April 2026

I learned a big thing today. I would never have learned it without AI. The skin is often neglected as a vital part of the body. Very few people look after their skin well, women much more than men. The basic act of moisturising, for example, the whole body, particularly in a culture that strips skin of essential oils daily with hot showers and baths. But that wasn’t the big thing. There are much better moisturisers to use, I learned that, and men should be using them as much as women. But the big thing was very different. The skin is a barrier for the body. Skin that is sensitive or irritated isn’t just dry and itchy skin, with eczema and dermatitis and the other symptoms of that. It’s a barrier that isn’t protecting the rest of your body. And what that can do is leave a person feeling permanently exposed to external threat, literally on-edge, anxious. Their nervous system is under continuous assault. This is a known thing in dermatology, but not widely known by the public I suspect. Very many people diagnosed with things like anxiety may simply have lost the barrier protection of their skin, leading to a constant assault on their nervous system from external stressors. One of the most incredible things a good moisturiser can do for a person is to make them feel calm, for this reason. They’ve closed the door to the continuous assault on their nerves from outside. Dermeze is a ripper, gold standard. Rub it in everywhere straight after your daily shower or bath.

Potholes are the next fake hysteria to try to scare people off EVs. It isn’t working. The Murdochs and friends also invented range anxiety, battery fires, ‘only the rich buy EVs’, ‘cheap Chinese shit’, and ‘EVs are stealing weekends and your ute’…

Only alarming if you don’t understand people. Humans don’t think, they imitate. To fit in, to have status in social groups. Those groups then battle each other for supremacy. It’s what humans did with social media, and what they will try to do with AI as well. Most humans do ‘cognitive surrender’ at birth, they have a lifetime of minimal thought. Humans were already doing what everybody else told them to do, through social media, most of which was totally wrong. The difference with AI is that it will much more often be right than wrong, and that it’s not engaged in status games.

Remember when Bob Hawke was criticised for promising that no Australian child would be living in poverty within a very short time? If he’d said ‘old person’ instead of child, he’d have actually been right. To this day people seem oblivious to the perversity of the old and retired being richer than working-age families. That’s kidult culture, again, I’m afraid. Maximising returns and fun for you personally, at every age. No idea of service or sacrifice, or maturing and taking on guidance roles. Just ‘living your best life’. Until they scatter your ashes or put you in a box.

Current projections for these very high fuel prices? To continue until at least mid-2027.

Happy Birthday, Kirst! 🎉🥂☕

At a time of international chaos caused by Trump, what does Angus suggest? That he be Trump. ‘Make Australia Great Again’, and ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’. The Liberal Party is dead.

I’m increasingly aware of the damage hot showers and baths can do to your skin, and therefore overall health. The skin barrier is a vital thing for health, if you constantly strip it away with hot showers and baths, you’re leaving your body wide-open to a whole range of irritants. It can even lead to anxiety, because your nervous system is exposed 24 hours a day and under constant assault. Things I’ve learned. Showers and baths should be short, and lukewarm. Most soaps strip away the skin barrier, and most of you doesn’t need soap anyway, just the armpits, groin and feet. Better to use the low-irritant cleaners for those areas, not soaps. And the best time to moisturise is when you’re still dripping, after the shower or bath. Don’t rub it in, just apply it in a smooth downwards motion, over the wet skin. Then don’t rub your skin with a towel to dry (that irritates it), just pat yourself dry.

Setting up Starlink for a family member reminded me again of some brutally hard truths about human beings and their groups. Like buying a Tesla, it’s the most beautifully elegant and simple process. Everything just works, and fast. And then the hardware when it arrives takes a few minutes to set up, and you’re away. Again, everything just works. That’s part of the engineering design. Tesla/Starlink have a very deliberate organisational design that allows them to always put the engineering first. It’s not a company run by committees. It rarely does marketing, it has no dealers for you to negotiate with. It just builds amazing stuff that works out of the box. And that’s not less human (spare me that hippie drivel). The reason things are so often ‘seamless’ with their products is because the engineering has been allowed to drive everything. Meaning there’s no need to be constantly negotiating with people under ‘customer service’, or to do deals. The worst organisations I’ve ever worked in? Everybody was consulted, about everything. You’d think that was more human. It was the exact opposite. It allowed for the most brutal, stupid, status-driven behaviour. Leading to appalling service and products for customers too. Always put the ‘engineering’ at the centre of what you do. The building of things that work. Humans will never agree on anything, but the engineering will force them to. It either works, or it doesn’t. Everything else is hot air.

I’ve posted a few times here about how the division between city and country is mostly fake. What we call the country is really just the extractive industries cities (where nearly all Australians live) use to extra the resources they need, to both use and sell. Nearly all country towns for example have a history as one of these extractive industries. Once that industry goes belly up, the town loses its entire reason to exist. At which point it tries desperately to be a tourist attraction. The urban planning equivalent of prostitution.

One of China’s high speed trains. China now has over 50,000km of high speed rail, projected to grow to 70,000 km by 2035. It built all of this rail since 2008. In under 20 years. Australia by comparison has zero high speed rail. Why the difference? Because Western nations live inside social media, whose only product is argument. A nation that builds things is also a nation that has found ways to coordinate people towards a common end. The building itself usually does much of that coordination.

The New York Times doesn’t know what NATO stands for.

Loomer is the type of kidult taking over the world. A social media influencer, and a moron in just about every way, with deeply disfigured plastic surgery face to put the icing on the cake. As I sit here in a nation apparently ‘fully conquered by Islam’, I wonder why anybody even bothers with America now. America is a joke. Let’s tear up agreements with them, which give us diddly squat anyway, and make China our main superpower ally. China has paid for our way of life in Australia, for decades. We reward it with 1950s-style Yellow Peril racism. Europe should do the same. Let America be ridiculous all on its own. (Oh, and notice one of Loomer’s references, at the bottom, to one of our own homegrown loons, Tony Abbott.)

I’m up an hour early today. The only way I’ve found to counteract the stupidity of Daylight Saving is to change my bed and waking times, to avoid as much as possible the shift to the circadian rhythm, which is so harmful to health. People know about my anger on Daylight Savings, going back many years. It’s symptomatic of a culture where only what is popular, happens. No matter how stupid, or how damaging. You can quote the science of why Daylight Saving is stupid and even dangerous until you’re blue in the face, and you’ll get the same response every single time. “But I like it.” That’s it. That’s the winning argument. Kidult culture, where popularity rules everything. Some people like raping women. Is that OK, because they like it? No? Kids will eat nothing but ice cream, if you let them, because they like it. Once you subscribe to ‘I like it’ as the way to decide things, you have to accept all of it. Whatever somebody likes will by definition be OK. Progress in human life is moving beyond likes and dislikes, and doing what’s smart and what’s right.

Good on Sammy for despairing at the social breakdown afflicting all of us. But like all rock star culture, the diagnosis here is all about feelings. Love vs hatred. As if the problem is an outbreak of people being nasty to each other, and ‘all you need is love’ to fix it. It’s the ‘all you need is love’ kidult crap that caused the hatred and division. Humans will ALWAYS fight each other, for dominance in status hierarchies, unless their cultures have collective mechanisms to control status. We had those. They were things like monarchies, and religions. Functionally designed to suck the oxygen out of status games elsewhere in societies. The things ‘all you need is love’ kidultism destroyed.

The best car review I’ve ever seen. A real car enthusiast, not with any axe to grind. He shows what I’ve posted about here before. What makes Teslas such remarkable vehicles is that they take all of the things people previously bought separate cars for - performance, safety, comfort, affordability, efficiency, practicality, connectivity, luxury - and it puts all of it inside ONE car. For the price of an ordinary family car. That would have been seen as impossible, before Tesla. To tick all of those boxes, with a single vehicle. This is what happens when you let engineering drive the company. As this guy said, previously he owned multiple cars, to tap into all of those different needs. Now he just needs one. And that one gets better all the time, with over-the-air upgrades. He doesn’t have to keep buying new models. I’m not a Tesla ‘fanboy’. I’m not a ‘fan’ of anything, I’m a grown up. I just think life gets infinitely better if you put knowledge and engineering at the centre of everything. If another company were to do this even better, I’d shift to them. This goes way beyond cars for me, this is how ALL life could be, if we put knowledge and engineering first.

