Cities, regions & infrastructure

Donut Labs, an offshoot of a Finnish company, created an electric motor that is actually part of the wheel. No drivetrain or transmission needed. Check out the stats: 845 hp, over 4300 Nm of torque, and weighs only…

Our home battery (Tesla Powerwall 2) has a warranty that says it’ll still provide 70% of its original storage after 10 years. So still perfectly usable well after 10 years has passed. But if I run the diagnostics today,…

Noah Smith is an American economist. As he describes here in great detail, despite Musk being a bit of a tool, on technology he’s led the world. Which is why he’s now the richest man in the world. The Chinese are…

Semi-autonomous driving technology is already a revolution for older drivers, and those who share the road with them.

I needed a new drink bottle for work. We had one of these at home and I thought perfect, one simple moving part, easy to clean, potentially usable for the rest of my life. What happened next is another window into an…

Somebody said to me that Tesla's Level 2 self-driving isn't that great (drove me the entire way to work today), that makers like Mercedes already have Level 3 autonomy. The problem is Mercedes' system only works in…

The skill of firing a good shot is like any other skill, pleasurable for the achievement. In that sense I can understand guns. In every other sense I find them boring, and just another example of how humans can turn…

Australia Day is now, like everything else in our lives, an argument. A debate. A great liberation for 2026 in my opinion is to identify this mechanism and ignore it, by ignoring all of the popular debates of the day.…

I think it’s worth noticing that in this record week of outrageous heat, there hasn’t been one story in the news about potential grid collapse and the need for people to conserve energy. That’s because of renewables.…

Be prepared in Australia for the targeting of rural and regional people by One Nation, including their newest recruit Barnaby Joyce. They see real opportunity to steal lots of Nationals votes. They’re also targeting…

Helping to care for the vast and growing number of old people in the world is one of the major reasons humanoid robots are under development. I’m sure many will have an immediate reflex ‘ugh’ to the idea, but this could…

Petrolheads think they’re being clever when they call EVs ‘appliances’. None of them can explain what that even means. On all the measures of car performance they themselves have masturbated over for years, EVs wipe the…

Building things is hard. Building big complex things is almost impossible. Going to the moon was hard, vaccinating the world against smallpox was hard. Today we live in a culture that nitpicks everything into a smoking…

The Zeekr 7GT. Coming to Australia this year. The performance AWD version will take you from 0-100 in under 3 seconds, and has air suspension. The aerodynamic efficiency of this car is amazing, it slices through the…

The Holy Grail of medical science is how to treat inflammation. Most diseases that harm or kill us have a link to inflammation. Heart diseases, cancers, neurological diseases etc. We know how to suppress inflammation,…

For any social progress or change, you'll find a rivalry between elite groups, using ordinary people as leverage. For example universal voting, which we're taught and assume was introduced because of pressure from…

You can see the boy racer mentality that dominates everyday road driving on display right now in F1. The new cars are more technical, 50% combustion, 50% electric, and require a lot smarter driving to create, conserve…

The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) makes the rules for Australian energy markets and advises government. It wants to make an outrageous change. Right now your electricity bill is mostly based on how much…

People of a certain age (like my age) might remember a great sci fi TV show from late last century, called Blakes 7. One of the characters in Blakes 7, a favourite of mine, was a supercomputer called Orac. Only the size…

Those who are passionate about slow, noisy cars that cost a fortune to feed (combustion cars) needn’t worry. When those cars are no longer sold because they’re rubbish, they’ll still be free to drive them as a hobby, in…

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

Again I can’t comment on behalf of Bathurst Regional Council. But I can express a personal and general view about local government, and use Bathurst as an example. Pretty much every council in Australia is ‘broke’.…

Upgraded home storage. What I love about Tesla is the software, though the hardware of their batteries is also still the best out there. And sexily functional, at a time most batteries are using plastic, Tesla is still…

In a year that included all the ‘Swasticar’ social media-driven nonsense, this is a remarkable triumph. The Model Y is engineering genius, the Model 3 too (it gets much less attention). Again, this has nothing to do…

This is the reality. Local government is nearly in ‘financial ruin’, pretty much everywhere. Even those Councils who can balance their books will have millions in arrears on infrastructure backlogs, like roads and basic…

The thing about back to nature/authenticity/getting away from it all movements is the ticket prices for entry. These are on the low side, and don't even include fuel. When people say they want to get away from it all,…

Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT. Their projected debts were so enormous that many felt they would collapse under the weight. But now they’ve found the only bottomless pit of funding in the world - the…

When I use the word ‘kidult’, it’s not meant to be just some cheap insult. It’s an analytical term invented by people who study societies, to describe a type of culture, where adult life is replaced by an extended…

Meanwhile in Straya we're still driving around in Tonka Truck utes that are shit *as* utes, with no driver dynamics or comfort for passengers, lethal for other road users in collisions, zero aerodynamic design (they…

Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia and Ras Laffan in Qatar are the global home of oil and gas production, respectively. Nowhere else churns out production like these, they’re the original and biggest sources of oil and gas.…

I don’t post so much about renewable energy and electric cars because I’m some ‘fanboy’ of them. I hate the whole fan/kidult culture we live in, where you join a team as a fan and then fight other teams for status. I…

I wonder if people can feel the imminent crash of what I call lifestyle culture. Where life and all of its existential complexities was replaced in the last century with the idea of life’s purpose being the maximisation…

Disruptions to daily life are now treated like customers getting poor service on a holiday. The relentless pile-on of complaint, of course driven mostly by social media (that we live inside now). No sense of perspective…

The most interesting things in life are usually hidden in plain sight. Like this disruption, it tells us hugely interesting things about our way of life. I often post that as a culture we have no idea of what ‘place’…

I’d almost forgotten that I once taught at South Sydney High School, when training as a teacher. I had no idea Heartbreak High was filmed there, I might have realised if I’d ever watched it! It was a nice school. The…

It's beautiful to see the social status mechanism brought into the light like this. 'Load-bearing for people's sense of self'. That's glorious. "Here is what the shock jocks and the Murdoch machine and the fossil fuel…

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

The US is famous for having a national 55 mph (about 88 km/h) speed limit on its roads. That limit now varies across the country, controlled by States. The history of the 55 mph limit has echoes for us today. Richard…

The deepest human desire and behaviour is to imitate. To copy others, because that gives us status and therefore identity in social groups. Imitation can be used for good, or bad. Good is the control of imitation, so…

Here are some electric Tesla semis, charging at one of Tesla’s truck charging stations. Tesla builds the whole infrastructure when it builds vehicles, including the charging for longer distance travel. The genius of…

Already seeing in my own daily social groups the modern delight of ‘calm-mongering’. The people or paid talking heads whose job it is to take a critical situation and tell everybody to calm down, ‘nothing to see here’.…

The fuel tankers that deliver the fuel to all parts of Australia travel a distance each year equivalent to travelling from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then back to the Sun again. They use over 200 million litres…

Some more details about Teslas, we chose them for their brilliant engineering. Their engineering design not only targets everything that makes them incredible family cars, they’re also brilliant driver’s cars with…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Another miraculous revolution happening in broad daylight, which almost nobody knows about. Sitting alongside the Gliptins (the magical ‘weight loss’ drugs that do so many more semi-miraculous things) is a new type of…

Fuel should have been rationed in Australia starting weeks ago. Much of the population acting like toddler pork chops during Covid makes all politicians too terrified to do anything. Global supplies are non-existent.…

We don't live in towns and cities now. We live in social media groups. Not an analogy. Social media has replaced geograpy. In technical terms, vertical communities have replaced horizontal communities.

Hantavirus has a high mortality rate (25%), and normally doesn't transmit between people. It's likely airborne, but it appears nothing is being done on the ship that reflects that, because the whole Covid debacle means…

Andrew Hastie telling the truth about electricity prices, gas, and Pauline Hanson. The Liberals picked a complete dud to lead them, in Angus Taylor, who's trying to out-Trump Pauline.

You can see how social media/kidult culture turns everything into a fake debate. The AFR is another sewer, notice the 'slug' in the headline - designed to enrage people. This will be just one more service electricity…

The electricity prices you're paying right now? That's coal power.

I’ve been driving the newer Tesla Model Y all this week, the YL. Patrick gets why this is the best car ever made. But it’s now even better, the YL even has adaptive suspension that allows you to move between fast…

Formula 1 now has its own anti-vax movement. The anti-battery/anti-electric crowd. F1 cars have been hybrids for years already, it’s made them faster than they’ve ever been before, while using much less fuel so…

The Chinese play a long game the kidult West has no hope of understanding or emulating. The Chinese text on the left says that there’s no rush, everything is under control. Asia’s capacity to think and act over…

Senior doctors in the US are now demanding that autonomous driving technology be prioritised. They see its impact as equivalent for health to preventing smoking. Humans are appalling drivers, in direct proportion to how…

A longish but very interesting read about why the airline industry can never make money. This actually links to my dislike of travel more generally, a culture that would be simply impossible without jets and jet fuel.…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The road conditions this winter have been appalling for driving on my daily commute. Very wet, dark, foggy, huge numbers of vehicles coming the other way because of the Mt Vic blockage, with all that headlight glare.…

One bit of advice I’d give to people as homes and lives become increasingly powered by electricity, is the value of sticking within the one ‘ecosystem’. Sticking to a single brand for your different electrical products,…

Traditional media is now caught up in the snowballing viral pearl-clutching over AI. This story of course framed as dreadful AI leading people astray. But where are these people being led astray? On social media. By…

This. Regional areas have no real reason to exist now, that their founding rationale of resources for the cities is increasingly irrelevant. But as renewable energy and data centre hubs, they can become important again.…

The anti-renewables and soon anti-data centre movements in rural and regional areas (again copying the US, where these viral outrages emanate from) are an existential threat to the survival of regional life. Regional…

I live in the regions, and I want them to survive. They won’t when their only idea is to become tourist locations for bored city people. Tourism generates activity, people passing through, it doesn’t and can’t create…

I drive the Great Western Goat Track every day to work, currently crippled by the malfunction of a 200-year-old 2-lane bridge. A joke as a highway even with that working. This is the nation’s fundamental artery linking…

Farmers and the Clean Energy Council have quantified what’s at stake in the idiot war some in politics have invented over renewables in regional and rural areas. This is the projected income to both local towns and…

I read Count Binface’s policies today. Some of my favourites: - people who use speakerphone on public transport shall be forced to join the army. Or to watch the film version of Cats - he wants the UK to build at least…

This is the nonsense of 'community consultation' today. A stack of locals in a hall or on the socials, having a whinge. Lithgow should be begging for multiple AI data centres. I challenge anybody to identify another…

When people approaching 30 list their favourite foods as McDonalds nuggets, and chips and gravy. Even regional towns now have 2 -3 McDonalds and 2-3 KFC outlets. What’s a kidult again?

This is the sort of gap that exists between the bullshit fake reality many live through social media, and what actually happens out in the real world. Not only are renewables now the leading source of electricity…

A short highlights package of some of the things Tesla's autonomous driving technology can do. If you can look in 9 directions at the same time, all around your car, 30 times per second, then you win. (And you're full…

Just to give a sense of the sort of analysis AI can turn out in a matter of seconds, I asked it to describe what it saw as the legacy of Live Aid. A superb analysis, and describes the kidult culture I often write about.…

I thought a good example of the way social media works. Pretty much everybody would read this and assume it was about AI. The big growth in data centre electricity use in Ireland happened before the introduction of AI.…

Manners evolved amongst elites, specifically amongst rivals for elite positions. Manners were the way rivals signalled to each other that they deferred to one another, rather than have conflict or fight. A way to hold…

The deliberate conflation of learning with copyright in this debate. Training is not stealing. Copyright is to take somebody else’s work and to use or sell it as your own. But to train is to learn. We have never taxed…

I’ve posted before about how social media is confused with social networking, which came before it. The two main differences that turned social networking into socially toxic imitative rivalry, were: 1) the creation of…

Why are we still subsidising motorists with petrol and diesel cars? Diesel subsidies alone cost Australians $15 billion per year. That would put an abundance of electric fast-chargers on every major road, with plenty of…

Part 2 on why Australia should industrialise house-building, but probably won’t. As always, it’s about status. All societies run on status. The way we currently build homes in Australia is driven by a massive growth in…

There are 2 bubbles being mixed up in this type of argument. Yes there is a possible financial bubble in the AI race. But the technology bubble is independent of that. Railways caused a financial bubble when they were…

Cities are remarkable in a way I only recently came to understand. Throughout all of history humans have struggled to find ways to live together, without violence and death. That’s because humans relating only to other…

The Jevons Paradox says the better you make something, the more people will use it. And the worse it will then get. Everybody who works in public life has felt this, or even every parent. The better you make life for…

Tesla is finalising another genius bit of engineering. If you have the home battery and wall charger and vehicle, it will allow you to use your car batteries to top-up your home battery, as needed. This is a post about…

Data centres are the focus of another current wave of viral outrage, driven by social media. What I think they mean. We’ve been increasingly living our lives in the ‘cloud’. Our social connections are now global, not…

Was at a tyre workshop chatting to the owner while they were working on my tyres. We were talking about tyre wear on EVs, which can vary depending on how you drive, the road surface etc. He said ‘it’s just that they’re…

Towns and cities are a remarkable invention. Humans didn’t invent them, or even create them. Wtf, hey? Surely humans create towns and cities? They’re certainly part of the mix. But nobody and no group designs and…

Father Brown was one of those shows I always saw in the options on streaming platforms, and never dipped my toe in. I thought it must be one of those innocuous Brit shows that offered pretty views of the UK countryside…

I try to use images as compressed concepts. As a way of conveying complex ideas at a glance. AI is stunningly good at it. Like this one. While we physically still live in towns and cities, this is actually our culture…

I've created this image to explain the magic of an ordinary city street. It's like a special x-ray image of things you normally can't see. A project I've been working on for a while. Behind the simple facade of an…

The material infrastructure of our lives is something that needs to be much more visible. I’ve mentioned before the exorbitant use of energy that travel-based flying is, for example. But I’m not sure people see just how…

Roads are public infrastructure. They shouldn’t be user-pays. Imagine saying people should pay at the front door of the hospital, or to get into school every day. Fuel excise doesn’t pay for roads. How many times does…

Most regional towns now hold regular economic forums, large chatfests to try to figure out how to keep the towns viable. The thinking being that the towns need to ‘attract’ business and people. I’m not confident that…

Road user charges turn every road in the country into a toll road. How is this not seen.

Rather than try to make their regions independently successful, China is rejecting the separation into city and country. It’s connecting regions more aggressively to their mega-cities, with fantastic transport and other…

In historical terms, many urban environments are remarkably peaceful and functional. Not utopian, not without issues, but compared to human history as a whole modern cities are very livable environments. We often…

In conversation with people here and elsewhere, so often I see angry rejections of the idea that AI is thinking. A reminder that Hinton’s work on machine intelligence via neural networks is the foundation of AI, and won…

And another AI post. What trends is what’s real, in zombie Western social media culture. Progressive politicians are making great inroads into rural States in the US, with confected outrages over AI. South Australian…

The emergence of a near-transcendent force of destruction in the Manhattan Project created the fear of global annihilation. Instead that transcendence ushered in an era of almost unprecedented peace, via the threat of…

The importance of 'right-sizing' a home battery. This is the data for our place yesterday, a typical winter day. You can see from the green line that the battery charges once per day, and that's enough to get us through…

The standard theory says telescopes help you see things that are ‘far away’. Bizarrely these same theories say objects emit images of themselves that then travel through ‘space’, which the telescope then focuses. Has…

So often you will see the claim that AI is ‘stealing’ the work of artists, like writers and musicians. I think that’s deeply and self-servingly dishonest. Just as AI doesn’t store words, books or publications and then…

The huge jump in the price of meat in Australia in the past decade got me wondering. We produce a LOT of meat, it didn’t make sense. It turns out the main reason is the same reason gas (and through gas, electricity) got…

I’ve shared my concept of a ‘social field’, like a magnetic field but for society more generally. Not an analogy, the way mundane material transactions of everyday life create a collective, continuous web of stability…

“…the vast majority of New England is in favour of the REZ. It’s jobs, whole new industries. It drought-proofs so many farmers.” New England is Barnaby Joyce’s electorate. When renewables started rolling out there years…

If you’re swept up in the viral outrage over data centres, here’s a tip to make them go away. Get off social media and the internet, and stop streaming and using AI in record amounts. You’re the cause of the data…

Some perspective again on how remarkable what's happening in China is, and what a backwater of whining adolescent irrelevance the West now mostly is. In the past 20 years China has spent $7 trillion (AUS) building new…

"Quincy, Washington, is now home to more than two dozen data centers, which pay more than half the city's property taxes. That windfall has bought Quincy a new high school, sports complex, hospital, library, police…

As the pumped-up hysteria over AI data centres continues, fed by the algorithms on the socials, it’s worth looking back to the response when railroads were first built. Nothing changes.

My own training followed a pathway that disappeared centuries ago. Where you were expected to understand both the sciences and humanities, but not as two separate domains. Not just a mix-and-match. All knowledge was…

The times they are a 'chargin'. The Bathurst Tesla Superchargers used to sit empty most of the time, except on busy holidays. (Which is normal, most charge at home.) Absolutely packed today, and a new car arrived with…

Every man and woman and their dog will tell you the joy of travel is to ‘experience’ other places and other cultures. Experience is a tautology. Everything in your life is an experience. The travel guide book shows the…

The Anglo nations are enslaved by social media, the bubble they now live inside. All are rushing to install their own local Trumps, the social media President. Despite the complete train wreck Trump is in the US. Facts…

A neural network has nodes, which in our brains (analog AI) are neurons, and in AI (digital AI) are weighted numbers. When our bodies or AI experience the world, these nodes form themselves, nobody pre-programs them.…

One of the proliferating waves of nostalgia we’ve seen was the push to return more buttons and knobs to cars. The rationale given was that using a touchscreen is too distracting. That viral nostalgia is now dead, when…

One of the most glaring symptoms of the problem with all Western cultures is their total neglect of regional life. You only need to look at the highway system to see it. Tens of billions spent creating smooth multi-lane…

I don't think the magnitude of global ice is widely known, and what melting it all will do to sea levels. For those sceptical sea levels can vary much, historically we know how high the seas were the last time all of…

I was paying my rates the other day, and looked at the itemised costs. And while my rates are quite high for a regional town, when I looked at the itemised bill I thought this is such a pittance for what I’m getting.…

‘Local AI’ is a term to become familiar with. Increasingly AI *in use* is local devices doing the inference work. Your phone has been doing it for years already. Data centres increasingly only train the AI models these…

This post from an English guy who’s lived in China for many years, comparing it to the UK again on a trip home, shows in stark detail why I post so often about China here. Our thinking about China is based on…

This is the current Holy Grail for Covid, a nasal (mucosal) vaccine. The vaccines we have target the lower respiratory system, they don’t prevent the virus entering our noses in the first place. It’s much more difficult…

If you want a real indicator of the damage social media is doing to societies, go out today and buy a hard copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. Skinny as a regional paper.

Just one sporting ground in the UK. This is climate change, they're no longer even denying it. This particular ground has flooded 8 times in the past year alone. Many big clubs are not confident they will survive.…

Can’t wait to see these out on the roads. Over 5,000 sold already apparently.

