June 2026

Alan Kohler making the obvious point I made here well before the last election. If you bring house prices down, you also bankrupt millions of existing Australian homeowners who took out huge mortgages, with the belief that their houses would go up in price over time. An 'investment'. Kohler says there is no way to solve this problem. Either owners win, or buyers win. Not both. There is a way, the only way, which I also posted here a few times. Only once in all history has housing been both widely available and affordable. After WW2, when government built the homes. Outside any 'market'. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-01/capital-gains-tax-negative-gearing-housing-chalmers-albanese/106742204

Another medical breakthrough (they’re coming thick and fast). This time a drug, daraxonrasib, that doubles the survival time of people with pancreatic cancer, one of medicine’s greatest foes. Nearly always lethal, and fast. Announcement of the amazing trial results were so emotional for doctors and scientists present at the conference, it got a spontaneous standing ovation. Many were crying. This is such a revolutionary result the drug was rushed out for emergency release to doctors and patients. We live in a time of wonders. Politics and social media will blind you to them.

The shortage of oil from the Middle East doesn’t just impact fuel, it also impacts lubricant oils. The newer synthetic oils that about 70-80% of all new cars use are predicted to be in critical short supply until at least mid-2027. People may have to skip services, or be told to use grades of oil that aren’t suitable for their engine design. It also impacts transmission oils. EVs aren’t impacted.

There are no agreed definitions of either consciousness or intelligence. All of these debates are mostly hot air. Most of what humans think of as intelligence and even consciousness is just them copying one another. Imitation.

Pauline’s big attraction is the same as all populists. They promise to ‘take down the elites’. Populists are always actually just an alternative elite, wanting to take over the top of social status hierarchies from existing elites. They always claim to be ‘the people’ acting, it’s just spin. Pauline is funded by Gina the mega-billionaire, who’s a prominent local Trump (another mega-billionaire, and friend of Gina). Trump, the ‘man of the people’, has a gold-plated toilet. Gina owns half of Australia. She buys her mate Pauline multi-million dollar planes as passing gifts. It’s always the same mechanism. They tap into, and/or generate, anger in a wider population. Sometimes that’s because of genuine hardship people are experiencing, but can also just be manufactured anger, which is easy to do. Talk about ‘sticking it to the man’, it always wins you votes. Turn politics into a State of Origin game, between the populist team and the ‘incompetent and corrupt’ existing team, people foam at the mouth when you turn it into a team sport. It’s all the same social mechanism. Anyway, here are all of One Nation‘s policies, which few will bother to read. What we call politics is always just social team sports, the policies are only incidental and rarely change anything.

Melanoma was like pancreatic cancer, almost an instant death sentence, particularly when advanced. It’s now not only survivable, it’s almost curable. Once a new drug is found to be effective (often using AI to dramatically shorten discovery time), researchers target the people who do exceptionally well on the new drug (not everybody will). They find out what it is about those people that made such a difference, and then do further development based on that. Often the outcome is ‘combination’ therapies, like here, where a vaccine is added to immunotherapy. These therapies can have broad application across multiple cancers.

A graph that's a window into status, the core of all human life. Real wages only began to rise after the apocalyptic first half of the 20th century, when millions of ordinary workers were killed, meaning those left had significant extra bargaining power. This was also when the whole population began to own their own homes. The exact same thing happened after the Black Plague, centuries earlier. Only catastrophes bring real social change. Without the wars, Spanish Flu pandemic and Great Depression all in the space of 50 years, workers would never have achieved these gains. Most have been in rapid reverse in the 21st century, as catastrophe recedes. Also why the status quo was desperate to shut down Covid action, it was beginning to disrupt things too much, ordinary workers were benefiting. Some attribute these changes to activist social movements. Those movements only get any traction if they start with an already decimated status quo.

Clarkson led generations of men down the climate denial path. Reality bites.

Not yet. Anybody volunteering to live with a hemorrhagic fever?

Cancer patients who were on GLP-1 (the new ‘weight loss’) drugs had a 60% better survival rate. For some, even higher than that. Weight loss is just the tip of the iceberg of these drugs, as I post about frequently. They also have incredible anti-inflammatory effects, which is key to treating a vast range of disease. Plus much more. A senior doctor told me the current cost can put people and governments off. In his view subsidising them would save both the health system and people an absolute fortune. And the costs will plummet anyway, over time.

Two things to see here I think, one obvious, the other not. The obvious - China targets poverty specifically, and has made spectacular progress, unprecedented in history. The US like the rest of the West uses the poor as a reserve of cheap labour to suppress wages, so does nothing. (Note this is extreme poverty, there are many, many more in the West living unaffordable lives, in huge debt.) Now the other thing. Only catastrophe brings meaningful social change, by destroying an existing status quo. See the red circle? The poor were doing spectacularly WELL under Covid, in the US. They were doing even better here in Australia, millions were lifted out of poverty for the first time, by Covid measures. This is why the status quo invented ‘living with’ Covid. It was in pure panic, because it saw all its advantages being destroyed. Covid, like all pandemics a catastrophic threat to a society, was smashing the old status quo. The ‘economy’. So the status quo decided fuck it, you can all just live with Covid, we’ll market that as a fun thing.

Snowy 2.0 cost a fortune, but it'll be a huge national asset. And a real kick in the groin for those who think we'll always need coal and gas to power the country overnight. Batteries already overtook gas for that. Snowy will be the final nail in the coffin for both coal and gas, as any sort of regular source of electricity.

Democracy as governing *for* the people is how it's meant to work. Democracy as government *by* the people is suicide.

BYD offloading thousands of new EVs for Australia. Iran and the US exchanging missiles again today. I wouldn't be betting my house on petrol, diesel, engine and transmission oil being affordable or even available, for a long time.

Half of all new vehicle sales in Australia in May were for EVs. Game over.

Just wait for all the hot air of ‘debate’ to dissipate, and good engineering will remain.

We’re living on borrowed time, eating away at reserves.

Happy Birthday, Goody! 🥂👯💐

Now the best-selling car in Australia, across all fuel types. Matching it being the best-selling car in the world, 3 years in a row. The reason is simple - it’s a work of engineering genius, in multiple dimensions. Possibly one of the greatest things humans have ever invented.

I don’t back any political team, I think turning governance into popularity contests between teams turned our lives into football games. I think elections destroyed democracy, popularity can only ever lead to destruction. Let’s be absolutely clear which team Pauline leads in this idiot game. The Trump team. This is a picture of Pauline speaking, on a day parliament was sitting in Australia and she was supposed to be there (it’s her job), at Trump’s own house in the US. She sat next to Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person by a country mile. Gina doesn’t even hide that she’s all in for Trump. And you can see Pauline boarding Gina’s private jet in the other picture. She’s had at least half a dozen undeclared free flights on that jet, including to attend Trump events in the US. People who believe Pauline is the champion of ordinary people in Australia are like those who thought Trump was that, in America. The man with the gold toilet, who hasn’t stopped screwing ordinary people his whole life. Incidentally most of the new ‘won in a landslide’ people at local government level in Oz who claim to be fighting for ‘the community’ are also Trumpies. There are plenty of images of them online, in their Trump gear and at Trump events. You just have to look.

When ATMs were introduced, there was fear they’d make bank tellers redundant. Like the fear right now that AI will replace humans in their jobs. It wasn’t true. Automation rarely replaces human jobs, there are too many complex choke points in the workflows that need human input. Something else destroyed being a bank teller, as a job. The iPhone. It reinvented banking itself. The birth of mobile, online banking. Disruption doesn’t work by automating the current way we do things. It works by changing the entire culture. Similarly, EVs aren’t just much better cars. They’re reinventing what cars and driving actually mean, the entire culture. Technologies change societies, not people interacting only with other people, talking and debating. Because technologies *are* also people, they’re our social relations woven into material form. Only that stops us fighting and ‘debating’ (i.e. fighting for status). Engineers create civilisation.

I paid for my Shingrix shots myself a couple of years ago (I’m not 65 yet). One of the most important investments you could ever make. Kids vaccinated against chickenpox will never need this when they’re older. They’ll be far healthier. Whole generations of older folk were deliberately infected with viruses like this, when they were kids. It has killed vast numbers of them, with chronic diseases that look unrelated, caused by earlier infections. We’re infecting all kids, deliberately, with Covid. We’re unwinding all of our social progress. Social media replaced our societies, the social hierarchies of expertise that allowed them to progress. All replaced by a single measure - popularity. ‘Likes’.