From my senior physician friend, about the Gliptins (‘weight loss’ drugs, like Ozempic and Mounjaro). He believes they’re now the only emerging hope for the hundreds of millions of people with Long Covid too. The Penicillin of our generation. It’s that huge. “…the effects on metabolism are unique to the GLP-1 Drugs. No question they are special. The novelty of adding other elements to increase: * Anti-inflammatory effects * Greater weight loss * Targeted muscle preservation * Unique neuro-inflammatatory effects And more... This is the Penicillin of our generation. Like statins - they will change health and how we define chronic illness.”

The Association of Australian Super Funds (ASFA) have updated their estimates for levels of super needed for different retirement lifestyle goals. Quite large jumps, reflecting increased inflation across all parts of life. This is the latest targets for people who want to reach the top ‘comfortable’ band, how much they should have roughly at age 67 (if they own their own home, you need much more otherwise). These retirement balances make the elderly richer than ordinary working people, carrying the major burden of keeping a country’s lights on and raising the next generation. And far, far in advance of the young. That’s a profound shift to our entire culture. A massive siphoning off of wealth towards the old. Or deeper, a shift to understanding life as a permanent ‘lifestyle’, rather than as a social circle of life, focused on raising new generations. If you want to know why societies can’t seem to afford to keep their basic infrastructure maintained, here’s why. That wealth is going towards individual lifestyles. For example the fights over Council rates - when you look at the numbers, the average resident spends FAR more on their lifestyle, than on their shared collective infrastructure. Towns, cities and nations are now just tourist resorts for lifestyle individuals, who offer their complaints and reviews through social media.

For many years another anti-EV message was that they have no resale value. How the worm has turned. Some people are selling their used EVs now for more than they paid for them, new. Meanwhile second hand petrol and diesel vehicles have plummeted in value. I’ve posted before about petrol and diesel vehicles becoming ‘stranded assets’ i.e. goods nobody wants. Even hybrids will quickly come into that category, except for people who need those for very specific reasons i.e. a lot of remote driving, heavy vehicles, towing etc. The new vehicle emissions standards will also make combustion vehicles much more expensive every year now, as more than a century of free pollution comes to an end, the gigantic subsidy that made combustion vehicles affordable. Buy them now at your own financial risk.

Status runs all human life. “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.” Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

I could hand out some copies of Blake to the traffic queue. Travellers don’t understand Blake. The whole world is in every grain of sand. You don’t have to move about everywhere.

What happens when you get off the socials, and hop in the car.

There have been debates for years between people who believe in ‘socialism’ (i.e. government-led life), and those who believe in ‘capitalism’ (a life led by individuals in markets). And me? I don’t think either -ism even exists. They’re fantasies, ideologies. All societies operate the same way, through status. What they call their status hierarchies, what names they give them, differs. But it’s all just status. The UK is in deep trouble, as a society. For most of the past half-century, it’s tried to be a market-based society. The results have been a disaster, have a read. That doesn’t mean socialism would be better, and that capitalism has failed, because what’s happened there hasn’t been capitalism either. It’s just uncontrolled status games. Status allowed to operate at will. That’s what a ‘free market’ does, allows everybody to fight for top dog position in status hierarchies, by stripping away the existing hierarchies under the fiction of a market operating. There was never a market, humans never operate in the way markets say. They form groups, through imitation, who then fight within themselves and against other groups, for status. You can see the shift happening in Oz too, how basics like education, health care and energy were ‘privatised’ i.e turned into status objects. People now fight for status in education, health and energy, rather than get an education or healing or cheap energy. It’s not capitalism, it’s uncontrolled status competition.

I see this all the time at work and in the community. The avalanche of retirees, freshly released from the pressures of work and then suddenly feeling unplugged from relevance to our societies. This is part of the same kidult culture I often write about. There are no age-related roles now, you’re an adolescent ‘living your best life’, from age 13 to 103. All of this vast and growing mass of retirees are a bit stuck for what to do, to feel relevant. Many travel to distract themselves from that irrelevance, but many also start to interfere with things, they become permanent and demanding activists, for always new causes. They want to be relevant to social life. (To be honest many then become a permanent pain in the arse, for public administration.) I can retire in a couple of years, and have already thought long and hard about this. I never needed my working life to feel ‘relevant’, I’ve never tried to have a career. I pursue knowledge, and that will be the case even after I’ve retired. It will just give me more time to do that. Having never pursued or liked the groupthink of most social life, I certainly won’t miss it either.

Is it your birthday today, Mike? If so many happy returns!

The stench of Trump’s incompetence and stupidity is thick in the nostrils of Americans now. Even many who voted for him. Meanwhile in Australia the prominent Trump cover band, One Nation, is surging in popularity, playing all the big Trump hits. The LNP are getting on board too with their own Trump cover band. People flirting with the idea of voting for Trump cover bands only need to look to the US as to how that all ends. 

There's no such thing as 'the community'. Community consultation will mean getting the views of a whole range of people, many if not most of which will disagree with each other, and nearly all of which will just be some re-hashed propaganda from major political parties and industry groups. For example this movement in the bush against renewables? It didn't even exist, until Barnaby Joyce made it exist. Farmers welcomed solar and wind farms because it gave them regular and secure income for the first time. Joyce only made it exist to distract people from his drunken public behaviour, and dumping his wife for a young member of staff he'd been rooting.

As an engineer, the thing that attracted me most to Tesla, and which I think is genius and rarely spoken about. They managed to take all of the things people usually love about cars, like performance, driveability, efficiency, safety, practicality, affordability, luxury and connectivity.And they put it all into *one* car. Before Tesla, you needed to own multiple cars to get all of that, each specialising in only a few areas. Now you can have it all, pretty much, by owning a single vehicle. This Tesla review is the best I've ever seen, and I was happy to see that it focused on exactly this, the engineering design that gives you almost everything, in a single vehicle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W29Ct4f_Krc

The real tragedy about Elon Musk being so repugnant to so many people is this. What Tesla are doing and planning to do is almost beyond belief. All of the sub-companies and products, like Space X, xAI, Starlink, the Optimus robots, Tesla energy etc. - all of them are part of a connected, single strategy. Have a watch, I can guarantee it will astonish you. https://youtu.be/2dRuLMP9v5k?si=vqB_7T1z_QWBVZUu

To illustrate the nonsense about the range of cars. Few realise that the average range of combustion cars hasn’t changed much in almost 80 years. That upper average of around 650 km in that time is already the range of good EVs today. You can get higher ranges with combustion by adding large fuel tanks, or by using a hybrid or a turbo-diesel. But the vast majority of combustion cars have the same range as modern EVs. EVs can also do the higher ranges, up to 1000 km or more, simply by adding a larger battery. The equivalent of adding larger fuel tanks. For most drivers that’s a completely unnecessary expense, as it is for most drivers of combustion cars. And the most critical thing to remember is that a combustion vehicle needs to always re-fuel at a dedicated service station. It uses a fill-up model, rather than a top-up model, for most driving. It empties the tanks before re-fuelling. An EV is more like your mobile phone. You plug it in overnight, at home, to top up charge. You will rarely need to use a highway fast-charger.

Happy Birthday, Dorothy! 🎊🥂💐

Still waiting for ‘the people’ to rise up and overthrow Trump. Maybe just a few more protests will do it.

Here’s an international traveller, standing next to roughly how much fuel it takes to transport them - just them, per person - from (say) Australia to Europe. That’s one-way. They need the same tonne-cube to get home again as well. Combustion engines, including jet engines, are grossly inefficient. About 1.2 tonnes of that roughly 2 tonnes each passenger needs to get there and back goes straight out the exhaust of jets, unused.

You may be surprised at how many Australians think this guy is terrific. Some of them are even local councillors elected to local councils. Many more Australians who can’t stand him will happily vote for Pauline Hanson, who’s a carbon copy of Trump. If he was in an aged care facility, they’d up his meds.

And with the vehicle emissions standards, wait until people see the price of wankpanzer utes in the next few years, to buy when new. All of life involves collisions between people's beliefs, and reality. This is one of those collisions. They will blame everything except their beliefs.

Fortescue (Andrew Forrest's company) has just added its 15th fully electric excavator to its mining operations. Check this - the diesel versions of these excavators use a MILLION litres of diesel EACH, every year. That's 15 million litres of diesel Fortesuce now doesn't have to buy every year. Where there's a will, there's a way. Anti-renewables people always love to say heavy industry can't operate electrically. Like everything they say, it's complete bullshit.

Australia’s conservatives are fighting each other to see who can be the most like Trump. You’d think the last election here was a warning about that. Or that what’s happening to Trump in the US would be a warning. They’re not very bright.

Read the 10-point plan the Iranians sent Trump. There’s no chance that will be any deal. Both sides of politics in the US now openly talking about having Trump removed.