My posts on travel are explorations of the idea of 'being there'. There's an automatic assumption that going somewhere brings you closer to the 'real thing'. Proximity as authenticity. I argue the opposite. 'There' is…

There’s no water to fight the LA fires. That’s because an urban reticulated water system isn’t designed to fight massive fires across thousands of homes at once. Another example of the catastrophe of climate change…

Imagine if this was the road toll, or drownings, or food poisonings. Hundreds dead every week, from preventable causes. There’d be an outcry. Then ask yourself why you’re happy for these deaths to be Covid deaths, and…

Ignoring all of the Elon Musk distraction around Tesla, their engineering is superb. Like the new Model Y, when you build a car all of the component parts have to be bolted and welded together, which takes time and a…

The feed-in tariff for solar is how much you get paid for exporting to the grid. In Victoria the proposed minimum rate retailers have to pay owners is now only 0.04 cents per kWh i.e. effectively nothing. Down from over…

What I see every day with utes, including with trailers. This class of vehicle is some of the ugliest driving out there. Had one of these behind me (with a trailer) in a queue overtaking a truck the other day, flashing…

I still recommend Bill Hero, the automated price comparison service for all your energy bills. It will automatically take all your gas and electricity bills and compare them with everything else on the market, to make…

Propaganda and hysteria now dominate public life. Anti-renewables propaganda, sponsored by fossil fuel companies, encourages Australians to believe that vast areas of Australia will need to be covered with windmills and…

It’s nearly election silly season again, and I don’t play those team sports. I often criticise the modern LNP (as do many who have left the coalition) because they’re not a political party, they’re now entirely a…

Trump will be a train wreck even before this term is over.

A stat for fans of ‘baseload’ power. In the past decade, households have used nearly 5% less total electricty. The cost of this electricity grew by more than 70%. This is coal and gas-fired ‘baseload’ electricity.

Dick Smith is sponsoring this, another one of his fact-free crusades, like Dick Smith peanut butter. What does nuclear mean for Lithgow? Nothing. Australia will never build nuclear reactors for electricity. Nobody will…

Probably the first time a manufacturer has re-invented a market segment with a vehicle at their first try. You can do most of your driving in this car at full-electric, never needing to spend a cent on fuel. About 80km…

Venice is one of the few cities on Earth where you can still live the truth of this. Cities aren’t loud. It’s combustion engines that make them loud. Venice is eerily and beautifully silent (though now overrun with…

I do get that Elon Musk is putting many people off Tesla in any form. But Tesla is 130,000 brilliant people, doing urgent things the world needs. For example way bigger than its cars is its provision of battery storage…

The First Fleet was a convict transport. Ask those convicts if they’d celebrate this day. ‘Australia’ began in 1901, more than a century after the First Fleet. We don’t even know our own history. I have zero interest in…

This is the car Kell and I just bought. Not the actual car in the picture, but the exact same model, colour etc. The Model 3, Long Range. People know I spend a lot of time looking at all the EV options out there. What…

82 people have died of Covid in aged care in Australia, in January. They all caught it from us. The same number who died in the Granville Train Disaster. How are our ‘principles’ going?

Can you, from standing, cross your feet and move smoothly to sitting cross-legged on the ground, without touching anything with your hands for support or using your knees for support? And then get smoothly up again,…

Trump and others hate what they call the ‘Deep State’. Sounds scary! All it means is the professional civil servants that actually run countries, who annoy popularly-elected dickheads who can barely tie their own…

The sorts of electricity prices renewables are making possible. The red rectangle is completely free electricity between 11am and 2pm every day. The red circle is electricity at only 8c/kWh from midnight-6am, to charge…

City and country are not two forms of life. They’re one form of life. Have a look at the UK, the land gets progressively more valuable the closer to London you get. The people who live in the ‘countryside’ see it as a…

Did my calculations long ago for the new EV. If we stick with grid power to charge it at home, at full grid price (not special EV price), it’ll cost about $15 a week to ‘fill’ the Tesla. That’s for 300km of motoring per…

What a window into the mess of our ideas about relationships. I love that many are realising that being alone is not a bad thing. But their reasons here are all about personal development, incredibly self-centred. Being…

I was talking to my brother about overtourism. Mike is a senior manager in the travel industry. He made the fascinating point that what’s allowed travel to explode to levels of destruction is Airbnb. All of these people…

So many councils under pressure to raise rates to meet basic costs. I still think it’s a startling fact that the average person spends more on take away food, alcohol, recreation and travel than they do on their roads,…

Such a ridiculous idea. Fuel excise doesn't go to roads anyway, the whole thing is a con. If they want extra revenue, cancel the diesel fuel rebate, massive subsidies to utes, and other subsidies to oil and gas and coal…

AI may end up being the best healthcare many of us can access. Even in a larger regional town, it can be impossible to get into a GP. Mine has a 5-month waiting list, good luck if there’s anything actually wrong with…

I could never go back to a combustion car. The physics says it all. Look at those flaccid torque and power blue and red lines for petrols and diesels. You spend most of your time revving the shit out of the thing (what…

My $3.60 in electricity for a week of commuting between Bathurst and Lithgow was based on an estimate. I re-did the calculation using actual data from the car this morning. It's $2.40. Per week. If I was working in the…

I have a few friends here who use OVO (myself included now). With an EV their overnight 8c/kWh charge is fantastic (AGL offer similar). They also give you completely free electricity between 11 and 2 every day. You may…

The beauty of a home battery is that you get to control your energy costs. As an example, I program the battery to top up if needed between midnight and 6am, when we get super cheap electricity from the grid, and also…

As once big acts descend on tiny regional towns to try to get any gigs, while acts in those local towns increasingly gravitate to themed cover band type shows to attract audiences, you can’t help but feel gig culture is…

Australia might go one better. It might elect a halfwit who wants to spend $600 billion (of your money) on foreign nuclear technology that nobody needs. Imagine the roads, schools, trains, hospitals and affordable…

What modern car nuts (mostly just guys of middle-age who used cars as a way of defining their social group as teenagers) don’t understand is that an EV is really a GT car. A grand tourer, gran turismo. Cars engineered…

What is often called a ‘tree change’ is more technically ‘rural gentrification’. For a while it gives an appearance of injecting dynamism back into regional communities. But it’s mostly people wanting a city lifestyle,…

This is a false distinction that I often post about. City v country. These aren’t two things, they’re one thing. Neither exists without the other. They’re a single form of life. There was no country without cities, and…

Of course it will. Remember the ‘plan’ is to spend $600 billion taxpayer dollars - that’s ’your money’, as they like to say - to build nuclear plants for electricity. Electricity you can already get for free at home…

To give a bit more of the flavour of insanity that passes for public life now, you'll see these Foxtel dishes all over Australia. They're owned by Rupert Murdoch. If you think Murdoch is a cancer on democracy (and he…

Electricity is still very cheap in America. This is cost per kWh. In Australia most people pay at least twice these rates, sometimes triple. Why the difference? It’s mostly the last place people expect to look.…

The genius of the renewables transition is that everybody wins. (Except foreign fossil fuel and nuclear companies.) For example, with OVO's supercheap overnight rates, and free energy between 11am and 2pm every day,…

If only there was a way to have no electricity bills. Or petrol or diesel bills...

Incredibly powerful way to see so much about Australian life. - we’re one of the most urbanised nations on Earth, though we pretend we all live in the outback (which we can’t define) - that level of urbanisation is what…

Rio Tinto is Australia's largest user of electricity. Not least because it runs aluminium smelters, which use huge amounts. It's just announced it will be powering these using solar, wind and batteries. The reason?…

Temperatures in Greenland are 20 degrees above average. The ice covering much of Greenland if melted has the potential to stop the major ocean currents that transport heat between hemispheres.

Another urban myth. Citronella candles are useless against mozzies. DEET is the gold standard, like in Aeroguard. Roll or spray a bit of that on, forget the candles. This is starting to really matter even in temperate…

The car lobby is also the parking lobby. Nothing exercises Bathurst more for example than parking spaces. What causes increased traffic and increased need for parking, is new roads and new parking spaces. It induces…

It’s so important to remember the magnitude of both the ambition and the material achievement of this organisation. The Chinese have copied it, Tesla was the trailblazer. You can see some of the actual material outcomes…

Thoughts? How will we fund roads?! (Sorry, another anti-EV myth, that EV drivers don't fund roads. Fuel excise doesn't fund roads, and this shows it.) The only thing I buy at servos is packets of chips.

The ALP is offering $150 electricity bill rebates, and the LNP 25c off every litre of fuel. It's a great example of how big the savings are by going electric. With 25c off every litre of fuel, at current prices of…

Household electricity use is actually quite a small component of household budgets. A much, much bigger component of those budgets is what it costs for people to fuel their vehicles. That’s also part of your energy…

It won't be long now until the clown car drives off the road all by itself. No need for you to become a violent gang member and head out to loot and burn anything. No threat of fascism or Nazis, that's all cartoon…

Wonderful footage from the 1960s of construction by the then Department of Main Roads (the DMR) of part of the Sydney-Newcastle expressway. Lots of familiar bits of road even today. I love that post-war public optimism,…

Every engineer in the country told them this years ago. Nuclear is the thirstiest of all electricity generation methods. Bananaby hitched the Nationals' train to nukes, in his anti-windfarm crusade, to try to win back…

Electric vehicles preceded combustion vehicles. Combustion vehicles were considered a joke: loud, inefficient, spewing pollution, gutless. That’s because they were a joke, and still are. Rubbish technology. Only cheap…

Game on! Bless the Chinese. Now European giants like VW are responding to the Chinese challenge with fabulous, affordable EVs, like the ID.4 Pro. Great mid-sized SUV, with superb German road handling, and at the same…

There's a vehicle driving from Lithgow to Bathurst every day, normally at about 90 km/h. Often has a queue of traffic behind it. I went to overtake them today, and suddenly they were doing 125. This sort of driving…

Classic example (in an otherwise good review) of a misunderstanding I think we're seeing with the Shark. (And yes, it's an older article, posting to highlight thinking in it, not to share a new review.) "Once the…

Brits have named this pair the two sexiest men in England. When they transported the genetic diversity they did have to Australia in the 18th century, what was left became a nation of in-bred hobbits, with tastes to…

Amazing aerial recreation of Rome more than 2000 years ago, at the time of Jesus. Nice one for Easter. Look at how stunning ancient Rome was. The Roman Empire also gave birth to many of the world’s most famous cities,…

The UK's energy system is privatised. It also has nuclear power. The whole thing is such a train wreck that a growth industry there now is energy theft, with ordinary people and organised crime finding ways to steal…

I love the dappled light and colour of an autumn garden. The genius of it is the complex filling of almost every available niche in space, without sacrificing the capacity of light, air and water to pass through at the…

Historically tradies dominantly voted Labor, but were skilfully brought over to the conservative side of politics by targeting young men mostly, with fake wars on women, EVs and utes, Greenies and whatever else could be…

This ongoing drivel about EV drivers not paying their fair share of road upkeep. Petrol and diesel tax doesn’t go to roads, and the same party promising to slug EV drivers to pay for roads are cutting fuel excise to buy…

Tesla is launching cheaper versions of its major cars like the Model Y and Model 3, reportedly from the middle of this year. They'll take some of the more luxury elements out of the vehicles, that aren't needed for…

Australia follows a pattern also seen in the US and other places. The real tension is between urban and rural environments. The more urban a society is, the more cosmopolitan voters tend to be. Living in cities…

There's a deluge of new renewable capacity coming online, provided no idiot politician gets in the way. 40% of Australia's electricity last year came from renewables. That number is going to climb very fast now, if…

Something I posted about here a few weeks ago. Ordinary petrol and diesel cars have been getting so quiet in recent decades, they've had to pipe fake engine noise even into the BMW M5, to satisfy those who like the…

The recently opened Flyers Creek wind farm, near Orange and Bathurst, produces enough electricity alone to power both towns. Expect to see a dramatic and welcome acceleration in renewables now the LNP have been kicked…

The beaten dog syndrome, when you inherit a pet that’s been beaten by a broom for example, and then for the rest of its life every time you sweep the dog panics and hides. I’ve noticed a similar thing driving the Tesla…

EVs aren’t mostly bought by ‘inner city elites’. They’re mostly bought by poorer people in outer suburbs, because they save them a fortune in fuel costs. Together with people in rural and regional areas, they buy well…

In Australia household solar generates more electricity than all of our coal-fired power stations combined. And it’s still growing at an enormous rate. That was thanks to John Howard, who introduced the subsides for…

One of my favourite examples of how suggestible and manipulable people are. When wind turbines first appeared in the Central West, most people didn’t care, while for others councils even built viewing platforms to see…

A secondhand Tesla is probably the best value used car out there. This one has done nearly 300,000km and still has 90% of its original battery capacity, and drives flawlessly. It also shows just how much value you get…

All of those who love the sound of a V8, like Jeremy, always forget that the sound they love is not the engine. It’s the exhaust, a metal tube. Invented to get rid of the truly horrible sound of an engine, to ‘muffle’…

This Modigliani nude sold for over A$235 million. The art market is an ocean of fakes and forgeries, trying to cash in on the enormous money a tiny handful of works attract. Modigliani is one of the most copied artists…

It's only in popular music that fights over 'originals' really happen. Symphony orchestras and jazz bands dine out on almost nothing but 'covers'. It's not a musical thing, it's a social thing. Popularity culture always…

City and country aren’t two ways of life. They’re one way of life. Originally what we call ‘rural’ coexisted in the cities with more urban dwelling. But then they ran out of room and needed more resources, so farming…

Pick any country town, and you’ll find in nearly every case it was originally farms and/or mines.

This one will be shared a lot. It’s a game-changer I think, showing that the criticisms of the Shark off-road seem mostly to be reviewers who don’t have a clue how it works, or how to drive it. Some of these hills are…

Ute and other 4WD fans threw every insult and criticism they could at the BYD Shark when it came out, particularly claiming it wasn’t a proper off-roader. It turns out it needs a professional who actually knows how to…

These columns on the Pantheon weigh 60 tonnes each. They were quarried in Egypt, more than 2000km away. They were then dragged across desert, and put onto barges, to float them to Rome, along rivers and across the…

One of my mini projects is to explore how all human behaviour is people copying other people, driven by the desire for status. You can explain pretty much everything using that framework, it’s the periodic table of…

The kids drove back from Sydney last night. They didn't charge while down there, and when they got to Katoomba they were already below 30% charge. But the car told them they'd have 22% charge when they got home. And…

Estimates of payback times for home batteries. The more electricity prices go up the more these payback times go down. Worth remembering too that a battery isn’t just useful to save money on electricity, it also gives…

Have mentioned Bill Hero (https://www.billhero.com.au) here a few times, the bill comparison service that will automatically check your personal energy bills every month (it does very detailed calculations, using your…

Have posted about this a few times. How the ‘country’ really isn’t a thing, it’s mostly settler towns for farming and mining and other extractive industries, for the city. Once the extraction dries up, the town dies,…

Today's trivia. The fuelling network for petrol and diesel cost at least 3 times what rolling out supercharging Australia-wide will cost. The alleged 'range' of petrols and diesels is really the hundreds of billions…

AUKUS was another Scott Morrison train wreck. AUKUS is the US wanting a mobile launch platform for their missiles, against China, in the Pacific. They can piss off. Why shouldn't China be our main ally, in 2025? Pretty…

If all the ice in Greenland melts, ocean levels worldwide go up 7 metres. That’s the end of most coastal cities. All except one of Australia’s major cities are on the coast. 98% of Australians live in those cities.

More kidulting. You may recognise Keith, from the Great Pottery Throwdown. A master potter. He and his wife Marj bought an old chapel in Wales, to renovate. What’s fascinating about the show is watching the modern adult…

These lists of notable deaths every year another window into the culture that’s invisible to us. Almost entirely celebrities - rock, film and sports stars, mostly. Others from the entertainment industry. Some…

BYD is an engineering powerhouse, they can generate new cars seemingly out of thin air. The Denza B5 is a plug-in hybrid rival to the Toyota Prado. Early drives suggest it’ll eat the Prado for breakfast, a brutally good…

Hugely lower energy costs and phenomenal power and performance. Now is an incredibly fun time to own an EV, because the roads are still chockers with petrol and diesel clunkers that you can embarrass.

Yesterday Lithgow was the coldest place in the entire country, in the morning. Today is even colder. The house is toasty warm, in every room, and has been all night. I heated up its thermal mass yesterday with free…

When an accident blocks the highway, what do you do? You watch Netflix or Youtube.

Going back to the distinction between tailored and designer clothes. This is current F1 drivers. All of them, to a man, are badly dressed. All of them to a man are *expensively* dressed, in ‘designer’ clothes. None of…

When kids learn to ride a bike, it just happens. They fumble around with training wheels for a while and then suddenly their body just knows how to balance and ride the bike. The curious thing about this is that we…

Another good example of the fake distinction between city and country. Pretty much every ‘country town’ is or was just a mining or farming operation, an extractive industry driven by city life. Once there’s no more need…

This seems a sensible article. Except more than anything it shows the collapse of public health. The idea of public health is to prevent disease *arriving* at your home in the first place. To control diseases in public…

A mum I know was despairing this week that her kids are sick again, for the third time this year. ‘They just seem to catch everything now, and it doesn’t go away.’ That’s Covid at work. It suppresses (technically…

One of the things the collapse of our education has created is the misunderstanding of thinking itself. Thinking is a job. Just like plumbing. It has a set of specific skills, that take a long time to learn. It’s what a…

It's going to be challenging to transport huge wind turbines into the Central West. Who cares? It was challenging to go to the moon too. I'm sick of the whining and complaining of activists. I know people are probably…

Classic example of a factoid. Something that is wrong, repeated so often that people come to think it’s true. Modern electrical devices are designed to be left turned on at the wall continuously, in fact cycling them on…

My first training was as a materials scientist/engineer. Materials more than anything else create the modern world. Like the treatments of glass, Diamon-Fusion in this case which we’ve had applied to the new shower…

I’m seeing a lot of Model Ys now, even in Bathurst and Lithgow. Like when it was originally introduced, it sells so well because it’s engineered so brilliantly to cover so many needs. Its inside space is huge, a genuine…

Tobacco plantation owners were some of the high status, wealthy people of their day. Every era has its high status positions, that generate wealth and power. The counterculture we’ve all lived since the 1960s is the…

NASA routinely transported space shuttles along city streets. Huge crowds would gather to look and cheer. Trees, signs and lamp posts had to be temporarily removed or adjusted. The route required levelling the streets…

When Rod’s not busy getting very rich being a permanent teenage rock star, he’s being a permanent little boy, building model railroads, and complaining to his local council about potholes in the roads to his vast estate.

