March 2026

The electricty grid is a wonder of the world. There’s a perception that it delivers electricty (electrons) to homes and businesses like water flowing through a pipe. But that’s not how the grid works. The grid is an enormous electromagnetic field, covering the entire country, which actually surrounds the wires, it’s not inside them. That EM field *is* the grid that the energy moves through. The EM field is a living thing, constantly pulsing with changes in energy flow. If a large power station generates energy, it causes the entire field to pulse, instantly (at the speed of light), as that energy is transferred to all places more or less instantly. It’s not a process of firing electrons down the lines. The people who figured out how to do this are some of the smartest who have ever lived. Never do electrical engineering unless you want your brain to hurt. Here’s another amazing fact - the grid pulses at a frequency of 50 Hz. That means the wavelength of the electrical energy is about 6000 km. The entire continent is covered easily by a single wave of energy.

We watched the latest series of Bridgerton on the weekend. Why do people love period dramas? I think for a reason that links to what I post about a lot. Period dramas are pretty much all about one thing. Social status, and the hugely complex ways that people negotiate it. When you look all of it is about rank and position, and how that impacts people’s lives. Kids in a school playground do the same thing, constantly. So do adults. This is the core of human life being shown, which is why we’re drawn to it. All art reflects the cultural times. Today status is as important as ever, but the lack of hierarchies to control it - the great movement of populism, towards ‘equality’ - creates entirely different challenges. Our modern drama is the fight for identity, to be seen at all in a world where status rivalries are uncontrolled. Unlike Bridgerton’s people, we’re not so much negotiating our position within existing complex hierarchies. We’re ‘performing’ our identity, in the absence of those hierarchies. It’s also why our times and art are more violent, because the fight for status is uncontrolled and the individual faces an existential encounter with the universe, alone.

The Busby Street developments have been controlversial in Bathurst, but that isn’t saying a lot, as anything that happens in a community now generates a pile-on. That’s social media culture, you can see it in the comments on any social media post, the pile-on as people look to promote their own status. One interesting approach to housing problems that targets status directly is ‘Yuppie Fishtanks’, a concept Noah Smith (economist) invented I think. It says if you build high-end dwellings, the better-off will buy those and move out of the lower-cost dwellings they will otherwise gentrify, driving prices up for those. Real world data shows this tends to work, if you build high-end dwellings, the richer members of the community will shift to those, freeing up cheaper housing stock for others. As Noah says (and I’ve always believed), supply and demand explain nothing, it’s a complete fiction. Target status, that drives everything.

Most GPs would maybe suggest a bit of Panadol for Covid, and that's about it. After my Covid infection, my Covid specialist friend ordered a big array of tests, to see if there'd been any flow-on impact to my organs or other body systems, including kidneys. People have no sense of the danger they're putting themselves in by casually allowing Covid into their lives. Their GPs are too often pissweak numpties.

Oil prices surged another 12%, with the conflict in Iran. Owning an EV will save you up to $50,000 in fuel costs alone over the average life of the vehicle.

A Harvard professor researching aging. The key to a long life is to avoid infections. This should be obvious, given that control of infection doubled our life expectancies in the last century. But 'living with' infections is now trending, and in social media societies, what trends is all that's real.

AI is already super intelligence, far beyond what humans can do in almost every way. Those who deny this are like those who deny renewable energy or EVs. They’re just throwing every made-up obstacle in the way of them having to shift out of their comfort zone.

It’s easy to see this as just an isolated issue. But it means something much wider. It means public health itself, which covers a whole range of diseases, has been broken by a social media culture that prioritises only what trends, often for about 10 minutes. I can’t emphasise enough that the public health gains humans made through the last century were humankind’s greatest ever achievement. It doubled our life expectancies almost within a single person’s lifetime. Not medicine, public health. CONTROL OF INFECTIONS. Now all being unravelled by social media culture and its influencers and their followers, in super fast time. Society is eating itself.

When I use the word ‘kidult’, it’s not meant to be just some cheap insult. It’s an analytical term invented by people who study societies, to describe a type of culture, where adult life is replaced by an extended adolescence. Bathurst’s ongoing war against increased rates is a good place to see it, I think. You can see here both the existing and projected average rates for residents. And then underneath the data showing what people living there currently spend their weekly budgets on. Notice that even if the rate increase is approved, Bathurst residents on average spend between 4-5 times as much per year on recreation and culture, about twice as much on alcohol, and between 3-4 times as much on hotels, cafes and restaurants, as they do paying their rates. What type of culture spends 25% of its income on booze, entertainment and dining out, and less than 2% of its income on the upkeep of its civic infrastructure? Easy - an adolescent culture. Those are the priorities of kidults.

I’ve been seeing this in my own kids for some time, they’re immersed in Asian culture. It puts the recent rise in One Nation/Hansonism into perspective, as a last gasp from ageing boomers to cling to a time already gone.

Another view of the Model Y 6-seater, about to be released in Oz. Seriously considering getting this, to replace our remnant combustion engine in the household, in the Kluger hybrid. The petrol price volatility with the Iranian war only makes it a sweeter swap. The Model Y is Australia’s Car of the Year, because it’s brilliantly engineered in just about every way, people who buy them almost universally adore them. It’s a revolution in car engineering. It has hundreds of litres more interior space than a Prado or Landcruiser, for example. Many won’t even go there, because of lives bogged down in the need to conform with trending memes, like ‘I can’t support Elon’, ‘EVs have no range and catch fire’, blah blah blah. Instead they’ll go out and buy a Tonka Truck ute, because that’s what everybody else drives, and you wouldn’t want to not be like everybody else, hey. Trapped in Year 9 forever.

Housing affordability is trapped inside a filter of understanding that will prevent us ever fixing it. The supply and demand filter, which is total nonsense. All sides of politics and most people will tell you the answer is ‘more supply’. But who (which builder or developer) is going to build a lot of houses that are much cheaper, losing them money? None. It’s a fairy tale. What’s happening with land and housing is that it’s becoming something only the most wealthy and privileged can afford. And that’s returning us to most of human history, to feudal times, when ‘lords’ of every description got power by holding land. (We still call owners of land ‘landlords’ today.) Like I post about a lot, we’re returning to a time when Kings ruled the world, with their ‘court’ or aristocracy of elite barons and lords. We just call these positions different things now. The only time in thousands of years, all of history, when ordinary people owned land and housing in great numbers was between the end of World War 2 and about the 1980s, when governments built people housing after the war. Once people felt the re-build after that war was done, humans returned to doing what they always do, creating status hierarchies. Reversing that shift.

Today on my way to work I got the car’s AI to help me refresh my conversational German. This is a full conversation, not pre-recorded tracks, and you can do it with any language, it will teach you to speak it at any level of previous knowledge or experience. Here it’s talking to me about my job at Council. Then when I wanted a break from that, I got it to read me a Jane Austen novel. The modern world is full of wonders. Only social media stands in the way of experiencing them. 

Meanwhile in Straya we're still driving around in Tonka Truck utes that are shit *as* utes, with no driver dynamics or comfort for passengers, lethal for other road users in collisions, zero aerodynamic design (they have the drag of a garden shed), thirsty on fuel and hugely polluting. With Russia until the past 2 years we were the only country in the entire world without vehicle emissions/efficiency standards.

One of the most lethal delusions about our idea that 'the people' run democracies is that we assume we will need to convince people of all the emergency things that need to be done, before they can get done. That's never how the world has worked. You do the emergency things, and then find ways to make them palatable to people. And you run right over the top of objectors, or they will quite literally destroy your civilisations.

From an F1 engineer. The cars this year will be noisier, because some like that, but the engineers say they'll get quieter again because that's just wasted energy, which will make the cars faster if they get rid of it. One for the broom broom brigade, who love the sound of a combustion engine. That noise is the engine farting, blowing energy unused straight out the exhaust. And nearly all combustion cars you can buy make hardly noise at all now anyway, it's only the tiny handful of enthusiast old clunkers that still make a racket.