I often post about how culture is invisible to the people living it. Fish don’t know water exists until they’re beached. And that Western culture has no idea of ‘place’. No meaningful connection to the ground under its feet, no groundedness. I met the Project Elevate people in Bathurst last night. They want to make Bathurst’s tourism more premium, to up the ‘spend’ by tourists. Pretty much every country town is doing this now, to survive. With almost no exceptions, if you look at the history of every country town, it began as a place people lived while working some extractive industry (usually agriculture and mining), for the cities. There is no such thing as ‘the country’, what we call that has always just been the resource-extraction arm of city life. You can see it clearly on the map. Nearly all of Australia huddles into a tiny land area, in a few cities, on the coast. Just about all of the country is uninhabited, in any meaningful way. The ‘land’ means nothing to us, except as resources to be extracted. If it meant something to us, we would live there. But we don’t. Those who do live there again are remnants of the old extractive industries. Many love country towns because they provide a city life, but with fewer people. There’s no specific ‘country’ culture to these towns. And so now as the extractive industries die, they try to sell that - the ‘lifestyle’. It’s a type of geographical prostitution. They transform themselves into lifestyle theme parks, with good food and wine and tourist ‘experiences’, to attract bored, cashed-up city people on their days off. Cultures who understand place work it into their culture. Like Aboriginal culture, that many think of as primitive. They didn’t need tourists to survive, they had the land, and the land needed them. It was a mutual relationship, and it wasn’t land as in a paddock to be ploughed or a mine to be dug. It was incorporating all elements of the landscape, all living and non-living things, into the culture itself. The landscape was life itself. You didn’t need a ‘job’ to survive, you didn’t need to sell the landscape to passing tourists. Ask yourself what actual meaningful connection your town and its people have to the landscape they live inside. I guarantee it will be a ‘resource’ at best - land to sell as real estate. Minerals to mine. Ploughed fields to harvest. ‘Sights’ and ‘experiences’ to sell, to tourists. We’re end-stage ‘imperial’ cultures, who only know how to move around and accumulate things, to send back to their cities. All roads lead to Rome. They never ‘come into land’. They’re not grounded. They can’t just BE. When they get bored at home they travel abroad, to continue the accumulation of sights, sounds and resources there.

As the author says, the bizarre culture we live in is one where the population is ageing rapidly, western societies are literally giant aged care facilities. But at the same time the culture of these wrinkly nations has become an entrenched adolescence. A culture entirely of the ‘trending’ present, where no custom or tradition survives.

There is some sort of fascinating link between the geographical regions most opposed to the idea of climate change, like Queensland, or the middle and South of the USA, also copping the biggest brunt of the impact of climate change. It's tragically almost comic that this next smashing comes just a day after Queensland's Premier launched his 'Drill Baby Drill' Trump-lite project.

Seeing so many of these stories, of people who were in the anti-EV bubble, and then the moment they experienced one thought wow. This one is the toughest segment to crack too, the ute market. BYD nailed it.

Have been waiting to see when the reality of concussion and brain damage would start to really bite in football. From May 1 professional footballers will apparently no longer be able to get insurance for head injury. Many parents are also buying new helmets, but there's no science that says a helmet will protect against concussion. American football, which is where the concussion and brain injury problems were first noticed, has always used helmets - it made no difference. The concussion comes from the brain itself moving around inside the skull, slamming into it in collisions. Helmets don't stop the collisions, or the brain moving inside the skull.

When you read the history of the first Industrial Revolution, the people who opposed it look like idiots now. Our current revolution is much bigger, to electric-powered societies. You get to choose right now whether you want to look like an idiot, when the history is written.

Here’s another window into kidult culture. Which is social media culture, we live inside the platforms now, they replaced public life. The pandemic is not over. The definition of a pandemic hasn’t changed, it’s defined by the number of infections in circulation. Not by the level of acute injury to those infections. The dangerous thing is the number of infections, which accumulate over time to cause chronic disease. Thus the continued explosion of Long Covid. That’s why the definition is about numbers of infections. The pandemic simply stopped ’trending’. Only what trends is real, for kidults living inside social media platforms. They got bored with the pandemic trending, and moved on to new trends.

Again, for kidults reality is just an endless series of shifting trends. Tesla was hugely unpopular in Europe for a while there, when Musk was chummy with Trump. The kidults, like groups of kids in a playground, said Elon wasn’t their friend any more. That trend, like all trends, has now gone. Tesla’s sales have exploded again in Europe. Reality never goes away, underneath the facile world of our kidult trending obsessions. Electric cars are by far the best cars. And Tesla electric cars are the best electric cars. Engineering - 1, Hashtagging Kidults - 0.

The motivation for the NDIS is wonderful. But it’s a public administration nightmare, it’s punitively expensive. Astronomically, cancerously expensive. If people deny this reality, the NDIS will lose its ‘social licence’, as the article says. Reality will intervene, it’s swallowing the entire national budget. Unless cost controls are introduced, it will die. Simple as that. Kidultism is already responding by turning the emotion knob to 11. The Culture of the Feels. There’s nothing more dishonest than using feelings to ignore realities. The NDIS was always going to be an explosive thing, because kidult culture, adolescent culture, is a culture of grievance. Everything is a grievance, everybody wants compensation for their grievance. What Robert Hughes called the Culture of Complaint. The genuine need for support for disability was quickly swamped by a tidal wave of confected complaint and demands.

Always question negative news stories about EVs. They’re cherry-picked sponsored BS. Yes some charging stations had delays, usually in remote areas with minimal charging infrastructure. Yes we need more chargers, but you can function just fine with what’s currently out there. There are queues for everything at Easter.

The supply of fuel we’re still getting all left the Middle East before the war began. It’s about to run out, globally. In populist politics it will all of course be ‘Albo’s’ fault. When really it’s the fault of Australia doing diddly squat to get off fossil fuels for the past 30 years. The same halfwits who caused that delay now say we need to drill for our own oil, here. It’s time to ignore the halfwits. Electrify our energy supply and use, at emergency speed. You can do that in your own home and with your own vehicles, don’t wait for the halfwits to do it for you. They won’t.

The head of Australia’s largest super fund speaking the truth about housing that Australians never want to hear. ‘Supply’ won’t fix the housing crisis. Nobody is going to flood the market with cheap houses. It would send builders and developers and existing property owners bankrupt. Australians use housing as casino chips, as a way to get rich quick, to gain social status. Fast capital gains. Until we stop using housing as a national status casino, it will be unaffordable. Only once in all of history has housing been affordable to ordinary people. After WW2, when government took control of housing. A housing ‘market’ is just the casino, and will never deliver affordable housing. Australia needs to invest in meaningful things, not capital gains. In building 21st century infrastructure. In renewable energy, roads, electric vehicle support, aged care, land repair. Etc etc. We’ve had more than 4 decades of ‘free market’ politicians who refused to do any of those things, telling us the ‘market’ will deliver what the country needs. The market is bullshit, it just funds status games, where people compete with each other for social status. In housing, education, health care, wankpanzer cars, etc. etc.

Real pain likely coming. When the shit hits the fan, the stupid will get nasty. The last thing they will do is admit their own stupidity caused the problem.

It was the response to this fantastic story that highlighted just how stupid the anti-EV groups are. ‘But it was only toilet paper, it’s not heavy!’ It was 36 tonnes. 36 tonnes of toilet paper weighs the same as 36 tonnes of steel, or timber, or cement. It’s the same weight. The truck did the trip in half an hour less time, because the extra torque from the electric motor meant it could go uphill much faster. It cost 85% less to run. If you’re an anti-EV person, sell your brain on eBay. You’re not using it.

One of the strident critics of Bathurst Council.

Working for a Council, complaints about potholes are one of the biggies. What’s not often said is how much people’s choice of vehicle causes this problem. Modern utes and SUVs are heavy. EVs are often accused of that, but all of Australia’s most popular vehicles (utes and SUVs) are heavier than EVs. (Just one more lie about EVs.) For example a Toyota RAV4, only a small SUV, weighs the same as a Tesla Model 3.

Spinoza made visible an impossible tension at the heart of all of our lives. What is ‘right’, in terms of morals but also facts and knowledge, is always in opposition to what is socially acceptable or popular. If you want to live a life that is based on what is right, you will always be in opposition to most of the people you know. Our wrong ideas about democracy encourage us to think the ‘consensus’ view on something is the right view. But consensus comes from battling social teams, fighting for status. A negotiated ceasefire. It has nothing to do with what is objectively right. Spinoza refused to compromise. His own community literally cast him out. 350 years after his death they still haven’t forgiven him.