I like to share the everyday experiences of owning an electric car, because for most all they hear is the battle cries of various competing pro-and-anti EV teams. For example, in my drive from Lithgow to Bathurst every…

If you’re getting solar, do a shade analysis before buying (good installers will do it for you). For example this mighty tree in my street was factored into our system. By 3.30 most winter days, it shades our entire…

EVs reduce exhaust emissions to zero in cities and towns. And they also reduce the amount of brake dust by up to 83%. EVs use regenerative braking rather than brakes a lot of the time, meaning the electric motor spins…

Gaza bewilders, how can Israel continue what it’s doing? It can because despite all the guff about Anglo countries (dominating the grey in the pic) being democracies, no country is actually a democracy, in the way we…

Kidult culture is also name-drop culture. The death of or publicity for a legend of kidult culture has others madly sorting through even the merest contact they may have had with them, so that the post can be about the…

Noah’s distinction here between horizontal and vertical communities is the most crucial defining feature of our lives today. When the two collide you can get real hostility. A lot of what passes for ‘local’ issues, like…

Loved this government response about average speed safety cameras to one of the many boy racers who see public roads as personal race tracks. No doubt he 'drives to the conditions' (i.e. speeds indiscriminately,…

Supposed ‘toxic masculinity’ is an invention of gender activists, working mostly through social media, to reframe what is almost entirely domestic violence as gender-based violence. If all you have is an hammer,…

The EV not only measures how much energy is used on a trip, if you’ve driven the road before it has a memory of your last trip there. Every little peak and slope on this graph corresponds with a different part of the…

Comments by a Bathurst councillor last night calling out misinformation and disinformation movements, referring to a program on ABC’s Compass. This is the issue of our time, the Trumpian populist tricks that shock jocks…

Human life expectancy doubled in the last century. Most of that was due to the use of vaccines. Now kidult culture has turned vaccination into just one more team sport for morons on social media. The comments on this…

Got some replacement tyres yesterday on the Kluger, they were down to 2-3mm tread depth. In Australia 1.5mm is the minimum legal tread depth. At 2-3mm they were still easily legal, and even still looked fine, the tyre…

And again, petrol excise doesn’t fund roads. Petrol and diesel cars have been polluting for free for over a century, that’s the mother of all ‘free rides’. Ditch diesel fuel tax rebate and make billions more than this…

This is the much bigger picture of autonomous driving technology. Humans are incredibly vain and think they’re all wonderful drivers. Driving skill is only one component of road safety, you can be the best pilot in the…

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

Electrochemistry is one of the hot fields right now, obviously with the explosion in interest in and demand for new types of batteries. What’s interesting is that the main element that features there, lithium, has…

It’d be pretty common to say that the function of a road is to get you from A to B. Mary Beard, the historian of ancient Rome, points out that that was never the function of roads. You’ll have heard the expression all…

Another example of social change. Remember the huge to-do about reducing urban speed limits to 50? Now barely rates a mention. If you drive through these areas now at 50, you can directly feel that 60 was much too fast,…

Transgender and its politics is really just one more subset of what we call identity politics. And identity politics in turn is the kidult society I talk about, where instead of focusing collectively on collective…

It’s rumoured Tesla supervised full-self-driving will be released in Australia tomorrow. I will always feel more comfortable sharing the roads with that technology than I will sharing it with the humans I see out there…

Always check the data. The reasons semi-autonomous ‘autopilot’ driving will save many lives is that greater than 90% of crashes on roads are due to human error. This isn’t about driving skill, it’s about unavoidable…

Subsidised home batteries have been a thing for 8 weeks now. Installations are averaging 5000 per *week*. Let that sink in. It’s the equivalent of adding a new Mt Piper power station to the grid every FORTNIGHT. This…

Have a watch of a long road trip through Sydney at night, with a full-self-driving Tesla. Some of the busiest streets in Sydney, including across the Harbour Bridge, in the dark. Hypnotic to watch, and interestingly the…

The Australian magistrate at the forefront of addressing ‘sovereign citizen’ type arguments in Australia made the interesting observation that many come into the movement after some kind of traffic offence. I post a lot…

Heh, you couldn’t make up just how unbelievably stupid our way of life is. 40% of all global shipping is transporting fossil fuels to other countries. Countries that can now produce all of their own energy, pretty much…

The power of urban myths. For years the story has done the rounds that at his death, Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen, hoping to one day be brought back to life. It never happened. Disney was cremated 2 days after…

My first call at work yesterday was a guy who said “what can I do about the prick who lives across the road from me?” The default state of human life is not happy, peaceful coexistence. It’s fighting, for status.…

Does Tesla Mobile Service still exist in Australia? From feedback I’ve seen on various online forums, it appears to have been quietly removed as an option? All the service options in the app direct people to one of the…

Was listening to a violin concerto this morning on the way to work, and thought, why did we bother with electric guitars? The violin is so much better in terms of tone, sustain, harmonics, and ease of fingerboard use.…

America’s decay isn’t caused by ‘authoritarians’ taking over the country. It’s caused by its cultural obsession, its hatred of public regulation and policing. That’s the theme of every Western movie, right there in…

So many think renewables is still a choice for people to make. The energy sector made that choice years ago, and not because it's full of Greenies. Renewables are so much cheaper and faster to roll out. That's it. The…

If you’re sceptical status runs all human life, the road should be a great teacher. For example, why is it so overwhelmingly popular to overtake other vehicles, even those doing the speed limit? And why do people being…

This week Trump, and one of his clown car monkey idiots, Defense Secretary Hesgeth (ex Fox News), gathered all of the top brass of the US Defense forces in a single room. What followed was hilarious and horrific. Trump…

Had a quick drive in and out of Sydney yesterday, and observed driver behaviour as I always do. What I found. About 30% of drivers were consistently below or well below the speed limit. About 40% of drivers were…

I’m the only person I know who still regularly masks. My kids are some of the only people their age who regularly mask. Why do we do it? Because nothing actually changed, the pandemic never ended. You can see here…

As another week begins in local government, another week of constant abuse from members of the community, I thought this was timely. You can see here that all councils, everywhere, are financially collapsing. Not…

Trump's decision to reject renewables is leading America into a full energy crisis. They're critically short of electricity, and coal and nuclear, his (and all the loons worldwide who ride the Trump train) favourite…

A Formula E car. All-electric. These cars only carry relatively small batteries, much smaller than modern EV road cars, less than 40 kWh. It's still enough to do nearly 100 km, at very high speeds. They flog an F1 car…

What I like about Tesla vehicles is that they reclaim motoring from kidult car enthusiasts, often adults whose identity as teens focused heavily around their cars. The need for EVs to focus on efficiency, to preserve…

What’s happening with Covid right now in the UK is so important to help people understand the mess we’re in. That 10 months of relatively low Covid low levels wasn’t interrupted by a new Covid variant. There is no new…

I’ve posted a few times about how country towns are doomed when the extractive industries that founded them (mostly mining and farming) leave. This article details the calamitous stats. There is no such thing as the…

Tony Seba is probably the pre-eminent thinker on disruption and innovation. He has a rule he calls the “10x” rule. If an innovation is 10 times cheaper and better functionally, change is inevitable, it’s just a question…

I didn't know traditional Japanese homes are largely made of wood because that's much less likely to kill the inhabitants, if it collapses in an earthquake. But hardly anybody lives in those now, a century ago 85% of…

Humans are such great drivers. There will come a day people will be astonished we ever allowed individuals to have such leeway over tonnes of metal travelling at high speed while sharing roads with millions of others.

The ‘Fundamental Law of Road Traffic’ is one of the most studied and accepted outcomes of transport economics. In simple words the law says “building roads creates traffic”. We get stuck in this loop, pouring more and…

My car drove me to work today. The entire way, country highway, overtaking slower vehicles, roundabouts, traffic lights (negotiates amber beautifully), city traffic etc. Absolutely flawlessly, I didn't need to do a…

Anti-renewables people dishonestly blame higher electricity prices on renewables. The real cause is the use of gas to generate electricity, with the failure of coal-fired plants. Gas is hugely expensive. As batteries…

Chris Bowen has organised for all Australians to get 3 free hours of electricity in the middle of the day, as some retailers were already offering. This will give people an opportunity to load-shift their heaviest…

And then let's build new steam trains. This person is paid a lot of money by you to run the country. Every single person in the energy industry is laughing at him.

I think one of the most abused words in modern culture is ‘experience’. It’s our religion, we see life as something to be ‘experienced’. Like we’re passive tourists on life’s journey, and it will keep throwing up new…

Isn’t it funny that all of the improvement in cars in the last 50 years, towards them being quieter both inside and out, less polluting, and more efficient converge upon the ultimate solution to all of those things.…

The great swindle here is to make unthinking Australians believe their power price rises are due to renewables. Even a Year 7 science student could find the data in about 5 minutes. The surge in power prices is due to…

The National Party's push to turn windmills into a regional political issue could end up costing councils a fortune in wasted legal fees, if they get involved. Tamworth Council for example has just had a judge more or…

Every old band has seen the massive cash-vacuum nostalgia tours now are, and are dusting off the instruments to get out there fast. The Gallagher brothers are making $100 million EACH from their tour. Nostalgia is hot…

Close up of springs in an anglepoise lamp. More generally called balanced-arm lamps. I’ve posted about these before, and how the human body operates via a similar principle, though using a different mechanism. These…

It seems certain the LNP will ditch a commitment to Net Zero, and try to spin their way out of it by pretending they're prioritising cheaper electricity through coal, gas and nuclear. Only complete idiots don't already…

It's glorious that companies like Globird are announcing plans like this only one day after the LNP announced their idiot 'let's use lots of expensive coal and gas and nuclear' policy. 4 free hours of electricity in the…

It’s reported Gina is going to help fund a mass propaganda push leading up to the next election, on the evils of Net Zero and also mass migration. To try to turn the public on Net Zero the way they did on the Voice…

Most public debates are completely fake, they're not about the issue in any way. They're about the status of the competing teams. Here's a good example, in the US the two main parties (Democrat and Republican) have…

The greatest con of the past 5 years is that ‘lockdowns’ damaged us. Lockdowns freed vast numbers of Australians from poverty, for the first time in their lives. They forced much more workplace flexibility, which…

Nathan’s Tesla has done 404,000 km. The only maintenance he’s needed is some work on the air conditioner, and on the suspension at 345,000 km. He’s paid not one cent for fuel, or on regular servicing. Fuel savings alone…

The climate crisis is reaching tipping points. This is Tehran, capital of Iran. 14 million people live there, about half the population of Australia. Preparations are underway for imminent possible evacuation of the…

One for those who think machines can only output what a human has input. That AI just plagiarises what humans do. AI taught itself Bengali, without any human training it. Google has no idea how it did it.

Saw a lot of this sort of thing after the storms in Bathurst, with truckloads of abuse for Council staff. The 'nature strip' or verge (road reserve) is indeed Council land, and sometimes it plants trees there. If those…

This is very common, deliberate behaviour. Men with tiny weenies whose entire identities is tied up in their Tonka trucks, like toddlers in a sandpit. The shift to EVs makes them feel what they are - nobodies. The…

Even NSW, which was a laggard, now on most days provides most of its electricity from renewables. Those red arrows show the tiny remnant of coal used during the day, quickly collapsing. Overnight you can see what impact…

Inflation remains too high because we have an ageing, cashed-up population who are spending without restraint. The stupidity of the favoured economic ideas of our time, monetary policy (free market idiocy), says the…

James is only a college freshman. He suffered cardiac arrest while training. Finally some are starting to see the ‘uncomfortable truth’.

I want to talk about the ‘hollowing-out’ of towns, to give more context to my deep dislike of modern travel culture. This is Bourton-on-the-Water, in the Cotswolds, one of the most photographed towns in the UK. It has…

The bizarre thing is that ‘sports’ cars are built to drive on public roads. The people who buy them will drive in anti-social ways, why spend the money otherwise? We need to reframe what ‘good driving’ means, away from…

One of the fastest ways to identify disphits on the road is to look through the comments on posts like this. Just one more example of the sewer social media turns our lives into, giving visibility and coordinating power…

A brilliant side-effect of electrification, which will also revolutionise plane travel. Unlike fossil fuels, you can generate energy from renewable energy anywhere, without having to truck in fuel. It will make even…

It's so hard to talk about anything today without people defaulting to their team in whatever fake 'debate' has been set up around it. Like discussing Tesla things, it fires up the anti-Elons and the anti-EVs and…

In my recovery I’m thinking again about my social media use, from 2026. I’m tired of debates and arguments over basic things with friends and family. The societies we grew up in had institutionalised expertise that took…

I share this not as medical advice, though it was medical advice to me, from senior Covid specialists and researchers. If you go to your GP with Covid, you’ll probably get told to take some Panadol, drink plenty of…

On New Year's Eve, AEMO said new demand (not supply) had to be found for electricity in Victoria, or else some solar farms would need to be shut down. There was too much electricity. Remember being told by coal-carrying…

Another side to the gas ‘debate’ is that a lot of gas infrastructure is old and failing, leading to dangerous explosions. New builds will increasingly no longer have gas as an option, though the industry will fight hard…

Was watching this unfold live before going to sleep last night, and while pilots tend to get all the applause and publicity, the cabin crew managed to get nearly 400 people off this burning wreck in no time at all,…

Neighbourhood Watch runs in several countries. The idea being the community more engaged in assisting in the prevention and reporting of crime. So here’s my idea. We need something similar for roads. For example,…

Another of the fear-mongering slogans about EVs is that you have to replace their batteries, and it costs a fortune. Tesla has the data on this. After over 320,000 km of driving, the batteries are still at 90% of their…

Reading the comments on this one, worth pointing out that the State government designs, builds and maintains all highways, including the parts of highways that run through towns. And all traffic lights on highways.…

Another trend we’re seeing, gentrification of bush towns. The Rockley Pub another good example. Where cashed-up, often young city folk transform local communities into boutique luxury lifestyle options. It’s a tough…

The most popular EV in Australia, Tesla’s Model 3. Can be bought for less than the price of Australia’s favourite car, the Toyota Hilux. But that’s just the sale price: - fuel costs for the EV can be close to zero -…

Another legacy carmaker backing hydrogen not because it’s better, but because it means them not having to retool their factories as much. Green hydrogen costs a fortune to make, and wastes astronomical amounts of…

"The Tesla Model 3 is the top-selling sedan in the country...easily outselling the once-dominant Toyota Camry that is tens of thousands of dollars cheaper." This whole article shows the main reason for the delay with…

Great publicity for Lithgow. Councils don’t have enough money to fix or build basic infrastructure now. People don’t want to have the conversation, but pay far more for personal recreation, travel and dining out/take…

Much of the anti-EV rubbish you read online comes from this community. The ‘towing’ community. Most of them haven’t even got a clue about towing, let alone EVs, hurtling along highways uninsured, with tonnes of gear,…

As a Part 2 to the Chicago anti-EV piffle circulated by the mind midgets at SKY News Australia, the irony is the same city has seen the same propaganda before. In 2011 hundreds of petrol cars were abandoned because the…

This stuff is dishonest. Firstly it uses the most expensive electricity in the country, in fast-chargers, up to 70c/kWh. That's more than twice what many pay at home for electricity, and more than 10 times what you pay…

EVs are already changing the culture of Australian towns. Many towns are bypassed by big highways with big servos on them. Now those towns are adding chargers and suddenly people are visiting them again. The service…

There are so many debates about housing, and like in so many other things, some of the ways these problems have been solved in the past have been forgotten. From the 17th century in Europe and 19th century here in…

The huge untold story of petrol and diesel vehicle range is what it costs the country, never spoken about. The range of a vehicle is a property of its energy supply network, not of the vehicle. Without that network, its…

This very interesting graph compares the cost of driving 100km for petrol and EV, at different prices for electricty. Yellow is one of the EV rates of 6c/kWh now on offer from some retailers. Blue is an average grid…

The Greenland ice cap is losing 30 million TONNES of ice every HOUR. To those who still pretend this is all normal, a tip. It wasn’t losing 30 million tonnes of ice an hour in our lifetimes, or anybody else’s, for at…

Detroit has 300,000 buildings. 70,000 of them now sit empty, because the only thing that made them function was cars. As oil prices went up, people in the suburbs could no longer afford commuting, and the suburbs died.…

London is a Roman city. Originally Londinium. Much of our civilisation we owe to the Roman Empire, and specifically its adoption of Christianity as the Holy Roman Empire.

You won’t find a State or town in the country who has anywhere near enough money to provide the basic services people demand, like repairing these roads. We as the public need to start to make some tough decisions about…

The ‘live with the virus’ slogan has driven a huge escalation in anti-vax beliefs and behaviour. We’re told that vaccinations will protect us from Covid, but nobody is getting them. And they’re also stopping their…

Renewables have cut the wholesale price of electricity in half in the past year. Consumers should see that in their bills from mid-year, when the regulators update the pricing for retailers.

Playing with Covid worked out well for Travis Head. If he’d had a muscle strain, we’d have said he was playing with an injury. But Covid, the third leading cause of death in Australia? Not mentioned.

Politics is mostly done with words. Take the loaded word ‘spending’. Invented in the 1970s to portray all government as wasteful. A much more accurate word is investment. Governments invest in communities, creating…

Transmission lines are vulnerable to extreme weather events, and everybody is getting a lot more of those. And it’s slow work building the 10,000km of new ones we need too. A really interesting proposal that’s now…

Making fun of Lithgow is a national pastime. If you wanna ride that train, you better have something pretty special to match 8800 TONNES of Nutella, every year.

If you want to filter the air, at home or at work, a great idea even without a pandemic (particularly if you live in a city, or somewhere that uses wood fires for heating), these IKEA Starkvind purifiers are pretty…

We drove the Bells Line today. No question the more beautiful of the two mountain roads. But the road itself is lethal, not even close to modern safety standards. Amazing more people aren’t killed on it. And it was…

The Powerwall 2 ships with a capacity of 13.5 kWh. But because it’s chemistry and not neat, you’ll often get more than that. You can test how much the capacity of your battery has degraded over time, it’s warranted to…

Look at what the collapse of the coal plant in Victoria has done to the wholesale electricity price there. Nearly $17,000/MWh. OUCH. Compare with South Australia, with its renewables? They're giving the energy away…

Private health, education, housing, electricity and roads are all catastrophic failures, kept afloat only by huge injections of taxpayer dollars. Let them all live by their beloved market rules, take the taxpayer…

Next time you see protests anywhere about Council rates, it's worth noting that the 2022 floods in NSW caused damage to over 13,000km of roads. That's enough road to cross Australia 4 times. Those roads were already…

My greatest pleasure in driving is finding ways to maximise the smoothness and efficiency of the trip. Not changing gears (only cars with engines that have no grunt need gears), or any of the other boy-racer fetishes…

The storm between Bathurst and Lithgow tonight was the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to Armageddon on a road. 20km or more of cyclonic rain, lightning strikes metres from the road and overhead, maybe 100 cars…

Diagnostics on the Powerwall after more than a year of use. You can see they’re sold as a capacity of 13.5kWh, but you can end up with more, as ours is, 14.7kWh. And 0% degradation for the battery after more than a year…

And another climate event. Beyond the capacity of councils to afford. Meanwhile communities spend a huge proportion of their weekly incomes on personal entertainment, dining out and travel, and then complain when…

Another astonishing breakthrough by materials scientists. (Disclaimer: my original training was as a materials scientist ;)) Battery development is on steroids right now, put the engineers to work and watch them go.…

England's water infrastructure was privatised in 1989, sold to the private sector for 6.1 billion pounds, with no debt carried forward. Since that time those private sector companies have extracted 75 billion pounds in…

Rubbish technology, which kills you to boot. 11,000 people in New South Wales die every year from vehicle exhaust pollution. Many of the rest get diseases like Alzheimers. And people not only defend it, they love it.…

This is the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, under construction in the UK. (Actually a model, it’s years away from being finished.) Keep this one in mind as the debates around nuclear power heat up here. When…

Having worked as an engineer at Lucas Heights, I can promise you Matt Canavan knows as little about this as he does about everything else. This isn't even the Lucas Heights reactor (in the picture), it's Australia's…

Guess how much Sydney motorists will pay in tolls between now and 2060? $195 BILLION dollars 🤔 Governments should just build public infrastructure, like they used to.

