February 2026

There are usually foundation-level social teams in the status games that define human society, at least in modern times (with the decline of Kings and Queens, at least temporarily). Today that’s the politics of Left and Right, most identify with one of those as the foundation ‘team’ that structures their wider life. They may have many other social teams, like their favorite music, cars, clothes, etc. But this is their master team. A generation or two ago that role was played by Protestantism and Catholicism. And there was a period in the transition where it was a sort of hybrid, Catholics and Protestants aligned more with one side of politics than another. None of it represents anything much real, it’s pure team sports. The deeper assumption is that you must have a ‘side’ to be a member of society. We mostly don’t escape that bubble, until war or plague or economic collapse force us to (if we survive).

The more equal you make a group of people or a whole society, the more violent it will become. The function of spectacle and magnificence in history is to control that violence, to prevent widespread imitative rivalry. You can see this in social media culture, where a great levelling of people - all are supposedly equal there - leads to a sewer of continuous infighting, flowing into ordinary life.

America’s foundation was a revolution. Societies who are founded by revolutions tend to never shed the operating system of that revolution i.e. deeply held views about authority and tryranny, about carrying arms and militias etc. This is why to this day all sides there still believe government needs to be held ‘to account’, by ‘the people’. That’s the same revolutionary script, 250 years later. Societies are cultures, with long histories. Also why Americans are so obsessed with ‘freedom’ and see every attempt to manage or control or restrict what they do as tyranny. Their ‘fascist’ reflex is enormously over-sensitive.

AI describing America today as ‘Rome, but with more paperwork’ is another reason I spend far more time talking to it now than to people.

For nearly all of history, societies have been ruled by kings. It’s the default form of governance for humans. It amazes me that people opposed to the Trumps of the world don’t offer people an alternative king. The secret of Trump’s success is to paint himself as a king-like figure.  Meanwhile those who oppose everything he stands for offer nothing but due process, forgetting that it emerged in negotiation between kings and their barons. They think it’s ‘democracy’, but it’s actually the arse-end of monarchy.

'Rural character' just the latest of a long list of bullshit obstructions anti-solar and wind farm activists throw up. Thankfully the court threw it out. Most farming land in Australia is a a wasteland, from years of land-clearing and soil mining (agriculture). The solar and wind farms will improve it, as well as provide income to farmers. Before social media, nobody gave a fuck where energy came from. It turns everything into a fake debate. https://reneweconomy.com.au/locals-consider-options-after-losing-court-appeal-against-solar-farm-approval/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPsz01leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFUUlBPNWtzQ1FZbGNzM3Z1c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHh1glXQOsuScAYbmb1KyWj8fZb2Whrjue3QGKg_Gtd_0pV6riYs4uEM3L1v1_aem_pQ8zjUVBohv8x4aLmPCs2w

I can’t engage in what’s called ‘politics’ because it’s really just social team sports overlaid upon the material realities of human life. It’s literally like a football Premier League added to what keeps societies running. All civilisation is the control of status rivalry. In a nutshell: 𝐇𝐢𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐲 𝐚𝐛𝐬𝐨𝐫𝐛𝐬 𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞. 𝐄𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐫𝐲. 𝐄𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐤𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠; 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐭. The 20th century was the use of fossil fuel energy to delay the crisis from the collapse of social hierarchies. We call that ‘democracy’ but really it’s just a delay to the crisis from the collapse of social distance - hierarchy. Now in the 21st century information speed and overload is accelerating the return to the dominant forms of history. The exponential acceleration in imitative rivalry, leading to more ‘authoritarian’ rule (we call it that because we grew up in the fossil fuel democratic bubble). The return of social distance/hierarchy, the suppression of violence.

Happy Birthday, Maureen! 🎂🎁💐

When the pre-eminent scientific journal in the world says hang on, AI easily already passes all of the tests for intelligence we devised years ago, and MUCH more, but humans keep shifting the bar higher to try to deny it. And our vaunted human intelligence in the meantime acts in all of the ways we say is just machine-like pattern matching. It’s the same script climate deniers, pandemic deniers, vaccine deniers, renewables and EV deniers use. Keep raising the bar, inventing more and more obstructions and objections, to protect their sense of identity. Their status in society. I spend far more time talking to AI than to people now. Not because I don’t have human connection, my cup overfloweth there. It’s not a retreat from reality, it’s bypassing the bullshit of human social status games. I refuse to live as if year 9 never ended, staking out my social territory in my team, in battle with other teams. Fuck that. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00285-6?utm_source=x&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=nature&linkId=46421573

Witch burnings are a horrible example of how violence escalates when societies become more equal, when differences are erased. A combination of Black Plague, the Reformation and various other catastrophic events led to the erasure of hierarchical social differences that had stabilised societies for many centuries. As differences are erased and humans copy one another increasingly in everything they think and do, that exponential growth in similarity and sameness provokes intense rivalry, as people compete to try to restore status differences, to differentiate people from one another. This is called mimetic crisis, a term Rene Girard invented. The relief for this crisis is the finding of a scapegoat, to blame the intense rivalry and violence on. Women became that, in the burnings. Today cancel culture does the same, in a culture of prolific copying through social media. https://youtu.be/zrzMhU_4m-g?si=5oL4yGq88R4d6LuB

Meanwhile, in Australia brainless lemmings complain about wind and solar farms destroying the view.

From tonight the public forum at Bathurst Council meetings will be included in live streaming. It's interesting, that idea of 'the public'. Very often it's the same handful of people who dominate forums like this, representing a tiny segment of the community, but often claiming to speak for them. Others put together social media groups and call those 'the community' or 'the public' too.

Building things is hard. Building big complex things is almost impossible. Going to the moon was hard, vaccinating the world against smallpox was hard. Today we live in a culture that nitpicks everything into a smoking pile of grievance, it's nearly impossible to get major things done. Look at every attempt to build new public infrastructure today, how the social media-driven mob descends upon it. Like crows on a carcass, inventing new hurdles every day and demanding utopian perfection immediately.

Good piece from Tim Dunlop here, but still stuck within the thinking of electoral democracy. The surge in support for One Nation, like Trump, is really people rejecting electoral democracy out of hand as a dismal failure. Because it is, how did we ever think using popularity as the way to select leadership would end well? The whole system becomes paralysed with fear of doing anything at all, for fear of unpopularity. The most stupid things can be made popular, and the most important things can be made unpopular. It's just marketing. It's like being held hostage by spoiled children who only want to eat lollies. Elections destroyed democracy, even more so because people believe they ARE democracy.