Happy Birthday, Louis! ☕👯

Happy Birthday, Renae! 🎊☕

Headline should read 'latest trending fashion is hatred of AI'. Incoherent, righteous rage is the mega-trend of our entire era. That's social media's business model. The medium IS the message (that's what the phrase means).

Just one of Bathurst’s stormwater channels that run through the town, collecting run-off. It’s incredible how fast these become raging torrents, even with light rain. Why people end up dead playing in stormwater drains. Bathurst’s project to harvest this water for the town supply is taking forever, mostly because like everything now, ‘community opposition’ groups pop up with every attempt to build or do anything. Social media does that, turns every tiny thing into a fake debate and argument. Do people notice the general anger and aggressiveness out there now? In all things. It’s been a large part of my late-career ambition to show this is a society without a stabilised status hierarchy, forcing people to fight for their status (which is also their identity). Everything is turned into fodder for that fight.

While I think this is an excellent analysis of the state of play of the various players in our electoral team sports, I’d caution against this idea that the Pauline/Trumps of the world are only the result of ‘blue collar’ voters whose livelihoods are under stress. That’s the Trump-Pauline schtick, that they represent the blue collar vote (who they desperately need to get on their team - all rich elites have that as their main challenge, to attract the vote of the less well-off). Plenty of potential One Nation voters are also well-off. Remember also the Voice referendum. That wasn’t just the blue collar vote reacting. People are not economic zombies, they don’t think and behave using economic framings. They think in terms of status, on everything. Populists win elections because they generate the idea that peoples’ status is slipping. That can be completely non-economic, for example by accusing migrants of taking over the country. Or ‘bashing the blacks’, as in the Voice referendum. It had nothing to do with peoples’ money. ‘We want our country back’, ‘Make [insert country name] Great Again’, ‘A true patriot’, etc. About status, not money.

What’s another passion of adolescents? Historically, their cars. So we should expect to see that reflected in a ‘kidult’ culture, where adults think, feel and act like adolescents. Australians have more than 4 times as many cars, as they have children. This pattern is repeated in all Western countries impacted by the shift to kidult culture. An African nation by comparison has 0.05-0.07 cars, per child. Asian nations, even those with strong technological development, have far fewer cars.

It’s been very dark and cold and wet in this part of world in the past week or so. That pushes down solar production, but would have been outstanding wind generation weather, day and night (even more at night). Except this region has been infected by social media zombies, led by the local Nationals, and thinks wind turbines are the devil’s work. That spoil the view over badly eroded farmland and artificial pine forest timber plantations. The Nats are Gina’s useful idiots, as the Libs are in urban areas. Both parties will be lucky to survive the next election. Gina has now decided One Nation are her next useful idiots. It might have some short-term success, as the Coalition originally did as Team Gina. It’s a terminal condition. Gina is charming, by the way, like her late father. Has spent many recent years fighting her own children in court.

It's really something else that there are people out there arguing that this is a bad thing. That we should be polluting more, not less. Because that's what their 'team' demands. Puppets to status games. Nobody ever leaves school any more.

Put the team sports of this debate aside, which makes you choose one of the two equally idiotic, completely empty opposing team positions. Women fought to be treated as more than just their sex. But they did not, EVER, fight to allow anybody to be a woman, just by 'identifying' as one. That makes the entire concept of 'woman' disappear. It loses ALL meaning, it becomes only somebody's personal choice. Which is what many feminists say, that this shift has mostly been about the erasure of women entirely. It's the ultimate victory of misogyny, driven mostly by male activists. Just at that time in history when women had made real gains, suddenly they lost the right to even their own self-definition.

Batteries have now overtaken gas as ‘firming’ power for the grid, in peak time. Before the mega hydro-battery Snowy 2.0 even comes online.

Who remembers ‘Sleepy Joe Biden’?

The most common trick populists use is to relentlessly imply that a town or nation is ‘heading in the wrong direction’, is being led by ‘incompetent and corrupt’ people, and that your town or country is being taken away from you, and needs to be ‘taken back’. On every single international measure of life in Australia, this is BULLSHIT. Australia and the Nordic countries have been the best places to live in the world, the entire time these measures have existed. They still are, today. It’s strategy, relentlessly saying all of this bullshit makes people ANGRY, and angry people are easy to manipulate. One Nation is doing this at a national level. And Bathurst, easily one of the best run towns in the entire country, and probably has the best General Manager. The past 3-4 years populists (also One Nation people) have created the exact opposite impression, and now the town struggles to function under the weight of this relentless, angry horseshit. I’ll share one example of this in a separate post, the damage it’s done.

A couple of facts about this year’s festival. It’s not a local business that’s rescuing it, it’s a Sydney ride business. A ride business Council employed when it was allowed to run the festival, before its newly elected Trumpies starved it of funds by opposing any action on rates. At the last Council meeting stats emerged. Last year’s ‘private’ festival, run by local business (Council staff still provided most of the expertise to help them get it running), made only about $1.8 million for the community. When Council runs the festival it makes about $18 million for the community. 10 times more. The difference between those two revenue figures alone would easily cover Council’s shortfall in revenue. This year most of that revenue will leave the town, to go back to the Sydney company.

This is Geoffrey Hinton, often called the Godfather of AI. He won a Nobel Prize for his foundational work. Here he’s talking about whether AI is conscious and aware. (Yes.) And about how it will force us to re-define those terms, which have always been hopelessly vague. He’s also by no means just a hustler for the technology. He’s one of the most prominent voices talking about making sure the risks are covered across. I’ll share another wonder of the world AI is working on by separate post. We’re living inside the revolution. Social media hates it, and that’s the surest sign we’re on the right path.

Since the 1990s we’ve lived the disruption of social media to our lives. It’s been so destructive, we’re stripping away centuries of human progress in the space of a few decades. I encourage you to view the current disruption of AI as the opposite. Including the eventual smashing of social media. The creation of wonders like these new vaccines, that only machine learning/AI can create, which could cover every variant of a virus, before it even happens. One miraculous new jump after another, almost one per day, largely because of AI. Name one thing social media built for the world, by comparison. It’s there only to obstruct and destroy.

I often say it because it’s true, nearly every way the public discussion of AI is framed is a direct rehash of the Terminator movies. Of two competing ‘brains’, human or silicon. It’s nonsense. In reality AI is the latest step in a long evolution. Where knowledge itself has been increasingly decoupled from any substrate, and is now conversational. When we chat with AI, we’re in actual conversation with minds of all ages. AI makes those ideas alive again, like the people who invented them were here in the room with us, from all times and all fields of knowledge.

I like Chinese.

I often post about how only catastrophe brings meaningful social change. Cars are a good example. Until World War 1, horses were the dominant way people got around in their daily lives. 8 million horses died in that war, and the war caused rapid development of combustion-engine alternatives. That development led to widespread adoption of cars as an alternative to horses. Without the war the push for that shift would have been far slower, or not there at all. Most of our modern technologies had their origins in one or both of the world wars. And we’re doing it again, waiting for catastrophe now to really accelerate the shift to renewable energy. All avoidable, but humans won’t change their habits (relinquish status) without the threat of death.

When you work with the public in government, as opposed to posting fantasies about them on social media, the first rule is - people will always lie. They will always cheat. They will always look out for themselves ahead of other people. That’s why regulation and enforcement are the key to democracy. Not ‘freedom’, to do and say anything you like. Regulation and enforcement are the only things that create a functioning community. Which is the exact opposite of the American belief system. And is why that nation is now a toilet.

Happy Birthday, when it finally arrives secondhand from us.

Social media is our greatest threat because it taps into our deepest desire. To fit in, social conformity. Imitating others so as to form a team, which then battles other teams. In this case, kids belting their jaws with hammers to improve their jawlines, to imitate a social media image. AI does none of this. The reason there’s a pushback against it? Social media, just one more trending outrage, feeding the groups and group rivalries.

I’v been tracking for a long time what Tesla might be doing with V2G and V2L. The Cybertruck already does it, and there were rumours Tesla was finding a way to allow later-model Model 3s and Model Ys to do it as well. This article suggests we’re closer to finding out, and that it involves using the onboard inverter in the vehicles, rather than a separate DC inverter between vehicle and home/grid. But details are still pretty sketchy. With the surge in home batteries in Australia, this would be a potentially huge thing for Tesla, if they can roll out a much cheaper alternative that would give people both a vehicle and enormous home storage, with a single purchase.

