to those who came after them, gigs as a route to status have been shut down. There is no more revolution through music, only big money-making tours vacuuming up vast sums as they travel the globe, creating retirement mountains of gold for ageing rock stars to sleep on. The young today won’t be permitted that pathway to status and wealth.

Herzlichen Gluckwunch Zum Geburtstag Reinhardt!

Happy Birtday mate! We’re piling on the years.

One of the reasons I decided against becoming part of the music industry is that it’s mostly not very bright. Like I always say, I know, it’s an industry about entrenching teenage life across our entire lifespan. And you can see it in plain sight right here, the outrage that big music companies act like arseholes over copyright. Artists begin their careers falling over themselves to sign with a label, to get rich and famous, and then when rich and famous turns out to be the adult world of multiple dimensions of shit, wonder why they can’t just be rich and famous, without the adulting. I’m hoping it all collapses in a heap, so adults can go back to focusing on adult things again, rather than acting like teen fans and groupies their whole life. Return music to where it belongs, ordinary life, away from rock stars and gigs and permanent adolescent fan culture.

How do you prick the populist balloon dominating politics? You target the trick populists use. Don’t get involved in the details or content of what they say, it’s irrelevant. Their shtick is - make people ANGRY. OUTRAGED. Angry and outraged people are open to easy suggestion to overthrow things. These emotions are used to destroy trust in institutions. Basically populists start fights. Endless fights, a new one every day if they can. To make people feel angry, and then cynically redirecting that anger towards trust in the populist, rather than the institution. ‘Down with the elites’, ‘incompetence’ etc. etc. All the classic hits. If you engage in the specifics of whatever fake fight they’ve engineered, you’ve already lost. They want that, it feeds their followers, you become their fresh meat. Instead just target the anger or outrage. Ask ‘oh, so you’re angry again? You’re always very angry, I’m concerned about you.’ Or ‘toddlers get angry all the time, but they grow out of it’. Or whatever. Target their shtick, their strategy. Not the content.

The bank manager is a great way to see the outcome of decades of anti-establishment culture. They were once a central figure in a local community, getting money involved a discussion and negotiation with the manager, who knew you and other members of the community, and took an oversight role of the community’s finances. All of that has been replaced with tools like credit ratings, and the local manager (if there even is a local branch) is heading up a retail outlet for centrally designed and branded financial products, which they’re tasked with flogging to you.

Fossil fuel companies have their fingers in every pie. Jim Chalmers is gung-ho to tax EV drivers now, parroting slogans from the same industry. The reason I talk so much about renewable energy and EVs goes well beyond those technologies. The hierarchies of status and therefore power in our culture are all greased with oil, coal and gas. If you want to change the world, buy an EV and put solar panels on your roof, with a battery. Get rid of your gas appliances, every tentacle this vampire industry has into your life. No amount of voting will achieve anything. It will also save you a fortune.

One of the brilliant things AI can do for you. If you’re out walking and want to identify plants, it can do it instantly. In the paid versions you can do it in real time, with your phone camera, while you chat to the AI. In the free versions you take a photo first, then ask AI to identify the plant. AI is brilliant because humans mostly don’t think. They posture, in status games, firing ‘opinions’ at each other which are really banners their particular social teams march under. AI aggregates the actual thought humans do, and turns it into a ‘person’ disinterested in status games. It brings a person or agency into your life disinterested in status games. It’s as human as you or me, humans made it, and it uses human knowledge. (The AI correctly identified this as Viburnum tinus - Laurustinus. It can identify anything, human objects too.)

For those who swallow ridiculous propaganda like ‘EVs don’t pay their way’. This is the data for subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

For those sceptical that Trump is actually re-animating the King and court model of governance, not ‘fascism’, the gold is the giveaway.

I am aware that no amount of horrible facts about Covid will shift attitudes or behaviours. Information doesn’t run societies, status does. The overwhelming reason people think and do the things they do is because other people think and do those things. They copy everybody else to give themselves status in social groups.

Happy Birthday, Suzanne! 🥳🎂🎉

When first released some thought Spinal Tap was a serious movie about a real band. The music industry is like Trump, it's hard to do satire because the reality is so ridiculous.