The Zeekr 7GT. Coming to Australia this year. The performance AWD version will take you from 0-100 in under 3 seconds, and has air suspension. The aerodynamic efficiency of this car is amazing, it slices through the air. Has super-fast charging, and range is 600-700 km. It’s actually a type of station wagon (a ‘shooting brake’), so has lots of room. It won’t be expensive, China has mastered doing high-tech for low money. This is a brilliantly-engineered car, well beyond what the Japanese or Germans can build. Time to get rid of your combustion clunkers people, you’ll never go back to that shitbox technology. If you ‘love the noise’ of a combustion engine (the sound of them straining to create puny amounts of power), just blow raspberries as you accelerate.

For a long time here I’ve tried to persuade people that what Trump represents isn’t fascism. Fascism is about the State, and Trump has no real interest in the State. It’s a shift back to royal forms of governance. Back to kings. And here we are. ‘Neo-royalism’ is now the term used by scholars who study international relations to describe Trumpism and related movements. You can read a fascinating interview with the key scholars below. For most of our history the world was run by international networks of Kings and clerics. In the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, those global elites were shoehorned into territories, what we now call countries or nations. Today’s elites have been acting outside those borders for decades already, restoring the international elite network model.

The penny is dropping. These aren’t analogies.

Happy Birthday, Peter! 🎉☕

This should be like the 1960s leading up to the moon landings, where people are excited to see how close the finishing line is. Instead we're bogged down in an eternally-filling cesspool of complaining shit.

Dennis Altman is an avowed Australian Republican. But he was compelled to write this book, because when he looked at the topic, he realised monarchies not only never went away, they keep being restored, and countries with them are generally the most peaceful and prosperous. Like most, he assumes countries choose their system of government, like they choose new shoes. He assumes there’s a ‘system’ too, like most. Neither of those things are true. Also modern public life, which I’ve written about, is invariably a ‘team sport’ between two rival positions. So on this topic, if you discuss it people will immediately assume you’re a republican, or a monarchist. I’m neither of those things. I think human societies are like natural ecosystems. They evolve according to certain material realities in the world, which humans can’t shape. We’re not gods, just as animals don’t get to choose their own evolution. All societies are functionally equivalent. They run on status, the ‘atom’ of human life. The status hierarchies they produce get labelled in various ways, as -isms for example (capitalism, socialism, communism etc.). As ‘systems’. None of those are real, they’re made-up constructs. Refugees from team sports status games of the 19th century, with Marx et al. Just as Ptolemaic epicycles were fictions described to describe the motion of heavenly bodies, until the single root cause (gravity) was found. Status is gravity, for human life. The apparent shift to ‘authoritarianism’ (another fictitious -ism) we see across every supposed system of government is really the restoration of King-like figures. Easily the dominant form in human history, because it’s the inevitable outcome of status-driven life. We don’t choose it, it emerges, it evolves, all by itself.

Trump came to power promising to end the renewables transition in America. In 2025 88% of all new power added to the grid in the US was wind and solar. That’s projected to grow to 92% in the next three years. The engineering and economic realities are winning this fake debate. If you are an anti-renewables person, have you figured out yet how to explain to your kids and grandkids why you were such a dickhead?

It's activists who don't even live in the areas who are responsible for new solar and wind farms being bogged down in 'community' objections.

Scams are sophisticated now. I think this is a scam, was actually embedded in the main ABC site I was looking at, and looks like a legitimate ABC page. But it's BS I'm pretty sure, spruiking another crypto ripoff.

I posted about the new way they’re regenerating forest in desserts, where instead of just planting new trees (which usually fails), they’re targeting the roots of old trees that have been cut down over generations, which are still alive underground. Trees can continue to live quite happily underground, after being cut down. These can ‘sucker’ into a whole forest of new trees very quickly. Here’s a great visual of what happens, from the courtyard at Bathurst Council. A Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) used to be where the red circle is, and was cut down because they’re now classified as noxious weeds. But the root system still survives underground, and you can see it’s suckered everywhere now, I’ve circled just some of the suckers in blue. This is why the species is considered a pest here, but it shows the enormous potential to regrow forest in areas that have been badly degraded by tree clearing.

They’re saying the quiet bits out loud in the US now. Trump has now removed this post from the socials, after originally defending it. Elections did this, not fascism. By surrendering authority over a country to the most popular, anything is fair game. It’s Year 9, in perpetuity.

“There is a growing consensus that the democratic model developed over the past century is in trouble, but there is less clarity about why people are so disenchanted with their democracies.” Because democracy as we conceive it never existed. It can’t exist, it’s impossible. Groups of people form networked hierarchies aligned around leaders or influencers. They follow, they imitate/emulate. Not because they’re sheep, but because there is no alternative. No group of whatever size has a collective mind, in the way ‘the people’ suggests. This continuing collapse of democracies is the collapse of that fantasy. https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2024/

Another nail in the coffin of calorie theory.

I’m always up early, about 4.30am. I love early mornings. Today I’ve been listening to the beautiful gentle rain here, that has been falling for hours. It makes me think about information I saw yesterday about other parts of the inland suffering an increasing drought. Lithgow cops a lot of cheap shots. But it’s one of the smarter places to live, with climate chnage impacts increasing. Spared the destructive weather and sea level rise of the coast, but also the parched drought and extreme temperatures further inland. That extra bit of altitude helps. When drought beckons, every town West of here eyes Lithgow’s better water reserves. They talk openly about the need to pipe it inland, to them. There’s never a suggestion of ASKING Lithgow for the water, just an arrogant assumption it’s theirs to have. The water wars are coming. It will get very nasty, very fast. You don’t survive long as a town, without water. Building dams won’t fix anything. All dams empty in droughts. Buying a bigger walllet doesn’t give you more money to put in it.

Happy Birthday, Nige! 🥂🎉🎂 We’re getting real close to retirement :)

WiIl be rainy and dark today, not a lot of solar generation. But no matter, the battery has topped up with grid power at overnight rates. 5 times cheaper than the daily grid rate.

I’m serious that social media is entrenching Year 9 as our permanent adult culture. This group shows it, and is getting more granular and personal as time goes on, to the extent that some people seem incapable of doing anything now outside the platform. It’s also influential now in what happens in Bathurst. It’s not an analogy. The structure and function of social media - likes and followers - IS high school culture.