Driving past the servos on the way home, with all the prices north of two dollars per litre for the Texan/Saudi Arabian soup. Then I came home and plugged the car into free Australian sunshine.

If you’re queued at the servo this week ready to cough up a week’s wages for a tank of fuel, here’s some reading material.

When I talk a lot about Tesla, I often get the ‘Tesla fanboy’ label. Because people who say that have had their lives hijacked by social media, and so now everything in their life is a rivalry between opposing teams. They never even bother trying to understand anything, they just try to figure out what team you’re on. I talk about Tesla a lot because of their engineering, and great engineering is the only thing in history that has given civilisations longevity. If another company does the engineering better, I’ll talk about them instead. Great engineering isn’t just the nuts and bolts. As you can see here in the Car of the Year citation, it’s being able to bring that great tech to the largest number of people too, affordably. It includes a Supercharger network for charging, integrated into the car’s software, and an app that manages everything from access to the car to its integration with solar charging, home battery etc. A fully integrated ecosystem. Tesla’s engineering did all of that. It’s a wonder of the world, despite the CEO having toxic personal views on many things. Who cares. How well do you know the CEO of Woolies, or of your bank or local health district? Many of them are fuckwits. Musk’s genius is that he knows how to allow engineers to change the world. With cars, rockets, satellite broadband, battery storage, robots. Etc.

I overheard somebody the other day talking to another person about the cost of living. And ‘what do they do? They let all these migrants in, to take the jobs, and the houses. Pauline Hanson is right.’ Immigration is the only thing staffing our aged care societies. I think many genuinely don’t understand just how OLD the people living in developed nations now are. Within 20 years more than a MILLION Australians will be over 85. Countries that attack immigration today are on the fast-track to extinction. A vote for Pauline is a vote for Trump. If you like what Trump is doing, you know where he lives. Move.

And another 'we can't electrify because...' bites the dust. Truckies love electric. Instant torque, not constantly shifting up and down through dozens of gears, minimal maintenance. https://reneweconomy.com.au/electrifying-all-road-freight-between-sydney-and-melbourne-is-a-no-brainer-the-payback-is-less-than-4-years/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQXOytleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETEwTndneDVmQ1pKSjZyOTZac3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHuxUCE4GTsroO9u9uDtyK9GrFeNCFqsr-9nJfpkV2iAp7ZdXsJOW6866fDB8_aem_i0jJlgIhCHXCO55AWwGELA

Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia and Ras Laffan in Qatar are the global home of oil and gas production, respectively. Nowhere else churns out production like these, they’re the original and biggest sources of oil and gas. They’re now both closed, with the conflict in Iran. As is the Strait of Hormuz, the tiny pinch point I’ve circled in yellow, where ships carry this oil and gas to the rest of the world. This tiny region is the source of much of the world’s energy in the past century. Hands up if you think it’s much smarter for the whole world to get its energy where they live, from the free sunshine and wind that is available everywhere? You can even grow it at home. We have our own power plant, which powers the house and car. It will set you free, and make you much richer. (For the people at the back of the science class, oil and gas are also solar energy. Just 3 millions years of it, concentrated into a filthy polluting goo, which we burned in 300 years and then wondered why the planet became a sauna.)

The problem isn’t that people are stupid. We’re all stupid in areas we know nothing about. The problem is that people now get a say in all of those areas they know nothing about. Social media did that. We forget that in our own lifetimes, there was a time that didn’t happen. We paid no attention to most of the things we know nothing about. We left those things to people who did know about them, and got on with our own lives. The greatest symptom of the probably terminal damage social media has done to our civilisation is that everything now is an endless argument. Because everybody is an expert on social media, on everything. It destroyed centuries of hierarchy of expertise and experience. Those hierarchies are what created social progress and peace and prosperity. Social media replaces all of that with eternal violence.

You can see here why China began a major push towards renewables a long time ago. The rest of us are sitting ducks. Note this isn’t per capita figures, China’s larger consumption is mostly that they have so many more people.

Seeing quite a few pained posts to local social media groups about petrol prices. Some are angry they’re over $1.80/litre. I see plenty over $2, or even $2.30. And they’ve been high for years. They’re never coming down again. Fools and their money. You can save $50K just in saved fuel costs over the life of a vehicle, by buying an EV. They pay for themselves, it’s more or less free motoring. And much more powerful and enjoyable motoring, to boot.

The new BYD Seal 08 will have 1000km of range, and be able to be charged with BYD’s megawatt chargers in just 5 minutes. BYD is following Tesla’s lead and is installing chargers in China and Europe right now. They’re looking to do the same in Australia in the next 12-18 months. I’d always emphasise for new EV owners that you will almost NEVER need a fast-charger. Unlike petrol and diesel cars, where every re-fuelling needs a trip to the servo, electric cars refuel at home about 99% of the time. There’s no need to wait for more fast-chargers.

If you wonder why communities seem increasingly aggressive and intolerant, look to social media. Social media is transforming our lives into never-ending argument and debate. We live inside the platforms, they are our society. What happens outside them is now only more content for the feeds.

There seem to be credible hints that Tesla will release Powershare for Juniper models, in homes that also have a Powerwall, some time this year. Apparently the needed power electronics are already onboard. It looks like Highland Model 3s will be limited to V2L, not V2H. V2H is best used for emergency backup, rather than daily home usage, which is one reason Tesla are linking it to pre-existing Powerwall ownership I think. Plus of course it helps protect their Powerwall product line, but to me it’s also a mistake to confuse Powershare with your car becoming a regular home battery, which technically isn’t a great idea. There’s often frustration that Tesla announce things well in advance of them actually appearing, but I think there’s a good reason for that. It tells people what to expect (it would have been better for example if they’d done that with the PW2/PW3 integration, to help people with planning there). Then it allows their engineers time to really nail the implementation, rather than rush it. They’re like Apple, and Musk apparently liked Steve Jobs’ approach. When once asked why Apple was slow to market with new initiatives, an Apple executive said that it’s easy to make things, it’s much harder to make them well i.e. seamless. Tesla are like Apple in that way, their products tend to work seamlessly, relatively more than competitors. And they target an ecosystem approach, of interoperability between their different products. That’s hard to do, in engineering, thus the frequent delays. Tesla delays PowerShare with Powerwall until mid-2026 [Update] - Drive Tesla https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/tesla-delays-powershare-with-powerwall-until-mid-2026/

I don’t post so much about renewable energy and electric cars because I’m some ‘fanboy’ of them. I hate the whole fan/kidult culture we live in, where you join a team as a fan and then fight other teams for status. I post about these things because they’re the lynchpin of our entire culture and its problems. Fossil fuels contain highly concentrated energy that took several million years to form, and we burned it in a few hundred years. That distorted everything in our lives, and has heated the climate to extinction-level threat. The people who YouTube objections? The time for appeasing morons is over. Go and read a book. The travel culture I often criticise is just one more symptom of it, where we burn astronomical amounts of energy on our ‘bucket list’ destruction of other people’s homes and cultures, with our mass tourism. Fossil energy allowed us to think we’re gods, unattached to place in any way. Which means we destroy all places, including our own. Renewables, and electrifying everything (including transport) restores sanity and equilibrium to human life and culture. They’re not just some new toys. It restores energy to every location on Earth, rather than us all slaves to the holders of the few large oil, gas and coal reserves, and their wars over these reserves. Putting solar panels on your roof and driving an electric car will change the world faster than anything else. Everything about the world, it’s all connected. It gives you power back (literally), and saves you shit-tonnes of money. Or you can keep emptying your wallet at a servo, and paying thousands a year for gas-powered electricity.