Watching some US Masters. You can see status in everything, because it is everything for humans. Take the beloved baseball cap, worn universally by professional golfers and even fans. It’s completely idiot headwear for the sport, which carries very high skin cancer risk. Some stats. More than a quarter of golfers get skin cancer. Golfers are 250% more likely to develop skin cancer than the general population. Professional golfers diagnosed with skin cancer average 25.5 years of age. Eye cancer is also a huge risk. Very few wear sunglasses. Why do they wear caps and not wear sunglasses? Because that’s the style that trends. It’s status, fashion. People want to fit in with what other people are doing. A life lived according to what’s smart and right will always be in tension with what everybody else is doing.

How good is this? Sharing this one not just for the brilliant engineering, but because it illustrates how cars are being reinvented. Cars are moving away from being ‘mechanical’ devices. The basic mechanical drivetrain of an EV can last forever, in car terms, and doesn’t even need maintenance. Now cars are more about software, which add functionality over the air, rather than people needing to go out and buy new models to get the features. You can even use software to tweak the drivetrain. I can pay Tesla to make our Model 3 go from 4.4 seconds 0-100, to 3.8 seconds, with a simple over the air software update. Car enthusiasts say this makes EVs an ‘appliance’. They think that’s hilarious. They don’t think. Appliances just work, without having to pay for constant maintenance and repairs. These appliances are also far more powerful and have more functionality than the combustion vehicles they love. Maybe they mean a great car is one that breaks down all the time, is slow and noisy, and costs a fortune to fuel.

So much of the change needed is getting people into the real-life experience of the change.

Times are tough and are likely going to get very nasty. Possibly a recession. All of this was avoidable, but humans refused to give up fighting for social status, to follow what knowledge told us needed doing. And so, as history shows time and time again, catastrophe will force them to shift. It’s the only way humans will change. For example, these profound shifts to working life would never have happened without the unnecessary slaughter of tens of thousands of Australians, by Covid. Over 20 million died, worldwide, mostly avoidable. We could have made that shift without killing all of those people. But humans won’t ever just give up their social status or the fights for that status. And so reality does it for them. And many suffer, many die. We’ve spent decades denying the need to give up on fossil fuels. Now the catastrophic result of that is going to be a wrecking ball through all of our lives. Necessary change will come from it, but it’s going to hurt a lot of people.

Great piece from Ian Verrender about why the idea of drilling for our own oil, to try to solve the fuel crisis, is complete idiocy. We’d have less than a decade of fuel if we did it, and it would cost a fortune to extract and refine, meaning it would also cost a fortune to buy and use. Also no need to rebuild refineries, there’s no oil for them to use. Australia is a global energy superpower. Renewable energy. The people obstructing that basic truth are destroying the country and your children’s future. And the rest of the world will now lead with renewables, throwing away our natural advantages. We invented modern solar panels, for fuck’s sake. China produces enough solar panels every year to replace 1000 coal-fired power stations. And the rate of production is accelerating. They learned how to make them, from us.

Saving petrol ad from the 1970s. These worked, though this is before social media. Social media turns everything into warring gangs, the car ‘enthusiasts’ are just as likely now to use double the petrol if asked to cut back, out of spite. Everything is an argument, a fight.

Democracy has been a failure since its introduction, and it's been getting worse on all measures since. It's also deeply unpopular. That's what populism is, the popular response to democracy. 'The people' never run societies. Or even any groups within those societies. All human life and change is led, by a tiny proportion of people. All social/political systems are 'authoritarian'. All aspects of human life are. It's all a fight for status.

This is a collision testing machine for vehicles, one of the tests that gives them their safety rating, out of 5 stars. As another window into the genius engineering that sits inside Teslas, when Teslas were tested on this machine, they literally broke the machine. The car cabins are enormously strong, because they're pressed as single pieces, rather than bolted and welded together from different parts. Teslas have recorded the highest ever scores, on car safety tests. The test they use to see how a car performs when it rolls also didn't work. They couldn't make the Tesla roll.

The Mazda CX-6e is an excellent electric car, about to be released in Australia. It's very well priced. It's also how Japanese manufacturers are trying to catch up with EVs - it's a re-skinned Deepal, a Chinese EV.

That's a heckuva stat. The threat is greater than any war, the possible end of all civilisation. We stopped the whole world, everything we were doing, for over a decade, to fight the world wars. A far smaller threat. Today? Disaster is just a stage kidults perform their identities on. It creates visibility, attention. Nobody tries to fix anything, they just want to be seen and heard, to promote their identity/status.

For once I agree with an economist. Fuel should have been allowed to get super expensive, not subsidised, to force people to restrict their usage. Look at Easter, where about half the State still went on their usual driving holiday. By mid-May there may be no fuel to be had at all, at any price.

While the Queensland government spent $500 million drilling for enough oil to supply one service station, NSW is finally really ramping up EV fast-charging infrastructure, electric heavy vehicles and kerbside chargers. Note fast-chargers are mostly for long trips. You don’t need them for nearly all of the driving you do.

And this is for electricity at 15c/kWh. Most EV charging plans are half that, so over 80km for each $1 of electricity. If you charge with solar, it's free. Australians are some of the slowest in the world to adopt EVs. It's costing them a fortune, and shows a total shift in the culture, which used to embrace innovation with open arms. Social media did it. Turned everything into a fake 'debate', to obstruct all change.

And noting again that at 15c/kWh, this is twice what most EV users can charge at overnight. So those 2c figures are actually 1c figures. Only just over 10% of Australians have bought electric vehicles. It's embarrassing, from a nation that used to pride itself on innovation.

What's not as often said about the fertiliser crisis is how completely dependent on fertiliser our farming methods are, to grow anything. And that fertiliser in turn comes from fossil fuels. Agriculture will be smashed by climate change for this and weather-related reasons. Again, all avoidable, and we did...nothing. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-15/australian-fertiliser-manufacturing-after-iran-war-deficit/106559278

A fascinating insight into how driving changes qualitatively as an activity, once you’ve had prolonged experience of semi-autonomous technology. Just as these cars change the nature of cars fundamentally, they also change what it means to drive. It’s like having 8 drivers all paying attention every second, in every direction. No human can do this. It also then changes how you interact with other vehicles, it takes away that competitive rivalry people experience behind the wheel. It brings a great sense of calm and relaxation, and safety. She does this whole piece to camera, while the car is driving for her. Watch to see how that is, in the car, how effortlessly it negotiates the different road environments.

The revolution that founded America was just over 250 years ago. What I think they and most of the rest of the world don’t notice is, that the US just keeps repeating that original revolutionary moment. Revolutionary societies often do that, the revolution destroys accumulated custom and tradition, meaning all people then know how to do is revolt. Look at today, people are still urged to ‘rise up’ in the US, all the time, against ‘kings’ and authority. That’s revolution 101. Most Americans will tell you this is what democracy is. ‘The people’ running the show, and rising up against tyranny. It absolutely isn’t what democracy is, it’s the classic definition of revolution. They’re stuck in a time-warp bubble from which they can’t escape.

Toyota is often thought of as the pinnacle of reliability in vehicles. With some justification, they pioneered affordable quality engineering for cars. But this would be about the sixth critical recall issue we’ve had with this car in only three or four years. Which is fine, they’re just being careful and no technological product is ever perfect. But I imagine if it had been even one critical recall for a Tesla, the hysteria we’d have seen in the press about it. I haven’t had one critical recall for the Tesla, and any updates needed have all been over the air software updates, overnight. A car that needs no servicing and which can run for 1,000,000 km with minimal maintenance is going to dethrone Toyota.

HBD! 🎉👯🥂

Andrew Forrest giving the middle finger to Murdoch and his army of morons.

Lithgow is Australia’s Strait of Hormuz. Maybe it should start a blockade ;)

I’m going to give concrete examples of kidult culture, rather than just mention it in general terms. A guy at work bought one of these, a BYD Shark hybrid ute. He’s a car guy, has owned over 20 cars. All combustion until this point. He *loves* the Shark, says it’s changed his mind completely about cars. It’s been a pile-on. His friends at work and elsewhere have been mocking him relentlessly. It’s mostly good natured, but the intent is serious. They think he’s lost his mind. They say he’s bought a ‘girl’s car’. I asked why a girl’s car? ‘Because - electric.’ These are grown adults. Assessing their adult lives like they’re in the sandpit at preschool. Not one thought about the objective reality of what makes a good car, in the engineering sense. It’s all about ‘branding’, what your ‘team’ says is a good thing. It’s the school playground. All areas of life are like this now. I find it exhausting, tedious. I left Year 9 in 1982, but the whole world is now Year 9, at every age. Everything is trends, imitative rivalries between competing brands. People desperately trying to forge and protect fragile social identities. I want an adult life back.