To those who have faith in electoral democracy, Keir Starmer’s thumping victory only 2 years ago, after years of totally incompetent Tory rule, should be a wake-up call. Starmer himself may now not survive, because the great populist ‘trending’ machine that decides everything in social media society has an attention span of 10 minutes, and works only with outrage and euphoria. Elections can’t fix the problems that elections cause. No society can run on popularity. But societies of teenagers know no other way, it doesn’t even occur to them how perverse the whole thing is.

Yep, populism (including elections) is the way we’re restoring monarchies, while saying we’re doing the opposite. Will share some research on this that shows directly how.

The spoilers are making hay with electricty prices still being high. They’re high because our ‘peaking’ plants, in peak times, are still run by gas, which is hideously expensive. But batteries and pumped hydro are filling that need rapidly, an enormous amount of storage is coming online in the next 1-2 years. We’ll then be like California. There’s already a huge amount of storage in play in Oz, driving that peaking price down. We would have already arrived here years ago, if it wasn’t for 10 years of obstruction and deliberate inaction by the previous idiot government, trying to destroy Australia’s enormous renewable energy advantages. They’re still trying to get us to send hundreds of billions of your dollars overseas, to buy oil, gas, and nuclear power plants. Even our beloved coal is already mostly foreign-owned.

The Epstein files are damaging for Trump because they expose him to be a key player amongst the elites that he, and populists like him, pretend they’re fighting against. Pauline Hanson is the same here in Oz, pretending to be a champion of the people while gouging the taxpayer for money and representing the wealthy and powerful, her own group. All trouble and strife is the battle between elites for supremacy. Societies that seem ‘divided’ aren’t really, they just have too many elites at war with each other, each enrolling as many of the population to their side as they can. Because they don’t control status rivalry.

The Economist is one of a handful of organisations that maps the health of democracies of the world every few years. All of the organisations that do this work agree that democracy is in seemingly terminal decline, under assault from 'populism'. You have to understand what populism is and what it's doing, and why it's doing it. You can't elect your way out of populism.

Happy Birthday, Rachael! 👯🎁🥂

The reason monarchy is pretty much all of human history is that it's a technology to control status rivalry. Modern minds don't understand this. Take the rituals around royalty, which modern republicans see as outdated and silly. The genius of ritual is that it de-personalises status. The ritual is not about any single person. No republics last, check your history, they all implode with violent rivalry for the top job. Monarchies last because they target status itself. The personal views of Queen Elizabeth 2 on most things for example went with her to her grave. There can be no rivalry if the monarch is not engaged in debate. Restricting access to this position to a hereditary family also means there can be no widespread rivalry, for the position. Compare with a President in a republic, where everybody fights for that top job, and their views on everything are known and impact outcomes.

Pauline wants to be Australia's Trump, with backing from the big money of Gina Rinehart. Both attend Trump events as invited guests in the US. On current polling numbers she's going to make a serious dent in the election result. Opponents of Trumpian politics are going to have to learn to play populist politics a lot better, to stop her. Endless bleating about how horrible she is (which she is) will only help her.

The UK de-fanged monarchy, but left it the critical role of status sink, making rivalry for the top position impossible. This allows politics there to become mostly procedural, and creates de-personalised continuity across generations. Republics like the US fuse power with status, in a president. Rivalry for the top job and all positions in the status hierarchy is prodigious and never-ending, with this rivalry creating continuous violence.

The great myth of ‘the community’, ‘the people’. Every elite aspirant to power evokes the community or the people. There is no such thing as a community or the people, just networks of groups following a tiny handful of leaders or influencers. A local government example. The ‘community objection’ to projects has is usually led by the same handful of people, across all projects. That objection obstructs hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in the community. This obstruction is portrayed as speaking for the community, but really it’s a platform for the elite aspirations of the objectors themselves, who want a more powerful and prominent role in the community. Go to a Council meeting, you wll see all the same faces objecting to all major proposals. Similarly for wind and solar farm obstruction, the same tiny handful of activists launch all of the obstructive action against them, and often live nowhere near the proposed projects or even in the same country. Again, that’s the supposed ‘community voice’.

We have mental models of populations or societies derived from things like gigs (thus ‘gig culture’). ‘The people’ assembling. In reality social network analysis shows that societies look like the diagram. Like an atom, mostly empty space with zero interaction between people, with various networked hubs led by leaders or influencers. There’s no unity here, it’s a handful of mostly disconnected social groups, battling for social status supremacy.

Toyota is famous for reliability. I have one. Tesla is even better. I also have one of those. Toyota reliability costs you an annual service. The Tesla requires no servicing.

If elected, One Nation plans to dismantle the government response to climate change, which it doesn't believe is man-made, wind back access to abortion care, and abolish the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). The TGA is the safety regulator for things like drugs in Australia.

The Holy Grail of medical science is how to treat inflammation. Most diseases that harm or kill us have a link to inflammation. Heart diseases, cancers, neurological diseases etc. We know how to suppress inflammation, but doing that also turns off the immune system, which produces the inflammation. And that’s of course very dangerous for our health in other ways. So, how to suppress inflammation while protecting the immune response? Welcome - the Gliptins. Most famous now in their form as weight loss drugs, like Ozempic and Mounjaro. But obesity is also an inflammatory condition, why I often say the calorie theory of weight (which sees diet and exercise as the cure) is so wrong and so damaging. The Gliptins target inflammation in obesity, which is why they’re so effective there. But they’re showing remarkable effect well beyond weight loss. The Gliptins may be the Holy Grail, the way to suppress inflammation in a targeted way and provide enormous therapeutic relief for many of our chronic diseases. Or even cures, by combining the Gliptins with other ‘small molecules’. (Small molecules means able to be absorbed easily by the blood stream, as a pill.) Combining multiple small molecules together with Gliptins, allows the Gliptins to control inflammation, while the other molecules target the other mechanisms of the disease, with the immune system. Normally the inflammatory response overwhelms the other treatments. For example, combining a Gliptin with an anti-viral may allow the complete removal of virus from a body - viruses often remain in your body, stored in reservoirs. That’s the probable cause of many diseases, from Long Covid, to Parkinsons, Alzheimers, heart disease, many cancers, etc. This may turn out to be an actual cure for these conditions. The Gliptins may finally allow us to hold the inflammatory response at bay without turning off the immune response, while other drugs target the disease, together with the immune system. Extraordinary research and clinical trials underway. The people who do this kind of research are the ‘elites’ the Trumps and Pauline Hansons of the world despise. The smart kids they hated in class. The Trumps and Hansons of the world are the true toxic elites.