This is Omar Yaghi. You may have seen hm in the news recently, he won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He invented a technology using Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) that will pull moisture out of air, even in deserts, generating up to 1000 litres of clean drinking water a day. Solar-powered devices that are completely off-grid. Omar’s parents were refugees. The family of 12 lived in a one-room home, with no running water. His parents were mostly illiterate. Omar is the sort of person the anti-immigration crowd would ship off to an island somewhere to rot. (Disclaimer: I’m the child of an immigrant. Without immigration I wouldn’t exist.)

Saw this while out walking.

Watching the first Formula 1 race for the year. This year the cars are very different, they’re 50% combustion, 50% electric. They were hybrids before this too, but not with this much electric. Many purists want just pure combustion, but they’re much slower. When the drivers hit the boost button, the electric motor really kicks in, and the cars take off like a rocket ship. You’d think that would show the combustion hangers-on how much better electric motors are, but don’t hold your breath. The year promises to be fascinating, because unlike combustion, a car can add charge to a battery while driving, through regenerative braking, or using the combustion engine as a generator, and a few other methods. The car will be faster by dialling down the combustion engine down the straight for example, going slower, and using it to generate for the battery, to let the car be much faster elsewhere in a lap with its electric motor. It will need smart strategy from drivers to maximise their speed over an entire lap. Even if you’re not into car racing, it’s like a real-time demonstration of one of the great battles in our world today, between rival technologies.

It really is a symptom of how fundamentally baked-in stupid social media has made the world that this ever even became a fake debate. We argue over whether to use cars that run on more or less free energy, need next to no maintenance, give off no pollution, make no annoying noise, and are much more powerful and fun to drive.

“Americans are very lucky, because wherever they go to bring freedom… they find oil.” Michele Serra, Italian journalist

This is cheering. A nuclear war would also likely shut down social media, so the ANZAC nations may also stop arguing about everything, start vaccinating again, driving electric cars and using free energy from the sun and wind.

Had a near disaster yesterday. Could smell smoke, and we tracked it down to the main house switchboard. The main 63A service fuse to the house was starting to catch fire, you can see the charred cables either side of it. The fuse itself didn’t trip, it wasn’t a load problem, the problem was the metal clips holding the fuse in place had become loose. You can see the screws used to tighten them. That caused the current to arc, and thus the burning. It struck me what a weird design the fuse is, and how little this is probably checked, particularly in older homes. Adding larger loads to our place (grid-charging-capable batteries and EV charging) had likely made this fault visible with higher loads flowing through. One to watch if you have older switch gear, and maybe something installers should be checking?

Only catastrophes change people and their societies and cultures. Without them they just default to pissing contests for status. It will take this sort of ongoing disruption to our ‘cost of living’ to wake people up to the fact that fossil fuels are the problem. Except it won’t wake them up, they’ll die in a status ditch of their own making.

The German concept of shameful joy, schadenfreude, fills my every day right now.

Or: Status Status Status Everything in human life is about status, when you look.

That mythical universe James Cameron created in Terminator where humans are at war with the machines for supremacy? It arrived years ago, but without a battle. The machines already won, social media took over the world. By targeting humans’ deepest and unsaid desires, for status rivalry. For social comparison. The platforms own us, and are destroying centuries of social progress. People who think that’s an exaggeration I don’t think understand how humans or societies work. By replacing centuries of knowledge and expertise (hierarchy), won through millions of deaths and suffering, with a society run entirely by popularity. By likes. By eternal year 9. Where the most popular own the world, no matter how base or stupid or violent they are.

I wonder if people can feel the imminent crash of what I call lifestyle culture. Where life and all of its existential complexities was replaced in the last century with the idea of life’s purpose being the maximisation of personal development. Of ‘fun’ and individual meaning, through ‘experience’. When you look at ads for retirement living, notice how they conspicuously exclude everybody except the blissfully happy old couple, released at last from the shackles of any responsibility for ongoing social life? On their ‘bucket list’ of never-ending spoiling (travel) of other’s homes across the globe, for the benefit of their own personal ‘experience’? That’s the apex of lifestyle culture, though everything leading up to it is the same culture. We stopped fighting infectious disease for example mostly because it obstructed our lifestyles. It stopped our morning barista coffee, and our beloved trips, and our dining out and gigs. The ‘you can’t take it with you’ philosophy of saving an enormous nest egg for retirement and then blowing the lot in an orgy of lifestyle indulgence is the same culture. It’s always disgusted me, the total removal of any sense of need to invest for the future of a society, to make life that bit better for those who come after us. Of the idea of service and responsibility, and connection. The circle of life, now an infinite flat line of ‘each to their own’ fun. I don’t know about you, but the crumbling of our societies happening in front of our eyes tells me the most obvious thing my own retirement planning will increasingly be called to do is try to insulate my family from that crumbling decay. Kids in major cities in the West now are increasingly staying at home well into their 30s, because they can’t afford to do anything else. It’s a slow but mostly unaware return to a life devoted more again to the idea of continuity, of connection and service, and actual investment in social progress. Of the circle of life, of the old making way for the young, but also retaining an actual meaningful social role as they age, rather than just be eternal tourists. A collapse of the hedonism of lifestyle culture.

Large luxury sedan with the performance of a hypercar, chock full of amazing tech, charging speeds quicker than filling with petrol, and for the price of a Toyota Corolla. Game over for combustion clunkers, unless you have some sort of brain injury. I saw one of the local FB groups complaining about petrol prices, and saying EVs weren't an answer because they 'cost $60,000-$100,000, and who has that sort of money?' People living inside idiot social media slogans. The same people can find $80k-$100K to buy a shitbox Tonka Truck dual cab ute.

I've been buying up Jerry Cans to stockpile electrons.

Disruptions to daily life are now treated like customers getting poor service on a holiday. The relentless pile-on of complaint, of course driven mostly by social media (that we live inside now). No sense of perspective of the magnitude of the complexity of the problem, just toddler-adolescent finger pointing and rage. Suggest to the public that their public infrastructure hasn't had really significant investment since after WW2, and that they'll need to think about sacrificing some of their lifestyle aspirations for new investment to happen, and you'll get another pile-on of complaint about 'corrupt' and 'incompetent' government. Kidult culture, folks. It only gets worse from here.

Doing some more research on Starlink, which some of my friends have been using already for ages. The genius of it in the technical and business sense hit me when researching internet options for one of my kids moving into a flat in Sydney. I was flabbergated to find that Starlink was easily (almost 50%) cheaper than any ground-based option for them, and could offer double or quadruple the speed. On top of that it’s far easier to order and set up. This is the genius of Elon Musk, that isn’t appreciated as much because his personal views on other things are so obnoxious. If you’d said ‘I’m going to launch satellites into low orbit and offer broadband to every pointer on the globe, no matter how remote, at high speeds and low latency, and at low prices, with a 5-minute setup process’, people would have thought you were insane. But - he did it. And it’s not only profitable, its profitability is growing all the time. It’s a staggering achievement. One of the brutal truths of humans being driven by status above all else is that a company that offers seamless, amazing things to customers is almost always one led in an ‘authoritarian’ way. Otherwise status games *within* the company destroy the relationship of the company to outsiders. For that reason effective CEOs will pretty much always appear to be arseholes. (I included the Telstra ad for their satellite broadband, which they’ve now given up on trying to do themselves and simply re-package Starlink.)

Mods or speccing your ride is classic child behaviour. Like buying Ken or Barbie with all the accessories. All of this culture is in plain sight. As the saying goes, fish don't know water exists.

This will be worrying Trump more than anything else. Those who complain about fuel prices when there are clear alternatives to driving combustion shitboxes? Fools and their money.

Human beings are the AI that bacteria built.

Greek yoghurt is almost impossible to find in the shops. The cause is a viral trend about using it to make dishes like cheesecake. Look around and you’ll see evidence that our ‘real lives’ are increasingly just us acting out viral trends, from the socials. Let’s add panic petrol buying to the list. Social media isn’t about society. It is society now. We live inside it.