Together with 'range anxiety' for EVs, many have battery anxiety, thinking they'll be up for thousands to replace faulty batteries. Both myths originating in social media slogans. EV batteries last way longer than you…

Rod decided to do his own road repairs, because his Ferrari kept bottoming-out (we all feel for him). Part of a trend that’s obvious everywhere. No money for councils to fix roads, the public and their 5-car families…

I remember when self-driving was considered a fantasy. Now any car with ‘adaptive cruise control’ (they call it that for legal reasons I think, to emphasise they still want the driver to be paying attention) can do a…

If your German is no good, what this diagram shows is the network of infrastructure needed to get energy into your car, for the current fuelling options. To the right of each car is the outputs (pollution). EVs at the…

Alan Kohler making the brilliant point that fossil fuel export projects, which make us bugger all anyway, are hogging more than half of the workforce we need to build new homes and our renewable energy infrastructure.…

This is a social catastrophe that still has a long way to run. Cities and towns (including Bathurst) can’t even house essential workers. The standard idea that it’s all a problem of ‘supply’ isn’t right. It’s a lack of…

This got wide applause on social media. It was an act of rank stupidity. It’s vigilantism, the sort of thing social media encourages every day. If people had been injured or killed as a result of the DIY traffic control…

Public transport in Finland.

Schleswig-Holstein in the north of Germany is one of the most beautiful parts of Europe. Many travellers have never heard of it. Which is probably a good thing, they won’t wreck it. I lived there with dear family…

Kyoto has had enough now. Says tourism has turned its city into a ‘theme park’. A perfect description of what travel does to a place I think, it’s inevitable. Visitors can only ever have an image of a place, a…

Every autumn and winter is a gardening challenge, because massive trees over the road in a schoolyard deposit literally cubic metres of leaves up our driveway. Every year I use a leaf blower to deposit them back in the…

I walk every lunch time, and see this quite a lot. Really rude and selfish, I’m able-bodied so can easily divert onto the road to get around it, but I shouldn’t have to. If you’re old or in a wheelchair, this can…

7 countries now generate ALL of their electricity from renewables. When you look at the list, they’re mostly not rich countries. And they managed to do it even ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’. Another…

Comment about a hybrid vehicle. A very common misunderstanding among the anti-EV crowd. An EV is a vehicle that uses electric motors. *Where* it gets the electricty from is irrelevant. Because electric motors are so…

Most local councils are tens of millions of dollars short of having enough money to do even basic road maintenance. Climate change will now make many roads unusable. Meanwhile the public, hypnotised by social media,…

Nissan is advertising the new X-Trail ePower heavily. It’s a ‘series’ hybrid. Meaning the petrol motor acts only as a generator for the electric motors, that drive the wheels. There are also parallel hybrids where the…

UK railways are one of the best real-life examples of the myths around public vs private. They began in the 19th century as private railways. That was a complete disaster, and so the government nationalised them in…

There’s enough energy in a standard tank of petrol to power an EV from Sydney to Perth, and back again. The petrol car is so inefficient that it won’t even get out of NSW on the outwards-trip, on one tank. Some chuckle…

Delighted to see the BYD Seal already making inroads into Bathurst. A beautiful car with kickass grunt, great range and low price tag. Some lucky person now has zero fuel bills to boot. Aren't those recessed door…

A technical guy I know recently bought a BYD Seal. A no-nonsense bloke. His review below (note he uses standard grid power to charge at home, you can get much cheaper rates again than what he's using). I got a BYD Seal…

Sad to hear Barry Otto is battling Alzheimers. Though always difficult to know how much the sufferers suffer, Otto apparently is enjoying a new childhood, with hot chip sandwiches and strawberry milkshakes, and delight…

Saw a 50-minute video demonstrating somebody's full-autonomous Tesla driving yesterday. The driver still has to supervise, but this is now like aeroplanes, or even trains. Much safer with a machine in charge. Anybody…

Armidale. Applied for a special rate variation (SRV) of 58.8% last year. This was on top of a 10.5% SRV it had approved in 2021-22. It was approved because the independent regulator saw that the Armidale Council had…

As @[585851453:2048:Adrian] explains so clearly here, the relationship between your head, neck and back is a central indicator of how well you are functioning as a human being. If you are chronically tight there, you’re…

What happens when you use social media as a platform for your actual life. It’s alarming when you think about it that tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are now providing the infrastructure for…

Ultimately the federal government needs to stop using taxation revenue to buy useless things, like nuclear submarines, and give it back to towns. Or even a fraction of it back to towns. In the meantime people spend more…

The Tesla Roadster in matte black - tell me you wouldn’t like it in the driveway.

I know many are thinking about EVs for their next car. To share my thoughts on the relative merits of the two biggest options right now, Tesla and BYD. Other makers like Kia, Toyota, Subaru and European brands make…

One of the last refuges for anti-social bastards is driving. I have to drive a lot of kms every week, and nowhere in society do people behave more appallingly than on the roads. Few follow a speed limit. They don’t…

Blue asphalt in Doha, to reduce heat generated by the roads.

From November in NSW this year, you can get up to $2400 from the NSW Government to add a battery to your solar installation, as part of their Peak Demand Reduction Scheme. They should have been targeting households a…

The Unsatisfactory Husbands Club. Thought this was very powerful, I’ve posted a lot about love and how little I think we understand it, thinking of it as a feeling. The stories of these couples shows what happens when…

A Judas Goat. Trained to lead other animals (sheep, cattle) to slaughter. The goat is spared, to continue the work. There are also Judas Cows. All social animals, including humans, follow leaders. Right now we have…

Cars destroyed city life. Barcelona is just one city fighting back. This is what cities used to be like. Now they’re loud, the air is filthy, and vehicles dominate everything. When Bathurst launched a ‘Streets as Shared…

‘Manspreading’. Sitting with your legs spread is actually much healthier for your hip joints. When you’re sharing a tight seat, sure, put the legs together. But men sit like that naturally because that’s the way the…

In China, some cities are now almost completely silent, because everybody is driving EVs. I don’t think we recognise what a profound change that is. Plus the air is beautifully clean. Here it is, up close.…

A provocation. I think Cold Chisel are probably the greatest band of all time. The greatest songwriters at least. Unlike The Beatles or Elvis or any of the other huge names, the songs found a way to marry white and…

The Murdoch press last week was posting stories about EV sales falling off a cliff. That’s because it lies, compulsively. EVs are booming. Glad to see BYD making inroads too, the Seal has been popular. They’re only just…

“…a social trend of “petro-masculinity” in which men flamboyantly use fossil fuels to express their opposition to social progress.” Also the more aggressive style of driving the vehicles encourage that’s mentioned here…

(Kris is a climate scientist.) It’s summer now in Greenland. The average temperature in summer in Greenland is about 7 degrees C. Right now it’s 15 degrees C. The enormous quantity of ice in Greenland was already…

What’s caused the ‘cost of living crisis’? What’s not well understood is that our lifestyles have ALWAYS been expensive. Western lifestyles are the most expensive lifestyles in human history, they’re ruinously expensive…

There are 55 GW of generation capacity in the Australian electricty grid. At current prices, it costs $25 billion per GW to build a nuclear plant. To make our electricty system nuclear would therefore cost over a…

It should still amaze us that a modern air conditioner can provide about 6 times more heat or cold energy than it uses in electricity. 600% efficient. That’s AMAZING. We’re so blasé. It provides 6 times more energy than…

In the energy debates, lots of mention of 'baseload power'. The public is encouraged to believe this is the minimum amount of 24/7 power that is needed to keep society running. That's not baseload power. Baseload is…

One turn of these big wind turbines generates enough electricity to power 5 homes for a whole day. Only one rotation. Just one of these can power 5000 homes, day and night.

I saw a candidate for election say this. "[Aborigines] were not an advanced civilisation and DEFINITELY would have had to have some form of colonisation by someone in the 18th century." I think many Australians probably…

Up to 70% of road accidents are caused by human error. Humans love to believe they're brilliant drivers, but no human can ever drive (or fly) as accurately or consistently as a machine. There's no need to go as far as…

The tragedy of AF447, where an Air France jet smashed into the Atlantic, killing everybody on board, is a window into the need for proper automation in flying and driving. The jet crashed because the autopilot cut out…

-5.5 here this morning. Have 7 heat pumps running, keeping the whole house toasty warm (as it was all night). Collectively they’re drawing less electricity than a single standard column or bar heater.

It’s difficult to believe just how stupid this situation is. We give away our own gas to foreign fossil fuel companies, who get obscenely rich selling it overseas. (We literally give it away, they pay as good as nothing…

One of the arguments for privatisation is that it saves the taxpayer money by shifting responsibility to private organisations. But the taxpayer ends up paying even more, in user charges. Driving is now much more…

The Tesla Model Y is a brilliant mid-sized SUV. It’s also the world’s best-selling car. You can buy the base model in Australia now for less money than a Toyota RAV4 hybrid. It’s a much better car than a RAV4 hybrid.…

I share energy things because many of the public are missing out on the fantastic innovation out there, living in a fog of social media propaganda. One of the great things about Tesla is their superb software. Whether…

From within our own region. Loved the response from the ute-driving moron in Rockley. We worship the ute-driving moron, by all buying gutless utes we don’t need that handle like tractors on the road, and guzzle fuel.…

The number 1 place most people catch Covid (or any respiratory disease) is at home. And they catch it there mostly from their kids, who pick it up at school. I had to consider the best way to protect the family in…

Last Thursday one of the big generating units at the Loy Yang coal power station tripped, just before 2am. This caused a frequency collapse in the national grid (red line). That's a very bad thing, it can stop…

Sydney’s toll roads are an epic story of how privatisation is always the gouging of taxpayers. Transurban built and runs the roads. It spent $36 billion building them. How much will it make from them, in tolls? At least…

Scientists are excited, because it appears China has reached peak fossil fuel, with electricity from renewables now becoming its dominant energy source. Massive investment in renewables and EVs in China has done what…

Come on snow. Last time it snowed, the government is now so obsessed with ‘living with’ disasters, they left the road open. It was like ice skating with cars out there.

Loved this from Transurban: "...a state-owned tolling entity would add a level of bureaucracy without benefiting motorists." The same Transurban who spent $36 billion building the tollways, and is charging taxpayers…

In this week’s Antarctic cold blast, a third of Australia’s electricity came from wind power alone. As the regulator explains here, ‘baseload’ never meant the base amount of power we need to run the country. It always…

Covid is a 'seasonal' virus, people trained in social media science say. Yes, you now get it in every season.

Peter Dutton pretends he’ll stop of all of this if he wins goverment, and replace it with nuclear. He won’t though, because he can’t. The coal plants will fall over years before nuclear could give off a single watt of…

West Connex was promoted, as all new freeways are, as the answer to traffic congestion, in this case along Parramatta Road. It’s been fantastic for people like us, who rarely go to Sydney, a super easy (but bloody…

I ran the diagnostic on the Powerwall today, it’s heading towards nearly 2 years of use. Battery degradation in those nearly 2 years? (Warranty is for it to have 70% capacity still after 10 years.) Degradation so far is…

Here’s an example of how social media took over the world. It’s a bait-and-switch operation. First it offered us the bait of ways to ‘connect’ with our friends and family. It then sold us as data, to media companies and…

There’s a trillion tonnes of water in this iceberg. Not one mention in the description below of the disaster this ‘calving’ represents. If (when) all the Antarctic sea ice melts, sea levels will rise between 60 and 70…

Petrolheads often use the concept of the ‘driver’s car’. They use it to suggest only they know what good driving is, and everybody else should defer to their expertise. It’s bog standard protecting of social territory.…

Another cultural observation. I often hear ‘cheap Chinese crap’ when there’s talk about Chinese goods. The Chinese are master manufacturers, just as the Japanese learned to be, very quickly. Or BYD, now making big…

There’s a huge train crash coming for aged care. Many working in that industry say it’s here already, which is also true. But it’s about to get much, much worse. There is no easy answer to this, apart from importing…

Do you think all of the armchair epidemiologists who advised us that we ‘need to learn to live with Covid’ told olympic athletes that it would mean wasting 4 years of training?

Nobody does jingoistic bullshit better than Channel 9. ‘Our Jess’ *vomit* One Australian team flogged the USA yesterday, comprising mostly young women from regional Australia. (Hint: it wasn’t the Matildas.) Mass public…

More chargers opening in NZ. Re-capping the stats I did for Australia about the massive untold story of the shift to EVs. Getting fuel tankers and refineries out of commission. These chargers don’t need fuel tankers to…

The trucks that deliver fuel to service stations in Australia every year use approximately 8 BILLION litres of diesel, just to fuel the tanker trucks. That’s before one drop goes in your tank. When vehicles shift to…

Australian data. You don’t need to be good at maths to see the inevitability of what’s happening. And Australia is slow, this is HALF the rate the rest of the world is growing at. Also accusations of this being some…

Tesla do brilliant software, this is just one small analysis the Powerwall does. Showing how much money we haven’t needed to pay for electricity since installing solar + Powerwall in December 2022. On track to pay off…

In China, more than 60% of EVs are already cheaper than petrol and diesel cars. Outside China governments are in bed with old car manufacturers and oil companies, who fund social media campaigns that get millions to…

The Tesla app, part of the car section. Defrost mode gives you a heated car with defrosted windscreen, turned on from the house. Bioweapon defence mode turns on HEPA filtering of outside air (good for bushfires or heavy…

Freddie Mercury was an Asian rock star. His family was from India. In a lot of photos this isn't obvious, but in others it's unmissable. Part of his genius was to hide both his sexuality and his ethnicity, in an Anglo…

Parents doing this. Kids as products to be sold. I’m well aware that pretty much everything I post to social media isn’t the sort of thing people log on to see. Imagine turning your own life into a product. Even those…

Had to do a quick run Into Sydney yesterday, and always find being on the roads gives some of the best insights into human behaviour. Like these newer adjustable speed limits. A great idea, when they monitor traffic…

Great honest assessment after nearly 100,000 km of driving a Model Y, from somebody who isn’t a Tesla fan. Notably, obviously zero fuel costs, except cheap home electricity. And not one service or repair needed, in…

The new trains look very flash and will have more functionality. But these old silvers really stood the test of time. Still extremely comfortable and quiet. I was amused to see a US city proclaiming its first ever…

This is what monkeypox (now called mpox) looks like. The new strain in Africa has been declared a global health emergency. Fatality rate much higher than Covid, as an example (and Covid is our 3rd leading cause of…

I think the term 'Long Covid' is far too timid. It basically means 'Covid trashing your entire body, until you die an early death.' Your chances of getting Long Covid increase hugely with each new infection.…

You can see here that in 1916 it was only Rockefeller's cheap oil that knee-capped an obvious technology. It's taken us a century to come to our senses. It costs trillions to drill and refine and transport oil, to get…

When I first started posting about travel here I think it probably sounded deranged. But now stories like this are everywhere. Travel culture is turning the world into theme parks. It destroys locations, as locals…

Oprah led the world in making everything about ‘me’. Here she pays tribute to Phil Donahue by posting a photo that obscures him behind her, while hitching a ride on the publicity around his death with a story about…

The reason Australians will be getting unbelievable bargains on Chinese cars is that they have enormous industrial capacity, but their own domestic market is full. Thus the big push on now for exports. These are…

The ‘outback’ is a mythology Australians love. It’s a myth. We’ve always used the land outside the main cities as either a big farm or big mine. Extractive industries. We’re a settler culture, ferrying resources back to…

One of the social media sports is to mock the local council about potholes and roadworks. People seriously imagine Council employees come to work every day, and say ‘let’s not fix the roads.’ Like a Council needs…

Rooftop (home) solar provided almost half of Australia's electricity during the day last weekend, creating a record low draw of power from the grid. This caused negative prices (they pay you to use electricity), and…

Reading some of the social media around upcoming LG elections. ‘Councils should be run more like a business’, that’s an old favourite. Councils are nothing like a business. They’re a government. They provide services,…

We’re starting to see electricity retailers now who offer completely free electricity in the middle of the day. Renewables mean the wholesale price (circled in red) is negative for much of the day now. The retailers get…

The cloister is a beautiful architectural invention, seen mostly in old monasteries and also universities, and some schools. (Hogwarts had a cloister.) It’s like an internal verandah, a space between inside and outside,…

The wholesale price of electricity is negative all day today, from 6am until 5.30pm. (The red circle.) Coal generators have to pay retailers to use the power, or if you buy wholesale electricity yourself through a…

Crowds at Westmead Station in 1955, excited to see the new electric train. Electric transport is just as exciting today. Unless social media is your guide in the world.

Posture isn’t a great word, because it tends to make people think it’s something they need to do. To hold themselves in a certain position. The concept of ‘neutral posture’ helps, it means sitting or standing in a way…

NSW really can be the arse-end of the world. The only jurisdiction on the planet with average speed safety cameras that doesn’t use them for cars. FINALLY after a big surge in road deaths, NSW politicians have…

A tale of two States, SA and NSW, over 24 hours this week. This is electricity generated over the 24 hour period. Black is coal. Green is wind. Yellow is solar. Blue is battery storage. Purple is exports to other…

The most expensive wholesale electricity has been today. Never happened until there were renewables. Before right now it's been negative prices again all day - they will pay you to use it.

I looked at 'barefoot shoes' a few times. The idea is deceptively appealing. Shoes that allow your feet to act as if they're barefoot, while giving you protection from dirt and cuts etc. But experience and some thought…

I know the senior doctor who trained Nick Coatsworth. They were once friends. I can’t repeat what he now thinks of him. Just one who found celebrity (Coatsworth now has a TV gig) through a natural disaster, peddling…

Old-fashioned (racist) ideas about China still dominate. For example, why do so many Western countries have their things manufactured there? Listen to Tim Cook. It’s not low labour costs, which we always assume because…

One of the long list of ridiculous reasons people give that EVs aren't the way to go is that there aren't enough public chargers. I've posted before how that's a misunderstanding, that most EV charging will happen at…

You can’t miss it out on the roads now, more EVs every day. More joy for those drivers. Ditch your jalopy.