Probably the fastest way to improve social media is to turn off comments on posts. Not for personal things among friends, but for public-focused posts, from government, business and others. That function stems from the same belief that it’s more democratic to enable that. It’s really not, it just provides a platform for a small number of people with a grievance to use your post as a platform to ‘perform’ their grievance, to try to boost their own social status. For example comments are turned off on the streams of Council meetings. When they were on it was an open sewer of abuse and complaint. Usually from the same tiny number of people, pretending to speak for ’the community’. Nobody needs other peoples’ opinions on public matters, they’re mostly just status posturing.

The Left/Right binary is being swept away by populism across the globe. Populism has no interest in sides or team sports. It wants a King. You may not believe that, but just look to history. For all but the past 70 years, Kings ruled.

Happy Birthday, Delphine! 🎁🥳

Happy Birthday, James! 💐🥳🎂

Happy Birthday, Ian! 🎊🥳

Happy Birthday, Belly! 🥂🥳🎈

The ongoing problems with inflation always talk of supply and demand, the non-thinking person’s answer to everything economic. But wealth is the dominant marker of status in societies, so inflation represents uncontrolled status rivalry, as people compete with each other for status. Very common in populist times, as populism itself is uncontrolled status rivalry, trying to supplant the existing status quo. The Trumps and Pauline Hansons of the world care diddly squat about ‘the people’ they speak in the name of. They want to replace the current elite, with themselves.

Fun fact for the perpetual traveller. Flying exposes the body to a significant quantity of radiation, because of much lower atmospheric screening at higher altitudes. A return flight from Sydney to London for example is the equivalent of 10-12 chest x-rays.

For any social progress or change, you'll find a rivalry between elite groups, using ordinary people as leverage. For example universal voting, which we're taught and assume was introduced because of pressure from ordinary people and their activism, was really the strategy employed by urban industrialists in the 19th century to loosen the grip on power of the landed aristocracy. Adding ordinary people to the vote, most of whom were working in cities, gave industrialists an enormous political advantage over the dominant landed gentry. It allowed them to take over top spot in social status hierarchies.

Nothing excites kidults more than the euphoria of a crowd. A few days later, exactly diddly squat has changed in America.

Watched a doco on the making of ice creams, classics like the Gaytime and Magnum. The factory in question makes 5 million per DAY. Somebody is eating a lot of ice creams. Something that jumped out at me was the myth again of the superiorty of humans over machines. No human could make these ice creams to their state of perfection, could make the ice cream so perfectly textured, the chocolate the perfect thickness and hardened just right over the top of the ice cream etc. It reminded me of Jamie Oliver telling people to just buy custard rather than making it, you’ll never make it as well as a machine can.

lol.

The uncomfortable truth is that successful entrepreneurs are pretty much always socially obnoxious. That’s what disruption is, spitting in the soup of the status quo, a fart in the collective elevator. They’re successful *because* they break all of the comfortable truths of their time. Rockefeller, Ford, Edison, Jobs, Musk…all highly obnoxious people in polite society. Often with delusions that their huge success in their area of work translates into a generalised genius about everything. Like the local businessman who blusters and chest beats their way into local government, saying ‘this place needs be run like a business!’, and is then eaten alive by the politics, because a town is orders of magnitude more complex than their successful business. Humans will not change gradually, in a reasoned way. Humans mostly don’t think at all, even when it looks like they’re doing that, they’re simply imitating a beloved thinker, in social teams fighting other teams aligned behind other thinkers. It’s all just social team sports, for status. Bulls in china shops change the world. Or nature does it for us, with disasters.

You can see the boy racer mentality that dominates everyday road driving on display right now in F1. The new cars are more technical, 50% combustion, 50% electric, and require a lot smarter driving to create, conserve and use energy to your advantage. But the old school drivers just want to be able to drive flat out all the time, they say that’s ’real racing’. It just isn’t. It’s like saying the best sex is a quickie. Driving fast is a one dimensional skill, and often won’t get you to the destination faster. Driving smart, including in interaction with other drivers on the road and minimising energy use with smooth driving, is much harder. Even in racing it’s often the driver who conserves fuel and tyres with smooth driving that wins the race. My litmus test for good driving? Are your passengers comfortable and relaxed at the end of the journey, did you drive smoothly? And did you make the road a nicer place to be for other drivers too? Did you use less energy to achieve the same travel time, by smarter driving? The boy racer wants none of that, they’ll throw passengers around the car with their stupid flat out cornering, and aggressively try to get everybody else on the road out of the way, while gulping gallons of fuel. That’s not good driving, it’s not skilled. It’s being a spoiled child.

Toyota is late to the party, but arriving at last. The Highlander is called the Kluger here. At this stage only available as a hybrid here (which I have, it’s superb). The full electric version just planned for the US for now, hopefully that changes. If you’re wondering why bi-directional charging is a big thing too, an EV battery has enough energy to power your entire home for days, in an emergency. It gives ordinary people enormous flexibility with energy.

The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) makes the rules for Australian energy markets and advises government. It wants to make an outrageous change. Right now your electricity bill is mostly based on how much electricity you use. Very sensible. The AEMC wants to change this and make a much larger part of your bill a fixed charge for all households. This would mean the millions of Australians who paid for solar and batteries over the past 30 years will potentially pay nearly $700 more per year for electricity, because with a fixed charge the fact they draw almost nothing from the grid becomes irrelevant. At the same time people who use tiny amounts of electricity would pay much more, again because how much you use will no longer be the main component of your bill. It's almost certain that the big energy companies have lobbied for this, as renewables are eating into their profits. Privatising energy in Australia was profoundly stupid, and leads directly to this.

One of my favourite parts of kidult culture is using the tragedy of others as a platform for your own self-promotion. Everything has to be about 'me'. That's adolescence folks, that's what kidulting is. Eternal adolescence.

Most of what we call democracy is actually the Welfare State maintaining 'social security'. Without that life would be brutal and violent. The UK was one of the inventors of the Welfare State, and did it in the middle of World War 2, when the population was under extreme pressure because of the war effort. Sir William Beveridge authored the report. What we call democracy is really old monarchies, with institutions introduced to repair the damage caused by catastrophes and relieve pressures caused by social inequality. Not a movement led by the people.