When collective life is pulverised into a mass of fighting social media teams, fighting for status, the only thing that brings us together collectively is mass trending euphorias. The mad rush to join what everybody else is doing. Society as a giant schoolyard, a gig. No working together towards some higher end or purpose, just big crowds imitating one another. Did you know this is Split Enz’s 4th reunion tour, in 20 years? Our mass euphorias now are festivals of imitative nostalgia. Stuck in late adolescence, at best. Neil and Tim Finn are both past traditional retirement age.

Matrix LED headlights, which solve the problem of losing visibility when you have to dim high beam for oncoming cars, are another engineering innovation that Tesla brings to ordinary drivers. Previously this sort of technology was only available in very expensive brands. It also follows the standard Tesla model, in that it can be updated over the air, via software. For free. Normally when you buy a car, if you want new features you have to buy the new model. Most new features in a Tesla download to your car automatically while you sleep. They re-invented the industry.

Tesla is about to open the factory for mass production of its semi. It'll be able to build about 50,0000 trucks per year. The semi does over 800 km in range. China has been building thousands of electric trucks per year already. The 'electric can never replace diesel' myth is gone. Electric trucks are far superior for hauling, with minimal maintenance, no pollution, no huge amount of gears for drivers, and instant maximum torque from 0 rpm. Drivers who trial them never want to go back. Very timely given the current energy crisis, where we're reminded again how fragile our communities are, being so dependent on energy from a tiny part of the world. All completely avoidable with renewable energy and electric motors. Iran has apparently begun putting mines in the Strait of Hormuz, which would be a nightmare to clear. This could lead to long disruption to world energy supplies.

I'm genuinely looking forward to the national directive to work from home, to conserve fuel. It may come.

Today huge crowds gather mostly to see gigs. Why I call us a gig culture. But in 1851, they gathered at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London, to see the wonders of modern science and technology, and how they would change the world. 6 million Britons rushed to the Crystal Palace, itself a marvel of engineering at the time, to see the exhibition, in only a matter of months. That was a third of the entire population. Makes Tay Tay look like a garden party. You can make adult, exciting things the things that go viral in a society. The Victorians knew how. We have no idea. We repeat the same adolescent rituals of our teen years throughout life, into people’s 80s and beyond. Today if you did this, social media would already have invented 15 bullshit fake stories to attack all of the scientific and engineering marvels. Today China and the rest of Asia is living this other sort of revolution, like the Victorians did. We in the West are perpetual teens who build nothing, wallow in our emotions and feelings, and bitch and moan and complain on the socials about every tiny thing. Promoting ourselves to try to gain some identity and status in the melee.

It looks like Tesla will release the Model YL 6-seater in Australia today. Perfectly timed, with the pressures on fuel. We’ll probably get one, and will be free of fuel bowsers forever. When these were launched in China last year, all 40,000 they had planned sold out in a single day. About 500L more cabin volume than a Toyota Prado or Landcruiser, and with the hatch-type opening a much bigger entry space for goods you want to carry, with a perfectly flat stowage floor. 0-100 in 4.5 seconds, and loads of other advanced tech including adaptive dampers. The longer wheel base also gives it great stability on the road, that luxury cars often use. You can see some mild off-roading in this clip, the AWD Teslas have superb traction, with all that direct, enormous torque from the electric motors. You can see them even tow semis out of snow drifts.

In many parts of Asia various measures to ration fuel have already begun. That’s because Asia is mostly still run by grown-ups, also why they took Covid much more seriously. Nothing in the West yet because the kidults in social media culture would go apeshit. We don’t understand our own culture, permanent adolescence. Any collective action is seen as oppression, like a teen being grounded. All social life becomes preening and posturing to try to curate an identity amidst the schoolyard chaos. That’s what the countercultural revolution was, our revolution. Teens took over.

I’m almost completely disinterested in fitting in, in most situations in life. Which probably makes me seem rude sometimes, but it’s not that. I realised as I got older that I genuinely don’t care about what the expected thing to think or do is, or the possibility of causing friction by going against what everybody else is doing. I’m absolutely not a contrarian either, that would be to be even more interested in what others do, so as to always go against it. It was Kell who suggested a possible reason for this, she said ‘you’re a twin’. And that was an a-ha moment, because twins’ primary attachment when they’re born and maturing through childhood is to each other. They don’t go looking for connection and affirmation from friends in the same way single children do. It’s an incredibly powerful bond, and it makes you feel totally self-sufficient in that human support way. I’ve never felt the heavy weight of peer pressure, it wouldn’t even occur to me to care. And it’s probably because I’ve never needed the approval or support of peers, to feel validated. I have a twin. It’s a brutal strength though too, because I don’t need the validation or support of my twin now, to feel the same way. It gave us both that strength, individually, it was a scaffold or platform that shaped our adult lives independently. It’s likely why status interests me too, because this disinterest in fitting in is also an almost total disinterest in status. It makes status extremely visible, because I bowed out of that game largely at birth.

The Iliad talks about how the use of force usually rebounds on those who begin it, in ways that they never predicted and which often destroys them as well. It’s a glorious irony of Trump and Israel’s offensive in Iran that it may single-handedly destroy fossil fuel-driven societies faster than years of hopeless activism could have dreamed of. It may turn out to be the tipping point towards a rapid move away from the use of fossil fuels.

Tesla did release this model yesterday, and we bought one. We’re now as a family almost completely independent of the need for ruinously expensive and unreliable oil, coal or gas to power our lives. The sooner the same shift happens industrially as well, including in trucking, the sooner life will get far cheaper and less violent for all. Of course many people won’t shift, until everybody else shifts. The number 1 guide in most lives is ‘what is everybody else doing?’ Permanent high school, peer pressure. Status and identity, fitting in with the crowd. It will take the lives of that crowd to be brutally disrupted for that shift to accelerate. Which we’re seeing right now.

Happy Birthday James :)

Prize for wally of the day to the parent who thought it would be a good idea to do a session with their L-plate child all the way from Mt Victoria to Lithgow, via the current diversion along the Darling Causeway and Bells Line.

A glorious collision between the two most powerful forces in Western societies right now. Social media’s social contagion model of public life (‘panic buying’, in this case), and fossil fuels. The panic will explode, if the Iran situation isn’t resolved.

One response to this mess that is not as common is to tell people to just stay home for once, and keep off the road. To avoid all unnecessary travel. But we can’t do that, because apparently all travel is necessary for our mental health. I still say if aliens observed our cultures today, their first question would be ‘where is everybody going?’

Everything we label a political problem is really a social/cultural problem. Specifically that adult problems can’t be solved by adults with the understanding and attitudes of permanent teenagers. That’s not just some cheap insult, it’s an analytical assessment of the actual changes the countercultural revolution brought to Western societies. The victory of teenage life over adult life. Just as Russia and China had their revolutions that shaped how they are today, we had our own, which we always ignore. This person of Iranian descent sees it, because you have to step outside Western culture to see how it works. Fish don’t know water exists until they’re beached. Where I think she misses is that this isn’t just the youth of today. Their grandparents, the boomers, were the real vanguard of this shift. The biggest kidults in the world now are all elderly. And it’s not anything bad about any of these people, as people. It was the separation of adult and child life, through schools, that did it. A change to the mechanisms of the culture.

Australia’s Trumps are mobilising. Amazing numbers of Australians who can’t stand Trump seem blissfully unaware how much One Nation and the new LNP love him and copy Trump’s playbook. Some of this group even travel to meet with the Trump team in the US. (AI image.)

It takes a catastrophe to change people’s beliefs. And then they wonder why they didn’t change much earlier.

It seems that rather than admit petrol and diesel is an energy source that will never be cheap or reliable again, the latest invented outrage we’ll use to try to not change what we do is to say it’s a massive conspiracy by oil companies and Albo/Bowen to rip everybody off. Most people never change unless they’re forced to change. All of history shows that. The pain those people feel right now is self-inflicted, and will only increase. The power of normalisation is also in play. Humans will accept even the most stupid and horrific things, if they’re regular. They ‘live with’ lethal viruses, for example. If fuel were to drop to say $1.70 or $1.80 a litre, people would feel that was a return to ‘normal’. That’s still hugely more expensive than fuel was even a few years ago, and enormously more expensive than driving an electric car.