EVs are going to revolutionise off-road driving too. The problem with 4WDs right now is they need a lot of torque at low speeds. But as I post about a lot, you have to rev the guts out of a petrol or diesel to get that…

First review of the BYD Shark. Reviewers astounded at what BYD have done here. Have a watch, an incredible vehicle. Other ute makers will be literally shitting themselves. How’s 0-100 in under 6 seconds sound, for a…

12 men walked on the moon. Only 4 are still alive. I was born just as the Apollo program was doing this. I’d sit for hours staring at the NASA photos of all the missions, amazed by the audacity of the engineering and…

There are now a lot of people with long-term experiences to share of owning an EV. A couple more today, Teslas again though all the EVs are good. Tesla I think are the best combination of engineering, efficiency,…

This is such an important window into long-term EV ownership. 165,000km of driving. No servicing required that entire time. Battery still with 90% capacity. The car looks brand new, both inside and out, incredibly…

Ah, petrol and diesel. Meanwhile Florida EV owners are charging at home and getting a headstart on the highways out of there.…

Bathurst elects its next Mayor and Deputy Mayor today, streamed live for your viewing pleasure from 2pm, on the Bathurst Regional Council YouTube page. (Link below.) The stream will come online a bit before 2, and just…

Europe's car industry is under assault from much cheaper (and better) Chinese EVs. You can see here the often reported drop in 'demand' for EVs is actually Western governments removing subsidies for those vehicles,…

The early BYD Shark ute reviews are starting to come in. I knew it would be good. I didn't realise just how good. It's a Ford Ranger killer. (The Ranger is the current gold standard ute.) Twice the power and also bigger…

The new BYD Shark I’ve been mentioning has a 2.5-tonne towing capacity. This is a deliberate choice by BYD. It has nothing to do with ‘grunt’. The Ford Ranger and other utes for example will tow 3.5-tonnes. The BYD…

Another story from the Industrial Revolution underway in China. China has 45,000 km of high-speed railways. (45 thousand!) Here’s a short clip from inside one of the trains, carrying people in luxury at 350 km/h.

Yesterday was a new record for Australia. 75% of our daytime electricity came from renewables. For those who say 'yes but what about the night', well you have water even when it isn't raining, hey. Storage. In fact a…

They were talking about cars today. I tried an experiment, asking people if they would ever buy an EV. ‘Why would anybody do that!’ ‘The batteries cost a fortune when you have to replace them!’ ‘Even when you charge…

The privatisation of Sydney’s roads is a story of epic corruption. Some locals are paying $150 a week in tolls. There is not one example of an essential service that has been privatised that isn’t a complete disaster.…

Yes they do, they explain it all the time. Australian electricity is so expensive because it uses so much gas to generate it, and our ageing coal plants cost a fortune to maintain. And gas is now hugely expensive. If…

KIA have done a fantastic job with the new EV5. Beautifully engineered, with suspension perfectly tuned for Australian roads. Refined inside and out, good range, and the most important thing for many - it's not…

So encouraging to see women now feeling secure enough to share photos of themselves topless as part of a publicity campaign. You can't make this stuff up. People love affliction now, it gives them infinite scope to talk…

Another reason BYD has settled with 2.5 tonnes of towing for its upcoming Shark ute is that the 3.5 tonnes advertised by other ute producers is dangerous rubbish. The GCM (Gross Combination Mass) for towing with these…

One of the genius design things about the Model Y is that it looks kinda small. Here it is next to the KIA EV5. In fact it’s bigger than the KIA EV5, it has almost twice the luggage capacity just for starters. It’s a…

The Stop, Revive, Survive campaign is based on research on driver fatigue. You’re supposed to stop and have a break of at least 15 minutes, every two hours. Think about that in relation to the need to spend 30 minutes…

A bit more on the Zeekr 7X. I said Zeekr are known for luxury interiors. You can see the 7X’s here, and I can only talk about a fraction of what’s included. All seats (front and back) are available as heated, cooled,…

Have mentioned Amber electric before. A huge opportunity for ordinary people, but also a risk if they don’t know what they’re doing. Amber allows you to access wholesale electricty pricing, directly. That can be an…

But it's OK for a tradie to pay nothing for their training, and also earn an income while doing it. Dutton couldn't care less, he's using this to try to attract the ute-driving tradie vote, the young men Trump is also…

Emeritus Professor Bruce Chapman invented HECS. He was on radio yesterday saying that HECS debts are now way too high, well beyond how the system was designed. And that repayments kick in much too low, at a salary of…

The fascinating thing about car suspension is that it has to do 2 important things, which are fundamentally opposed. There is no actual way to resolve that tension. Most of all, a car has to stay on the road to keep you…

I share renewables stuff because it saddens me that we’re all living through the greatest revolution in centuries, and many aren’t even noticing. Take this, the other night, those with a battery could sell energy back…

One of the things that makes me chuckle is just how aggressively Ford and GM (Holden) are developing electric vehicles, in the US. Many of the ICE knuckle-draggers in Australia are the Ford/Holden brigade, completely…

Car enthusiasts will tell you every day of the week that a ‘driver’s car’ is the ultimate type of car. What they really mean by that is a car that is good at going fast around corners. Basically a race car, driven on…

Most country towns owe their existence to one or more extractive industries. Agriculture and mining the two biggies. I don’t see them surviving with barista coffee and tourism. It also makes the claims that this is…

I still remember this having cachet, as a kid. It meant a car had grunt. Not a V8, but still respectable. Now it’s embarrassing. Many cars with barely 1-litre, 4-cylinder engines on the road have more power than cars…

I find off-roading usually a bit of a wank. Take the most extreme form, rock-crawling. The thing that always makes me chuckle about this, is if you just hopped out of the car and went on foot, you’d be over the obstacle…

The cost of desalinating water has plummeted. So much so that it's now often cheaper to provide freshwater that way than using rainfall and dams. This is another revolution underway, which combined with so much cheaper…

I challenge the now common idea that this sort of thing is ‘community concerns’. Having seen this from the inside in local government too. So often it’s a handful of local activists, stirring up shit, usually through…

Australia should use the coal from the mines owned by companies in Korea and Switzerland to power coal-fired power stations it doesn’t have and nobody wants to build, which would be at least 3 times more expensive…

Grid-level battery projects are taking off. Pretty soon your overnight electricty use will come from one of these big batteries, plus from wind power (there’s more wind at night, ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’, as morons…

Combustion clunker fans often say 'EVs are powered by coal-fired electricity!' Even where they are, they use only a third of the energy of a combustion clunker. If we kept coal and gas-powered electricty, and all…

KIA are doing a fantastic job with their EVs. And not expensive. This is their EV5. More than other electric car makers they’re creating a more seamless transition to EV driving, including more conventional buttons…

Origin is another energy company offering amazing electricity rates to EV owners. 8c/kWh, that’s about $5 to fill the ‘tank’ of an EV. Have a look at the difference, it will cost you at least 15 times that to fuel a…

We will probably buy a Tesla next year. Because I finished school almost 40 years ago, I don’t play the “we don’t like Elon so you should all avoid him” games. This video is a great set of reasons (there are others) why…

If everybody would just follow the bloody speed limit, traffic congestion would be dramatically reduced. Speed limits act as a spacer between vehicles, if everybody is doing the same speed traffic can’t form, nothing…

One of the most damning indictments of the idea of 'toxic masculinity' is the actual statistics. So much violence against women is domestic violence. Domesticity is the causal factor, specific strains on specific…

That peak mid-afternoon has the government and AEMO a bit worried. Ordinary people and organisations asked to cut electricity use. "About 6 gigawatts of coal-fired power station capacity remains unavailable, including…

The ‘cost of living crisis’ and problems with domestic violence are really the same problem. They’re the social model of the nuclear family under strain. The nuclear family is the expectation that children will move out…

I found this story powerfully symptomatic of the times we’re now living in. The total collapse of a ‘public’ anything. People stripping power cables from streets, to sell the copper. Just outrageous, like living in…

This is social media society. Where instead of each of us just doing the jobs we’re trained to do, everybody is suddenly an expert on everything. And these platforms then aggregate all of our ignorant opinions on things…

Shows how the status quo simply won’t change, unless it’s forced to. It’s been clear for years that electric cars would be the way forward, traditional car companies mostly ignored it. Now they’re having their Kodak…

I think a very good and not often asked question is why 'performance cars' are even allowed on public roads. It's clear they're designed to use public roads as race tracks. Also sometimes called 'driver's cars', a very…

The roads are a fascinating place to observe. The bigger and more expensive cars have become, the more aggressive driving has become. Huge SUVs and utes are the main drivers (ha) of increased aggressiveness. Humans play…

The impression given by Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan is that it’s nuclear vs renewables. Actually it’s nothing like that at all. He doesn’t even deny renewables will generate by far the most electricity into the future,…

Imagine if it had been an electric bus, I can just see it now, demands that the technology be banned or at least claims that it can’t be trusted. The train Molly came home on last night was a diesel as well. It caught…

The number one rule of traffic engineering. Roads create traffic. Induced demand. Just as dams create the demand for water, they don’t create a supply of water.

20% of the projected cost of nuclear power in Australia could put solar on every rooftop, free of charge. And that electricity would then be totally free to the householder too. Unlike nuclear electricity, which would…

As an indication of just what a disaster the Trumps and Duttons of the world are, calculations show that if the US were to convert its electricty grid to renewables, electricity there would cost under 3 cents per kWh.…

4 million Australians already have solar panels. Under Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan these panels would be forcibly switched off on many days by the grid operators, to protect the planned nuclear power stations, which…

Tesla has some of the best electrical engineers in the world. They're scathing about Peter Dutton's nuclear plan, correctly pointing out that the grid won't function with that much 'baseload' power, and millions of…

The battle between gig culture and Covid can only have one winner. Ariana Grande has cancelled all her touring for 2025. (She contracted Covid filming Wicked.) Maria Carey has just had to cancel some of her Christmas…

Change doesn't happen gradually. Nothing happens for a while, and then everything happens all of a sudden. See if the history below rhymes with changes to transport (EVs) you see today. "In the early 20th century...the…

Back to the marginal cost curve for renewables, to one of the miracles of our lives. SWB = solar, wind, batteries. You can see that the lowest cost SWB grid generates between 3 to 5 times *more* energy than our entire…

“Ordinary Australians will continue to slap solar panels on their roofs to escape the entire drama and decide the future without Canberra.” The energy problem is already solved. You can live it right now. You don’t have…

More marginal cost curve for renewables. At the bottom of the u-curve, an increase of investment of only 20% creates up to 200% more power. That’s ‘superpower’. With that extra 20% investment, the energy produced can…

New Zealand’s new government came to power with a tired old cliche about freeing everybody from dreadful government. They cut the guts out of public spending. Now their economy is a train wreck. There is no such thing…

I added the price of electricity in red, for EV drivers.

The maths of stupidity. The Granville train disaster killed 83 people. It’s still commemorated. Tens of thousands of people have died (and are still dying) of Covid in Australia. Our attitude to that? It’s ‘just a…

When humans gather together in groups of any size, they play status games. First within the group itself, for status within the group. Then between groups. Paradoxically (for many) this means that the more we ‘connect’…

4WD culture carries an assumption of getting closer to ‘nature’ (whatever that is). When in reality it’s using the landscape as a theme park for cars. Doing terrible and increasing damage as it goes, and grows (and it’s…

“Palmer told Business Insider that delaying transitioning to EVs in favour of selling hybrids was a “fool’s errand” and warned that automakers doing so risked falling even further behind Chinese EV companies. “Hybrids…

I prefer to see it as just one of many of his age who provided a glorious soundtrack to the West spinning down a self-absorbed toilet. Asia trained engineers while we went to gigs. That divide is going to get greater,…

One of the holy grails of medicine is a genuinely effective and safe drug for obesity. We may have arrived, with Semaglutide and Tirzepatide. Not developed for weight loss but instead for management of diabetes, their…

The next 5-10 years are going to be brutal for Australia’s energy. We invested our own money here at home to offset some of the risks of that, by installing solar and a battery. That will not only save us money and pay…

The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is also called The Doomsday Glacier, because of the dire implications of it melting. It’s about the size of the UK. One of the icebergs (B22a) which has been holding the glacier in…

This is the side of solar that is less spoken about. Every person you see with solar panels on their roof is a mini power station. They’re providing some of the electricity you use, and they used their own money to…

It’s hard to put a finger on what’s unique about Lithgow, in Australia. I’ll likely never leave. I think that it’s the transplanting of a British industrial village, into the Australian landscape. The picture below is…

Portugal achieved this in only a handful of years. For comparison, that price is about 0.6 cents per kWh. In Australia that price is currently 30c per kWh. We’re paying 50 times more for electricity. This is what will…

I turn 55 this year. About a decade ago I remember a flurry of colleagues retiring at 55, with gold-plated super schemes. The schemes where you retired at 55 at your final salary, for life. Those schemes were quickly…

Apparently the Bells Line of Road connects Richmond, to Bell.

Skipped the ’watch with free Covid’ sessions at the cinema and finally saw this yesterday. Great fun movie, amazing flight scenes. A few things: 1) the mission at the centre of the movie is a copy of the destruction of…

The 120-hour driver training for young people now is very interesting, and says a lot about what 'good driving' is. Car enthusiasts will always tell you good driving is something like race car driving - fast, picking…

I am provocative on this, but as an engineer I’m a bit tired of the rubbish. Just look at the difference in efficiencies here. If you put $100 of petrol or diesel in your car, $80-$90 of it goes straight out the exhaust…

Inflation soaring, electricity prices a big contributor. If you pay for electricity.…

Watching the men’s hockey world cup. One of the publicity pages I read said Australia is ranked 4th in the world? I think we’ve been number 1 for years.

Another way to look at the future of vehicles is to compare actual energy use, per km. While it takes the same energy to move the same mass the same distance, what that leaves out is efficiency of conversion of the…

EVs again. Range is a biggie for many. The average EV even today has enough stored electricity in its battery to power the average Australian vehicle for two weeks. (Newer Teslas - 4 weeks.) And costs less than $20 to…

Don't you love how oil companies keep fuel prices high through the school holidays and on public holidays? And look at diesel, often people buy those to use less fuel, but the savings are easily wiped out by higher…

The people who scour YouTube and other online forums looking for reasons to deny the emergency of climate change need to spend a day with the road crews in local councils. Humans have zero chance of surviving dramatic…

Beautiful drone shot from the ABC, showing a dingo patrolling the dingo fence. Worth reading the article, how the landscape on the dingo’s side of the fence is much richer and healthier than the barren wasteland of the…

Drove the new M8 yesterday. It was very pleasant, freeway driving all the way from Penrith to the Eastern suburbs. The thing with these mega road projects though is that they ignore that what creates traffic is roads.…

So many Australians are either already in dire financial trouble, or are about to be. All because of a handful of absolutely ridiculous ideas, which Ian Verrender exposes here. Ideas which people with a modern training…

One aspect of cost of living that isn’t spoken about as much is financial illiteracy. Many people in their 40s and 50s still manage their money the way they did when they were 17. Using my favourite example again, of…

When a commercial plane flies, it occupies an area in space. But it also occupies an envelope of time. A schedule. This spaces planes out to allow them all to fly as quickly and as safely as possible. This is a key…

A variation on people not following speed limits, is people speeding up when overtaking lanes start, to stop people passing them. Just incredibly stupid and annoying behaviour. And HUGE numbers of people do it, despite…

It took decades for public health to make inroads against smoking. Big Tobacco has now reversed a lot of those gains in only a handful of years, with vaping. At epidemic levels in the young, exactly the demographic they…

Hybrid update, our Kluger. Latest fuel consumption figure is 4.8L/100km. For a 2.3 tonne 7-seater car. That's with majority highway driving (Lithgow-Bathurst), which is actually less efficient with a hybrid because you…

The Rolling Stones still tour regularly. But they haven't recorded an album in 18 years. Elton John of course is constantly on the road, though his last album was 7 years ago. Genesis did a tour in the last couple of…

Solar energy is now already the largest source of electricity in Australia. And it's growing faster than ever. Most of the energy powering your home is coming from the panels you see on other peoples' houses and from…

Lovely exponential curve. Not even the pandemic slowed the momentum much. You can be on the wrong side of this history, it'll just mean costing you a lot of money and pride. And think about the benefits: - no more…

Torque vectoring is sophisticated engineering that varies the amount of torque (turning force) going to the wheels of a car, depending on conditions. This means the car gets optimum grip and drive, because unlike a…

The Tesla Model 3 is already significantly cheaper than owning a Toyota Corolla, over 5 years of ownership. (It has next to zero maintenance costs, and electricity is much, much cheaper than petrol or diesel.) The…

There’s a genuine risk of stagflation this year. Like the worst of all possible worlds. High prices, high unemployment, nobody buys anything. It happened in the 1970s, when Big Oil formed a cartel to drive oil prices…

"The RBA is attempting to curb price growth by reducing the capacity of households to purchase goods and services, reducing demand and making it harder for businesses to hike prices more." Really worth reading that…

This is a very useful, practical article (ignore the ‘Error’, the link works) that explains what a 10kW solar system can run in your home. 10 is large, many have less than that, but because the cost of panels has…

Regional areas are expected to need another 11,000 GPs in the next decade. 50,000 teachers are also expected to leave teaching in the next TWO years. Try finding a tradie to do anything without waiting months. This day…

Had to take back roads home tonight, because of an accident on the highway. The way the car ate up those roads reminded me why hybrids are the ultimate car for driving, though they’re mostly seen as ways to save fuel.…

Good to see government funding new EV charging points in towns, including Lithgow. But we should electrify the whole town, everything. It would make it the cheapest place to live in NSW. We’re already a town with a long…

Trangie has no petrol or diesel. But it’s on the electricity grid. Simple solution staring right at us here, which not one person mentioned.

Working for local government is a bit of a hiding to nothing thing. Everybody almost universally hates it, and treats you with contempt. The pay is some of the worst in the job market. And there’s no funding, to do…

I wouldn't advise anybody to train as a number 6. They're going to need some in the transition, and some EV technicians, but it's a dead-end otherwise. California for example (twice as big an economy as Australia) is…

Because of renewables, gas consumption to make electricity last year was 30% lower than it was just 5 years previously. In the next 4 years it's projected to fall up to another 66%. It's not a debate, it's engineering…

The Lithgow Show fireworks are spectacular. Fireworks at regional shows are so much bigger and better than they were in my childhood.

Origin’s new scheme to try to get people to use less electricty in peak times. This behavioural approach has been missing in Australia, so good on them. If you use less electricity in those peak times, you get bonuses…

I still remember when dual-cabs were invented, we had a few growing up. The thing about them, which I remember my dad talking about (as a builder) is that they’re not good utes. Trays are small and too deep for a lot of…

Thousands of experts in this area, have been saying the same thing for years. Disaster is imminent. Don’t listen to anybody who tells you otherwise, they’re a moron and standing in the way of salvaging anything from…

I was 1 when humans landed on the moon. The thing that interests me much more about it now is how society has changed, since then. Look at the pictures of that day in 1969, people gathered around the handful of TV sets…

One of the many objections to EVs that people throw up is that they can't work in more remote parts of Australia. In fact, as the Americans show here, they make even more sense there than in the cities. They save even…

Every 6 years the ABS analyses weekly household expenditures in Australia. One of the interesting facts to come out of it is that Australians spend as much or more on recreation and alcohol each week, as they do on…

Look at the jump in transport costs for households, in the past 6 years. Nearly all of it the doubling of the price of fuel (see little bubble to the right). Over $20,000 per year, just to get around. That’s serious…

I know many who work in various bodywork and physical therapy disciplines. One overwhelming fact re-framed all of that, for me, as it can anybody who wants their body to function in extraordinary ways. Your body is…

O dear.…

"More than three million households across Australia now own solar panels, with the time it takes for a 7 kilowatt (kw) system to pay for itself in lower power bills falling to a record low 3.4 years." The panels…

The rai line over the mountains was electrified in the 1950s. Nearly 80 years ago, we understood that electric motors are not only much more efficient, but need much less maintenance and are also more powerful. We’ve…

Autonomous driving cars are very close, in fact you can see Bill Gates driving in one in this short video. Around London, so a very challenging environment. It performs beautifully. Cars and trucks are the only form of…

A terrible crash between 2 utes on the Barton Highway, 4 dead. 94 percent of motor vehicle crashes are caused by dangerous errors made by drivers. Many of them excellent drivers too, it’s not about skill. With…

Australia makes about $70 billion a year exporting iron ore, for other countries to turn into steel. If we created the steel here with renewable energy, and then exported it, we could turn that $70 billion easily into…

More on wood heating. It has its benefits, it’s a renewable resource for example, and can capture emissions when you replace cut wood with new plantings. (How often that happens is a bit questionable.) Here’s another…

The idea you need a million dollars in retirement is ludicrous. Vast amounts of money and resources going to the retired that should be going to re-building our collapsing infrastructure.