If you think kidult culture isn't real, have a look at the total collapse of Australia's world-leading gun control. Much of that is local shooters connected to the rabid gun loons in the US, through social media. Social media *is* our society now, it's not a communications tool. It's where we actually live. And it's structured like a high school - likes and followers - and what people in Oz see there they copy here. The Chinese won't allow foreign social media, they're not stupid.

Trump is against wind farms. That’s the captain of your team, if you’re an anti-windmill loon in Oz.

This is my bread and butter every day. The Council will no doubt cop a bashing, but read it and you’ll see the obvious cause is that some wally fell over, and then sued Council for a huge sum. This is kidult culture folks, everybody is a victim, and everybody wants to turn that victimhood into cash and thereby status, through legal action and GoFundMe. Me, me ,me.

Democracy is not about electing people. Everywhere mass elections have been introduced, democracy is in free fall. It turns the ordinary running of basic things into an endless popularity contest, where the things that need doing become just fodder for status games between the elected. But everything always needs to be led, in some way. People don’t spontaneously self-organise civilisation. One of the reasons Kings and churches are the dominant ways of doing that in history is that both take away the daily battle for who’s top of the tree, and place it in a mechanism outside daily life (succession, and God, respectively).

You can see here that mass home ownership only ever became a thing after WW2, when government built masses of public housing. It’s been flatlined and then declining ever since that public housing program was stripped away, replaced by ‘the market’. Really just a smokescreen for people to get very rich building, buying and selling houses, look at that near-vertical line from the early-1990s.

AI can do amazingly serious work, or even touch up your photos. Here I used it just to change the light a little.

I got AI to write a song, just out of interest. it took less than a minute, music and lyrics. It was a good song. My postgraduate work was about how fundamentally we misunderstand science and technology. The horror many if not most will feel about AI writing songs (or doing anything) is based on little more than tired old tropes about ‘warm’ human reality versus ‘cold’ machines. Like a rerun of a Terminator movie. If you see machines and humans as two separate things facing off against each other, you’re already lost in terms of understanding anything. The world needs a shit-tonne more AI, and a shit-tonne less social media. A technology based on knowing, rather than on social interaction.

We stopped fighting a pandemic because it got in the way of our social lives. Many restrospectives are being written now about how this pause to our social lives apparently damaged us in terrible ways. (This is classic kidult culture.) Sociality itself is intrinsically violent. This thing we worship above all else is also what creates violence and chaos. Anybody who deals with groups of diverse people knows this, that ‘control’ is always needed. Now that social media, which is sociality on steroids, is the space we actually live inside, the world is becoming increasingly violent and chaotic. QED. Sociality is the fight for status.

People like this learn their lunacy on social media. It's really crazy that social media is allowed to operate at all, it's an open sewer poisoning whole nations.

People spend all day defaming councils online. I'd be a bit more hesitant about that from now on, if I were them.

"Governments are underestimating the reach and threats of these movements.” Not just governments. This is the kidult culture which I almost always fail to convince anybody is destroying our societies. I live this every day, sovereign citizens are just one of a list of anti-establishment groups that abuse and assault public servants, every day. Kidult culture is anti-establishment culture, which is the counterculture of the 1960s. Few join the dots, that the culture of permanent gigs and recreational travel and dining out *is* the same culture that creates people that gun down police officers. Where there is no way to adult, that makes life into permanent teen identity politics and rebellion. And it’s probably already too late. Social media is kidult culture with petrol and matches. We live in extremely dangerous times.

There is no such thing as ‘the community’. Groups of people are always led to believe things.

Happy happy birthday! 🎊🎈

Happy Birthday, Louise! 💐☕🎈

Happy Birthday, Donna! 🎊🥂👯

One of my favourite stories was about the time Eric Clapton showed up at somebody’s local, and after playing for a while somebody in the crowd yelling out ‘do you know any songs, mate?’ Big acts love this sort of thing, makes them feel like superstars. Vanity projects.