The most interesting things in life are usually hidden in plain sight. Like this disruption, it tells us hugely interesting things about our way of life. I often post that as a culture we have no idea of what ‘place’ means. This shows it. Our towns are not really places, they’re nodes in big transport networks set up to serve cities. They were originally set up as places for workers to live who worked in agriculture and mining, to allow resources to be transported back to the cities. Not much has changed. The minute the road gets blocked towns are in crisis. They’re not places, they’re hubs in a transport network. Genuine places would not be so completely dependent on the road in and out of town.

I know a deeply committed ‘motoring enthusiast’. What George Monbiot calls a ‘boy racer’, which better captures the psychology. The guys (though also women, but less often) whose actual identity as a person is heavily based on their vehicles, since the time they were teenagers. Their vehicle is like their Ken and Barbie set, but for adolescents. He constantly tells me I need to ‘trade-up’ back to a petrol engine. I tell him I’m not really into slow, noisy cars that cost a fortune to maintain and run. Something he said the other day was a real window into the psychology, he said ‘me and my mates will never buy an electric car’. It’s a group thing. It gives him membership of a social group. ‘Me and my mates’. It’s not, despite what he says, any greater appreciation of the engineering of cars, or even driving. His car floods in the boot when it rains, the air con won’t work and many mornings he takes his wife’s car because his modded chariot won’t even start. On the flip side, I’m not into EVs because I want to be part of some EV owners social group, like ‘Tesla fanboys’. I hate all that stuff, passionately. I’m not a teenager. I like EVs because they’re brilliant engineering, which makes them the most brilliant cars to drive as well. I like knowledge, especially when blended with material things.

I’d almost forgotten that I once taught at South Sydney High School, when training as a teacher. I had no idea Heartbreak High was filmed there, I might have realised if I’d ever watched it! It was a nice school. The main challenge with educational reform is that schools are valued by the community mostly as childcare, and universities allow teaching to be almost entirely at the discretion of individual academic staff, who often outsource it to casuals anyway.

You can see just how much our lives are now kidult gangs battling over absolute nonsense. In NZ there was a suggestion that if fuel becomes short, EV drivers should be banned from driving. What logical reason would there be for that? None at all, it’s just spite, from anti-EV numpties. They would see the fuel crisis as a loss in the pathetic team sports that is their whole lives, and rather than change their stupid beliefs and behaviours, they’ll act as spoilers. It’s stark raving insane.

Japanese anemones. A lovely bridge between summer and autumn.

I’ve come to see voting as mostly a waste of time, and also the most destructive force in democracy, because it replaces competence with popularity. It’s still important to know what you’re voting for.

Social media has consequences. The wilful destruction of medical research in the US, at a time when medicine is making huge advances against major diseases, is entirely due to the power of health ‘influencers’ on social media. One of whom is now running the Health Department in the US, employing other influencers as deputies. A culture run on popularity/likes doesn’t survive. That’s the culture of Year 9, of high school. It doesn’t work in the adult world, it destroys everything as social teams look to win their battles against other social teams. Strangely, most don’t see that elections began this rot - social media is just accelerating the collapse.

The tipping point must be coming when other Western nations change their superpower allegiance, to China. They’re already all absolutely dependent on China economically anyway. The whole thing is a farce, to maintain an old Yellow Peril racism against China for political purposes, while utterly relying upon them for your way of life.

Social media means very large numbers of people you know are actually living in the US right now, because they live on social media. Social media has replaced any idea of a local community. I would say the majority view in my workplace, based on conversations in recent days, is: Donald Trump is a tremendous businessman and great for America and the world. Pauline Hanson could continue his great work, here. Those who oppose Trump have 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' (TDS) - a term invented by a US politician that nobody in the office has even heard of. One older member of staff said "I can't stand Trump, and he's going to cause a recession here if the Iran thing keeps going." The reply from younger members of staff? "What's a recession?"

Some deaths hit you hard, this is one of those, for me. David was remarkable, a unique mind who discovered the most astonishing things about how humans work, and shared what he discovered with thousands in his extraordinary writing and workshops. I learned so much from him. About how gravity actually keeps us upright, the exact reverse to what we’re all brought up to think and feel. About how our bodies allow for complete, literally effortless freedom of support and movement, and that effort itself was the result of our misunderstanding of both gravity, and that our body is a single, coordinated system that we so often try to control. That control creates effort, which is completely unnecessary. He was a wonderfully patient and funny teacher, with a gift for understanding how to help people overcome years of misunderstandings and misconceptions. The truly intelligent are always funny in a unique way, and that was David. He was so giving of his time to others as well. I had a long conversation with him just over a year ago when he was already suffering from Parkinsons (I think it was Parkinsons). Life can be so fucking cruel, to strike down somebody who devoted a life to teaching people how to have wonderful ease and freedom in their bodies with a disease that removed both. He was worried that the work he’d done was still misunderstood, and I saw that in so many even who were supporters of what he did. I’ll be keeping my own desire to share what he discovered. He began as a teacher of the Alexander Technique, but his mind discovered the fundamental flaws in that body of work very quickly. He was never forgiven by many of the AT crowd, who like all social groups battle to this day for their own status, at the expense of understanding. RIP David. Like all those who actually see more of what this life is about, you’ll never be really gone for me. I’m always happy to share with others what he discovered, it’s life-changing and like all true knowledge, joyful and perpetually surprising.

'Range anxiety' is now worrying what your petrol or diesel is going to cost if you drive too many km.

It's beautiful to see the social status mechanism brought into the light like this. 'Load-bearing for people's sense of self'. That's glorious. "Here is what the shock jocks and the Murdoch machine and the fossil fuel funded think tanks have spent 30 years building. Not just doubt about climate science. That's the surface level stuff. What they actually built is a cultural identity around scepticism of clean energy. They made it so that if you drive a ute and vote conservative and live outside a capital city, accepting the reality of solar and EVs and renewables feels like surrendering. Like admitting the other side was right about something. Like betraying your tribe. That's the genius of it. They didn't just lie about the technology. They made the lie load-bearing for people's sense of self."

Sentence 2 answers Sentence 1.

One of the many young Paulines in Australia told me today that anybody who moves to Australia should have to follow our culture, and not try to change it. I asked what our culture is. They couldn’t think of an answer.

Medicare is a universal health care system in name only, since John Howard introduced public subsidy of private health insurance. And that was always the plan, to destroy Medicare, which the Liberals hate and have always hated. They destroyed it once already, under Malcolm Fraser. They know it’s popular, so under Howard they decided to destroy it gradually rather than suddenly. And how did they do it? They targeted status, which humans want more than anything else. People want private health insurance because they want to jump queues, to go beyond the public/Medicare option. The same happens with private schools, the Liberals are smart, they know if they target status, people will climb over each other to have it. And doctors love private health insurance because it makes them exceedingly rich, increasing their status enormously. The whole lot will collapse with an ageing population.

The great potential of AI. To shut everybody up. To counteract the destructive wrecking ball of social media. Social media culture believes everybody knows everything, about everything. A culture of opinions. It’s a wrecking ball through actual expertise. AI culture is the opposite, it says expertise matters. Our future depends on AI defeating social media. Read this powerful evidence-based piece from Noah, you’ll see he agrees.

Things getting real. Fuel prices in NZ. Karma is coming for Donald and his goons. The rest of us will pay for his stupidity. You can pay a shit-tonne less by being smart and removing the fossil fuel vampire squid from your home and vehicles.