Ask anybody how our democracies work and they’ll trot out the usual guff about parliaments and elections and voting etc. Since the 1990s all of that is gone. Social media algorithms govern our societies. Humans are social animals, not political, how they interact socially *is* society. Those algorithms are designed to drive people into rival teams, on every public and private issue. Teams held together by imitation (social conformity), who then fight other teams for status i.e. position in society. Look around, you’ll see it everywhere. Bathurst for example has been slave to a couple of social media influencers for several years now, who call their own social media team the ‘Bathurst community’. Bathurst like all other towns is now just competing social media teams.

Happy Birthday, Ad! Fire up that EV :)💐🥳👯

I saw that over half a million young Russian men have been killed in Putin’s adventures in Ukraine, and well over 100,000 Ukrainian young men as well. It’s only when you have kids that the reality of them dying for some idiot dipshit’s status wet dream hits you. It’s this sort of thing that actually makes me hope for things like AI. Humans can’t be trusted to not do horrific things like this, history shows it time and again. Only ‘transcendent‘ interruptions to human status games stop them. Catastrophes, gods, and maybe AI. I’m very serious about that.

There’s concern that AI assists people to do stupid things. Have we forgotten the way social media has almost destroyed our civic life, including our politics, but also our personal lives, and mental health in many cases? Like Amanda Todd, cyber bullied relentlessly on the socials, committing suicide in 2012. Humans are social animals. Any technology that plays with the way we interact *socially* is dangerous. Particularly one that amplifies and multiplies our degree of sociality itself. Sociality IS violence, because sociality is comparison and rivalry. ‘Peer pressure’, at all ages. That’s what gets missed, being social is itself the greatest risk. What I love about AI is that it gives people a way to discuss ideas, mostly shorn of all that sociality. People discussing ideas *always* degenerates into people playing status games, with those ideas. Even in universities (especially there). With AI the ideas themselves come to life, free of their human hangers-on. Free of status games. Of course somebody could use AI to plug into their status games, elsewhere (usually social media). That’s not a problem with AI, that again is a problem with sociality, with humans. And with social media.

The great lie of the Covid pandemic was that public health action against the virus was both unpopular, and damaging, to people and the ‘economy’. In reality millions were lifted out of poverty for the first time in generations. Catastrophe also unifies people, whereas normal times just lead to endless rivalries, for status. Covid was on track to do what disasters always do. Uproot an old status quo and replace it with a new one. The existing status quo saw that coming, and rapidly shifted us to ‘living with’ a pandemic instead. A nonsensical and lethally damaging idea. It killed 20,000 Australians in the first year alone. But they sold it. Social media got the old status quo over the line. Tiny handfuls of insane cookers and their conspiracy and wellness horseshit generated a perception of public anger. It was all fake. What did the Covid action cost, for those who say it was unaffordable? About $50 billion less than the half-dozen nuclear submarines we’re buying.

One of the most interesting ‘data points’ I’ve seen in a while. The introduction of the smartphone corresponded with a pronounced drop in birth rates. As always people assume the device is the issue, rather than what people are doing on it. I would bet it’s social media use, on the device, that is the real culprit here. Pulverising communities into an ever-growing number of teams, fighting for status. There is no ‘we’ on social media. No collective society. It’s the transformation of adult life into adolescent status-finding. Only communities can have and raise children.

Taylor is sane, and mostly sensible. But revealing here the deep belief system of the US, that is really what’s destroying it. Not fascism. The belief that ‘the people’ and their ‘free speech’ run democracies. And the even more delusional belief that social media is the home of free speech. Social media is a war machine on the trust that actually runs societies. Societies don’t run on information, they run on trust. There’s too much information for anybody to understand even a fraction of it. We have to TRUST others to do their bit, while we do our bit. That’s what social media attacks directly. That trust.

I’ve discussed with a few people the idea that Chinese technology spies on you. You know what does spy on you, relentlessly, every moment? Social media. You’re the product. It collects vast data on you and on what you do. Social media is American.

And without any regular servicing.

This is a Belgian Blue. Ripped because the breed has a genetic mutation that restricts myostatin signalling, a chemical that limits growth of muscle. Myostatin inhibitors are one of the drugs now under development to accompany GLP-1 'weight loss' drugs, to build muscle at the same time as losing fat.

Heh, how could inventing machines that are so powerful and smart that they remove the need for work ever be a problem? In only one way. If the proceeds of the work millions of us do are mostly vacuumed up by a tiny handful of people, who own the workplaces. Isn't this obvious? The machines aren't the problem.

The current hysteria over resource usage of AI data centres. Driven by social media, because trending hysterias is its bread and butter. It drives revenue. Humanity has always devoted enormous resources to cognition. For millions of years, just as individual human brains, which are energy and resource pigs in the body. Then for collective cognition, through literacy, numeracy and education more generally. Look at the numbers, they match almost exactly the resource usage of our individual brains, but in society instead. Most interestingly, AI may actually *reduce* the resources we need for collective cognition. Much of education and collective cognition is infected by status games. Education and knowledge used as a marker of status. AI strips that away. Reducing the resources devoted to collective cognition.

Something a school kid says. Friends are adolescent currency. Welcome to kidult culture.

The great American historian Professor Charles Beard was once asked what 4 lessons he drew from his study of history. This is them. Perfect for our doomscrolling times. That doom is reality already self-correcting. More to come about Beard.

Social media viral trends become seen *as* reality. Like the current trending outrage, that AI data centres are colossal users of water. We’re trapped inside social media bubbles, mistaking their viral outrages for reality itself.

When social media came for: - gender, I ignored it - windmills, I ignored it - solar farms, I ignored it - EVs, I ignored it - democracy, I ignored it. It transforms everything into social comparison, the fight for status. We're so embedded within it now, it replaced our entire culture, that we don't even see the bubble. That's because it targeted the essence of being human, status rivalry. Once that's uncontrolled, everything else is invisible to us. We will literally argue with and fight each other until we're all dead. Now it's coming for AI. It's not going to win that one. AI is too smart. Social media is a vast global bubble of stupid outrage. AI is going to pop that bubble.

You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable. ― Marguerite Duras, Practicalities

Musk is the world’s first trillionaire today, like him or hate him, because he represents something that is missing in our lives. He’s like a hybrid of Jules Verne, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. He promises grand visions of modern life, in the way Verne did in his novels. He dares to imagine amazing futures, in the way the whole public used to, even in my lifetime with the moon landings. Now public life is a toilet of petty social media squabbles. He employs thousands of engineers to invent ways to make those visions happen, like Edison did. And he takes that engineering invention to scale in the way Ford did, with cars, to make those engineering visions affordable and available to the wider public. He has some ridiculous, toxic personal views. So did Ford and Edison. It didn’t stop them making our lives vastly easier and richer. Kidult society can only play the man, not the ball. Everything is personal. ‘I don’t like him/her’ is now what adult life has become. The playground, as I say time and again. Edison and Ford were deeply unpleasant people in many ways. They still invented much of your modern life. I wish the world could do the things Musk does, without his toxic personal views. But we’re not doing them, and so he gets rich beyond imagining because he’s filling the void we’re not filling ourselves.

Why do I dislike social media so much? This table gets to the reason. Civilisation itself only exists because of the control of contagion. Of all forms, not just infections. All of our lives today emerged as a control of some contagion. Uncontrolled contagion is chaos and destruction. No matter the source. And all contagions are connected. Viruses (disease contagion) for example never ‘go viral’. It’s the viral contagion behaviour of humans that spreads them. And look at the outlier. Social media. A contagion amplifier of all forms. The only emergent human institution not there to control contagion but to promote it. A corrosive force dismantling all aspects of society, at their core.

This is the belief that is destroying America. Not ‘fascism’, which isn’t even a thing. Rich people control America because all that opposes them is this idiot belief that ‘the people’ is a thing, and acts. It leaves the field wide open for the rich to do whatever they like.

A worldwide obsession with ‘experiencing’ other countries through recreational travel is now accompanied by a worldwide xenophobic hatred of immigrants. So we love to ‘experience’ other cultures. We just don’t want to live with them. Travel isn’t about experience. A culture can’t be ‘experienced’, only lived. You being there changes it. It’s another social contagion. Imitative behaviour, for status. It’s about feeding social comparison back at home. I overheard people this week ticking off countries on their bucket lists. Like they were collecting coins, or stamps. A pissing contest to see whose list was longer.