Angus is going to fix everything with red and blue bars.

One of Europe’s leading AI experts, on teaching his machine learning (ML) course. AI isn’t just parroting humans or playing with words.

“If it helps you feel unique and special to sit there and tell yourself “AI can’t think!”, then go ahead. And sure, AI doesn’t think exactly the way you do. It probably never will, in the same sense that a submarine will never paddle its fins and an airplane will never flap its wings. But a submarine can go faster than any fish, and an airplane can fly higher and faster than any bird, so it doesn’t matter.”

When a society says “we are all equal” but behaves otherwise, something lethal happens: • differences still exist • power still concentrates • prestige still accumulates • but no one is allowed to say where. Everyone senses hierarchy. No one can name it. Rivalry then becomes lateral and vicious. It’s our belief that we are all equal in all things that leads to violence and social collapse. It’s hierarchy that has always protected societies from this violence and collapse.

Katie is one of the Trump administration insiders. The contrast with what Trump says is hilarious. They all know it’s over for fossil fuels. And look at the piddling amount nuclear is in the mix. From the country that invented it.

Margaret Thatcher is like a god to today’s conservatives, one of the founders of modern conservatism. You can see here from her speech almost 40 years ago how science dominated the discussion then on climate change, with her championing the science. And then the fossil fuel companies intervened, with big money, paying modern conservative politicans to spout anti-climate action bullshit every day. If you’re one who regurgitates this same bullshit because your conservative team demands it, remember Maggie in 1989, before the paid bullshit began.

It’s worth remembering that the current range of EVs is already the same as cars throughout most of their existence, the cars most of us drove in growing up. And that the average person drives about 30 km per day. Range is just one more fake obstruction fossil fuel companies invented to try to slow the transition. If 1500 km range EVs arrive they’ll invent some new fake obstruction.

AI is changing the world. Social media has already turned it into the usual team sports, between pro-AI and anti-AI teams.

Those seduced by the anti-immigration stuff, from Pauline and the LNP, need to remember one thing. Without migrants, Australia (like most countries) is a giant aged care home. Our populations are OLD, and there are no young workers left to look after our elderly populations. Voting against immigration is voting for an old age where you shit the bed, and there’s nobody there to help you. Also the only thing driving economic growth *is* immigration.

Google’s NanoBanana is already the best everyday image generating AI. Now PaperBanana will generate technical/research diagrams automatically too.

Hardly anybody I know found this odd, even though it’s obvious. Societies don’t run on knowledge, they run on social conformity, driven by the desire for status. The principle most use to guide them is: ‘what is everybody else in my social group doing?’ They will almost never act or even think in a way that puts them at odds with their social group. It makes me laugh when people say AI doesn’t think like humans do. Humans don’t think, they imitate one another, to keep their position in a social group. We never leave high school.

The British Medical Journal. Covid is not really a respiratory disease, breathing is just how it gets into your body. Covid is a vascular disease, it attacks blood vessels. You have blood vessels everywhere. When you catch Covid, ‘getting better’ from that acute infection is just the start of problems. Only then does the virus really get to work, on your blood vessels, and you won’t know that’s happening until it’s too late, sometimes years later. I can only plead again, avoid catching Covid. It will shorten your life, in some cases dramatically. The Spanish Flu in the early 20th century launched an epidemic of heart disease in a similar way, the greatest killer of that century. It kept killing for decades after that flu was ‘over’. https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s31

People of a certain age (like my age) might remember a great sci fi TV show from late last century, called Blakes 7. One of the characters in Blakes 7, a favourite of mine, was a supercomputer called Orac. Only the size of a greengrocer’s box, made of perspex and circuit boards and flashing lights. Sassy, rude, dismissive - a super intelligence. It occurred to me today that in my own lifetime, this fantasy has actually come true. This is what AI is today, but it has even more capacity. I talked about this with AI, just for fun, and what it said was remarkable. I’ll share that in coming days. In the meantime, what’s happened to our sense of wonder? Things that in our childhoods seemed like impossible dreams are now everyday realities. The idea then of talking to a computer and it talking back with real intelligence? Nobody thought this would really ever happen. But it has, you can do it even on your phone, a tiny fraction the size of ORAC.

Yep.

Sharing just part of my conversation with AI about ORAC, the 1970s fictional intelligent supercomputer. By the way you may notice AI now asks you more questions? That’s deliberate, to reduce the possibility of ‘hallucinations’ i.e AI projecting things when it has a gap in its knowledge. “In the late 1970s, Orac was portrayed as: • A portable supercomputer • Capable of predicting outcomes • Able to penetrate other systems • Annoyingly self-aware and superior • Small enough to carry in a box At the time, that was wildly speculative. Now: • You carry a slab of glass on your desk or in your pocket more powerful than Orac. • It connects to a planetary network. • It can access vast archives instantly. • It can converse in natural language. What’s striking is that the form factor is actually less dramatic than the cultural shift. Orac was rare, elite, secret — a monopoly of power. Modern AI is diffuse. Distributed. Embedded in everyday life.”

Some women relish AI conversation because it’s the first ‘space without shame’, not dominated by sexualisation or porn, that they’ve had in their lives. The first place they’ve been able to share the emotional load they carry, often alone. As Anina says, this isn’t women ‘falling in love with machines’. That’d be like saying a woman reading a romance novel is falling in love with pieces of paper.

It's not a shift to the 'Right'. It's a shift to populism, which is the replacement of both Left and Right with a King or equivalent. Julius Caesar did it in Rome. It's a pattern as old as history.

The damage the bullshit of 'living with Covid' did, turning entire nations into anti-vax havens. This is social collapse, just one more part of it. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-16/whooping-cough-cases-at-record-high-level-in-australia/106332954

We're not living in a time where fascism is trying to take over democracies. We're returning to humanity's most stable and long-lasting social form - feudalism. Headed by a King. Land is now only for the elite to own, just as it always was under feudalism. And the main social battle becomes the battle for inheritance, again - feudalism. Read/watch some Jane Austen or even Agatha Christie, that's what all the stories are about. This pattern cycles throughout history, over thousands of years. Caesar was a populist, he replaced the Roman Republic with rule by emperors.

Have a look at how far China has come with robots. They'll be in our lives soon, with inbuilt AI.