In Asia some countries have already started 4-day weeks and widespread work from home for professional jobs, to ration fuel. Unlike under Covid, where we decided to open up everything again and just all get infected with Covid all the time, without fuel pretty much nothing can function. There won’t be any choice in it. Societies only change meaningfully when facing catastrophe. We’re arriving there now, after 30 years of having our heads up our arses. Australia should be a renewable energy superpower by now. Instead we’re languishing near the bottom of the pack, completely exposed, and utterly dependent on foreign fuel imports.

To be clear, a vote for Pauline is a vote for Trump. And Trump isn’t a Senator. Facts have never been a Pauline thing.

Just do it, Matt. Would love to have been a fly on the wall in the Sky News control room.

It’s testament to the genius of the engineering design that the Model Y is the biggest selling passenger vehicle in the world, including all combustion and hybrid vehicles, for the third year in a row. And this despite the obviously enormous effort many have made NOT to buy it, because ‘Elon’. Engineering - 1, Social Media - 0.

Chinese cars are already dominant in Australia. Fleet sales make it look like older Japanese brands are, but they’re not. Ordinary Australians are already buying more Chinese cars than anything else, because they’re superbly engineered cars at unbelievable prices. There’s still a racist belief in some that Chinese = crap. We went through that racist nonsense with Japanese cars last century, when they first arrived. They now dominate our sales, and are superb quality. The traditional car industry is now dead, including the Japanese brands. They can squeal about how petrol and diesel are still players all they like. It will just accelerate their collapse. This is how humans always change, the only way, by the catastrophic destruction of the old status quo. They never leave high school and only want to do ‘what everybody else is doing’. They will change when everybody else does, not before. Social conformity. Time to grow up. Yes both of my cars are now American, but the American company that had the bravery to put engineering ahead of social conformity. The Chinese have emulated their approach and their success, and will bring that bravery now to scale, for the world, as the world’s industrial powerhouse. (The Chinese build most of the world’s Teslas too. The only country that can do precision engineering, at scale.)

Clean your teeth. When I cut most sugar out of my diet about 20 years ago, the first thing I noticed was much healthier teeth and gums. Most people and even most doctors think fat causes heart disease. That’s very old, outdated science. Infection mostly causes heart disease, still our biggest killer. Sugar breeds inflammation, which is what damages hearts, and inflammation comes from infection. Often in your mouth.

Next time you feel a tight spot (say foot, shoulder, jaw): Instead of working on it: 1. Include the whole body 2. Include the room around you 3. Let the tight spot exist within that field Don’t try to relax it. Just notice, does it change when it’s no longer “the centre”?

What concerns me about this is that we already live in a culture where adult life was replaced by adolescent gangs, fighting for their respective ‘brands’ in everything (cars, coffee, clothes, energy, etc.). If petrol and diesel vehicles have to stay in the garage or slow down, because of absence of fuel, I can already imagine the possible backlash against EV owners, from the disgruntled kidults who can’t drive their combustion clunkers, or have EVs sailing past them on the freeways, at full speed.

Australia ships in 81 tankers of fuel every month. That’s almost 3 per day. It’s an insane way to live. It costs us $60 billion per year. Australian-made energy is free. And doesn’t need to be transported.

Ahem.

Do you think kidult life could sustain prolonged emergency action? We may be about to find out what nations of teenagers of all ages do when everything stops working. I’m not confident, if Covid is a guide. We were and remain hopeless there, and this may be a far larger disruption. Kidults are more likely to use the smoking ruins as a stage to perform their identities on.

The US is famous for having a national 55 mph (about 88 km/h) speed limit on its roads. That limit now varies across the country, controlled by States. The history of the 55 mph limit has echoes for us today. Richard Nixon introduced it to try to curb fuel use, during the first oil crisis in the early 1970s. Slowing vehicles down is already one suggested strategy to deal with our current energy problems. Good luck with that. A kidult behind the wheel is the most aggressive and selfish variety of human ever invented.

Insurance is my day job, for Council. Unaffordable insurance is a leading indicator of social collapse, because it means a society isn’t managing risks, leaving it all to insurance. A society that doesn’t manage risks - what sort of society might that be? Which demographic group traditionally takes on high risk activities? Adolescents. It’s kidult culture. People can deny it until they’re blue in the face. We refuse to understand our own culture. When the countercultural revolution exploded in the 1960s, when that massive wave of teenagers took over the world, this was always going to be how it ended.

Happy Birthday, Amanda! 🎈🎂🎊

The over 2000 comments on this one show the sad and pathetic world of the average ‘motoring enthusiast’. Enraged that not only did somebody buy an EV, but a WOMAN did. Outrageous. The guys we all met at school who got into cars because nobody wanted to shag them. It’s all a bit gay.

In the past half a century the fear of overpopulation in the world was pretty common. But during that entire time, global birth rates have been in free fall. To the extent that many parts of the world now face a genuine crisis of having badly ageing populations with nobody young to carry on the culture, or to look after the old. Immigration is the only emergency measure to address this, but in many of these nations of oldies it’s a hot political potato. And even it won’t fix this problem longer term.

The deepest human desire and behaviour is to imitate. To copy others, because that gives us status and therefore identity in social groups. Imitation can be used for good, or bad. Good is the control of imitation, so that people copy all of the various tasks needed to create social progress. Societies that have/had kings for example had them mostly to take the oxygen out of widespread status-seeking imitative behaviour, to allow the nation to focus on social progress instead. Kings and gods - their actual function is to constrain imitation. To place the pinnacle of status beyond reach, so that energies can be re-focused towards collective need. In the absence of that sort of constraint, societies succumb to the worst form of imitation. Contagions, of all kinds. Everything going ‘viral’, meaningless trivialities become collective obsessions. When millions pack stadiums for example and act like choreographed lemmings, it’s a sign your society is in real trouble. None of this leads to social progress. It makes the performers very rich, that’s all. And the performers usually think the mass crowd is some sort of worshipping of their talent, when in reality the performer is a useful idiot, used by the crowd as the catalyst for their contagion behaviour. Smart performers feel that directly, and flee the crowds at every opportunity. Ask The Beatles. Beatle-mania. An actual collective psychological dysfunction. If you individually have mania or manic behaviour you’ll be treated for a mental health condition. Collective mania is no different. All these modern performers are just imitating that original mania, that ‘countercultural revolution’ that was a wrecking ball through centuries of progress.

The disruption to global energy supply is an existential threat, particularly to Western nations, who are energy pigs. And unsurprisingly, what's their level of concern or action? Virtually zero. The kidult 'just chill'. This could require planning and preparation to rival or even surpass the world wars, to come through it. What are we doing? Nothing. And it's not surprising. We gave up controlling a pandemic because it was too hard for kidults to have to sacrifice anything. 'Viral' societies, nothing but trending fads and fashions, many of which last barely 10 minutes. The West is now tangled in a web of social conformity, where nothing is done for fear of upsetting the status quo. It lives inside social media, the eternal schoolyard of likes and followers.

Yep. Whole nations of oldies, with nobody to look after them.

Kidults have got this, don’t worry. So much material for the socials. I reckon we should be able to hashtag our way out of it.

The continuing surge in popularity of Chinese cars in Australia, easily the dominant vehicles in sales in Australia, and have been for a while. Their brilliant EVs are now rushing out of salesrooms. Tesla’s Model Y is now also completely sold out here. You can still order one, but you’ll be waiting until about July on latest check, for delivery. Great European cars will also be cheaper here now, with the free trade agreement. In Europe and the UK a BMW (for example) has for some time been as common a car choice (and similar price) as a Toyota or KIA here. The Germans are really trying with EVs, but their whole business model is against them, and they’re taking big losses on them to try to buy into the market. It’s almost impossible to completely upend an industry. The Japanese aren’t really even trying. Modern cars will now be much more about software than hardware, and they’re both miles behind. Everybody is well behind Tesla there. The hardware is difficult to better already, electric motors are supremely powerful and efficient and have been for well over a century. The innovation comes more in the software, where you ‘update’ the car regularly over the air, rather than always buying new models.