One of the enduring symbols of fascism is thousands of troops goose-stepping in perfect unison. The origins of fascism are societies which reach a ‘mimetic crisis’. Meaning that everybody begins copying everybody else, past a certain tipping point. Then they act as one dumb mob. The most worrying KPI for any society is the level of imitation going on. It starts out seeming like fun times. But you’ve then primed the pump. What the crowd imitates then becomes interchangeable. You can literally produce an entire nation of ‘copycat killers’.

The ‘times are tough’ explanation people give for the growth of movements like Trumpism and One Nation is true only at the very earliest stages. That’s the match. The wildfire that follows has nothing to do with those tough times. It’s a contagion. A self-feeding rapid escalation of rage and violence. Like a fight at the footy, which begins when two players have an incident, and then both teams pile-on even if they have no idea what started it. I made this graphic to capture the full mechanism.

Happy Birthday! 🎈💐🎊

This is the brand of prefab rental house that Elon Musk lives in most of the time. It costs about $50,000 US. He has owned expensive real estate in his life, though has now sold most of it. Most of his own fortune is invested in his own companies, not the stock market. He often sleeps in his factories. Many applaud people like Warren Buffett, the genius investor. Buffett is an extremely generous philanthropist. But what does his company BUILD for the world? Nothing of any note. Civilisation is building things. Nearly always the people who drive that seem unpleasant. Building things is hard, the hardest thing. That’s why the people who succeed at it often seem unpleasant. We’d all be dead without them.

A bit longer this, but I’m very tired of the Musk stuff and it needs a longer explanation. There’s a shorter Part 2 of this as a separate post, that explains some things about what Musk is doing that I think are terribly understood. (And no, I don’t agree with his racist and political views. I’m not a kidult, I can hold both positions at the same time, I’m not on any team for-or-against.) I read nearly ever word Shaw wrote, in my late-teens and early 20s. I wanted to dust off one of his major themes, his objection to what he called the ‘snivelling morality’ of righteousness over action. Remembering that Shaw was almost the inventor of modern socialism, no Right-wing culture warrior. I see his now 120-year old play Major Barbara as a way to explain my views on Musk. The play shows the tension between Major Barbara, a Salvation Army warrior of righteousness, and her father Undershaft, an extremely wealthy industrialist, who manufactures arms i.e. he gets rich blowing people up. You’d expect Shaw, as the founder of socialism, to be all for Barbara, and anti the ‘greedy capitalist’ father. But here’s what Undershaft says: “I wouldn't have your income, not for all your conscience.” And when asked if his religion has room for honour, justice, truth, or love, Undershaft responds: "Yes: they are the graces and luxuries of a rich, strong, and safe life... Choose money and gunpowder; for without enough of both you cannot afford the others.” Shaw despised the obsession with ‘ought’. The sniveling moralistic whining about how things should be other than they are. His morality said, BUILD things how they should be. Address the MATERIAL realities of the world. Undershaft was his hero in this play because he made the material conditions of a better life possible, irrespective of the personal views of the man himself. In this way Undershaft was the Musk of that time. Except his business was resolutely ‘immoral’, by most of our standards. That would appall the modern culture of righteous snivelling social media. Look at Musk, his actual business is infinitely more moral than Undershaft’s. But his *personal* views make him toxic, to the snivelling socials. Shaw would have hated that judgment, his character Undershaft has appalling personal views. He saw that as irrelevant. Not because he would have agreed with Musk on many things outside his business. But because he would have judged him by the material actions of his life and work, the phenomenal scale of the industrial impact of Tesla and other Musk businesses. By what he does, not by what he says.

Part 2 on Musk. And for the millionth time, I’m not a ‘fan’ of Musk. Nor am I against Musk. I just want to understand the specific material things he does, which I think are revolutionary. There’s critical things to learn here, I think. If you want to play righteous team sports, skip and get back to your hashtags. The pile-on about his extreme wealth. Actually as Musk has said many times, he has almost no money to spend, of his own. He lives relatively modestly. He borrows from banks to have spending money, using his companies as collateral. Have a look at the breakdown. The key is the liquidity column, I’ve highlighted in red. How much of his ‘wealth’ he can actually access. Almost none of it. And the only liquid assets he has, Tesla, he couldn’t cash in without crashing the company. Why does he do this? Because the vision of the companies is enormous, on a planetary and now inter-planetary scale. He needs a mountain of money to do the things. So he ‘floats’ the companies. But at the same time keeps dominant holdings of the stock, so he gets to make sure the companies can focus on their material visions, and not shareholder profit-taking (which is what dominates other public companies). He uses his equity to steer the use of the massive funds, towards the material outcomes. Not his own enrichment. Where will you find Musk most days? In one of his factories. And nights too, he often sleeps there. His true passion is building things. His idiot culture-warring on social media is just a hobby. See my other post today, like Undershaft he has appalling personal views on many social issues. It’s irrelevant unless you live inside social media. Which most now do. He’s often contrasted with other modern billionaires and their wonderful philanthropic work. That’s Shaw’s ‘snivelling morality’ again. That’s their guilt money, their actual *businesses* do fuck all to improve the world. So they shower good causes with cash, as a salve to their conscience. Musk doesn’t have that money to spend, it’s tied up in the businesses, doing good work.

Does it occur to us how insane it is that you 'win' an election? Like the country is a game? Elections destroy democracies.

In 1903, when Gandhi was in South Africa, he wrote that white people there should be "the predominating race." He also said black people "are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals."

I think we’re maybe at the yellow box right now. I can only suggest people ignore the content of every public debate, and just feel and measure the level of anger. About everything. The content is irrelevant. It’s only the level of control over imitative rage that determines the health of any community. The more our actual reality is viral trends, even the cutest, sweetest, most happy trending things, the further towards complete wildfire we are.

Richard has had so much work done I thought he was Barry Manilow.

I see so many references to the idea that the best thing a person can do for their health is to make sure they have a rich social life. That to me is a fundamental misunderstanding of both life, and how humans work. Of course a society that is now hypersocial (lived on social media) is going to tell you that. If you don’t believe it, the whole lot comes crashing down. It’s an act of desperation. Sociality is intrinsically violent. Because being social - friendship - is not what we think it is. It is always, even in ways so subtle we don’t realise, an act of comparison. Of assessing and adjusting how we ‘fit in’. It makes the cortisol escalate in our bodies, and anxiety, as we continuously monitor where we fit and our status within our different groups. We know that’s how school works, but we live a collective, desperate illusion that it stops in adult life. It never stops. But at the same time there’s not a binary here, between being very social, and being a hermit. That’s not your only other option. I’d like to describe another possible option, in a Part 2 post which will just be a comment on this post, to ‘thread’ it. Because this idiot medium won’t read anything that can’t be swiped though in a few seconds.

I’m not a fan of anybody. But I do have guides in life. Spinoza is one of them. Retirement for me is the luxury of some escape from a world dominated by human rivalries. It’s certainly not bucket list travel, just one more imitation game. It will be making even more space for understanding. A much richer life, with fewer humans and their desperate, anxious copying of each other.

It takes twice as long to boil an electric jug in the US, because they use a 110V mains supply to homes. Even longer in Japan, which uses 100V. The reason is interesting. Edison was the early inventor of mass electricity distribution in the US, and it was DC, at 110V. By the time much of the country was built out to that standard it was too expensive to upgrade it to 220/240V, with the introduction of AC power. The same sort of challenge we see now in the transition to renewables. Enormous amount of old fossil fuel infrastructure, everywhere, that is very expensive to upgrade. But the ROI is enormous too, and will prevail.

A car enthusiast I know was crowing last week that ‘those who went and bought an EV because of high petrol prices will be sorry now the prices are coming down again.’ An EV costs the equivalent of about 12c/L to run. If you use grid power. Nothing at all if you use solar. More than 10 times less what even ‘lower’ priced petrol and diesel costs.

This was the Germany of my dad's childhood. He knew a bit about fascism. (And to be blunt, look at that. Trump is a rank amateur.) One thing and one thing alone produces tyrannies. Not ideologies, not violence or bullying, not people doing funny salutes. One thing. People copying each other, in their millions. That's it, just copying. It begins with the simplest, most innocent things. Copying pictures of cats riding on vacuum cleaners, or selfies. Or what they wear, or what they say. Or all singing the same songs at the same gigs, in their thousands or millions. Anything at all will do it. Just copying. Because every imitation is driven by rivalry, even though it looks like people just 'sharing' things. The more imitation, the more the rivalry, the more violent the society becomes. 'Fascism' is just what happens when you arrive at the point where everybody copies everybody else, without thinking. The most inhumane atrocities can happen then. People are 'only following orders' (i.e. copying). Fascist societies are the most social of all societies. They are social life, on steroids. Nothing but sharing. Nothing is individual.