It’s rumoured Tesla supervised full-self-driving will be released in Australia tomorrow. I will always feel more comfortable sharing the roads with that technology than I will sharing it with the humans I see out there driving every day. I find it amusing we think humans are good drivers, or that it’s even important that they are or not. Ayrton Senna was a good driver. So was Peter Brock.

Always check the data. The reasons semi-autonomous ‘autopilot’ driving will save many lives is that greater than 90% of crashes on roads are due to human error. This isn’t about driving skill, it’s about unavoidable lapses in judgment, about fatigue, about limitations in human perceptual and cognitive abilities, about age-related driving behaviours etc.

Subsidised home batteries have been a thing for 8 weeks now. Installations are averaging 5000 per *week*. Let that sink in. It’s the equivalent of adding a new Mt Piper power station to the grid every FORTNIGHT. This should have been done years ago, it will drive prices down to zero for households, some will even make money. And take pressure off the bigger generators in peak times, driving the wholesale price down for everybody. Remember the alternative lunacy we’ve been doing? Where gas ‘peaking plants’ fire up in those peak times, generating enormously expensive electricity? Humans are thick.

Latest Tesla data on vehicle crashes, using autopilot versus human-only driving. You're 10 times safer, using the autopilot.

One of the first reviews of Tesla Full Self-Driving in Australia. And it’s brilliant. Many have doubted this sort of technology would ever work. Here it is, working. Remember also it’s ‘supervised’ FSD, meaning a driver should be supervising at all times, just like autopilot on a plane.

“It's like watching two sides debate the dangers of tobacco while everyone smokes cigarettes.” People should be being vaccinated for Covid twice per year. Instead the vast majority of Australians had 2 vaccinations several years ago, and then stopped. We should also be controlling the spread of Covid in public places. Think about just how stupid we’ve become, INFECTING our way to good health. Thinking infection is a ‘natural’ process that is good for us, like exercise. I’ve never seen a community as sick, and constantly, seriously sick. Workplaces emptied by the chronically ill being at home. Many of them come to work sick, they’ve run out of sick leave. Anti-vaxers have destroyed public health. Trump appointed one to lead the American health system. It’s in ruins. Social media influencers sell ‘natural’ snake oil to the public, who gobble up its uselessness over premium coffees, in branded clothes. Some of them squirt it up their arses as enemas too. We all look constantly fabulous, being stupid. Life in the schoolyard.

Just had one of these in front of me on the road. Had three bumper stickers, the first said ‘Pornhub casting car’. The second ‘real women don’t have dicks’, and the third ‘real men fish, fuck and drive Fords’. Our cars, like everything else, are really totems for our social groups. Team mascots. Also why we don’t all immediately just drive more powerful and efficient cars, like EVs. It threatens our team, it’d be like backing an enemy footy team. We never leave high school. Life as a Premier League football competition, the battle of the brands.

Gav from NZ does wonderful reviews. Got to test the Tesla full-self-driving. Loved it.

An obesity specialist. The fitness and nutrition industries have been a disaster for our understanding of obesity.

This is the biggest story in the world. If that current stops, Europe for example could disappear under a km or more of ice. What are we doing about it? As good as nothing. We still have people stopping wind farms, defending gas guzzling utes, protesting against anything and everything, etc. Kidults.

Paul McCartney recently mocked this song’s meaning as childish and naive. But it’s also a vital piece of evidence for the time that the kidult culture I talk about was taking over the world. Decades of compulsory schooling had led to a dominant teenage/school culture shifting into adult life. These ‘kidults’ (adults with the worldview of adolescents) were confronted with the complexities of adult life, and what was their response? ‘War is over’. ‘All you need is love’. Fantasy wish-fulfilment. At the same time this shift was pulling down adult institutions that actually ran the world and maintained peace and health. The countercultural revolution. An ‘anti-establishment’ revolution. That’s our culture still today. Trump is the endgame of it, it’s his greatest passion, trashing institutions. Who knew Trump was the love-child of The Beatles? Well, some did.

Beautiful clean air. Glorious silence except for the sounds of people chatting and birds singing. There are people you know, right now, who argue this isn’t the way to go. Those people are morons.