Cars fixed a major environmental problem. Horse shit. At the time cars were introduced, major cities were overwhelmed with the amount of horse shit in streets, as you can see in the photo. Cars went on to make the air…

The unfixable destructive paradox of travel is that it forces somebody else’s home to change, to cater to you. No matter how low impact you want to be. Some European cities for example are fed up with the tourists who…

It's fun getting an electricity bill when you made twice as much as you owed. And it's even (much) better than that, because you also made all the money you didn't pay for electricity.

I'd factored in using surplus solar (credits on the electricity account) generated over summer, spring and autumn in winter, to make up for any grid power needed then because of much shorter days, and needing to heat.…

Yep! Electrify and insulate your home. No other investment will make you as much money, as the article says, it’s thousands per year. Generate some or most of your own electricity and the savings multiply hugely. And…

Fraction of electricity generated by renewables in 2022, by State. Queensland - 22.6% NSW - about 30% Victoria - about 30% WA - about 30% South Australia - 71.5% Tasmania - 99.1% Nationally more than 35% of our…

You can also use a home battery with no solar panels at all. For example, you could use it to store off-peak electricity overnight, to use in your house during the day. That alone can cut your electricity bill in half.…

The loon petrol head brigade joined forces here with the crazy 5G loons, and a variety of other conspiracy nuts. Social media, mobilising stupidity now on a mass scale. Usually funded at arm’s length by the fossil fuel…

It’s always surprised me that Lithgow has a reputation for being an unpleasant place to live. The valley is beautiful. It’s also known as a ‘hole’, probably by people who failed geography in high school. It’s a valley.…

CATL is the world’s biggest producer of lithium-ion batteries. This week it did something huge. It announced its new batteries have a storage capacity of 0.5 kWh per kg. That’s about double existing batteries. This will…

I’d like to do a few posts on climate change. The whole topic is infected with political slogans, but the real knowledge is fascinating. Probably the greatest slogan is that ‘the climate always changes’. People arguing…

The Streets as Shared Spaces program in NSW is part of a global urban design push towards ‘placemaking’. Taking back urban space from the car. Making those spaces shared spaces again, for everybody, not just cars.…

Liddell was Australia's largest coal power station when it was built 52 years ago. It closed today. Last year it broke down (needed restarting) 23 times. That's an average of about once a fortnight. How's the slogan go?…

I thought this photo was a nice example of the toxicity of social media to our social lives. A standard sort of photo you see shared, a happy couple, others would see it and feel a whole range of emotions, depending on…

Why battery software is as important as battery hardware. The home battery did this while we all slept last night, monitoring the weather and charging the battery to capacity from the grid, in case the severe winds…

This is the greatest engine ever built. The Mercedes turbo-hybrid F1. The battery is on the right. Normal combustion engines run at a thermal efficiency (how much fuel energy they convert into movement) of 29%, max,…

The Owen Magnetic Tourer. Probably the world's first hybrid vehicle. 1915. The technology lost without trace after that for more than a century, replaced by absolute rubbish petrol and diesel cars. Now hybrids are back.…

This is Lake Eyre, our biggest inland lake (when full) and the third largest salt lake in the world. My father in law always says they should flood it with seawater. For years this sort of idea was tarnished by the loon…

In the UK, who we follow in everything, the country is so broken that they’re talking about using kids as doctors, without training. Nothing to talk about here? Apart from the trip or restaurant you did last,…

I’m fascinated by hybrid cars. The human body is also a hybrid. You have the energy generated by your metabolism, from what you eat. But that energy is hybridised with gravity, captured by the elasticity of your…

I track usage, exports and total costs for us at home. So far running at $0 cost for electricity every day, and it's been as cold as -7 overnights. And still carrying a big surplus from the warmer months with their…

Posted about this a few weeks ago. The massive melt in Antarctica is creating enormous icebergs, that when melted then slow deep ocean currents. Those currents transport food and heat throughout the world’s oceans. To…

Anybody know what the major road works at Meadow Flat are about? Huge amount of dirt shifted.

This is a problem already solved by engineers, the business model is the stumbling block, carmakers need to step up. These stories excite the smirking emojis because they think it shows that EVs aren’t the future after…

If you sit like this as many do, you will over time get tight hips, neck, shoulders and torso. If you go to a physio, they will give you stretching exercises for each of those areas, and maybe tell you your ‘core’ needs…

From the Orange paper. A pharmacist saying lockdowns made us more vulnerable to diseases, because we weren't getting sick as much. (Technically called the 'immunity debt' hypothesis.) The thing is, it's scientific…

I wonder what the resort uses gas for. Electricity could be used for anything that they might need gas for right now.

70% of French electricity comes from nuclear power. They’re in trouble now, because nuclear power uses a LOT of water. And with climate change water is drying up there. The Loire ran completely dry in places this year.…

Great piece on some of the engineering behind the electricity grid. And how the shift to renewables, batteries and inverters, EVs and a range of other technologies is making the grid much more resilient, sustainable and…

A plug for the Tesla battery, they've done a superb job with it and much of the genius of it is in the in-built AI. For example, if you have an electricity plan that is time-of-use, where you pay different rates for…

So cricketing fans - which 2 fast bowlers to elect from Boland, Starc, Hazlewood? Hazlewood and Boland are classic Alderman/McGrath-style bowlers, for English conditions. But Starc on a good day has the capacity to…

I have a passion for glass. It’s magic, invisible as air, but solid. And as a materials scientist knowing about it was my initial training. There’s a secret about glass, next paragraph. The thing about glass is, it’s…

The only part of the renewables shift the Flat Earthers tend to support is Snowy 2.0. Using the Snowy scheme as a big pumped hydro battery. The problem is, it’s a disaster. A typical example of private sector firms…

Got notification from our electricity retailer yesterday of big price jumps on 1 July. Though they’re also raising the feed-in tariff for solar, which is interesting and nice. I suspect they’re doing very well out of…

Smart words from Finn Peacock again here. Note that the system in this common scenario would pay for itself in under 3 years. And that you win on cash flow too, by doing this you have more money each week, not just when…

One of the reasons I went with a battery for us is this. I'm not confident the deadlines are going to be met, and if they're not, the whole electricity system in Australia is in serious trouble. 2-3 decades of total…

Australia's existing high capacity electricity transmission lines. You can see the problem we have, and why we need 10,000 km more. They don't link up. For example if Eastern Australia wants to use Western Australian…

How did the gas industry respond to the price caps the government put on it? It refused to create any new contracts for supply with local users, forcing them to buy from the international spot market, which is way more…

26% of air traffic controllers in the US right now are trainees.

Every capital city in Australia except Canberra will be underwater.

The ABC shared this video of a rail car imploding at 1 atmosphere (i.e. our everyday atmospheric pressure). Implosions are the opposite of explosions, they don’t throw things in every direction, they make everything…

The Chuquicamata copper mine in Chile has been digging this enormous hole in the ground (more than 1100 metres deep) for the past 103 years. They’ve stopped digging down now and are shifting to underground mining. The…

The Vision AVTR is a Mercedes concept car. The AVTR uses four electric motors nearly inside each of its wheels. Each motor and each wheel can operate independently of the others, meaning the car can move sideways like a…

Wilcannia is a famous outback town. Like all outback towns, the history is one of expansion of some empire. Nearly always mining (Broken Hill, Lightning Ridge, White Cliffs) or agriculture (Bourke, Wilcannia to some…

Cockburn a good example of our relationship with the outback, and with the bush more generally. It only exists because of mining, it was a place where trains and drivers exchanged when transferring mining ore out of…

The appeal of the outback to tourism is that it’s one of the world’s last ‘untouched places’. So if millions of tourists flock to this place, doesn’t it stop being the thing which they go there to see? Travel is like…

These three figures show weekly energy use in our house, in 3 different weeks. Blue means electricity imported from the grid, yellow electricity exported to the grid, by us. You can see the past 2 weeks have been…

At a 2-day training on leadership and management. Not my choice, tried to get out of it. The usual and dominant ideas, that management is about managing people in all sorts of ways, drawn from pop psychology and other…

21 of the 30 hottest days on record on Earth happened in July this year. The other 9 have happened since 2016. We’ve reached a tipping point with climate change, things are accelerating so much faster than even the most…

I remember driving through what we call ‘the bush’ one day, and thinking about how empty our landscapes are. Empty of people, and increasingly of plants and animals too. You’ll find handfuls of people living there, and…

Australians are overwhelmingly huddled in a handful of cities on the coast. As far away from confronting the reality of the country they live in as possible. Got a great example of this yesterday, Paul McCartney is…

That’d be a jet vapour trail?

Claims we’re ‘living with Covid’ are all bullshit. Good example here of the music industry. Lots happens behind the scenes to try to keep shows on the road. Often it fails, and even where tours go ahead most lose big…

Over 3,300 people died because of Covid in the first 4 months of this year, in Australia. That rate of death is still climbing, and is projected to be even higher in the next quarter. Thousands upon thousands of deaths.…

Was out for my lunchtime walk this week, and saw an older person zip by on their mobility scooter. And it made me think, for a lot of the journeys even young and healthy adults do every day, something like this would be…

I post a lot about Australia and the land, because I think there are some truths about this country that aren't well understood. Take the classic distinction between the city and the country. If you work your way…

Hopeless, useless, like the LNP as well. Completely in the pocket of developers. The whole country is run by them, politicians line up to chant ‘supply’ like trained monkeys.

I have a long commute each day on regional roads. Each day I think about the total cowardice of the NSW Government, the only State government in Australia that doesn't use average speed safety cameras for cars, only for…

This is a very standard story most days now. The wholesale price of electricty is negative across the country. In other words, generators will pay retailers to use it - they’re not just giving it away, they’re paying…

It’s about respect. There should be no debates on topics like climate change, or Covid. There are thousands of people highly trained to know what to do, for both. They can’t do it, because of millions obstructing their…

There are many more homes approved than are ever built. In the industry it’s called ‘land banking’, where developers get a lot of building approvals, and then don’t move to construction until they feel they’ll make the…

Why regional people are hugely disadvantaged when it comes to kids going to uni. Unless they have a uni close to home with a course their child wants to do, uni is going to cost them a fortune compared to metropolitan…

We’re all used to the idea of a ‘power station’. But already now, by far the greatest source of electricty used by Australians every day is the solar panels you see on ordinary homes and businesses. Not just by those…

For my CSU friends, who know it’s not when health care workers train outside cities that they stay there. It’s when the students grow up in the regions, and train there. Very powerful interests in medicine refuse to…

Like most countries, Australia's peak electricity usage is at dinner time every night, around 6pm. About 10 gigawatts of electricity. To give some perspective for how many solar panels would be needed to generate that,…

Companies are fighting for the opportunity to install solar farms and batteries. They know it's a licence to print money. Our area (Bathurst-Lithgow) is highly prized because it's near existing high-voltage transmission…

David is an engineer who runs simulations of the national electricity grid to determine how many hours of storage we need in the grid for 100% renewables. He consistently finds it’s only about 5 hours.

Diesel generators are used in some remote areas to charge EVs, pending the building of high-capacity chargers. EVs are so efficient that 100 litres of diesel can fully charge 10 EVs. That’s only enough diesel to fully…

If ‘No’ wins in the upcoming referendum, Australia will be an international laughing stock. It’s looking like it may win too. Our history makes that unsurprising in many ways. I posted a while back about how what we…

This sort of innovation is happening everywhere. One of the most sad barriers to it expanding is community opposition, through lunatic ideas people get via social media. When I grew up most people paid no attention to…

Fewer than 5% of Australians tow anything - a trailer or caravan/camper trailer or boat. And yet so much of the EV narrative is around range, and range is mostly an issue for people who tow. Which relatively speaking is…

The worst possible, most brainless thing to be happening here. The roads will become a killing field. One of these flew past me yesterday on my way home, doing about 20-30 over the speed limit. 3 tonnes of metal, the…

Father’s Day this weekend. There is no harder or more important job than parenting. We idolise celebrities and explorers and rock and sports stars and rich business people. None of that comes close to being as important…

I have the semi-autonomous functionality turned on in our car for nearly all the driving I do. You’d be mad not to. Many drivers I see out there on the roads aren’t safe, I’d much rather those cars were driving more…

The Snowy Mountains Scheme was a dominant force in building post-war Australia, socially. It brought over 65,000 Europeans and their cultures here, which changed Australian life fundamentally. And the engineering was…

Since installing solar in December last year, we’ve used $2166 of electricity. We’ve paid $0 (we’re hundreds in credit). That’s with 6 extra heat pumps for winter heating of the entire house.

This is my favourite method of storing electricity. A gravity battery. Surplus renewable energy in the daytime is used to lift very heavy blocks to the top of the tower. Then as the sun goes down they’re lowered slowly,…

Driving is changing fundamentally. No longer will it be isolated people behind the wheel, with their lapses of attention, deliberate ignoring of road conditions and rules, falling asleep etc. No other mass transport…

People who constantly chop-and-change lanes are 6 times more likely to have an accident, and in almost every case don't get where they're going any faster. The gaps they swerve into are also the main thing that keeps…

There’s a double-dip in demand for electricity every day in NSW. One at about 3.30-4 every morning, and one around 1pm. By far the biggest dip is that 1pm dip. The ’when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’…

Bathurst in the 1930s. Right at that point where horses were being replaced by cars, and both were on the roads. The guy in the foreground with the horse and cart will be saying 'ha, look at those cars, always catching…

The people and companies who sat on their hands and did nothing for 30 years against this end-of-civilisation scale threat will now increasingly try to alarm us all about how impossible it is to fix things in the small…

The average Australian household spends 5 times as much on alcohol, cigarettes, take away food, dining out, holidays and recreation than it does on local roads, water, sewer, waste, libraries, parks and museums. That's…

Australia lagging here, as in so many other areas. I’m sitting here right now with a temperature of nearly -5 outside, and I don’t even need a heater on, the temperature is about the same as when we went to bed last…

Unpacking modern Oz culture. Households spend 400% more on recreation, than they do on their roads, water, waste, parks, libraries and museums.

Here’s why I post about cars so much. As a social and cultural phenomenon, not just a technology thing. Cars are the most anti-social part of democracies. This brilliant idea, of town and city planning removing the…

The idea that solar is only worth it if you have a lot of north-facing roof dates from a time when the panels were expensive. The panels are now ridiculously cheap. You can face them north, south, west or east and still…

I hope Wang 9 (one of the biggest batteries in the world) gets the same public enthusiasm when it opens as the original Wang coal-fired plant did in 1958. Wang 9 will have the same capacity as the old station…

Landline had a great story today about how the biggest obstacle to building the new electricity grid is community opposition, to solar farms, wind farms, pumped hydro and new transmission lines. This isn’t the Australia…

Why social media is dangerous. 1) It creates fake social lives that people then consciously and unconsciously compare to their own. This creates enormous stress and anxiety, as the relentlessly happy and fun posts clash…

The oil and gas industry has made nearly $5 billion profit per DAY, every day for the past 50 YEARS. Never be in doubt who funds climate denialism. Anybody who lines up to cheer on petrol and diesel is doing the dirty…

And here’s the oil companies screwing everybody again, as they do every holidays. Know what doesn’t change price in the school holidays? Electricity. I like this picture, giving the middle finger to fossil fuel…

Ask for a 10% discount in cash-only shops. They’re mostly doing it to avoid paying GST, they’re pocketing that 10% themselves. GST pays for roads, schools, hospitals etc.

The huge amount of electricty renewables are producing during the day is making energy retailers charge huge amounts in peak times. That makes batteries even more financially viable, if you use them during peaks times,…

Petrol prices are eye-watering right now. When I was planning the solar system for the house, I was looking ahead to having full-EVs as vehicles. Here’s the system this month, nowhere near peak production yet. Green…

I worked at a nuclear facility. Here’s what the proponents of nuclear power never say. Nobody wants the waste. What does somewhere like the US do with its nuclear waste? Nothing. It’s all sitting at the nuclear plants…

The grid is changing fundamentally, have a look. It’s no longer a one-way grid, where the electricity flows from power stations to homes and businesses. It’s two-way, most of the energy is actually now generated at…

Underneath all the hot air of social media, reality continues to create a tsunami of change. Electricity is now like water or food, we’ll store it and just use it as we need it, rather than having to run dinosaur power…

The new fighting in the Middle East should remind us that we have to ship most of our fuel from there. Over $50 billion of it, per year. And it’s sending ordinary Australians broke. But we can power our cars with our…

Say you buy a new car, and drive it for 100,000 km. If it's a petrol or diesel car, the fuel over the lifetime of the car will cost you around $25,000. if you buy an EV, the electricity to drive 100,000 km will cost you…

You won’t convince most No voters to change their minds, because they’re not using their minds. As with EVs, climate change, renewables, Covid and everything else, they’re cheering on their ‘team’. It’s team sports,…

I’d trust a self-driving car over a human-driven car every day of the week. I travel hundreds of kilometres every week, and the human driving I see is appalling. We already have self-flying planes and self-driving…

My politics? Get rid of all elections, all referendums. All political team sports (parties). There are very simple, clear things that need doing to fix our worst problems, none of which need a popularity-based mechanism…

Latest electricity bill. For winter. All of our heating is electric too.

Batteries are going to win in the debate over which is more important, more transmission lines, or more storage. An example from our own region right here. In the US power companies are starting to buy home batteries…

South Australia's big battery paid for itself inside 2.5 years. That's off the scale in energy infrastructure, which never pays for itself. It also saved people of South Australia about $150 million in electricity…

We haven't paid a cent for electricity in over a year. We're making money from it. The previous government vomited endless propaganda about 'cheap, reliable power'. It was never cheap or reliable, because coal power…

I drive this road every day, and it's made me think about whether we've got lazy with road building. Lots of hilly bits like here, where instead of cutting the road into the topography of the land, to prevent large…

The true motivations of the No camp are now clear, because they know they won and now don't care about saying what they were really thinking. Tony Abbott already back out saying we need to get rid of the Aboriginal Flag…

The French are looking to cover all their large car parks with solar panels, generating as much electricity as 10 nuclear plants. At a *tiny* fraction of the cost. And no nuclear waste. And shaded parking for all.