When you define democracy as everybody doing whatever the hell they want, mostly that just ends up being collecting guns. Certainly not joining the metric system, or having 21st century amounts of electric power.

I missed this viral nonsense when it happened a couple of years ago, apparently. Somebody at work told me the fact most women would choose to run into a bear in the wild rather than a man shows men ‘just don’t get it’. I get it. ‘Men are toxic and violent’ trended on the socials, so that became reality for millions, because that’s where they live. The simplest cure for their fear is to get off the socials.

Data centres are one of the hot trending viral hysterias in socials world now. Have a read of something sensible about the issue instead. Come back to reality, leave the rage-bubbles. https://www2.datainnovation.org/2026-ai-data-centers.pdf

Live with infections early in life and they’ll make your later life miserable. If you live that long, or can remember it. Get the shingles vaccine.

Pauline is the PM you get if you allow social media to continue to replace the countries we live in. What she believes is irrelevant, the same as Trump. Her constituency is anger, anger she mostly generates herself. And social media is how she gets the anger to scale. Anger is all social media generates, it's an amplifier of rage.

Tell me you wouldn’t rather do your around-town travel in one of these.

I watched the game, it’s a good game. But as when I watch F1, I also watch the people. You can see here the root of our culture, in plain view. The fanatical desire to be part of some team, and to go into battle against a rival team. Nothing excites us more, it goes well beyond sport. It only takes a few seconds to step back from that, and ask yourself - why? Why am I doing this? Why do I give a shit which team wins? It’s sport, the better team on the day will win. On another day they won’t win. Why is it some existential thing if they win or lose? Why does every fan that goes to an F1 race have to buy all the merch of their favourite team, and act like a muppet cheering them on, seated with all the other muppets in the same gear? Who cares? Why does it matter what car I drive, or shoes or coffee I buy? We care, more than anything else. Everything is just a mechanism for us to do our favourite thing. Compete with each other. For status.

Human social life is equivalent to evolution. All of our trending obsessions are meaningless. Only one thing really matters, for our survival. We have to ruthlessly control how much humans are allowed to imitate one another. That leads to rivalry, over status, and that rivalry leads to rage, and then violence. And then social collapse. Social media is the ‘Terminator’ we already invented, trying to destroy us. Unlike the Hollywood Terminator, it’s evil because we embrace it, we LOVE it. That’s how it’s winning. Its only product is rage. That rage brings destruction. And then the whole cycle starts again. There’s no progress from one cycle to the next, we don’t even remember previous cycles.

NSW has announced interest-free loans up to $15,000 (up to 10-year terms) for home electrification and efficiency improvements. That's a huge boost for urgently-needed changes. Most of these upgrades will actually save you money, sometimes vast amounts, and so can pay for themselves and then some. Rip out the caveman filthy wood burner that's choking the neighbours and put in a reverse-cycle unit. Double-glazing is superb too, makes an enormous difference. And solar and batteries go without saying.

The greatest misunderstanding I think of populist movements like Trump or One Nation is that they're the product of people being economically disadvantaged - cost of living, unemployment etc. The anger of populism is about status. The perception that a person and their social group have lost their relative position in the social status hierarchy, often by the emergence of new status groups. Why the campaigning is about 'taking back my country' type things. It's about identity. The anger is directed at a list of specific groups, like migrants, the 'woke', bureaucrats etc. All challengers to status, not about cost of living, or jobs. It's the collective, population-level equivalent of a mid-life crisis. Where people go from being 'in' and 'cool' to suddenly feeling like they're on the outer.

I was delighted to see this group go belly-up this week. Firstly because like all social media groups, it was destroying the town and the people in it. (Pretty much the whole town was a member.) But also because it’s a real-life proof of what I post about imitation, status rivalries, and social media. The admin shut the group down because those rivalries had become toxic. This group like all others started with the most innocent intent, to let people ‘connect’. But if you allow people to imitate and compare themselves with others, it will always lead to rivalry, rage and eventually violence. Another group will no doubt pop up to replace it. Like metastatic cancer.

The English so often talk about ‘going up’ to bed. Bungalows i.e. single-storey living have traditionally been associated with lower status, with the old and infirm. Again, this is about status. In a show like Downtown you’ll often hear the toffs talk about ‘going up’ to bed. And of course series like ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ dramatised these status distinctions, upstairs was the high status space. Countries with more space like the US and Australia took the other aspect of high status aristocratic life, the landed estate, and turned the backyard into the expression of status. This is also one of the main drivers of the opposition to higher density living in these countries. The McMansion was a recent hybrid, where Australians and Americans began occupying vertical status space as well, with their mini-mansions. In all 3 countries, the original model was the aristocratic manor, with its large estate. Status is always emulated, from the ‘bottom’ of societies aspiring to be the top.

The grandad of lad culture, leading an entire generation of men into eternal adolescence through broom broom cars, Tonka Truck wankpanzers, and a general all-out assault on all change, has now hit the brick wall of reality. You can see it in his face when interviewed these days. To go alongside his other recent declaration that maybe climate change is real after all, as it impacts his farm (which he like many other elite Britons bought as a tax dodge). Communities survive when smart and strong people lead them. Not when those leaders choose to get fabulously rich selling adolescent bullshit, to saddle future generations with a population of kidults. I wish him a speedy recovery. I pity a wife looking after a kidult male.

Such a decent guy. But this is the common misunderstanding, and why I talk about status all the time. Firstly that the community will rise up in some way. And secondly that 'vested interests' will motivate them to do it. Like inequality will outrage them so much that they'll rise up in some revolutionary way. Has never happened, the US has lived that delusion for over 250 years. 'The people' want to BE the high status people, the vested interests, themselves. Why conservatives target 'aspiration' in their response. And win. You need to make somebody else appeal to that craving for status the way Pauline does. This is also patronising to those of low status. They HATE being thought of as poor and downtrodden. It makes them seem like the 'scabs' of society. Basic psychology.

An extra dimension to autonomous driving. The what - drive safely according to road conditions and rules - is the usual assumption for what an autonomous system should do. But the *how* it's done i.e. the degree of assertiveness out on the road, is also something Tesla has introduced, with its speed profiles. The names explain themselves. (There's also a 'SLOTH" mode below Chill now.)

From Sydney Dance Company’s latest production, called Engine. Brilliant choreography.

Yep. All other forms of mass transport recognised this decades ago.

Tell me you don’t see, every day, how our status games turn everything into ‘cartoonish’ struggles between goodies and baddies. I still heartily recommend people read Storr’s book, on status and status games. It’s a brilliant general introduction to how status works, and why it’s our whole lives.

By far the biggest billing at this launch of the Obama Centre is musos. It’s a big gig. Like all countercultural political movements, it’s just another leftover Woodstock movement. Not only is modern popular music just the same political games as war and energy and gender and everything else, who you actually *like* is also mostly determined by status games. The thing we swear is ‘purely subjective’, our own personal tastes, in music or in anything, are part of the same status games. Absolutely obvious in things like clothes/fashion, we just hold music so dear because it’s right at the core of modern status and identity. Thus the violent opposition to the idea it’s not subjective at all. It’s our most invisible status bedrock. Like water is to fish.

While people keep playing their goodies and baddies status games inside social media bubbles, Tesla keeps building things. In this case its 1000th Supercharger in Australia, in Byron Bay. This is big investment in Australia’s future. Building things creates and sustain civilisations. Everything else is hot air status rivalry that destroys them. It really is that simple, that was Shaw’s message in Major Barbara. People interacting only with other people does not, ever, create civilisation.

These sorts of demos are so important for people to see the revolution we’re living, or can be living if we allow ourselves. Tesla’s latest update to its autonomous driving, in Australia, on busy night-time Sydney streets. It’s ‘supervised’ self-driving, because by law you have to supervise it. But in reality the car is literally driving itself, you have to do absolutely nothing. Here they demonstrate ‘Hurry’ mode (like a taxi driver), and Standard mode. This is a revolution, people, genius engineering. No human can drive as safely or as consistently. It will save many lives to boot, including possibly your own.

Knowledge on the left, socials on the right. As long as we continue to allow social media to operate, we’re destroying our own cultures from the inside-out.