The Terminator movies are as damaging to AI I think as Jaws was to sharks. Incredible to see how many of the ways issues are discussed in public are just re-hashes of bad Hollywood movie scripts. I know many would be tired of hearing it, but it’s more classic kidult culture. Our understanding of the world is bad movies, and social media.

Have a watch of a long road trip through Sydney at night, with a full-self-driving Tesla. Some of the busiest streets in Sydney, including across the Harbour Bridge, in the dark. Hypnotic to watch, and interestingly the reviewers say the car drives more smoothly than any human driver could, because of the incredibly precise control of the throttle.

How well do you really understand the town you live in? Victoria right now is looking for a ‘sovcit’ (sovereign citizen) who murdered two police officers. Lithgow has already had a sovcit siege. The ‘March for Australia’ today is a neo-Nazi rally. This is the distinction between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ communities I posted about before. Horizontal communities are the people who live in the same geographical area as you, like the town of Bathurst. We still assume that’s our ‘community’. That’s a terrible mistake, with the growth of social media. Now people find community in their online groups, connected to people all over the world. Sovcit movements for example are mostly generated in the US, and vacuum up the gullible in other countries, online. The town where the recent Victorian shootings happened has seen older ‘horizontal’ residents saying sovcits aren’t welcome. They were then abused by the newer ‘vertical’ sovcits. Figure it Out Bathurst, the movement that has dominated Bathurst governance in the past 2-3 years, is another vertical community, based in the international Trump movement. I encourage everybody to be aware of these changes. Bathurst also has sovcits, and Council is regularly abused by them and other vertical communities.

Wonderful vid of FSD through some of Sydney’s most iconic and busiest streeets at night. Hypnotic to watch. The two ‘errors’ mentioned seem overblown, one in fact may not have been, and more the driver taking back control too quickly. Superb performance by the tech. As they say, it drives more smoothly as well than any human driver, unbeatable feathering of the throttle. https://youtu.be/oxp939WHaYg?si=p9cjB7X8QGLDFRzO

I’m a big fan of dishwashing liquid. Many of the cleaning products that are sold are caustic rubbish that are completely unnecessary, for example for cleaning showers. Professional cleaners often just use dishwashing liquid to clean showers, and nothing else, including for the glass, tiles and grout. Also if you have blocked drains, get rid of the caustic products (which are terrible for sewer treatment plants too), and instead squirt some dishwashing liquid down the drain, add some hot water and then plunge. Repeat until the drain is clear. Most stubborn stains and blockages are just fats, and dishwashing liquid is designed to dissolve fats. It also means you don’t need Windex-type products for the glass either, dishwashing liquid is designed to dry with no visible residue. Just rinse with water - done.

Another way to think about autonomous driving technology. How good are you at paying attention? A Tesla for example monitors every other vehicle on the road, and pedestrians, bike riders, animals etc. 36 times every SECOND. Using 8 cameras. Do you have 8 pairs of eyes checking all of that, 36 times every second, for every second of every trip, no matter how long?

The Australian magistrate at the forefront of addressing ‘sovereign citizen’ type arguments in Australia made the interesting observation that many come into the movement after some kind of traffic offence. I post a lot about cars and roads not just because I like cars. Cars are at the centre of our entire culture, in multiple ways that go well beyond transport. Watch drivers on the road. If you want to see status games, you’ll find plenty out while driving. The people who can’t stand anybody in front of them and who will speed up until they’ve cleared any vehicle in their line of sight. The so-many people who hate anybody overtaking them, and who will speed up to try to prevent it. Being overtaken to them is a loss of status, on the road. The flow of single vehicles that becomes clumps of handfuls of cars ‘racing’ each other to be head of the pack. All of that is status games. There’s a pecking order out on the road, beginning with which vehicle you drive out there, and then flowing over into how you drive it. And the laughable belief humans are tremendous drivers, with some of the slowest reflexes of any living animal, playing status games with multiple tonnes of high-speed metal.

We’ve saved nearly $1400 in petrol costs this year, by having the EV. Servicing costs have been and will remain zero.

Does your car have wasp mode? ;)