A few times over recent years I’ve posted about the debacle the Snowy 2.0 would be. 4 Corners last night showed it in all its sad detail. (And it’s actually a $10 billion debacle, and growing.) The biggest mistake the…

Peer-to-peer electricity trading may be coming. It's like 'Uber' energy. What this means is somebody like me, who has lots of surplus electricity every day, would be able to sell it to friends and family at heavily…

You can see here that even if we decided not to use renewables, shifting to EVs using our current grid electricity would still cut the cost of motoring by 50%. Add renewables and that’s 70-80%. And that doesn’t even…

Last week South Australia got 99.8% of its electricity from solar (yellow) and wind (green) only. That's day and night, not just days. On Saturday it actually hit 264%, but because prices were negative in the grid…

Many Australians doing it very tough right now. Look at far and away their greatest expense, transport. That’s fuel prices. That will drive the shift to hybrids and EVs faster than anything else. Always follow the money.

Having a home battery opens up many doors, not just your own use. Amber Electric one of the new companies that allow ordinary people to access wholesale electricity, rather than retail. This can be a way to make big…

‘Building batteries and other EV parts is more polluting than petrol or diesel.’ Not even close. ICEs are rubbish. And the gap will get even more huge as years go on as components are recycled and electricity is all…

Yep. And with zero air pollution and virtually zero noise. Our cities will be unrecognisably nicer and healthier, and we individually and as a nation will be hugely wealthier.

Every single slogan below is a lie. This industry creates them to cast doubt, flooding social media with them, to create resistance to change. Why so much of my social media is about countering this nonsense. Renewables…

Who remembers petrol at 70 cents per litre? It’s currently about $2.17. If you convert electricty costs to cents per litre, filling an EV costs about 40 cents per litre. And that’s using grid electricty, which is…

I'm thinking about setting up on LocalVolts, so we can sell our surplus energy to friends and family at much reduced rates to what they're paying electricity retailers right now. Have a look, only a short vid.

Who remembers the big South Australian blackout in 2016? And how the mind midgets at the time were crowing about how this was an example of how unreliable renewables are? Have a look at the performance of SA. It's been…

I share the solar stuff for those interested in how it pans out in practice. Here’s our highest-level use per quarter, in the past year. Yellow is electricty imports, green exports (we earn $ for those). Not shown is…

Most Australians live on the coast, making offshore wind a superb method of electricity generation for us, active now overseas for over 30 years. Offshore wind is often strongest at peak usage times as well, like when…

The Department of Defence produced a training package for firefighters dealing with EVs. Lots of great information in there for people who mistake clickbait for facts. Clickbait is how self-declared ‘experts’ like John…

One of these passed me on the road today. Haval is doing great business, it’s the old Great Wall Motors. An example of how fast China learned to make cars, these are great vehicles. High quality, and cheap. And the…

lol, ah Rupert. ‘Flexibility’. “For new and existing customers in these areas with a Foxtel satellite TV service, these customers have the flexibility to choose and arrange their own local technician to install or…

This is per YEAR. And doesn’t even include the greatest cost, transport. Add a hybrid or EV to at least double the savings.

This is what street-level chargers look like for EVs. Many countries have already installed thousands of these. Unlike petrol or diesel, electricity runs down every street, it’s an easy thing to tap into it. Useful for…

As a kid I used to wonder why cars could go up to 260 km/h, when by law you could only drive at 110 km/h maximum. The reason is that petrol and diesel engines are so hopelessly weak, that they make them much larger so…

This is a HUGE shift. Essentially the government is (rightly) saying that privatisation of electricity has failed. This is the sort of brave public policy we haven't seen in Australia for years. Hats off to them, well…

This is the main mechanicals of an EV. Beautifully simple. Electric motors (in red here) on the axles so no energy losses through having to translate motion to the wheels. The drivetrain in an ICE is so ridiculous,…

Costs per megawatt of different sources of electricity generation. Nuclear (regular plant) - $220-$350 Small modular nuclear reactor - $189 Wind - $45 Solar - $35 Solar and wind could generate twice what the entire grid…

Wholesale electricity prices fell 76% in the past year. And are still falling.

The reason we've experienced such a dramatic rise in electricity prices over the past 2 years is that we generate most of it (in NSW) using coal. And look at the price of coal. Meantime the price of renewables has been…

All burning of fossil fuels is grossly inefficient. Two-thirds of the energy is lost as heat. For example a petrol or diesel car’s fabled ‘range’ is actually bought by putting over 3000km worth of energy into a tank,…

The Chinese are scaling back their nuclear power plans dramatically. They realised solar and wind are exponentially faster and cheaper for them to build. They built more solar and wind capacity in 8 months than their…

I don't generally like American cars, they're mostly woeful. But Tesla is different, innovative engineering. Have a look at their new Roadster, the fastest car in the world. The acceleration you see in this short video…

Tesla semi again, so many amazing stories about this one. The engineers designed the truck to drive just like a car, so that (get this) the truck is less likely to disrupt other traffic. They recognised that a lot of…

Final on the Tesla semi for now. Jay Leno had a long chat with Tesla engineers and took one for a test drive. Quite a long video but fascinating at every moment. Little brilliant design details, like steps into the…

Towing, something very few people do in % terms, is another anti-EV favourite. (Electric motors are much better at pulling weight than ICEs, and towing impacts range for both.) Engineers have already solved it. They add…

A new trick the anti-EV crowd use is to compare costs of charging an EV at the most expensive public charging infrastructure with the costs of petrol or diesel. As this petrolhead influencer explains well, this…

These plans are becoming more common, with the huge amount of renewables in the middle of the day pushing wholesale prices below zero, to negative. OVO still makes money from this, giving you electricity for nothing,…

High electricity bills are caused by high prices for coal and gas. Like Yvonne, you can be free of them in about a day. For those who can’t, the sooner we can get those parasitic fuels out of our energy system, the…

Thanks to Trevor for the link. ‘Range’ is a total furphy when talking about cars. It can be as little or as large as engineers design it to be. EVs were the first proper cars, you can see Thomas Edison standing next to…

Again it's not a particular interest in energy that makes me post about it. It's because energy is the centre of societies, everything they do. The black line is the US. Australia (not shown) is close to that black…

It's a bit amusing that 'stop the migrants, there aren't enough houses for them' doesn't realise that without them, we can't build the houses.…

Can see here why AEMO is nervous tonight, this is NSW. Green line is demand, purple price. That’s huge demand. People with batteries can sell electricity into the grid right now at nearly 70c/kWh. Next post shows…

The even more interesting bit. The current spot prices in mainland States. Negative prices mean retailers are paid to use the electricity. NSW and Queensland both at huge positive prices. I’ve circled in red the…

AEMO's latest projections say all of Australia's coal-powered electricity will be gone by 2038. I'd place a bet it will be even earlier. Given the speed of the decline, for all intents and purposes it's game over even…

Solar capacity in Europe has grown by more than 40% per year for 3 years in a row. Graphs like this ram home what absolute fantasy most of what you read on social media is. (Except my posts, of course.)

Germany has been trialling hydrogen trains to replace diesels. All now shifting to battery-electric instead, because it’s so much cheaper. The people who back hydrogen do it for one reason only. Team sports. They’re the…

Brilliant idea out of the UK, where polluting firms pay (as a form of carbon offsetting) to retrofit social housing with energy efficiency changes (like insulation), solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps for heating…

It’s so accepted now that friendship is a vitally important thing that nobody really questions it. And it is a vitally important part of life, but it has its time and place. It’s also the most powerful way to stunt a…

Seems worth a try for some cleaner, more powerful cars, almost free electricity, and clean air.

These red letters were in a local museum for 13 years, and nobody could figure out the words they’d originally formed. They put them out to the crowd to solve, and somebody did it in a few minutes. The clue that set…

Electric and hybrid aircraft are already on the market. They may represent a boon for flying, for ordinary people. Right now the aviation industry is heavily centralised at massive airports, which have access to the…

In only a handful of years, Uruguay transformed its electricity production to between 90-98% renewables. How? They asked a nuclear physicist to lead the change. His first action was to abandon any use of nuclear as a…

The Shetland Islands for decades has been powered by diesel generators, the top picture. In the middle of 2024, it will shift to being powered entirely by wind. So much wind power that they will export nearly 10 times…

People who are close to these accidents know the lifelong trauma they cause. I’m on that road every day, it has average speed safety cameras installed, and has done for years. And the NSW Government is too gutless to…

The urban cowboy travelling the country, protecting Australians from the evils of wind and sunshine. I guess it resonates better than ‘Nukes for Port Stephens’. Don Quixote attacked windmills. He was unhinged.

Truck and train crash 70km from Broken Hill. The truck driver is 75! The two train drivers died.

We drove to Wang to see the fireworks. I love fireworks, and they never had them at the scale we do now in regional areas when I was a kid. They’re also a Chinese invention, it makes me chuckle that in this time of the…

Premier: expect 4500-6000 people hospitalised. Says that’s ‘within capacity’. No plan to reduce it.

From NSW Health yesterday. Three things: 1) those beds are required for everybody who is sick enough to require hospitalisation, and 2) ICU capacity in NSW is 1000 beds, but again that’s for all conditions. 300-500…

The ‘Economy’ is the worst it’s been for the entire pandemic. Lockdowns would be less damaging. (There is no Economy, just more proof.) Here’s the thing. ‘Living with the virus’ isn’t the opposite of ‘eliminating the…

Excellent question that very few are asking. You can’t just keep giving booster shots. Ultimately you have to stop the spread of the virus. That’s what ‘elimination’ means. That’s why the smart people who deal with…

Might need to contextualise these. John Snow was the father of epidemiology i.e. the study of disease patterns and causes, in public health. Most famously he discovered that cholera was being spread by dirty water in…

705 people have died of Covid in NSW in January 2022. That’s more than died in the whole of 2021. It’s 23 times the road toll in that time.

So far deliberately infecting the whole nation with a lethal disease isn’t polling well. Come on Australia, reject the attempt to turn us into the train wreck that is the US and UK. That is actually what’s at stake…

Please read this? So we can stop all of the 'endemic' and 'live with the virus' nonsense?…

The Granville train disaster was called ‘the disaster that changed Australia’. 83 people died. This is where I challenge us to think. We’re having 7 Granvilles EVERY WEEK, with Covid. What is wrong with us? If a train…

I keep posting about Covid, because there’s a total vacuum of actual information out there. Deaths first today. 1077 Australians have died of COVID in the last 15 days. That’s more than the 2020 road toll (1095), and…

LEGAL BLOOD ALCOHOL LIMIT TO BE RAISED. With only 1000 road deaths a year in Australia, most not even alcohol-related, there is plenty of spare hospital capacity to deal with alcohol-related accidents. The legal blood…

This is how dangerous the NSW and federal governments are. There was no train strike in NSW today, it was an old-school employer lockout. The NSW Government shut down the trains. Why? There’s only one reason that…

Paul Keating, in 1997. Back when we had leaders, and not just marketing men spewing empty slogans at us. Read this and then turn on the news. "The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech…

Roads don't like water.

How the Murdoch press works. Same commentator, different times. The first, when Bill Shorten was ALP leader talking about using government intervention to control electricity prices. The second, now, where private…

To this day I struggle with the idea that even Lithgow falls over itself to vote for the National Party. It's testament to the skill of the State LNP in rorting targeted grants that the impression is given that the Nats…

On Sundays I often remember the ‘day of rest’ idea we got from religion. It was against God’s will to work on the Sabbath. The Sabbath was actually a weekly ‘lockdown’. It bemuses me to watch those who hopped on the…

"“The so-called shadow lockdown was very powerful, we believe, in constraining the omicron wave in January on top of the holiday period...if that had been in March, it could have been a lot worse.” Professor Jodie…

Had a discussion yesterday about the Rockley Pub, now featuring a restaurant run by Matt Moran. My issue with some of these developments is that it’s partly a process of gentrification. Taking facilities in a poorer…

Another from the Roy Morgan report. Australians hate their governments in good times, and love them in a crisis. Look at that astronomical jump in love for national lockdowns in 2020. (The 2008 jump was Kevin Rudd’s…

In my lifetime already I predict we’ll look back at internal combustion engines and wonder what the hell we were doing using them as long as we did. Rubbish technology, hopelessly inefficient, thousands of moving parts…

Really good article about regional roads. While federal governments give away hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts, to people who don’t need them, basic infrastructure in every town in Australia is falling apart.…

Politicians asked us to look at hospitalisations and deaths. Both have been trending up all week. I looked, did you? How many are all aboard the bullshit train?

I put this in the category of stuff you REALLY need to know. Something that isn't said in public discussion, that I've seen, is that for a long list of workers (below), if you catch Covid-19 it is PRESUMED in law that…

This guy does instructional guitar videos on YouTube, and is charming. It made me think about how times change. I figured out this beautiful Fleetwood Mac song on guitar, by ear as a teenager, using a record player.…

Watch this. (As context, 74 people have died so far this week of Covid, in NSW.) ‘Towards Zero’ road safety campaigns have been in place for years. Hugely expensive and complex, and with strategies that stretch out for…

Bit longer post, but (to me) a mysterious, magical topic. This is Tollund Man, buried in a bog in Denmark for 2500 years. Many cultures mummified or embalmed dead bodies. Today very few cultures still do, we’re…

The Chinese are experimenting with so many interesting things, it’s such a shame we can’t learn from them because of the resurgence of yellow peril politics. This is Chengdu, a city committed to using green space for a…

'Live with the virus' requires health care and other core services to run at more than 100% capacity, 365 days of the year. This bullshit can't go on.

With climate change on path to incinerate much of the planet, those who made fun of Lithgow for this are going to be our amusement, as they burn.…

“Doctors at some of Sydney’s biggest hospitals say emergency departments are so overcrowded that patients are being treated in corridors and ambulance trolleys, as the number of ambulances on the city’s roads at night…

Very glad to have mine vaccinated this year. Let's hope the vaccine matches the circulating strain. "At least 10 per cent of children admitted to hospital with flu will be so sick that they need intensive care," NSW…

I think most of what we call Left v Right politics is really: - young vs old (we live in ageing populations) - urban v regional. As just one example. Guns in America. Mostly a battle of rural America v urban America.

The bigger you make your roads, the more traffic you’ll get. Traffic breeds traffic. No government understands this. Most motorists don’t get it either.

One of the urban myths I’ve heard from several car enthusiasts now is that around the world there are electric car graveyards, where electric cars are dumped because it’s more expensive to replace the battery than buy a…

I find many people assume Lithgow is lower than Bathurst and the Blue Mountains, in elevation terms. That it’s ‘in a hole’. (For the geographically challenged Lithgow is in a valley. Like alpine towns around the world.)…

Following up on my post yesterday about elevation of various towns in the area, here's the topographical map I'm using, which is incredible fun. Zoom in and out and click at different points to get elevations. The…

The highway between Bathurst and Lithgow tonight was ridiculous. Like Parramatta Road, the whole way. The beginning of the great aussie long weekend. Beats me why so many want to spend that 3rd day sitting in a traffic…

Australia is being literally robbed by fossil fuel multinationals. (Note this is true for coal, as well as gas.) And what do Australians say about it? They attack everybody who tries to build domestic energy capacity to…

Lithgow is not unlike most other regional towns or even Oz cities. Some key facts which I think the city needs to come to grips with, to survive, because I think its image of itself is about 150 years old: - the biggest…

'Private industry is more efficient than government' is one of those empty, meaningless slogans designed for numpties who want to avoid thinking about anything. We're living that lie right now, with electricity.…

Wow. Boom. Who knew that regulating a basic service was the answer all along.…

Orwell often said politics is mostly about language. One of my favourites is one the boy racers of the world use, to argue against speed limits, ‘drive to the conditions’. What it really means is ‘we should be allowed…

The BA.5 strain of Covid is exploding in NSW. Please pay attention to this, what happens when people get even ‘mildly’ infected. This is why I post the comparisons to HIV, they’re very close. We may be years off seeing…

See that bit at the bottom, about zero melanoma deaths? 4 people die daily of melanoma in Australia, and zero is our goal. Zero is also our target for road deaths. 50 die daily of Covid, and our goal is to ignore it…

As people now start to become re-infected with Covid, be aware that the new strains, BA.4 and BA.5, appear to be both much more dangerous (doctors I know reporting intubations firing up again), and also as contagious as…

Australia and electricity. Remove heads from anuses with a loud satisfying pop, and have a look. This is AEMO data, the regulator. - 100% of our electricity needs, Australia-wide, will be met by renewables at times…

Don’t you love NSW Government spin, ‘temporarily non-operational’. Meaning ‘the State is so infested with Covid we can’t operate.’ You have virtually zero protection from these new strains if you’ve been infected…

3 decades of spin has prevented people finding out about the genius of electrifying our energy and transport. For example, cars. Electric cars will not only be vastly more efficient, require almost no maintenance, have…

For those comfortable with the political line that vaccination was all we needed to do for Covid, here’s the reality. The vaccines were based on a strain of the virus that is 2 years’ old (and now extinct, the original…

Last Covid post for the day, but maybe the most important. Right now we’re actually living multiple pandemics, at the same time. Not Covid, but Covids, plural. Two key points: 1) the time between new variants is…

One of the main reasons cars dominate cities, is that city design has been handed over to property developers. A car is a dream to a property developer, because they can keep building millions of houses on unoccupied…

There are massive solar and wind farms near Wellington, from a distance you think it must be some bluey-silver crop, like lavender. Companies from around the world have been queuing for years to try to get these…

I learned this from the Australian biologist Tim Low. Which of these two locations has the greatest biodiversity? The city, or the bush? Answer: the city. Hands down. The bush is a wasteland, created by agriculture. I…

I promised to talk about chickens. This isn’t a chicken doing the splits, it’s a chicken with Marek’s DIsease. A type of herpes virus. It’s deadly to pretty much any chicken who catches it. I’m telling this story…

Yesterday the new PM said Covid from this point on is a matter of ‘personal responsibility’. ScoMo-lite. Treating a pandemic with personal responsibility is like telling people to build their own roads. It’s a…

In the 19th century the entire city of Chicago was raised over 4 feet, to allow installation of a sewage and stormwater system. The city had suffered repeated epidemics of typhoid and cholera. In 2022 people say we…

That 'minimum demand' note on the graph is another way to counter the myths of 'baseload power'. Australia is swimming in home-grown electricity, growing exponentially, and at that minimum point the grid itself will…

Bypass what politicians, media outlets and friends are telling you about Covid, and go straight to the expertise, like Professor Chris Goodnow. For those who won’t read it, his main points. It’s vastly more serious than…

I like to share vehicle technology, because I’m convinced people are not really aware yet of the revolution underway. Mitsubishi’s new Outlander PHEV (plug-in hybrid) is a case in point. It has an 84km full-electric…

Novated leases are a massive government subsidy to petrol and diesel vehicles. Good to see them under the spotlight, so we can finally start to get affordable full-electric vehicles in Australia. We have 3 decades of…

Many boomers get very upset at the idea of intergenerational injustice. They seem incapable of understanding privilege, and how you can still be a nice person, but privileged. I think I’m a nice person, but I know I…

In the UK people are mobilising to refuse to pay extortionate electricity bills. The often claimed efficiency of private industry, which nobody actually checks to see if true. Well, reality has now checked. This never…

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago. A thing of almost sublime beauty, with…

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction and discovering electro-magnetism, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago, and half…

In the pandemic Australia has sacked over 40,000 of the smart people who do this sort of work. Meantime TAFE will again be free, to fund the desperate shortage of tradies, a shortage that’s mostly an already bloated…

If you lower the speed limit on busy roads, traffic as a whole flows much faster. Going slower actually makes you go faster. Speed limits are mostly designed to smooth the flow of traffic. My experience on the road…

“…my eye fell on a news story about an unresolved murder; a torso of an African boy had been found in the Thames and, after several years of forensic research, they had been able to track down the region of Africa from…

The old ceremonies of mourning around the Royal death are like the Queen herself. Us in service to something older, bigger and more mysterious than our own beloved personalities. You don't have to be a monarchist to…

Somebody defined the economy as ‘driving to a regional town to have coffee, to see if it’s different to the coffee at your local coffee shop’.