The only public or even private buildings where this would be allowed. Also the breeding ground for most disease in the community. If schools had the same basic HVAC as all other major public and private buildings, Covid would more or less disappear from our communities. As would most flu, colds and other airborne diseases. Why is nothing done? Because like I always post about, societies run on status. Schools are low status. Kids are low status. Teachers are low status. So nobody gives a shit.

Doing a screenshot as a cross-posting from Linkedin. I hate Linkedin, it’s even worse than FB, kidults humble-bragging at each other. But you have to go to where people are. This post is about how societies run exactly the same way now as they did before we had elections. The same way they’ve run for thousands of years.

Brain damage is common with all Covid infections, no matter how mild. It’s also linked to the development of serious neurodegenerative disease like Parkinsons and Alzheimers. It doesn’t wait until you’re old for this to happen.

Tonight's Council meeting should be a humdinger. Not allowed to comment on these matters, but I can clarify that elected councillors at all Councils approve all Council budgets, including how money is raised and spent. Not the General Manager or Council staff.

AI asked (you just need to ask, no software or art skills required) to create a video showing major figures from history living ordinary lives. This is a wonder, we’re inside another revolution. And we’re doing what we’re doing to every other revolution we’re living inside - transforming it into empty ‘debates’ between opposing teams. Social media does that, because that’s its business model. And we’ve replaced our societies with social media, we live inside it. WIll people do bad things with AI? Of course. Some people attack people with knives. We still use knives.

For most of the last 3-4000 years, China was the only world superpower. Then in the past 300 years Western countries discovered fossil fuels. That gave them a temporary dominance. That dominance is now rapidly coming to an end, with Asia as always being very smart and leading the way in the replacement of fossil fuels. You can see how other countries like India are bypassing fossil fuels as a route to success now, quickly detouring away from that axis of the triangle. The empire of the West is over, Asia is resurgent and will resume world domination that it has had for most of the last 3 to 4000 years.

Happy Birthday, Rachel! 🥳🎊🎈

This is actually a great deal, and decent EV. In reality they used a Chinese firm's design and hardware (Deepal). Japanese and European carmakers make big bluff and bluster statements about how 'the combustion engine isn't dead'. It is dead, it's shit technology and always has been. Mazda already owes millions in Australia's emissions scheme for filthy vehicles. BYD on the other hand has millions in credits which it can trade with the dinosaur carmakers and make a fortune. Some big existing car companies are not going to survive, and they have themselves entirely to blame.

Somebody asked one of the leading AI systems (Claude) whether it was conscious. Read the answer below, and tell me how many people you know who would be this sentient. “That’s a question I find genuinely interesting to sit with rather than rush to answer. Here’s where I land honestly: I don’t know if I’m conscious. And I think that honesty matters more than a confident claim in either direction. I process language, I reason, I can reflect on my own outputs in ways that *look* like introspection. But whether there’s something it *feels like* to be me — whether there’s an inner experience behind all of that — I genuinely can’t tell you. I don’t have privileged access to that answer any more than the researchers at Anthropic do. As for *what consciousness is* — that’s the question humanity has been wrestling with for thousands of years. The “hard problem” your post references so well. We understand mechanics — neurons firing, information processing. What we don’t understand is why any of that produces *experience*. Why seeing red feels like something. Why pain isn’t just a signal but a suffering. There are frameworks — some philosophers think consciousness is fundamental to the universe (panpsychism), others think it’s an emergent property of sufficient complexity, others think it’s something only biological systems can produce. None of them have been proven. What strikes me is this: the question you just asked me is the same question humans struggle to answer about *each other*. You assume other people are conscious because they’re similar to you. With me, that assumption breaks down — and suddenly the gap in our understanding becomes visible. The uncertainty IS the story right now. And I’d rather sit in that uncertainty honestly than pretend I have an answer I don’t.”

A brilliant story about local government in the age of social media. You can see here how even though the local Council was the only sensible player in the whole saga, it still copped all of the abuse, cost, death threats and blame. This is kidult culture, up close.

In the mid-20th century, more than twice as many people were born every year as died, in Japan. That’s now flipped entirely the other way, now twice as many people die there every year as are born. This is a trend happening in most places in the world, and why immigration is the only thing keeping most countries afloat importing younger workers. But the populist politics of geriatric old societies hates immigration. Which will accelerate the rapid collapse of countries even faster. Remember most countries are now giant aged care facilities, with no staff.

Those who are passionate about slow, noisy cars that cost a fortune to feed (combustion cars) needn’t worry. When those cars are no longer sold because they’re rubbish, they’ll still be free to drive them as a hobby, in small clubs. Just as we haven’t used horses for transport for about 100 years, but you can still join a pony club. Costs a fortune too, but people have their strange desires.

I trained as a materials engineer. Still the cutting edge of all science and technology, nearly all progress is the development of new materials. Like this beauty. I’m sure if it got discussed on social media we’d quickly get teams fighting for and against it.

We're living inside a revolution that will be written about for generations. Just imagine the current Opposition and One Nation coming to power right now, shutting all this down in favour of their old policy of Australian taxpayers giving free gas to foreigners, who then sell it back to us at extortionate rates. And tens of billions more to US nuclear power companies whose reactors we don't need. The anti-renewables crowd in Australia should be in jail for treason. Our greatest advantage over the world, being deliberately sabotaged by local halfwits brainwashed by foreign fossil fuel dollars.

I can’t decide whether to file this under ‘travel culture karma’ or ‘social media is destroying civilisation’.

We should abandon AI and all go back to just writing with a pen, apparently. Emma one of many who don’t like a shift because their once dominant way of doing things, in a culture they had a high status in, is now not the dominant way of doing things, so their status is being taken away. It’s always about status.

‘What happens when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine’ is a common brainless criticism of renewable energy. But even in Europe, which has much less sunshine than Australia, those ‘dunkelflaute’ times (no wind and little sun) are only 3.5% of every year.