In a social media culture, somebody has to be to blame for everything, because that fires up the imitative rivalry. The fake debates, the outrage. Like right now, with fuel. The most common explanations you hear are that fuel companies are price gouging, that individuals are hoarding fuel, and that the government is somehow to blame. The actual reason is simple, and we all know it. What’s happening in Iran. And oil-based fuel has been getting more expensive all the time anyway, because the remaining reserves are rare and being fought over and priced accordingly. An adult culture, like Norway for example, looks at this and says ‘ok we should stop using this fuel.’ And then gets to work, doing that. Isn’t anybody else tired of living in kidult/social media culture? The continuous fights over the most simple things, with simple solutions. Turning problems into platforms for individual self-expression, to generate status? The exhausting social conformity caused by these fake debates, because changing anything would mean letting down your social team, ‘losing’ in the team sports. Don’t people recognise this as Year 9 culture, in a school, where peer pressure is the dominant force? Don’t we see social media with its battling teams of likes and followers has turned our adult life into permanent Year 9? Not by analogy, it’s the same culture.

Here are some electric Tesla semis, charging at one of Tesla’s truck charging stations. Tesla builds the whole infrastructure when it builds vehicles, including the charging for longer distance travel. The genius of electric trucks is that they don’t interrupt the flow of traffic. They can do the full speed limit up hills, because of their massive and effortless torque. And downhill they don’t even need to use brakes, they use the descent to regenerate the battery, like freight trains do. They’re doing the same speed as cars, with no need for lots of gear changes to get up and down the hill. This also makes life enormously easier for the driver, much less physical wear on them from all the gear changing, and the cab also allows them to stand up and stretch. These trucks also have Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving technology, to make the long trips truckers do much safer and less wearing for them, and safer for other vehicles on the road. And their maintenance costs are far lower than for diesel trucks. And they don’t blast cubic metres of filthy diesel particulates into the lungs of people nearby.

One of the glorious insanities of the adolescent world of the combustion engine enthusiast is their professed love of the 'sound' of a revving combustion engine. Which manufacturers then try to find ways to suppress, with sound insulation.

For those who like everyday comparisons, Kell just quarter-filled our Kluger (hybrid). The fuel cost $55, for a quarter of a tank. To fully charge the Tesla costs us either nothing, if we use solar and the home batteries. Or just over $5, if we use overnight grid rates. That's completely filled, from empty. A daily round-trip to Bathurst costs $1.60, or again zero if we use solar.

Politicans are now tame servants of social media. The most urgent things aren’t done, for fear of some anti-vote viral trend on the socials. Social media has created cultures of the most toxic, rigid conformity, terrified to do a single thing.

The same free homemade energy you can drive your car with will also power your stove. I love how people think things like work from home are a choice we get to make, as a society. With no fuel, there will be no choice.

Referring to this article: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-24/fossil-fuel-climate-disinformation-threatens-australia/106490840?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link

Happy Birthday, Miffany! 🎈🎊👯

Happy Birthday! 💐👯🎊

When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Gigs will fix it. Kidults to the rescue. Life stopped in 1968.

In kidult culture you have zero chance of having anything changed that's popular. And what is popular is nearly always stupid, but that makes no difference. Popularity overrules everything. And it needs to be removed entirely, stop fiddling with the clocks. Live by the seasons, everything else stuffs up your bodily rhythms.

We’re doing nothing in social media society to prepare for this disaster, for fear of enraging the social media mob. Prepare yourselves for what’s coming, folks, because nobody is coming to help. Maybe the anti-EV and anti-renewables people could power their homes and vehicles with their hot air opinions.

Many see modern activism as ‘democracy’ in action. The idea that ‘the people‘ rise up to bring about change. It’s all bollocks. Protest-activism is just the remnant of earlier revolutions. It’s exactly the same social model, repeated ad nauseum, because the revolution destroyed every other memory of how people can act. Revolutions destroy societies, and activism continues that destruction, but more gradually. It’s a process of breaking things, without pause. Most societies never recover from revolutions. You’ll never convince activist folk this is what they’re doing, they’re zealots. All revolutionaries are, by definition.

Already seeing in my own daily social groups the modern delight of ‘calm-mongering’. The people or paid talking heads whose job it is to take a critical situation and tell everybody to calm down, ‘nothing to see here’. And to then paint those trying to do something about it as somehow mentally defective, perhaps with ‘mental health’ problems. Have no doubt they’ll be the first to mow you down when the hammer falls, to save their own skin. It’s like a pathetic bravado in the face of their own prolonged stupidity, against quite obvious and avoidable threats. You can smell the fear in them, the deep terror that they may be about to be hit by the freight train they’ve always denied was coming down the tracks. This is, again, the kidult social media culture we live in. There are always two opposing options, two social teams slugging it out. In this case, apparently you can only choose to be absolutely hysterical, or totally calm and denying anything needs doing at all. Nothing is connected to reality in any way, it’s State of Origin team sports, for everything. Pick Door 3, folks. Use knowledge to guide your life. Leave the kidults to their sandpit play.

Wayne would be one of those who'd say he can't buy an EV, because they're too expensive for ordinary people. The Ken and Barbie camping set has gone up a lot since I was a kid. $170K.

We’re a culture where history is something that lasts about 10 minutes. And therefore we don’t see this sort of thing for what it actually is. Cultures that were founded by revolutions, endlessly reproducing that ‘rising up’ of ‘the people’. Revolutions only destroy, they don’t build. And ‘the people’ doesn’t exist. It’s a revolutionary fiction. One of the things revolutions destroy is the memory of any other way to go about things.

Attention is a gift. Most people don’t know how to give it. BY TOMASZ KOPEC3 A good mother doesn’t just feed the baby, clothe the baby, keep the baby safe. She keeps the baby at the centre of her attention. The baby knows the difference. Not intellectually. In their nervous system. A good teacher doesn’t just deliver the curriculum. A good doctor doesn’t just run the tests. What makes them good, what patients and students actually remember decades later, is whether they felt genuinely noticed. Not processed. Noticed. Spend an hour in a nursing home sometime. Not as a visitor with an agenda. Just watching. What the residents want is not better food, more activities, a larger room. They want someone to sit with them. To look at them. To ask a question and actually wait for the answer. What they are waiting for, what some of them have been waiting for, for years, is someone’s attention. Undivided. Unhurried. Theirs. Your attention is not a small thing. It is the signal that tells another person’s nervous system: you exist, you matter, you are not alone. That signal is older than language. It is processed below conscious thought. And it is something you can give completely, to a patient, a child, a parent, a friend, a stranger in a waiting room, without spending a penny, without any particular skill, without anything except the willingness to actually be there. The quality of your attention is the quality of your presence. And your presence, given fully, is one of the rarest and most valuable things one human being can offer another. (Nick comment: this is also what I mean when I say Western cultures don’t understand place. They don’t know how to attend to, to be present to, the places they live. They accumulate them in their endless travels because as ex-imperial cultures, they’re repeating that pattern of accumulation of locations unconsciously.)

The fuel tankers that deliver the fuel to all parts of Australia travel a distance each year equivalent to travelling from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then back to the Sun again. They use over 200 million litres of diesel themselves, just to move the fuel. The whole thing is laughably and grossly inefficient, hugely subsidised by governments for well over a century. The electricity grid by comparison is already plugged in to most locations. The energy it provides doesn’t need to be transported anywhere. And it moves at the speed of light to where it’s needed. Time to ignore the stupid people and just get on with doing obvious things.

AI has written more words in the past couple of years than all of humanity has produced in written history.

The idea of ‘community consultation’ is nonsense. A community is a whole range of separate groups, all aligned with their particular ‘influencer’. All fighting the other groups for social status. The winners always claim it’s ’the community’ that won. If you have big community consultations like this, you’ll produce nothing, as everything becomes a fight between the competing groups. It’s backwards, you don’t ask big groups of people what to do. You offer them something, that if they adopt then *becomes* a community, aligned around what they were offered. You can see this even in art, or business. Nobody successful surveys everybody to ask what they want. They produce something that will hopefully capture their desires, thereby forming a community.