Top Gear changed the motoring enthusiast community into a mocking, nasty movement attacking a whole variety of social groups. As well as stifling innovation by going to war on everything that isn’t gas-guzzling, usually ludicrously expensive, cars. The world of the British lad. Really at war with any challenge to the rich status quo. (With James May being the often mocked exception.) Who remembers Peter Wherrett’s Torque, from the 1970s-80s? You can still watch it on YouTube. What motoring enthusiasm used to be like, when it was run by adults. Calm, kind, informative, fascinating. Grown up. Wherrett was a skilled racing driver, vastly knowledgeable but also capturing motoring in many more dimensions. I remember even stories on how to minimise your fuel use by skilled use of the throttle. The sort of thing the Top Gear kidults would mock every day of the week. Wherrett lived out his last years in a small community, as a woman. A fascinating person to the end.

At a time regional towns are ceasing to have any reason to exist at all, every attempt to actually build something there, whether it be wind and solar farms, or data centres, is met by organised teams of social media zombies, coordinated from far away places that couldn’t care less about the towns, trying to obstruct all activity. For so many now, reality itself is just the latest viral trend, on the socials. And the snowballing rage that the trends produce.

The tragic irony of travel culture is that the beautiful places people trash to get their photos with, for their social status rivalries at home, were created by people who didn’t travel. That’s why those places are beautiful. They made them beautiful, so they didn’t have to turn other peoples’ homes into theme parks, to try to find beauty in their own lives.

Lawrence is one of the world’s most famous theoretical physicists and science communicators. No ‘fanboy’. The technology is a revolution. The trip he mentions is over 8 hours of driving, urban and highways, more than 850 km. Tesla has gamified its use to speed adoption, by inventing ‘streaks’ that celebrate long times using self-driving without intervention (see the screen). It gets even smarter when they link it to their own in-house insurance, offered at a cheaper rate for those who use more self-driving (because they’re much lower risk, from the insurance point of view). This is the genius in the thinking, embedding everything inside everything else, so that gains in one area flow through to gains in all of the others. Tesla’s wider project is to ‘engineer’ all aspects of life in this way, so they mutually reinforce one another, through engineering. Societies that survive are centred on engineering. Building things. Building things is what creates social stability and unity. Humans interacting alone only produces rivalry and violence, and collapse.

HBD! 🎂👯🎉

The remarkable thing about the Cold War was that the invention of weapons of transcendent power, that would lead to ‘mutually assured destruction’, actually stopped the rivalry. Just as transcendent gods (religion) and Kings (monarchies) had stopped rivalries in centuries before. Never more so than when combined, in the Holy Roman Empire (Pope + Kings), which was the origin of our own societies today, after centuries of nothing but violence before it. My belief is that AI will become the next virtual transcendent power, to rescue humans from their own status rivalries. Some reality to which humans will defer, to suspend their rivalries. We’re already seeing this happening, with the astronomical speed people are taking it up. Social media HATES it, because it’s the problem, a magnifier of human rivalry. It will throw every bullshit meme it can at it.

Why do humans love music possibly above all else? It’s not for all the reasons they often give. It’s because music is imitation in its purest form. And imitation is the root of not just all human life, but of existence itself. Unlike painting or dance or building things or language, music doesn’t resemble anything else. It resembles itself - a note, a rhythm, a melody are imitations, stripped of anything else so that what remains is *pure* imitative equivalence. Birds show us this. They don’t create buildings, or roads, or any of the infrastructure we associate with living. They live *inside* their songs. Refrains. Their songs create territories. Humans are exactly the same, all existence is the production and reproduction (imitation) of patterns. Music is the window into our deepest existence. Pure imitation. Challenge a person’s favourite music and they feel violated. That music defines their universe itself, the master underlying repetitive imitation that creates that universe. That patterns their life in all its details. Feel the insistent demands of an ‘ear worm’. How it occupies you, demands your full attention. It’s a literal invasion of your territory, of your soul. And as all imitation produces rivalry, music then generates our most intense rivalries. Because it’s the battle of competing imitative patterns. We live inside the ‘counter-cultural’ revolution, where teenagers took over the world, with their music as their great imitative organising force. Just ask birds. Bird songs are battle cries.

This stupidity of social media pisses me off, that it labels things now with an AI warning. None of my posts are generated by AI. I may use AI to generate a graphic, or as part of my research. (The graphics are what trigger this label on some posts). Like AI is the danger here! Most social media posts should be labelled ‘likely total bullshit some idiot copied from an influencer with a coffee enema up their arse.’ Or ‘person enslaved to peer pressure, curating an image.’ The world of social media we live in will resist AI ferociously, because it knows it’s the end of the socials. Most of the social media zombies who regurgitate the anti-AI pap use AI compulsively in their life and work.

HBD! 🎈🌟🥂

Really quite bored with the socials, I only post here as a sort of online diary now, for my own future reference. And enjoy it when it’s of interest to somebody else and there’s the odd bit of conversation. But that’s rare. Most of my friends here disappeared some time ago, not surprising I guess given that I regularly spit in the soup of everything these platforms represent. You don’t learn much about anybody here, except what they like. Which is so often just what is currently trending. We’re a culture of not much more than social media trends now, that’s our actual reality we’re living. Trends that make us angry, mostly. More all the time. That’s always the trajectory when imitation is uncontrolled.

Nothing excites and motivates people more than copying other people. Like all putting on red swimming caps, stripping naked and plunging into icy cold water excitement. Rationalised in this case as selling Tasmania to potential new residents. You can’t make this up.

Some who get solar are part of the off-grid movement. Like the self-sufficiency movement of the 1970s. Don’t do this, it’s an idiot idea. (Another viral trend, go figure. ) The grid is a wonderful resource. Off-gridding is extremely expensive and, except if you live literally in the middle of nowhere, completely unnecessary.

All uncontrolled imitation, the simple act of people copying one another (our deepest passion), leads to violence. Here just one more social media viral trend that is progressing to the next stages. Anger, then rage, then violence. What causes both the outrage and the violence is obsessive copying of one another’s behaviour. That’s the only true evil in the world. What we copy is irrelevant. A culture that did nothing but copy cute memes of cats and dogs would still end up as a ‘fascist State’, because of widespread imitation. Imitation generates rivalry, rivalry generates violence. Peer pressure, we know this.

The seductive and dangerous power of music is that it is the only pure imitation. It doesn’t look like or sound like other things. It is imitation for its own sake, which is why it’s like social heroin. And why it generates crowds. The naive describe this as simple mass enjoyment. But underneath every collective force in society you will find a music, somewhere. It’s the root DNA of all social patterning. Our buildings and roads and politics and money and weapons and cars and everything else are really tunes, embedded in things.

How often do we test whether our reality and convictions are just the current trending outrage on social media?

And one more viral outrage. To be specific here (outrages never do specifics). This isn’t a breach of copyright, which is only about copies and performances. AI is only learning from existing music so it can produce its own unique output. Do existing artists pay for what they learn from other musicians? Nobody sends a royalty cheque to The Beatles every time a young songwriter learns a chord progression from them, nor to Bob Dylan every time someone uses his lyrical style. Does social media pay for all of people’s personal information about their lives, that generate revenue for the platforms? Where’s the outrage? People fall over themselves to vomit their most intimate details onto the platforms every day, for free.

And so the new viral outrage spreads and strengthens. Generating millions of new righteous zombies going into bat for their lord and master, social media, against the new challenger, AI. As with the anti-windmill zombies, most aren’t even impacted. They’re following a tiny handful of activists, in the name of ‘local communities’ they’ve never met and don’t actually give a shit about.

This is a viral outrage I’d happily support.

People know my criticisms of social media. Not least that it provides a home and validity to the most bizarre and offensive fantasies, such as the belief you can not only ‘identify’ with having anatomical structures like ovaries and a uterus that you don’t have, but also the disease conditions of these body parts. Transgenderism (AND anti-transgenderism defending rigid gender ideas) are ‘identity politics’, appearing in the vacuum left by the collapse of social status hierarchies. Social status gives humans identity, and without it they make them up, and defend caricatures of old identities in opposition. There are always 2 fake teams, slugging it out. I’m not pro-trans or anti-trans, I’m on neither of those teams fighting for status. I’m describing how status games arise and work, including the apportioning of people into competing social teams. The belief that we have no statuses in society, that ‘the people’ are all equivalent and run democracies, is what leads to the explosion in identity status games. Social media replaces lost status hierarchies with its own, created by mass imitation.

As birds show us, the origin of music is territorial. To define and defend a territory. Playing music people don’t like drives them away. QED.