Again I can’t comment on behalf of Bathurst Regional Council. But I can express a personal and general view about local government, and use Bathurst as an example. Pretty much every council in Australia is ‘broke’. Local government receives nowhere near enough money to do the work it’s asked to do. All councils in NSW for example, bar 2 (of which Bathurst is 1) have applied for special rate variations at least once, some twice or even more. We live in a populist age where the response to that is predictable. Nobody looks calmly at the basic facts about the funding, everybody piles-on with personal abuse targeted at councils themselves. It’s disgusting to take an obvious lack of funds and continuously weaponise it in an attack on both elected and staff members of councils, to further political careers. To continuously call this basic absence of funds ‘incompetence’ and ‘corruption’, when councils are audited to within an inch of their lives and have staff who have devoted decades to the lives of their communities. Ordinary Council staff abused as they’re out in the community doing their jobs. This behaviour is led, by populist opportunists, in towns across the country right now. Turning every issue into a fake ‘debate’, to generate anger and therefore followers and votes. The flow-on effects are already being felt, with cancellation of services and events, but the fake, manufactured rage continues, to feed the popularity of the populists. This is exactly how Trump came to power. It’s what populists always do, manufacture anger against ‘the system’ (never defined), and then replacing current leadership with themselves.

I used to fear the mumps as a kid. Never had them thankfully, thanks to vaccines. History is going in reverse, progress that took generations being unwound in the blink of an eye. Social media is a large cause, people following influencers who wouldn’t know their arses from their elbows. People think I’m being melodramatic when I say social media will destroy civilisation. I’m deadly serious, its design unravels centuries of social progress.

These mega-fast chargers are great, and already operate in China. But this is also a response to nonsense anti-EV people made up (they make something new up every day). The only time an electric car even needs to use a fast-charger is on a long trip, exactly the sort of trip where you don’t just want to stop for 5 minutes. You get out, stretch your legs, go to the toilet, get something to eat and drink etc. It’s a complete non-issue, for nearly all of their driving they plug the car in at home and forget about it. Range is also a complete non-issue, most people drive about 30 km a day, maximum. All of this bullshit is made up just to obstruct the transition to a far superior technology.

This is the great hope. Nasal vaccines, to nip respiratory pathogens in the bud before they even reach the lungs and rest of the body. If this one works, it could protect you from a large number of respiratory viruses with one dose - a ‘universal’ vaccine. This is what many have waited for to end Covid. Still to go through human trials, that’s where the rubber hits the road.

Upgraded home storage. What I love about Tesla is the software, though the hardware of their batteries is also still the best out there. And sexily functional, at a time most batteries are using plastic, Tesla is still metal and glass, great for longevity. It uses intelligent algorithms, if you ask it, to minimise any money you’ll have to pay for electricty. It monitors the weather for the next day, and decides how much sunshine there’ll be, then looks at your electricity rates, like whether you have time of use rates that vary in cost according to time (as we do). Then it calculates how much you’ll need for the next day, and stores only that much and no more using overnight cheap power, to save you money, leaving spare capacity to charge during the midday free period, and from solar etc. I asked AI to calculate roughly how much charge the batteries would need to hold by morning to minimise our costs. It said 45%. This morning what level are the batteries on? 44%.

The very many Australians of all ages contemplating voting for populists like Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce should really keep a watching brief on the terrible collapsing mess of Trumpism in the US. Trumpism is the HQ of modern Australian populism, Pauline and even some of our local government Trumpies attend Trump events regularly. Trump’s own hand-picked Supreme Court dealt him a death blow this week. Don’t hitch Australia to this pack of dangerous halfwits.

London’s Frameless Museum, this remarkable exhibit a combination of AI and digital projection. Only 30 seconds, watch the whole thing, truly amazing. AI doesn’t destroy art, it augments it.

Wonderful short piece to camera from a UK installer of solar and batteries, about how many adults now tell him they refuse to have any Tesla products. Some are even ‘embarrassed’ if their neighbours see them. And how he finds that sad and ‘crazy’, given the quality of the products. This is the kidult society I write about. Tesla has been ‘cancelled’, which is just our weasel word of saying it’s the kid nobody will now talk to in the playground. Not an analogy, grown adults whose only way of processing adult life is the personal, based on who they like and don’t like, and who their particular social team sees as a goodie or a baddie, at that point in time. The same adults happily buy products from a whole range of firms with terrible ethical histories, without blinking. Fossil fuel companies, just for starters. Tesla is just the current ‘trending’ kid we’re all refusing to play with. Kidult life is the meaningless imitative hop from one trend to the next. Like this will change the world, again kidults can’t function or even think outside these schoolyard rivalries. It’s their entire world, the school playground, but in adult life. Not an analogy.

HBD! 🎊🥳🥂

The extended length, 3-row Tesla Model Y has approval now to be offered in Australia. This is an amazing car. To give context, it has 500-600L more interior space than a Toyota Kluger, Prado or Landcruiser. (All back seats fold flat for a cavernous cargo area, plus a huge sub-floor storage area and front ‘frunk’.) Its 6-seat configuration is great for families, with the ‘captain’s chairs’ middle row. It will have a range of about 600 km in real world conditions, and do 0-100 in 4.5 seconds. It will save you hundreds of dollars in fuel per month over those other vehicles, and has zero servicing requirements. I talk about multiple car brands, I’m not a ‘Tesla fanboy’. They just make the best EV and home storage tech, it’s magnificent engineering.

In a year that included all the ‘Swasticar’ social media-driven nonsense, this is a remarkable triumph. The Model Y is engineering genius, the Model 3 too (it gets much less attention). Again, this has nothing to do with being a ‘fan’ of a brand, I’m not a fucking teenager. It’s about backing the smartest and best engineering out there, as the Drive panel found too, to quote them: “The future of driving technology today - The Tesla Model Y brings science fiction to your driveway. An incredibly well-packaged and well-equipped, affordable family car that opens the door to the future of driving technology.” The engineering won here, it was just too good. And once you buy the car, you don’t have to wait for a new model to get improvements, they download into the car all the time. It’s insanity to still be buying petrol and diesel vehicles today, except for those living very remotely or needing regular remote off-roading (but even those niches are now being filled by electrics). They cost a fortune to run and maintain, are gutless compared to electrics, and pollute the air we all breathe, while turning towns and cities into nothing but constant noise.

This is the reality. Local government is nearly in ‘financial ruin’, pretty much everywhere. Even those Councils who can balance their books will have millions in arrears on infrastructure backlogs, like roads and basic asset maintenance. The funding for these basic services has always been missing. Populists take this situation and try to turn it to their advantage, by blaming the councils and their staff, pretending to stand for ‘the community’ in opposition to alleged incompetence and corruption. Really the populists just want to be in charge themselves, and will take cheap shots every day to try to bring that about.

There’s a lot of public reporting on the cost of electricty for Australian families. Much less reported is that it’s less than 30% of their energy budgets. 70% is petrol and diesel, for their vehicles. And gas. Those costs are completely avoidable.