Even a year ago everybody you know would have told you not to buy an EV, because the resale is dire. I’ve posted multiple times here about why that misunderstands both the car market and the change to it now underway. And here we are. Live your life outside adolescent trending bullshit.

The pathetic bravado fantasy of a spoiled rich boy nobody ever liked.

I've been preparing for this 'shock' for many years already. It wasn't rocket science to see it coming. My various interests I share on here, like renewable energy and EVs, are all part of that.

Actually what happened was, and it’s not the first time, Trump was responding to a leading question from Sky News Australia, the Murdoch sewer. They were trying to get a quote they could use as ammunition against the Albanese government. Murdoch/Sky News thinks Australia should be in there fighting with the US and Israel, against Iran, in some great Judaeo-Christian crusade.

Catastrophe is the only thing that forces change in human life. Everything from relationship breakups to natural and human disasters, like Granville. Without catastrophe, the status quo is the strongest force in all human life. The habitual way of doing things, the glue of ‘doing what everybody else is doing’, to compete and fit in, for social status.

After driving an EV your combustion car will feel like exactly what it is. A clunker. You can’t believe you ever put up with it, all that noise and blustering, for so little power.

Towing is another glorious example of human status games. When the BYD Shark was released for example, many people refused to buy it because it ‘can only tow 2.5 tonnes’. But in reality BYD’s engineers in China, removed from the macho status games of Australian towing, were simply reflecting the actual towing capacity of a dual cab ute. A 3.5-tonne towing capacity is like a 12-inch penis. The thing everybody wants to be able to say they have, but which nobody can actually use. It’s the same social status game. Pretty much all of the popular dual cab utes in Australia list 3.5 tonnes as their possible towing weight. All of them are lying, it’s marketing spin. The maximum legal and safe towing weight for all of them is between 2.5-3 tonnes, and at 3 tonnes you can’t really put many people or load in the ute at the same time without going over the safe and legal total weight. All of them are at that rough BYD limit, in real terms. If you see a dual cab out there towing 3 tonnes or more, stay well away from it, it’s death on wheels. That tow ball is like a pivot, well behind the rear axle, meaning with 3 tonne or more trailers or caravans the car is almost lifted off the ground in terms of its ability to control the weight behind it (often the front wheels are literally being lifted off the ground). You can get a weight distribution hitch that puts the tow ball weight more over the axles, which is much safer, but even then your relatively small ute shouldn’t be trying to control 3 tonnes or more being towed behind it. It’ll be crawling up hills, and struggling at speed if the towed weight starts to get unruly, to slow it down. The exception is the big American wankpanzers, like the RAM and Silverado. Those can tow heavier loads, because they’re actual trucks, not utes. The much bigger picture here is that towing itself is mostly a fad. A trend. A Ken and Barbie set for adults thing, a big swinging dick social status activity. Who can buy the best gear, the biggest caravan or trailer, and can mod or spec it out in the best ways. Mostly people don’t tow and don’t need to tow, anything. It’s an optional thing driven more by social status. It’s like home batteries, which quickly became a pissing contest to see who could buy the biggest 40 kWh or 50 kWh battery. Ludicrous for most home needs. Couple of good links on towing here: https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/the-truth-about-3500kg-towing-52878/ https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/advice-more-truth-about-3500kg-towing-117906/

Happy Birthday, Beverley! 🎉🎊🥂

Here’s more of the bigger picture of my Covid posts. The fact most of us catch Covid and recover means NOTHING, in terms of its long-term impacts. Those impacts are now flooding in. HIV for example, as I’ve posted here before, was a mild ‘cold’ when people caught it. 8 years later, they were dead. Katie Couric is a US journalist, talking here about the explosion in cancers in young people. Even in their 20s. 17 cancers have exploded in number, including ‘old people’ cancers like colorectal cancer. And they’re not just getting treatable versions, they’re getting Stage 4 metastatic cancers. Death sentences. To quote her, ‘so what the fuck is going on?’ Doctors are mystified. Pick me. I’ll tell you. Covid is an oncogenic virus. It causes cancer. Most chronic diseases, including cancers, are caused by infections.

You don’t have to be very old to remember when Australia took pride in eliminating disease. Now gone in social media kidult society, where we celebrate ‘living with infections’. Because otherwise we can’t go out to restaurants, gigs and fly overseas on holidays for a while. (Eliminating cervical cancer was controlling an infection.) Australia eliminated Covid. We were one of the first in the world to do it. We discovered it’s actually pretty easy to control and eliminate. Simpletons confused elimination with eradication. We eliminated measles, it doesn’t mean it was eradicated from the face of the Earth. It just means it’s not in community circulation, with only occasional outbreaks. But Scott Morrison wanted to go to an election saying he’d ended the pandemic, and let’s all get back to gigs, and flying overseas, and restaurants, doing no disease control at all. He lost the election. He got a gong for his efforts in the pandemic, lol. He destroyed public health in Australia. He celebrated doing it.

@[585851453:2048:Adrian].

The Trump family are masters of ‘pump and dump’ politics. They make announcements, knowing they’ll cause big shifts in the stock market (the pump) and then secretly in the background they and their crony mates buy and sell shares (the dump) with insider trading knowledge of the announcement to come. Trumpism isn’t fascism or authoritarianism. It’s old-fashioned corporate cronyism and corruption. He’s a conman, a grifter. A snake oil salesman. His pathetic ‘Art of the Deal’. The US isn’t becoming a fascist State, it’s becoming what it already was. A plutocracy. This is the American Dream in action, not fascist overthrow. It’s the culture, in its purest form.

I’ve been using FSD this week on my long commutes. It’s remarkable, the most calming and relaxing drive, knowing you have a system doing the driving that is paying attention in eight directions and across multiple dimensions, over 30 times per second. No human can do that, no matter how great they think they are as a driver. It also removes that competitive rivalry that dominates human driving on the roads, cars racing each other in various ways, and the aggression of fighting for their position on the road compared to other vehicles. That’s status games, as always. All of that on-road rivalry disappears. It’s the least spoken about but most profound effect of the shift. Humans play status games everywhere, including when driving. It’s why many speed up when being overtaken, they feel they’re losing their position and status on the road. Most road safety is preventing these status games. FSD strips them away completely.

This is the much bigger, profound shift that autonomous driving technology is bringing to roads. It’s not just replacing human driving with machine driving, it’s changing drivERS themselves. It’s stripping away the on-road rivalry and tension. The status games. Multiply this by millions of cars over time, and you can see how the whole culture of road travel will change fundamentally.

The Iranians released this video.

Unsurprisingly the majority of comments on this post gushed about how amazing the Oldsmobile is, and how the Tesla has no soul, and how everybody would choose to ride in the old car. That’s kidult culture, rampant nostalgia. If the people who originally rode in the Oldsmobile were alive today and given the choice, they’d have been queued to get into the modern car. Any modern person driving in the Oldsmobile would very quickly get sick of it, with no heating or cooling, no insulation from noise or moisture, crap suspension, handling and tyres, snail-like speeds, almost certain death in collisions, and a range (the funniest bit) much less than the Tesla. It’s a novelty, nostalgia. Bruno Latour once asked why people don’t find an ordinary aluminium drink can more amazing than a hand-carved clog. The can is a wonder, in many dimensions. But nostalgia means we think the old and simple is best. That’s people denying ageing, clinging to times closer to their youth. Even for much newer cars - I don’t miss the cars of the 70s, 80s and 90s one tiny bit. They were crap compared to modern cars. Kidult culture is at war with social progress, it turns technologies into status and identity markers. Tribal totems. People’s actual identity becomes their vehicles, the music they grew up with, the clothes they wore etc. It’s what kids do in a playground, with yo-yos, or sneakers, or haircuts. What I call the Ken and Barbie Set view of technology. Not anything about what it can do, only about it being a marker of your position in a social group. As Marshall McLuhan said, ‘past times are pastimes’.