Tony wasting Australian oxygen as always, imploring us to get behind Trump and Israel. Abbott is like Morrison. Both have a public-facing persona which looks like it’s about politics. But the true agenda of both is a fundamentalist religious crusade.

Some more details about Teslas, we chose them for their brilliant engineering. Their engineering design not only targets everything that makes them incredible family cars, they’re also brilliant driver’s cars with hypercar performance, while being the most efficient cars in the world. They have extraordinary software that they add features to all the time over the air. And they’re also the safest cars in the world. Have a look at the stats. In Australia, the Model Y achieved the highest safety rating of any vehicle ever assessed by ANCAP, in 2025. The Model 3 was the top performer in the Medium Car category. In the US, the Model Y has been awarded the safest car on the road every year for the past 5 years. The Model 3 also won in 2025. In Europe, the Model Y has posted some of the highest scores ever recorded in winning there as well. Why are Teslas so safe? Because they’re deliberately designed and engineered to be. They have a very low centre of gravity, which makes them extremely difficult to roll over in an accident. They have massive crumple zones, because with no engine at the front the entire front area can absorb shock in a collision. And their semi-autonomous AI software is like having 3 extra drivers protecting you. And they have enormous, designed structural rigidity, created by their ‘skateboard’ chassis and the use of large single-piece castings in the Model Y that prevent the cabin collapsing in an impact. This also makes them far easier to build and maintain. The photo shows a Tesla ‘Giga Press’, that creates these single-piece castings. In addition, Model Ys use HEPA air filtering, which removes pollutants from the outside air for passengers. Previously the fastest and safest and most efficient and most family-friendly and most technologically advanced cars were all different cars, by different manufacturers. Tesla’s engineering genius puts all of that into a single car. Add their sublime Supercharging network, and no requirement for servicing and more or less free fuel, at a family car price, and it’s an extraordinarily compelling buy.

The great American delusion, that ‘the people’ is a thing. That’s because they’re a society founded by revolution, and it’s all they know.

You can argue things, or you can just sit back and watch as reality catches up with people’s bullshit. If we’d just used our brains and a bit of knowledge, this transition would’ve happened from 30 years ago already. Https://www.facebook.com/share/1DLcsjY1sc/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Redwood Materials, a company headed by one of the engineers who set up Tesla, takes old car batteries and stands them up in the middle of the desert, linking them and controlling them with software. This creates massive storage for the grid. Within only 3-4 years, they estimate they could provide half of the energy storage needed by the entire US grid, just using old EV car batteries in this way. Old EV batteries still have loads of life in them, before they’re recycled and turned into new car batteries. Some use them as home batteries after they’re finished life as a car battery.

Billions more in subsidies to combustion vehicles. Fuel will still be well over $2/litre.

Having launched total chaos with the Iran war, Trump divides his days between playing golf, and talking about his new ballroom at the White House. Still, he’s probably single-handedly finally got the West to electrify their economies. Took a blithering idiot to do it.

Change usually looks like it’s going nowhere. And then it happens all at once, a tipping point when the floodgates open. https://thedriven.io/2026/03/30/as-petrol-and-diesel-prices-soar-ev-fast-charging-costs-are-falling/#:~:text=As%20petrol%20and%20diesel%20prices%20shoot%20through%20the%20roof%20as,charging%20sites%20is%20actually%20falling.

Trump’s ballroom at the White House (in gold) will be a vulgar, kitsch abomination, dwarfing the main building. Replete with Corinthian columns, the sort of thing kitsch property developers and wannabe Kings love. Trump is both.

Innovations that succeed follow the famous S-curve pattern. For a while nothing much seems to be happening. Then suddenly the change explodes and everybody is doing it. It’s not gradual. This is the status thing again. The principle universally used to guide people’s lives is ‘what everybody else is doing’. The imitative status games people play, to ‘fit in’ with their social groups. We call it peer pressure in kids, but it’s all adult life too. With a new innovation, you reach a tipping point where enough people are starting to do the new thing, that Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) comes into play. That’s when things explode, when everybody rushes to do the new thing ‘that everybody else is doing’. We may have reached that point in Anglo countries now with renewables and EVs, due to Trump’s glorious stupidity. He pushed us to the FOMO tipping point. Electrification has gone viral.

The data clearly shows that electrifying passenger vehicles would make the biggest difference to Australia’s liquid fuel use.

This is the one that really kicks Kidult culture in the gonads. Denying recreational travel. That’s what broke the Covid defence too. Kidults see it as an existential right and necessity, to burn tonnes of jet fuel to ‘experience’ other people’s homes.

This was always going to be one of the phenomenal benefits of autonomous driving technology. It could extend the driving life of older people for years. At the other end of the driving spectrum, it also allows significant safety controls for younger drivers, to prevent them killing themselves and others (this is already in the software). Many people still avoid buying Tesla because 'Elon'. There are plenty of fine alternatives now. But Tesla remains the clear leader in the technology. You may come to regret rejecting Tesla only because you don't like Musk. Nothing else out there can do this right now, for example.

Live from Australia’s Strait of Hormuz.

When you think that we knew this 20-30 years ago, and did nothing. That last Coalition government in particular should be in jail for national vandalism, with the exception of Turnbull, who tried and was rolled by Neanderthals. More than a decade of not only doing absolutely nothing, but actively obstructing the change. Australia should have been the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century.

This isn’t uncommon, that the elderly do the deliberate vandalism. The counterculture they grew up in never leaves them. Permanent revolutionaries. Kidults.

DH Lawrence foretold a time when compulsory and prolonged schooling would make the majority of the population despise all learning. I’ve posted a lot about how that shift led to the emergence of ‘kidult’ culture i.e. the replacement of adult life with a never-ending adolescence. Lawrence saw that this in turn would make people lose all respect for learning itself. Because those not born to be scholars (most people) are now forced to spend their entire childhood years trying to be one, and inevitably failing at it, they come to have a deep hatred of learning and those who are good at it. Which in turn means that societies no longer use scholarship and learning to guide what they should be doing. Prior to the compulsory and prolonged schooling experiment, people deferred to scholarship. It’s a job, a vocation, they knew some were good at it, and most weren’t. Just like any other job, some have a natural aptitude for it. And that’s how we ended up living in a world where there’s a hatred for actual knowledge. Where scholars are called ‘elites’ and are openly abused and attacked. Where all of that has been replaced by the lethal alternative - opinion. Universities replaced by social media, the great aggregator of opinion. Our greatest prejudice is against learning. There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying some people are smarter than others, and that some jobs and institutions (like unis) know things most people don’t know. We do that with sport, we do it with cooking, we do it with everything. But not knowledge and learning. Which means as societies, we are now dumb. Opinion is not a replacement for knowledge. It’s fake knowledge used to create social identity. Dumb societies don’t survive, for the obvious reason that they can’t access knowledge about the best things to do because they make all knowledge DIY. Societies are literally now led by the bottom two-thirds of every class at school, and their anger at that ranking. I was a teacher. As was Lawrence. Teachers are not democrats in the way we think of democracy. It’s a teacher’s job to ruthlessly expose and correct bad thinking. To have a hierarchy of what is true and what’s bullshit, and to brutally weed out the bullshit. To be ‘elitist’, just as a good plumber won’t tolerate crap plumbing. Teachers are now despised. That’s kidult culture.

Arson attack against a Western Sydney Tesla dealer yesterday. I worried this bullshit would start again. Basic civil order is the first thing to go with upset kidults, especially when they lose their petrol and diesel. Post-revolutionary societies only know one way. Ordinary Australians once didn't vandalise and torch other people's property. But now they're kidults...we need to open our eyes to our own culture. CEOs are even shot dead in the street, and ordinary people cheer it on. Adult life replaced with teen gangs. The teens are all ages.