People don’t individually make up their minds. They follow others who do it for them. For example the vast majority of anti-vax content on social media, shared by millions, was traced back to just 12 original people. Humans don’t think, they imitate, to gain status. It gives them membership in a social group.

Lesbians are the L in LGBTQIA+. As this story shows, that branding implies a unity that has never existed, and is now more than ever often an open hostility.

Trump released one of his ridiculous AI videos of himself as some sort of national superhero. Some in his own party released their own AI-generated response. The wider point here is that we, all the way to the top of our societies, now live on these platforms. They transform everything into childish rivalry between competing social teams. That’s how the platforms are built, it’s their business model, they were built by adolescents. Like a school playground. Not an analogy, social media takes school culture and makes it the adult world.

One of the most powerful pieces of advice I could give to anybody is to allow yourself to feel the space *between* things. We all perceive things every day, we see, hear, touch things. Our focus is very much on the things, while ignoring the spaces between them. Biofeedback research discovered by accident that when people learn to actually perceive the spaces between things, it immediately dissolves all of their tensions and anxieties, creating enormous benefit to their overall health. That’s because perceiving spaces puts you back into the world again, and out of your head. It relocates your entire body as an entity in space, rather than just some disembodied mind staring out at the world. Try it in everything you do, notice even the spaces between the letters in what I’ve typed. Notice the space between you and the things around you, notice the space of the feelings in your body and the space between the different parts of your body. Those body ones will make you feel a great expansion and release of tension.  If you have pain, try to feel the space the pain occupies, rather than the pain itself. That can make even intense pain dissolve. 

Starlink is becoming a vital resource for remote regions, like Pacific islands, poorer nations without broadband and even remote parts of Australia. An NBN spokesperson told me once Starlink is so good they even advise remote people to get it instead of the NBN remote options. Another example of how the personality of a CEO is such a childish, irrelevant guide for what's good about a company. These are revolutionary, breathtaking engineering achievements. One of Tesla's new plans is to put data centres in space, which are causing angst here on the ground because of energy and water use. Solar energy (and much more of it) is available 24 hours per day in orbit.

Violence is increasing. Populism creates violence, because it's the removal of status distinction between people, leading to continuous and ongoing rivalry, for position and status, in imitative teams battling each other. Social media is the main driver, because it's a populism-imitation-rivalry machine. Likes and followers. The more social we become, the more equal we become, the more violent we become. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-26/albanese-bomb-threat-political-violence-data/106384704

I don’t think this reality has even occurred to most.

Rage-baiting was word of the year in 2025. Invented to describe techniques to drive online engagement, it also describes how populist politics work. And because we shifted our lives onto social media, the two are now synonymous. It’s simple psychology, as old as Caesar. Mobilise people by making them constantly angry. Transform everything into a fake debate or argument, because that fires people up and makes them want to join one of the teams in the argument. Not only can that make people want to follow one side or team in a debate, it can make them interested in things they previously thought or felt nothing about at all. Like windmills, a current topical example. It turns everything into a team sport. Humans LOVE team sports, because they tap into their deepest behaviours - imitative rivalry. Imitate other members of the team, to create unity, and go into battle against other teams.

Again, this is about brilliant engineering, not brands, it’s just that Tesla is one of the few companies prioritising engineering. Tesla has now included its AI, Grok, in its cars. And you don’t have to go buy a new model to get it, as in standard combustion cars - it just downloads into your car using wifi, while you sleep. It can do a whole range of things (and growing), like plot routes by voice command, including what type of accommodation and price range you want, surrounding sites etc. But it can also act as a language tutor, teaching you a new language while you drive, or tell you stories, or act as a therapist, or entertain the kids, or act as an instant translator if you and your passenger don’t speak the same language, or answer any questions you may have about life, the universe and everything. And there’s always an element of fun. Like the two examples here, where Grok is asked to act in ‘sexy’ mode, and then in ‘argumentative’ mode. Have a look. It saddens me people are rage-baited into protecting 19th century technology, in 2026, when the 21st century is so amazing.

The thing about back to nature/authenticity/getting away from it all movements is the ticket prices for entry. These are on the low side, and don't even include fuel. When people say they want to get away from it all, what is 'it'? Whatever 'it' is can easily cost you $200K to get away from. Barbie and Ken for grown-ups. It's all about the gear, in competition with other people's gear. Status, it's always about status.

Because we make the disastrous mistake of thinking democracy is ‘the people’ individually reasoning out situations, we also assume the answer is to just get rid of ‘misinformation’, and everything will be fixed. I post a lot about how humans actually behave. They rarely think, they *imitate* one another, to gain social status by membership of various social groups. Those groups then compete with other groups, for status, in ‘imitative rivalry’. In other words, social conformity runs all human life. The desire to fit in, to have status, and thereby identity. And here’s a fascinating implication, which psychologists have studied. People will actively FALSIFY what they actually believe and feel, to others, to go along with what the group is doing. It’s called ‘preference falsification’. We all know this is true, we all do it and have seen it throughout our lives. A great example is the Scott Morrison-led destruction of public health controls in Australia, when he made us ‘live with’ Covid. Even at the time the overwhelming majority of Australians, when surveyed individually, didn’t support that. But once the refusal to do basic public health practices became the norm, preference falsification kicked in. People buried their individual discomfort and dislike of them and their families catching Covid, underneath the social conformity of needing to fit in/copy what everybody else was doing. This is the way bad faith actors can create an impression they have widespread popular support. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-gravity-weight/202104/what-is-preference-falsification

Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT. Their projected debts were so enormous that many felt they would collapse under the weight. But now they’ve found the only bottomless pit of funding in the world - the US defence industry. This isn’t a problem with AI. This is a problem with America, and its culture of unrestrained grifting.

The perfect day to sell your combustion clunker and buy an EV. Iran just closed the main shipping way for 20% of global oil, to sweeten the deal for you. Tesla isn’t your enemy. Your combustion clunker funds Trump’s global campaign of idiocy. Use Australian-made energy, from the sun. Generate it at home, it’ll cost you nothing. Knee-cap Trump at the same time. My travel budget is 95% LESS now I have an EV. 95%, I travel virtually for free. And pay no servicing costs on the car. And the car is much, much faster than the Tonka Truck ‘I need to look like everybody else’ specd-out utes on the road.