I was there when rock gigs still felt edgy. A bit dangerous, seat of your pants, only a handful of musicians daring to try to entertain an enormous crowd that overwhelmed them in scale, with ingenious lighting rigs designed for dramatic effect. It was like a high-wire act. Now gigs are through the looking glass of Spinal Tap and well out the other side. Grandfathers strutting the stage, in slick productions with national debt level ticket prices. Gigs are mostly about the love of being in a crowd, not music or art. They’re an ‘event’, like walking across the Harbour Bridge, or a City to Surf. A place for people to assemble, to be with other people. The act is secondary, a means to an end. The sad thing is that the whole industry became Spinal Tap 40 years ago already. The hair bands like Bon Jovi of the 80s and 90s were already parodies of a parody. They’re still out there now. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1655140365612426/?fs=e&fs=e

I’ve labelled an actual picture from the Artemis mission, of the eclipse of the sun by the moon. Thanks to Brian May for the details.

The hilarious thing about our Yellow Peril racism is that we’ve already been ‘dependent’ on China, for decades. The US does almost nothing for us, in practical terms. China funds almost our entire society, through the things it builds and buys from us. It’s also an ancient, wise culture. It rarely goes to war, have people not noticed that? The US invades 2 or 3 countries every year, or funds somebody else to do it. Anglo cultures are often vulgar, remnant imperial cultures, dressing up looting and pillaging as lifestyle pursuits, like travel and acquiring real estate.

Sulfur has a beautiful yellow colour. World supply of sulfur has been badly impacted by the Iran war. One thing the war has done is reinforce that the basis of people living together isn’t the relationships between people. It’s the material conditions of their lives. Rather than run our countries on the ridiculous notion of all having to reach agreement on things (impossible), it would be much saner to get rid of that and focus on whether the material conditions of our lives are healthy, or not. That’s objectively measurable, and independent of opinion and belief.

This article is from within the LGBT community. Mostly the T, which is where the rot started and continues. It’s destroying that movement. The URL plays up, but here it is: https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/the-needless-self-sabotaging-lies-of-the-lgbt-movement?twclid=2eje3emsvimml30fh6hac8ynzl

The robots are coming, and fast (literally). Driven mostly by the Chinese and their engineering genius. But also by Tesla. They’re going to change the world in fundamental ways.

Have a car nut friend who desperately wants an X5. He didn't appreciate this.

This guy traces the shift from institutions that build things, which we saw after WW2 in massive ‘nation-building’ efforts. To today, where nothing gets built. Where the main social activity is obstructing change, saying ‘no’ to everything. What he calls a ‘vetocracy’ - the power to veto anything. And sadly, for those whom Left vs Right replaced Protestant vs Catholic as some sort of ordering principle of the universe, the shift happened across the board. The Right oppose everything because it represents high status minorities, who want to be free of regulation. The Left oppose everything (they say) to ‘speak truth to power’, to hold power accountable. Everybody just says no, to everything. That’s the countercultural revolution I post about, the massive shift to kidult society, where adult life became a giant, unending high school. Who says no to everything? Toddlers and adolescents. They have little power to do anything, except refuse things. To say ‘no’. That’s our whole culture now. We build nothing. We say no to everything. That’s our fight for status, we use problems as a stage to fight those status battles on. Not to fix the problems. Kidult culture.

Trump’s idiot adventures in Iran are dramatically accelerating this shift. I’ve posted a lot here about how cultures need to be broken, catastrophically, to make meaningful change. Otherwise status always rules, the status quo, everybody’s habitual way of doing things, that protects their status. Which is also their identity. Now the brutal realities are hitting, expect to see the anti-EV and anti-renewables crowd either dig in even harder and then be swept away. Or do a triple somersault and double twist with their beliefs, pretending they were on the side of the change all along.

As of right now, no ‘deal’ looks close either, so we’re not even at the point where things like mine clearing could start. And even though the price of fuel has moderated slightly, we’re at the critical point where the last international reserves are running dry. Much more pain to come, potentially. Trump is dramatically accelerating the destruction of the fossil fuel status quo, the exact opposite of what he wants to do. He’s a useful idiot.

I’ve been using Tesla’s supervised self-driving for my entire round trip to work each day, a 130km commute on both urban and regional roads. It’s been absolutely flawless. Coming down Tunnel Hill in Lithgow yesterday, with the difficult to spot merging lane on the left, the car saw what was coming down the lane and calmly changed lanes to let them merge, before changing back again. It’s far smoother than any human driver in how it accelerates, brakes, steers and negotiates traffic. I love that they’ve coded it not just to be boring either. It will estimate when you can ‘run’ an amber light safely, and do it. It somehow seems to know when there’s a dickhead next to you at the red light, and will accelerate more quickly away. People will find every tiny mistake it might make and blow it up into ‘you can’t trust this’. The number of idiot things human drivers do every day has never disqualified humans from driving, even though it should have. Vastly more incidents happen, proportionally, as a result of human driving. And mistakes from FSD are captured for corrective updates, unlike human drivers. It also leaves you dramatically more calm and relaxed after a drive, because it’s taking a lot of the load, you’re just having to supervise. It’s the reason we’ve had autopilot on planes, for decades. (For those who imagine people dozing off or reading a book instead of supervising, the car won’t allow it. It watches your eyes, and if you’re not paying attention it warns you. If you continue to not pay attention, it turns off self-driving.)

This is what the counterculture produced. There was an assumption that we didn’t have peace on Earth because people chose not to have it. So if we just sang a song about peace on Earth, maybe people would change their mind and have peace. The full naive stupidity of this (which McCartney didn’t believe in anyway) didn’t occur to many then and still doesn’t today. Kidult culture, where everything is personal, and if we all just felt more positive and nice things, all of our problems would go away.

Interesting that it doesn't say here that Valentine chose Voluntary Assisted Dying to end his life. Oesophageal cancer is another one to watch, if you've had Covid. Reflux is one of the major effects of Covid infection. I'll be on reflux blockers for several months more yet, even though my 'mild' infection was at the end of last year. You'll be lucky to get Panadol from most GPs, for Covid. RIP James. A great radio performer. Also once said people need to embrace adult life, when it arrives. Can't argue with that.

Happy Birthday, Tim! 🎂🥳👯

Happy Birthday, Mark! 🎊🎁🎈

A street in Shanghai. Teslas abound, because EVs abound. China doesn't have the obstructive adolescent whine of social media to prevent social progress.

To reframe the debates around Council rates. They’re framed in these debates as costs to residents, charges. Like buying something at a shop. But Council rates are really public investments. They fund infrastructure that enables the community to grow in all sorts of other ways. They’re not a one-off charge, like buying a restaurant meal or take-away, or going to see a show, or taking a trip. Those are much greater costs for most residents, discretionary one-off payments that create no longer-term investment in community life. They’re lifestyle costs. I’ve shared here before the relative spend from most residents on these two ‘costs’. The average household is spending many multiples of what it pays in rates, on lifestyle costs. We’re not investing in community, we’re funding individual lifestyles. Again, that’s kidult culture. ‘Living our best lives’. Like a town is a tourist resort. Civilisation comes from public *investment*. In the infrastructure of collective life, that generates more community facility, over time.

Think I shared a video from ‘Mr Carlson’s Lab’ before. I love these, though many would find them technical and dry, because he’s an example of somebody with sublime mastery of a highly complex thing, in this case electronics. Incredible mastery, he speaks and acts with ease in areas that would bewilder most. He often restores old electronic goods, in this case an old high-end radio set from the 1930s, that rich families in the US might have owned. This massive set is nearly 100 years old, but as he shows it kicks arse even by today’s standards. It includes something called ‘high fidelity AM radio’, something I’d never heard of, that makes AM radio sound as full as an FM signal. He demonstrates it, it’s amazing. The bigger thing for me here is the level of expertise and accumulated knowledge needed to run even the most basic things in our lives. And how invisible and increasingly completely disrespected that expertise and knowledge is. We engineered modern life so well that people think it happens all by itself, by magic. The people and institutions with that expertise are increasingly abused and told they’re ‘elites’, and instead we should listen to moron influencers on social media, or fish and chip shop owners. Or suburban accountants that are besties with billionaires, who put on oversized cowboy hats and ride through the regions telling rural and regional folk windmills are the end of civilisation.

It’s difficult to comment on this because so many people have had their lives transformed by this funding. But to put things into perspective here, the NDIS is currently costing $15 billion more per year than the entire Medicare system. And those costs were still growing, almost exponentially. The NDIS currently applies to 2.8% of the Australian population. How do people in any basic arithmetic way think it’s sustainable for a system that supports 2.8% of Australians to cost more than the entire Medicare system for all Australians? At a time when that entire population is ageing badly and demands on the wider health system are growing enormously. Something has to give, our beliefs and feelings are decoupled from reality.