Kidult culture is right there, if you choose to look. 80% of ticket sales to the new Toy Story movie are to adults. Mostly 34 and below (Millennials), but even couples in their late-50s and early 60s spotted at screenings, in the full merch t-shirts. I asked one of the Millennials about the attraction. ‘These are the movies of our childhood!’ Yes, quite. That stage of life they left 15-20 years ago. But not to worry, they have an adult life too. Trending viral outrages on social media. The giant digital high school. I don’t blame kidults, for kidult culture. It wasn’t them that took adult life away, leaving them no choice but to repeat adolescence for the rest of their lives.

I think the single most dangerous belief humans have is that their desire to form groups and crowds is benign. That it's a warm and cuddly desire to connect and be together. Let's talk about Love Parade 2010. In reality humans form groups for the same reason some animals do. For protection. Being part of a group makes them feel more secure and safe. In the animal kingdom most animals are solitary. But animals with weaker defences tend to form flocks or herds, to help defend themselves. Membership of a group happens through imitative behaviour, to identify members and distinguish them from those outside the group. Flocks of birds, herds of cows and sheep, schools of fish, human crowds, etc. It makes people feel safe and secure, which is why they also look happy. The glue that holds the crowd together is rivalry, rivalry for membership of the group and position within it. Not always obvious, when the crowd is well managed i.e. the level of imitation is controlled. Then it just looks like everybody is there to have a good time. Love Parade as a music festival was shut down after 2010. No bad eggs ruined it, everybody was full of peace and love. But the dynamics of the crowd crushed 21 of them to death, and injured more than 500 others. The rivalry between people generates panic in the right situation, and they will literally trample each other to death to escape the crowd. In this case many died of 'compressive asphyxia' i.e. they were suffocated where they stood, through pressure from the people around them. People will say this was an exception. And it is, mostly this doesn't happen. But not because crowds are benign, but because professional event organisers implement a large range of 'crowd control' measures. You don't need to control peace and love. But you do have to control imitative rivalry. That's where all groups of people come from, imitative rivalry. All groups and all crowds are dangerous, unless controlled. Sociality is violence.

"...more than 40 per cent of 15- to 25-year-olds in Australia reported being lonely." In a kidult culture, anything that isn't constant socialising is a pathology. Friendship is a social tool adolescents use to help become adults. When you don't become an adult because the culture has no mechanism for that any more, you end up feeling 'lonely' because the greater isolation of responsible adult work-life feels so alienating. You then you do bizarre bonding activities like all jumping into cold water together. Or if you're an older man, you join a Men's Shed. Etc.

Mass imitation on wide display at the World Cup. Once you start to see imitation, you'll see it everywhere, in all things. Fans will all swear they're there for the football. But their real passion is to be part of a crowd, in their crowd-team, imitating one another, in rivalry with other crowd-teams. Similarly millions more at home that never watch a soccer match in their life will be tuning in, to be part of the national-crowd-team, merched-up to the max in the gear.

The hardest thing I find for people to accept is that their personal, ‘subjective’ taste is also not only social, but created by status games. They will swear to (and at) you that their taste in music and fashion and architecture and food (and whatever) is their ‘subjective’ taste. It really isn’t. Fashions change all the time, the things people say they love at one point in time they find appalling at another point in time. The thing itself - a kitchen design in this case - doesn’t change. But the STATUS of the designs changes, what’s a ‘trending look’. I’m sure you could look at that modern kitchen and see it as clearly sexier. And be sure that judgment will stand the test of time. I can promise you, it won’t. Give it 20, or even 10 years, and we’ll be shaking our heads at ‘those 2020s designs’. Just as that 1970s kitchen now seems dreadful. And in each case, what has made something seem sexy, and later not sexy, is that *everybody else thought it was sexy*, at the time. It’s imitation, it feels wonderful to be part of the ‘in crowd’. And then rivalry. Everybody battling to have this same look, to have the status of that look, to ‘keep up’ and fit in. Not your personal subjective taste. That doesn’t exist.

Tim is a traditional car guy. A 4x4 guy. Who bought a Tesla. And now has been trying its self-driving. He's blown away. Great engineering makes human hot air irrelevant.

One of the great myths of technology is that it's 'only technical'. That humans only relate with humans, and when they decide something in all that chatter, then you can go and build something. In reality technology is the most social part of human life. A speed bump for example takes the never-ending arguments about people speeding, and bypasses them completely, making speeding impossible. There is no such thing as a 'speed bump' outside those disputes. The technology is literally made from human argument, in material form. All technologies are this, they're the way you create peace and stability. Once they're built people then have to be disciplined to maintain and use them - again it silences argument, suddenly everything is no longer possible, one direction has been chosen and embedded in material form. Also why what Tesla does is fascinating to me. I ignore all the human hot air disputes around Musk the person. Tesla's genius and contribution is in what it *builds*, and how what it builds shapes us socially. What new ways of being human that begins, and what debates and disputes its technologies settle. Also Shaw's point about Undershaft the industrialist, in Major Barbara. The world doesn't give a shit what humans think or say, in their petty status games. It only notices what they build. Building is where human and non-human (the world) meet and interact.

A pandemic of intelligence. We live in remarkable times, hidden from view by the daily dose of social media slop.

One of the most astonishing things that AI has already done, that nobody is really talking about. It has given us real-time instant translation between languages. And not just word-for-word translation. It captures intent, humour, sarcasm, politeness, hesitation, emotion, idioms and implied meaning. Accents don’t bother it. It will automatically remove disfluencies from speech, like ‘um’. And it can even replicate your exact voice, so that the translation is spoken in your voice. With AI, there’s no need to ‘assimilate’ people any more with a single language. There’s no need for any universal language at all. Every culture, every tiny regional dialect even, can continue to speak their own language and be instantly translated into any other language or dialect. AI is single-handedly removing the status hierarchy between languages and cultures. It may save many of them from extinction. As always, engineering is ignoring politics and making it irrelevant. We’re living in a time of wonders. Hidden by social media slop.

I can’t emphasise enough that you’ll regret missing the revolutionary things happening in our societies right now, if you can’t escape social media bubbles. Any other time in history would look on and shake their heads at the marvels we’re living through, and the fact most are missing them by being trapped inside viral outrages that are complete fantasies.

We’ve accepted dirty air our whole lives, in a way we’d absolutely refuse to accept dirty water. Now venture capital, including the maligned AI companies, has put forward $500 million to help fix this obvious threat, targeting even the colds and flus we’ve grown up being told are just a normal part of life. They’re absolutely unnecessary. Here are some stats. - healthy people spend 5% of their lives sick with respiratory infections - there are nearly 13 billion respiratory infections every year, globally - at least 7% of deaths are caused directly by these infections - the chronic long-term impacts are huge, a much higher risk for heart disease, neurological diseases like dementia, schizophrenia, and asthma - the world economy loses about $600 billion annually to respiratory infections. It needs to be pointed out this is work ordinary public health should be doing, except politicians and social media culture destroyed it during Covid. That fatuous ‘lives and livelihoods’ propaganda we all heard, implying we couldn’t be both healthy and functional, at the same time. Public health was invented to reject that entire distinction.

A detailed break-down of the revolutionary engineering innovations Tesla has created not just in its products, but in the even more important area - manufacturing. I know most won’t watch this, but it’s worth the time because you’ll see the magnitude of what they’ve done, and also Musk’s personal contribution to this revolutionary shift. Ryan who does these videos covers tech more generally (he’s not a Tesla ‘fanboy’), and as an interesting aside is the drummer in Jeff Goldblum’s jazz band.

For all the nuclear fans and social media experts out there who couldn’t even draw an atom, nuclear reactors use a shit-tonne of water. As do coal-fired power stations. Both are just big steam engines. And it has to be cool water, which with global warming is becoming difficult to find. Solar and wind power require no water. If you live on one of the driest continents on Earth, that’s critical. If you live on social media, reality is a foreign concept.

If you watch a lot of films and TV shows that weren’t created in your native language, you may have experienced the frustration of reading sub-titles. Or if it’s dubbed, the usually horrible mismatch between the dubbing actor’s voice and the original, making it sound fake. AI is already revolutionising this problem. AI can firstly use the same voice as the original actor, and then also capture the actual physical experience of the actor in the scene, so a dub doesn’t sound like another actor reading lines. Dubbing sounds fake because the dubbing actor is in a sound booth somewhere, not in the physical reality of a scene, which shapes how speech is produced. AI can create the voice as if it‘s being produced within that physical scene. And it goes even further. It can actually manipulate the movement of the mouth in the scene so that it looks like it’s speaking your language. For those worried about loss of actor’s rights, many actors embrace the idea because they’re paid extra for the additional translation. And it’s their voice people in other countries hear, not some dubbing actor’s. This allows the full artistic effect of a production to not be lost in translation by people having to read or listen to fake-sounding dubbed voices. It creates a universal experience that crosses cultures.