When you add AI to autonomous driving, it becomes much more than just a car negotiating staying inside the lines at the right speed. It's constantly analysing all of the traffic around you and predicting what it might do. It's incredibly fun to watch it do this, yesterday afternoon I saw it planning many steps ahead while it assessed cars and trucks in multiple lanes. Sometimes you wonder, why is it doing this? And only a few seconds later it becomes clear, things you never would have seen as a driver.

When you use popularity as the way to select leaders of anything, don't be surprised when the whole system evolves to a state of permanent turnover. You only last as long as you 'trend'. Nobody is paying the slightest bit of attention to the practical work to be done. Starmer had a record landslide victory only 2 years ago.

The news celebrated Australia finding another 100 million litres of diesel yesterday. It didn’t say that’s enough only for one DAY of normal demand. There’s no resolution in Iran. Supplies are almost gone. This is Covid v2, where the magnitude of the clusterfuck is ignored in favour of just telling everybody to be calm and carry on, and ‘live with’ the catastrophe. Australia isn’t even rationing fuel. Kidults can’t deal with challenge. Living with no fuel should be a hoot.

In the US, home of ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’, they’re not drilling. The entire Anglo world is beginning to experience what happens when you try to deal with realities using nothing but political slogans and spin.

Kidult culture is a culture of the ‘feels’. Reality is ignored. Then when it arrives and everything collapses, kidults get violent. A collective tantrum.

We’re not ‘living with’ Covid. It’s continuing to destroy our health. Long Covid is now the most common chronic disease suffered by children, surpassing asthma. And we allowed this and still do nothing for what reason? Because the challenge of fixing it was bad for our ‘mental health’. Meaning it denied us eating out at restaurants, and travelling the globe, and going to gigs. I’m seriously over people not seeing kidult culture for what it is. A permanent gap year from reality, perpetual adolescence, allergic to any sort of adult challenge. A culture that deliberately infects its own shrinking number of children - all of them, an entire generation - to protect its lifestyle, is a dead culture.

Originally Anzac Day was a day of solemn mourning, and marches were often near silent as many who lined the streets were relatives of those who died. It was like a symbolic funeral. It started in 1916, in the middle of a world war. Bizarrely you can see in the image they were also advertising for new recruits, during the march itself. Today Anzac Day is at a bit of a crossroads. For many Australians there’s no connection with its history, and historians point out more Australians died in our own frontier wars than in all of the offshore wars we took part in in the 20th century, combined. War is usually innocent young people dying for a fight that isn’t theirs. Between rival elites, home and abroad. That’s what we forget. I honour them. They should never have died.

In that true Aussie tradition of innovation and hard yakka, we’ll do nothing and wait for the Chinese to be the adults in the room, for us.

You’d think an original comes first, and then copies of the original. But without copies, there’s no such thing as an original. Imitation always comes first, as Miles says.

The Welcome to Country has become a rallying point for the nation’s Paulines, and her banker, Gina. You see it at local council level too, with the local Paulines, have a watch. Some councillors sit down before it’s even finished, out of contempt. To all the Paulines out there, remember that makes you a Trumpie. Pauline is just Trump-lite. If you’re proud to be a Trumpie too, maybe move to the US, and we can get some of their brutalised, decent people here as a swap for you.

A photo of Chifley Road without Andrew Gee or Paul Toole could be worth a fortune.

A common anti-EV myth is that we’ll need vastly more electricity, if we all shift to EVs. EVs use 3-4 times less energy to travel the same distance, as combustion cars. 70-80% of the petrol or diesel you put in your tank is never used to move your vehicle. It disappears as heat out your exhaust and radiator.

During this energy crisis, I think it’s helpful for more of us to know the basic (mind-boggling) numbers behind the fossil fuel world we’ve all grown up in. Here’s a just a few. The world uses 16 BILLION litres of fossil fuels, per DAY. Let that sink in. Australia uses about 200 million litres of fossil fuels every day. About 6500 fuel tanker trucks are needed per DAY in Australia, just to move that fuel to where it’s needed. Those trucks burn about a *million* litres of diesel themselves, per DAY, just to move the fuel around. Once delivered, 70-80% of all of that fuel is wasted, when burned. Released to the atmosphere as heat and pollution, unused. The whole system is hilariously and grossly inefficient. And ruinously expensive. But people defend it.

Trump just cancelled peace talks with Iran. Israel just renewed bombing in Lebanon. Got your EV yet?

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯; 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘩𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧, 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤 𝘵𝘦𝘢 𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘢 𝘥𝘰𝘰𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘭𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭𝘴 𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘢𝘭𝘮. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘣𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘸𝘢𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴, 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘴, 𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘭 𝘢 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯. 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘴, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘵; 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘪𝘯𝘩𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘵. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘱𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺. 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮 𝘰𝘧 𝘪𝘮𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘥, 𝘺𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥. Proust completely inverted our ideas about immortality. He saw it residing in physical things, not spiritual. Many cultures have had similar intuitions, believing ‘souls’ are enveloped in objects. Proust describes the experiences that show this, which we all experience every day.

A lovely indication of just how sophisticated Tesla self-driving has become. The driver here wasn’t sure why their Tesla had pulled up well short of the Stop sign. Then it became clear - the car had seen the car-carrying truck coming and knew it would need more space to get around the corner. It gets even better, as the truck comes around the corner the Tesla realises it needs to leave a bit more space, and backs up gently. It then moves forward again before the truck has even gone passed, calculating the gap perfectly. All very gentle, and precise.

I talk about Tesla a lot because what it’s doing isn’t publicised much. It’s literally reinventing not just driving, but business and culture. Everything it does uses data in ways to reinforce everything else it’s doing. The driver becomes part of a network, in a folded web of mutually-enriching feedback. Like here, self-driving is folded into car insurance, so that use of it and the driver’s safe performance on the road reduces premiums directly. In a vertically integrated way i.e. Tesla provides the insurance, not a third party. At the same time roads become much, much safer, humans really are hopeless drivers, despite their belief in the opposite. They play status games on the roads, they’re not networked to other drivers and act alone, and they’re unable to pay attention in 8-9 directions at once, across multiple dimensions. It’s why commercial flight made this shift decades ago, despite pilots being well trained. The skies have never been safer, since. Tesla is doing something much more sophisticated than that, for driving.

Towards the end of my time at CSU, it took on a visionary project called Smart Learning (SL). I mention it because the ideas behind Smart Learning were more or less identical to the ideas that run Tesla, as a company. It’s a major reason for my fascination with Tesla, it has nothing to do with being a ‘fan’. Kidults assume you’re a fan of something, if you like it, it’s all team sports for them. What both SL and Tesla propose is to weave together in mutually reinforcing ways: - the research and theory behind the things you do - the design of how your organisation runs, and - the way your organisation operates day to day. Not just as separate factors to take into account. All of the above have to be mutually co-dependent, feeding into each other in real time, with ‘emergent’ data. Instead of ‘drilling down’ into endless reports and data, and trying to figure out how to apply it to what your organisation does, the data emerges from the interactions between all of the aspects of what your organisation does. That emergence is designed, you design the organisation so that the data doesn’t need interpreting. It’s feedback for the designed relationships. Smart Learning failed at CSU. It ran aground on the human baseline - status. It threatened existing status hierarchies, who then mobilised to kill it. It could have incorporated status into the design, and that’s why Tesla fascinates me. Because it’s done that. I will keep posting about them, because they’ve cracked the code civilisation thought was impossible. It’s that important. It’s not even about their cars or other products, they’re just components of what it’s doing. CSU could have been a global player, the dominant player in all global education. Instead it’s now reverted to what it had become pre-SL. An endless meeting that decides nothing and produces no meaningful action. Just a daily venue for the various staff to perform their status inside.

Autumn is nearly two-thirds over. The leaves on the deciduous trees at my place and around it are not only not falling off, they haven’t even changed colour yet, in many instances. The people who deny climate change are just more hot air the world doesn’t need. Look out your window. Winter will cease to exist in Australia by 2050, on current projections. Let that sink in. WINTER WILL CEASE TO EXIST. That’s a catastrophe. Except for kidult culture, which will celebrate extra warmth for more ‘living our best lives’ in the great outdoors.

The cost of the cut to fuel excise is about the same as what the battery rebate scheme cost. Annual subsidies for diesel fuel cost 3 times what the battery rebate scheme cost.