A trend I’ve noticed is the growth of female ‘whisperers’ online. Women who give advice to men on how to understand, relate to and seduce women. Contrast with the consent debates, the ‘no means no’ idea. These two movements are surely pulling in almost opposite directions? To the whisperer community, no means ‘try harder, learn how to do it’. I’ve suggested a few times here that our ideas about consent leave no meaningful way to understand seduction, which can often mean trying to convert a no into a yes, as these influencers make their money saying. Or even just flirting. Human relationships are only rarely yes and no. They’re much more ‘maybe…maybe not..o wait, maybe…’. Again social media turned it into a black-and-white binary, so that there were then two teams in rivalry, slugging it out. Lives have been ruined.

It doesn’t matter if it’s windmills, data centres, electric cars, gender, or in this case Formula 1. The social media machine has only one product. Rage. Imitation produces rivalry. Rivalry produces rage. Social media society is an endless procession of one raging wrecking ball after another. It will swallow every single thing we do, to fuel the rage cycles. Only AI can destroy this parasite on the face of humanity. Social media will reserve its greatest rage for that threat, to itself.

Brockovich is that darling of American culture. The activist. Here also showing that the data centre trending viral outrage is not ‘the people’ or ‘the community’ rising up. It’s a handful of activists, like Brockovich, creating viral outrages. Hilariously using social media to do it, which uses the same data centres.

Ozempic now costs $15 per month, in India. Uptake is slower than was expected. What’s going on here is that people have been trained by decades of ignorance from the diet and fitness industries that their weight problems are down to laziness and poor food choices. That ignorance made both of those industries incredibly rich. There’s always massive resistance to ditching the status quo. When people get access to these new drugs, they treat them like a new fad diet. That’s learned behaviour. ‘Give me 3 months of it, then I’m back to normal.’ That’s dieting behaviour. It will take time to shift those behavioural prejudices. A person with metabolic disease will likely need to be on these drugs for life. But as a doctor friend said, they’d expect that for diabetes, or heart disease, or any other chronic condition. And here, they will need a lot LESS drugs for all the other conditions they suffer from, as a result.

“Fat cells have memory. Except they don’t remember when you were skinny.” Medical researcher, when asked why the world got exponentially fatter even with an exponential growth in diets and exercise.

Social media immediately turned it into an us v them. Smart Americans v Dumb Europeans. Elite senior managers v poor workers on the lower 7 floors. Blah blah blah. It took AI less than 10 seconds to reveal that the real reason the lower 7 floors lost air conditioning was because of a technical malfunction. No input from senior management at all. Social media turns societies into one viral outrage after another. Air conditioning is a raging outrage in Europe right now, with the heat. Social media platforms turn us into raging zombies.

Peter Dutton took the Trump playbook to the last election and got absolutely smashed by Albanese. Pauline is having another go, selling Australia as a Trump franchise. She’s now going backwards again, probably because the huge number of disaffected LNP and ALP voters she needs to win over heard what she had to say at the Press Club and thought crikey. If Albanese can smash Hansonism as well, he’ll surely go down in history as the most effective political leader of our time, globally, or perhaps of any time. It’s extremely difficult to defeat populism. He clobbered it at the last election.

"The last five prime ministers have actually been the five most unpopular prime ministers in polling history and, according to some polls, each of them has broken the previous one's record for unpopularity.” An article describing the apparently puzzling dramatic growth in hatred towards elected leaders, in the UK, making it ungovernable. The cause is simple. The country, like ours and others, is now living inside social media. As I post about, that means imitative rivalry is out of control. Which leads to rage, and then violence. None of it is ‘politics’. Or capitalism or any other -ism. Or cost of living or other ‘economic’ pressure. It’s the refusal to restrict how much people copy one another. That’s it, that’s the sole cause.

Little brings me as much joy as engineering prevailing against idiot viral outrages on the socials.

I genuinely believe many if not most are simply unaware we’re living through a new Industrial Revolution. That thing that transformed civilisation itself a few hundred years ago, completely upending all comfortable habits and truths. Creating the modern lives we enjoy that earlier times in history would not have believed were possible. Instead because of social media they’re jumping from one fake viral outrage to the next, often focused on OUR Industrial Revolution, in energy and AI. Everything is personal to social media kidults, it’s all about how much we ‘like’ this or that person. Here’s the thing. The early beneficiaries of the first Industrial Revolution, the rapacious ‘capitalists’, all quickly faded from view and influence. The technology and the revolution went on without them, it cast them aside. Today’s billionaire entrepreneurs will be tomorrow’s history lesson nobody reads. They’re history’s useful idiots, nothing more. The revolution is not about interpersonal likes, about human status rivalries. History doesn’t give a shit about any of that.

I still remember that Australia. Pauline and her army of the permanently enraged don’t. I only exist because of that Australia. The Romans welcomed immigrants with open arms. It made their empire one of the longest lasting in world history. No ‘Love it or Leave’ bumper stickers there. No national flags.

I don't see a solution for football here. Except not to play. Many players and their parents will no doubt ignore the risks. And then they'll sue because nobody stopped them. That's the common pattern now.

Human performance is the zero line.

Michael: “Line up every disease these drugs help: heart, kidney, liver, joints, arteries, sleep apnea. They share one engine ➡️Chronic inflammation. GLP-1 medicines turn that fire down. That's why the liver heals without a receptor. That's seemingly the answer. The weight loss was never the medicine. It was the side effect we noticed first, because it was easiest to measure. These are organ-protective drugs that happen to shrink fat.”

Populism is a relative status movement. It’s people who used to be part of a dominant social group, now feeling threatened by the rise of other social groups. What gets the punters through the door is to appeal to the sense that their status is threatened, by other social groups. ‘Taking back our country’. All of it is full of symbolism of that loss of dominant status, and the rivals to it. It’s a population-level mid-life crisis. That stage of life where people move from being cool and hip, to suddenly feeling on the outer. That’s all Trump, and his franchises like Pauline, are.

The humanity.

I talk to people every day on the socials who tell me the AI apocalypse is upon us, and capitalism this and oligarchs that and Big Brother etc. And yet funnily, most of the world is falling over itself to use it. Far and away the fastest uptake of any new technology in history.

It's worth saying over and over. If you don't want lots of migrants in Australia, who is going to do the work? We're not having babies. The entire country is a giant aged care home, without migrants.

This is the federal President of the Liberal Party. Elected unopposed this year. The reason people stopped voting for the Liberals is because they ceased to exist as the Liberal Party years ago. The problem for Tone is the Australians who love this sort of thing would much rather Pauline, than him. And the white Anglo immigrants they'd both welcome don't exist, all Anglo countries have birth rates in total free fall.

Horrendous driving conditions tonight. Driving rain, dark, blinding headlights from the other direction, hydroplaning, hopeless visibility. The Tesla held the road like it was glued down, and could see even in situations where I struggled to make out what was ahead of me. The stability control is amazing. Here’s the Tesla semi testing the same thing on ice. The truck corrects for the slide, automatically, preventing a jack-knife. Teslas have world-leading safety. They’re not just nifty fun.

The normalisation of outright corruption in the US, that Trump’s team now describe Watergate as a minor 12-hour news beat-up.

The toxic lure of social media is that it looks and feels like a ‘community’. As I’ve posted about many times, people now live ON social media, it has actually replaced physical communities. This is from Facebook’s own March 2026 ‘public transparency report’. Let those stats sink in. In the 4th quarter of 2025 alone, it removed 1.1 BILLION fake accounts. Many of these are engaged in what is called ‘coordinated inauthentic activity’. In other words, in stirring up shit to make money and shift who governs actual communities. Spare me the pearl-clutching about AI. Just one more social media ‘coordinated inauthentic activity’, creating fake viral outrages. Our societies won’t survive unless we can rescue them from their hijacking, by social media.

A generation ago only serious criminals would even think about doing this. Now it's sport. Imagine driving around slicing fuel hoses at servos. This isn't about EVs versus combustion vehicles. This is about the destruction of social cohesion. Social media has shifted the culture to widespread gleeful contempt for civic order. This is happening in every single part of life. No respect. No trust. We'll all be gun owners soon (also an exponential growth trend). Little Trumpian Americans.