Me practising guitar about 40 years ago. The key to mastery of something is to practice so much that it becomes habitual, and then innovation can arise from that automatic set of habits. In my life more generally, I’ve realised this is also why I mostly dislike travel. Ordinary life is my favourite thing. Routine. The routine of ordinary everyday life is ‘practising’ life. Allowing it to become habitual. Only from that can something meaningfully new and magical emerge. Travel is endless distraction. Living at the surface of things, ‘seeing the sights’. It’s not life lived deeply. It’s like giving a kid a guitar who’s never played and asking them to improvise with a master. Asian culture gets this, the focus on the ordinary, the mundane. Extracting ‘events’ from it, novelty and surprise, through that long habitual apprenticeship in the ordinary.

Tiny numbers of people drive all social activity. For example, the ‘love the sound of a combustion engine’ crowd is absolutely tiny, compared to the number of drivers on the road. Listen to all modern cars, the most noise nearly all of them make is the tyres on the road. And one of the most popular selling points of modern cars is their silence, inside and out. Huge research and investment has gone into making them quieter, which also makes them much more efficient (the noise is just wasted energy). And *everybody* tries to live somewhere where you CAN’T hear noisy combustion engines. It’s a train wreck for property values, because the noise is terrible. For this tiny sub-culture of boy racers, that noise has always meant ‘grunt’. That is objectively bananas, in the engineering reality. The noise is wasted energy, it’s the exact opposite of grunt. The louder your car is, the less powerful it is. And yet this TINY group, and the towing crowd (also tiny, and often the same man-babies) dominate the obstructive hysteria we hear about EVs.

Our native Trumpies/Paulines, even at local government level, are maybe not reading the room. At our last election, being associated in any way with Trump was electoral poison. In the US the collapse is well underway.

I asked my friend who is a Covid physician of international renown how much he’s able to help people who come to him with Covid issues. (He’s overrun with patients, it’s out of control.) He said “at best I can return 80% of them to 80% of their former health.” Almost none regain their full health. He then said “if they get reinfected, all bets are off.” So many consistently sick people out there now who are not getting better, and have no idea why. Look what it’s doing to lifespan.

Asking EV drivers to pay a road user charge is like asking people who give up smoking to pay extra tax to make up for the tax revenue lost from them no longer buying cigarettes. Countries making progress with EVs look at Australia and laugh.

This is just the fuel. The fertiliser situation is possibly an even bigger catastrophe. Crops can’t be planted.

You can wish people weren’t so gullible, that they believe all of the total rubbish coming out of shock jock journalism every day. For example this one. Australian government employment as a proportion of total employment is amongst the *lowest* in the OECD. It’s completely made up. And motivated. Look, if it’s a sensational headline, let me help you. It’s almost certainly BULLSHIT. Paid for by vested interests who want to obstruct things that get in the way of them piling up vast amounts of money.

75% of Trump voters in focus groups are now saying they wish they hadn’t voted for him. In Australia the local Trumpies like Pauline are slow to realise they’re on a sinking ship. Many Australians may still vote for them because they haven’t had the direct experience of the disaster of Trumpism in practice. Though you’d reckon the mess with fuel prices might wake them up.

Outside all of the sponsored fake debates that social media society mistakes for reality, things are happening. Big things. A revolution. Quite seriously, don’t live to regret being the person who shouted at windmills like Don Quixote, when your grandkids ask about the revolution you lived through. Ignore human debates. They’re all fake, hot air. Look to the material realities.

You won’t find an AI platform that would put out dangerous rubbish like this. Only social media, where reality itself is just chips in a status poker game. Social media is infinitely more dangerous than AI, because it destroys centuries of experience and expertise with influencer slop-swill.

Look at the ad spend for Tesla, compared to other car brands. It's almost non-existent. It also does very little PR. The downside of that is people don't get to see the real novelty of what they're doing. They put the huge dollars they save back into R&D. Why I think we need to understand Tesla, they're re-designing not only cars, but how to do business and how to even run a society. Tesla is replacing not just marketing, but also the idea that humans first discuss and debate things, and then they build a society from those discussions. That's nonsense. Tesla builds things that are constantly improving with use, by making users and their data part of the technology network itself. It's mutually reinforcing, and it means knowledge is woven into societies, and grows with use. Things get continuously better and smarter. It is Tesla's mission statement, 'amazing abundance'. I don't like mission statements, but Tesla walks the talk. It's trying to create a world of amazing abundance, where everything continuously improves everything else, in use, in real time.

Happy Birthday, Skye! 🌟🥳

You could say what a tangled web. But it isn't very tangled.

The energy market regulator has a dilemma. Paying for network upkeep is done on the basis of a daily supply charge based on how much electricity people use. But because millions of Australians have now installed solar and batteries, their usage is very low or even zero (or they're next exporters to the grid). The genius current 'plan' from the regulator is to give everybody a much bigger, fixed daily supply charge, to make up the gap. This is outrageously stupid in a couple of ways. Mostly because it will mean that a large wealthy household, with no solar or batteries, using a lot of electricity, will have a dramatic drop in their bills. While a poorer household that's invested in solar and batteries will pay hundreds of dollars more per year. It's like the argument that EVs should have a road user charge because they're apparently freeloading on road maintenance (because they don't pay fuel excise). Australians are investing in renewable technology and EVs to transform the economy and stop us being incinerated by climate change, at the same time. Taxes and penalties should be concentrated on the fossil fuel, non-renewable behaviours.

I’ve posted about CAR T-cell therapy a few times. It works. Not for all forms of cancer, or at least not yet. But for some, it looks like being an actual cure. Knowledge changes lives. The only thing that ever does.

The ocean currents that circulate heat in and out of the northern hemisphere are showing signs of collapse, due to global heating. This could mean Europe having drought for centuries, as the waters there cool and reduce evaporation and rainfall.

We’re running on fumes. US reserves of oil are being drained to maintain life as normal elsewhere. As Javier says, it won’t last.

If we are going to stick with the idiocy of voting, let’s trial a new system where only the ladies get to vote, for three terms of government. Then the blokes, for three terms. And compare the outcomes. And who knew that a mechanism to sound the ‘will of the people’ is just used to reinforce existing social status battles inside societies? Bugger me.

No donor left behind.

Reopening of the Strait of Hormuz won’t restore an instant supply of oil. Apparently many of the oil wells there are low pressure wells, which clog up with a whole range of things if the flow stops. Possibly permanent damage. Possibly sky-high fuel prices for years.

Remember, if you vote for Pauline, you're voting for this.

Aussie trucking firm Centurion, with some of its new fleet of electric trucks. Engineering and economics beats bullshit every time.

Why do I post so much about Tesla? They don't talk about the enormity of what they've done. You don't need to be any sort of fan to appreciate it, it will change the world, all of the world (well beyond cars) and it's only slowly dawning on others how they're doing it. We usually think of cars as mechanical devices with certain properties. Tesla threw that idea away. Tesla sees cars as part of a vast knowledge/data landscape. They're at the centre of our lives and therefore of a vast ocean of information, almost none of which the car industry has ever used, or even realised. GPS navigation was only a tiny step towards liberating data from our car universes (and it had enormous business and social impact). Tesla goes MUCH further. It doesn't think of cars individually, it sees them as part of a networked fleet of other vehicles. The data their vehicles collect every second is able to analysed, fed into models and then returned to *all* vehicles in a fleet for upgrades. That means the learning of what happens even to only one car can be shared with millions of others. The whole fleet gets smarter, continuously. But they also see their cars themselves not as nuts and bolts, but as made of knowledge too. They constantly change them physically using their huge R&D and data from the cars in use. Tesla transforms the world into a continuously enriching ecosystem of knowledge. This is still only the tip of the iceberg.

Copernicus skewered the human vanity that placed us at the centre of the universe. The vanity remained and quickly moved to our brains and thinking. AI is the new Copernicus. Data here showing that AI comprehensively beat experienced physicians in an emergency department real-time setting, for both diagnosis and case management.

Lovely example of how the socials create a fantasy world, separate to the real world. This lady represents farmers who want to embrace renewables. Many of them won’t speak up because social media gives the impression they’re a minority. They’re an overwhelming majority. Social media is a bullshit pump, funded by people who don’t want a change to a status quo that makes them rich and powerful. It creates fake hysteria and ‘debate’, to obstruct change. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-30/renewable-energy-transition-support-study-australia-victoria/106615850

Quite a few years ago service stations began to look like mini-supermarkets. They were ‘diversifying’ their revenue (they make bugger all from the petrol and diesel, that all goes offshore). What the service station industry has now realised is that EV charging will be a boon for them. People may need to stop for longer to charge, making them much more receptive to what the inside shop has to offer. And they don’t have to buy expensive toxic muck from offshore and have it tankered in to fill hugely expensive underground tanks. And they need no hugely expensive pumps.