I post about changes to energy because what’s really happening out there should amaze people. And help explain why I say the change will be fast and brutal, much much faster than people are thinking. Some examples: -…

Thanks to Ed for this. The oceans are masking just how bad global warming is. They’ve absorbed over 90% of the extra heat we’ve produced by burning astronomical amounts of carbon-based fuels. The amount of heat they’ve…

You wouldn’t know from the stories we hear just how much amazing, fast change has already happened with renewable energy. Most of regional WA for example will soon not even bother with the grid. And this will be a much…

Water’s been gushing out of the ground in the hills around Lithgow for months, even when it’s not raining. At the same time, if you go up Hassans Walls Road and look up slope, a huge number of trees are well past…

I imagine if this was an electric vehicle charging station, how it would be plastered over the news everywhere by the petrol and diesel fetishists. Funnily, electric vehicle charging stations don’t tend to blow up, nor…

Climate change has so many ways of destroying society, and I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The damage to local road and rail over the past few years isn’t sustainable, enormously expensive to fix.

I've been dreading this day. Latour was probably my greatest influence in thinking about the world, I can't even begin to describe the ways his genius changed the way we can think about everything. His own mentor Michel…

Read this, these utes are already on the boats on their way here, arriving within weeks. Why are businesses lining up to buy them? They’ve done the sums, it will save them LOTS of money. At least 5 times cheaper over…

My first real insight into the genius of electric motors was a line trimmer (whipper snipper) my dad bought me more than 30 years ago. The Ryobi Electro Scorpion. It’s still going strong, and hasn’t once in more than 30…

Great article showing the brutally fast changes underway. This was Australia’s newest coal-fired plant, and remember many were calling for us to build even more. It’s gone belly up, entirely for economic reasons. None…

How to make a steel wheel for a train.

Out of interest I rang the local Mitsubishi dealer to ask what the waiting time is now on the Outlander hybrid. 13 to 14 months. The reason for this (which the salesperson didn't tell me, but I already knew) is…

This is Tesla’s car-making plant in Shanghai. It had the capacity to roll out 750,000 Teslas per year. They’ve just upgraded that to make it 1.1 million per year. It’ll reduce waiting times in Australia significantly,…

Australia is swimming in solar-generated energy from our own rooftops. More than twice what any other country produces, per person. The big jump in electricity prices is caused by the previous government not building…

I see very little evidence anybody cares. It's a defining moment in Australian society, deliberately infecting our children. Over and over, not just once. Our society may not survive it, the health costs alone could be…

Freemantle, outside Bathurst. I think climate change is often thought of as something that just impacts the weather. But our infrastructure isn't set up to cope with even this earliest phase of warming. What comes next…

My no-gas shower hack (for those who don’t live near me, gas infrastructure was damaged in flooding, so multiple towns have no gas for several weeks, maybe even months). I heated a big pot of water on the stove, and…

Another way to look at Australia’s problems, through the lens of engineering. The largest countries in the world graduate more engineers every year than Australia graduates students in ALL fields. Yes they’re much…

What struck me again in the middle of the Bathurst floods yesterday is how destructive ‘the economy’ is. A sensible society would have looked at that river yesterday and said ‘I think people should take a day off, this…

Took me an hour-and-a-half to get from Raglan to the centre of Bathurst this morning. ‘Stay home until we get this road properly open’, imagine a society with brains.

Brilliantly simple. We could have been doing this for the past 20 years and energy would be as good as free right now for Australians.…

Today is world toilet day. My first training in engineering included learning how to make toilets. They get a lot of jokes, but toilets are very complex objects, and have saved more lives than pretty much anything else.

Have decided on a Tesla Powerwall. It will likely never fully pay for itself at current prices (though I nabbed one before the recent price hike), but with electricity prices projected to rise by as much as 80% next…

Nobody has ever been able to explain to me why if you want to be an architect or nurse or teacher or engineer in Australia, or any job that needs university training, you have to pay for your own training. But if you're…

I post a bit about stretching, about why it’s mostly a waste of time, and in fact may be damaging. Here’s an extended wonderful passage by my friend David Gorman which gives a lot more detail. A bit of reading, but I…

The fastest way to rein in inflation is to put some sort of price control on gas and electricity. That’s what’s driving much of the inflation. Not peoples’s wages, which haven’t gone up in a decade. The fastest way to…

Technically 45 degree angle parking was invented because it fits more cars than either parallel or a shallower angle, like 30 degrees. It was also thought to be easier for drivers to rejoin traffic, without having to…

Am watching the soccer, but the hockey yesterday (and always) is an infinitely more interesting game. And gets much less publicity. We’re also world champions in men’s hockey and have been for most of our lifetimes.…

Before Christmas Australia may cap the price of coal, to keep electricity prices down. Coal and gas companies are making huge windfall profits on the back of exorbitant international prices. This could be very bad news…

South Australia today. Renewables are providing way above what the State needs, for electricity. 112%. The wholesale price is negative i.e. they’ll pay you to use it.

There are only a handful of ways to get rich. You can inherit a lot of money, or win the lottery (both very rare). Or invent something (a song, a car…) that is so popular that millions buy it. The hardest road is to…

A few people asked me to say a bit more about home batteries. I’ll talk about the Tesla Powerwall 2, because it’s what we have, but there are multiple brands out there now. But the Powerwall is probably still the best…

A new twist on batteries today. One big government announcement, and one change coming. Both will have a profound impact on the decision whether or not to own a battery. Today the government announced the building of 8…

This is such an exciting, revolutionary achievement, and spoiled in Australia by years of spin by politicians in the pockets of energy companies. I don’t think people have really registered yet what it will mean to be…

Power stations in NSW will be replaced by renewable energy zones (REZ). Really worth watching this short vid to see what's planned, and how quickly. For example the Central West-Orana zone will be first, and will be…

An electric taxi in the early 1900s, New York. There’s an assumption that electric vehicles today are the new technology, replacing petrol and diesel. But electric cars were built 50 years before either petrol or diesel…

The rail strikes threatened in the US are mostly about a simple issue. The rail workers want 7 days of sick leave per year. They currently have ZERO sick days per year. In fact it’s even worse than that, they have zero…

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. This inflatable character was used by emergency department staff in a US hospital to provide Christmas cheer. Unfortunately the staff member who wore the inflatable…

I think we need wide education in political language, the Greeks called it ‘rhetoric’, it was a cornerstone of their education. For example yesterday the acting Premier was asked about risks to regional NSW from Sydney…

My whole life I've struggled with shoes. (They really did once x-ray feet in shoe shops, to fit shoes.) So many debates about what's best - arch support, cushioning, flat shoes better etc. I've now decided a 'supported'…

Kinesiology tape really interests me. It’s not strapping, its job isn’t so much to restrict movement. Its job is to provide an elastic, movable envelope of support to allow movement to be as normal as possible, while…

Economics looks dry and boring, because it's designed to, to make you not pay attention. Look at this train wreck coming, hidden in a graph. At the moment that big dip down to about -15 is the government spending to…

Lots of criticism of FB for blocking a whole range of non-news sites as well. Because we’re too lazy to investigate anything, we miss that Rupert had specifically advised that the government’s social media legislation…

Australians have amassed over $200 billion in savings during the pandemic. Global warming gases have plummeted. Crime has collapsed. Cities have their cleanest air in decades. Hundreds of thousands were lifted out of…

A populism test. If you think is a great idea, you're a populist. (Tip: take a drive along some of these arterial highways, and see if the stupidity of this idea suddenly dawns on you.)

I don’t think we pay attention. At the beginning of the vaccine rollout in the UK, like the rest of the world decision-making was based on risk. Old people get the vaccine first, because they’re at highest risk. we…

Clive James once said 'freedom wears a crown', pointing out that highly educated and progressive people like him are supposed to support a republic by default. Royals are constrained by centuries of custom and…

So fed up with this government. If the tourism industry and airlines are struggling, print some money and give it to them. Don’t encourage millions of Australians back into circulation with a pandemic still active, I…

Many, maybe even most, people in the developed world experience the world largely as if they were occupying a space behind their eyes, looking out. The dominant idea that "I" am located inside my head, in my brain. So…

I posted about this when it happened. LNP fans defended the decision at the time, because as always they just swallowed spin without digesting. It was always a ludicrous, corrupt decision, a populist brain fart with no…

Couple of times I've tried to talk about gravity here with the example of people using stairs. It takes no more effort to go 'up' stairs than to go 'down' them. You'll use more energy going up, but no more effort in the…

About 40% of urbanised areas are devoted to roads. Nearly half of our cities. And traffic is gridlocked. Ideas always determine everything - to 'move' is a myth. To get from 'A to B', you have to connect them, but then…

You hear the word 'development' a lot. Usually seen as a great thing, creates money and jobs etc. What it actually creates is millions of houses sitting on often prime land, unconnected to most services or social life.…

Agency and landscapes. Aboriginal rock art can look like some sort of primitive attempt to draw. I don't think it has anything to do with art as we conceive it. Aboriginal people gave agency to all things in the…

The new Sydney ring roads feel fantastic because the contrast with the old traffic jams is so nice. But in the longer term they’ll be a disaster, moving in exactly the opposite direction to urban design worldwide. As…

Roads create traffic. Every road we build to try to reduce congestion just increases the congestion. We don't need bigger roads because everybody bought more cars, people bought more cars because we built bigger roads.…

It might be surprising that I actually love cars. But I also think you can either have mass car ownership, or a functioning society. You can't have both. Notice how high on the list cars and roads are for those with…

It costs up to 5 times as much to maintain ‘infrastructure’ over time than it costs to build it in the first place. Buildings, roads, sewers, pipes, parks etc. That funding is rarely forthcoming. Many local councils for…

Australians spend $60 billion a year on overseas travel. That's 10 times what the country spends on infrastructure, and about equal to what it spends on education. And nearly every cent of that money ends up overseas.…

The modern suburb is really nothing more than millions of garages. Roads and transport are the central thing. Try this thought experiment. How would our towns and cities look if the number 1 planning requirement for all…

Why is the idea of a 4-day working week so slow to move forward? We're all well-trained hamsters. Look at Daylight Savings as an example. We all wanted an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day for social…

This is Nordlingen, in southern Germany. Over 1100 years old. (Trivia - also the city shown from the air at the end of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.) Look how beautifully self-contained cities were before…

Bushmen like the fictional Dundee I think are Australia's way of romanticising the chasm they all feel but rarely admit to, between themselves and the country they're living in. The Dundee archetype plays on that deeply…

Very difficult to talk about vaccines without triggering the anti-vaxxers or New Age wellness "just strengthen your immune system" fruit loops. But I'm wavering on this AZ vaccine, for a variety of reasons. A longish…

The Australian 'bush'. What does that even mean? Somewhere we don't have a town or city, usually. Sometimes we create a national park out of it. A piece of 'bush' like in this picture, is usually a landscape falling…

"Up until about 1880, he said, cities functioned more like networked villages. A person likely worked, relaxed, and shopped all within about 20 minutes of their home. Cities of that era of course had plenty of their own…

Have been driving a lot more during the pandemic. Nobody follows speed limits, almost without exception. We have average speed cameras in place for trucks, turn them on for cars. Our hyper-individualism doesn't even see…

NSW the only State not to do this. What possible justification can people provide for not monitoring average speed? Been in place for trucks for years. The car lobby will suggest ‘driving to the conditions’ (i.e. using…

Nothing fires up a redneck more than telling them some new pointless property development or road is blocked by an endangered species. Some tiny little frog or insect, how ridiculous! But that thin blue line of life on…

Curious that something many attribute to a universal gender trait - toxic masculinity - at the same time as they argue gender is infinitely fluid - has such specific geographical outcomes? Similarly in NSW, DV up over…

I like Brian Cox. And he's a Professor of Physics. But he's made me come back to gravity again. He said, while riding the vomit comet: "by simply falling at the same rate as the plane, for a few, fleeting moments, we…

Love the bit in here about how ‘traffic’ is not some homogeneous thing, like water coming out a hose. It’s a decision by thousands or millions of individuals, based on many factors. Getting rid of roads actually makes…

Memory. This is Henri Bergson, long dead. Nobel Prize winner. Bergson realised that memories aren't in our heads. He showed that when we have a memory, we're not going into our heads, we're re-entering the past itself,…

A scholar, courtesy of Rembrandt. Scholars are the tradies of ideas. Ideas are the literal building block of our lives and societies. Everything you do, think and feel is based on some idea. Unis now compete for…

The word 'scientist' was invented in 1833. Before that time there were just scholars, who studied across the whole curriculum. The closest thing to what we see as 'science' today was natural philosophy. It's been…

This is Bathurst. People know I love patterns, and what they show. Bathurst is not unusual for modern cities, no strong pattern at all, it's sprawl. What does that mean? It means what it shows - no cohesive social…

A random part of the UK countryside, a pattern seen around the world. Look at the total saturation of paddocks, of farming. Nothing allowed to exist in the landscape except us. About 75% of the UK landscape is dedicated…

Much of China is still an entirely different model of humans in the landscape. One that Europe used at one time, too, the village model. People and other living things living in close proximity, in an integrated way.…

One more aerial shot for the day. Florence. Old cities could still be high density, and even have roads of sorts, without all the problems cars cause today. Access to the near vicinity (paths) rather than access to…

If there's a place on Earth most infected by the car virus, it has to be Los Angeles. Staggeringly that's suburbia you can see down there, criss-crossed by major highways. This space would be entirely dysfunctional…

Was in a webinar with John Skerritt this week, head of the TGA, the body that approves vaccines in Oz. A nice guy. This quote from him though shows the danger of medicalising a pandemic. "By being vaccinated, we're not…

Country towns now seeing the sort of road congestion you see in cities. And we keep making the same mistakes, thinking that more 'traffic' means we need more and bigger roads. Traffic is not a thing, its not like a flow…

That question people ask, if you had a time machine, where would you go? Now I would choose Australia, before the First Fleet arrived. Something miraculous, unique in all the world, had happened here, and had been…

Joining a few more dots between my posts, notice how politicians win votes with new transport spending, particularly roads. Moving around is the basis of our entire culture. Where are we going, with all that movement?…

Experts fighting back. Not the house-trained poodles the government surrounds itself with, real expertise. I'd beg everybody to read this, except that would be demeaning. But then I do wear Crocs, so I'll beg anyway.

Isn't 'broad musical taste' an oxymoron? To 'have taste' is to to be able to pick crap from quality. There will always be a minority of art (or anything actually) that is truly great. I remember one of the great…

Loving maths being compulsory in years 11 and 12. Not as thrilled that education is still seen as preparation for life. It is that, but it's supposed to change life too. Not just churn out well-trained employees.

Corruption, plain and simple. The National Archive is having to do fundraising to be able to keep some of our basic historical records, and aged care staff got no pay rise in the latest budget, but these clowns can find…

Maggie Thatcher was one of those most responsible for the common claim that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Trains were her main experiment to prove it. 40 years of disaster later, and the…

A deeper take on travel and movement. An astronaut in space cannot move. They can flap their arms and legs around, like in this video, but in terms of going from 'A to B', they can't move a millimetre. It's only by…

Thanks To Dave Roma for this shot. They're doing extensive renovations on the court house at the moment, I watch them every day. Another example of how technology is really morals wrapped up in materials. When you build…

One simple (and non-political) way to understand why Melbourne has needed to lock-down more than Sydney in the pandemic, is to look at how much movement occurs in each city. A city with more movement, means more people…

There are 65 million kilometres of roads in the world. Laid end--to-end, that's enough to circle the planet more than 1600 times. For most of those journeys we end the day exactly where we started, it's a commute, not a…

I used Westconnex for the first time last weekend, as well as the cross-city tunnel. All very smooth, and bliss to avoid Parramatta Road. But whoa, $40 in tolls! Public-private partnerships (PPP) are really just spin,…

Before 1847 there was no such thing as 'time' or 'space' in England. Each locality was a whole universe unto itself, with its own rhythms of life driven by things like seasons and cropping, and didn't see itself as part…

I love heat pumps, we should all get rid of wood and gas fires and use heat pumps instead. Some of the amazing physics. These two scenes, one obviously looks much 'hotter' than the other. But actually there's about…

The red bits are land within 1km of a road. The other colours are areas of ecological significance. Notice that where you have roads/red, you have not much else. North America, Europe, the seats of modern empires.…

I'm seeing the same Economy-driven nonsense in other natural events now, not just the pandemic. For example yesterday, this was the travel advisory for the highway. I was on that road yesterday morning, there's no way…

Politicians who believe we live in economies, not societies, adore transport projects. Do we stop and ask why? Transport is displacement, and displacement is dispossession. Taking goods and people from where they live,…

The oldest trick in the modern conservative's playbook is to knee-cap taxation (on the wealthy), and then claim the resulting budget deficit is due to too much spending. The spending doesn't change much at all, it's…

This is how society tends to develop. A bit like some kids put on weight before they hit a growth spurt, social things go through ‘mass’ phases - mass transport, mass shopping etc. - before then re-building ‘local’…

A photographer from regional Victoria. Her anger is at a public health measure, designed to save thousands of lives. That isn’t even mentioned. Her collapse in income is her only focus. No doubt that’s extremely…

Have a look at this city in Morocco, and then these trees exhibiting what is called 'crown shyness'. Trees leave distinctive gaps between themselves, in their crowns. It's a pattern almost identical to streets in old…

‘Ring-fencing’ suburbs and even whole regional towns is about as effective as trying to avoid a fart in an elevator, by standing on the opposite side. The NSW Government again asleep at the wheel. Watch the toilet…

Out of control, has been for weeks. The government refusing to do anything more, growing and spreading every day. Yesterday trying to steal vaccines from other States, who rightly told Gladys to piss off and do her job.…

Australians spend more on alcohol than on gas and electricity, or petrol. We spend more on booze than we do on clothes, and almost as much as we spend on health.

John Thaw, as Inspector Morse, stating the often unspoken truth of our great housing market democracies. Roads and cars enslave us, and houses even more so. We’ve ‘economised’ all the basics of life, turned them into…

One of the many things we maybe will never know about Aboriginal Australia is how they could run faster than Usain Bolt, with no training at all.

I’m now double-jabbed. Regional health providers have now been told to offer (encourage) people to have their second AZ shot after 8 weeks, and I’ve heard of some offering only 4. (Mine was 9 weeks.) Goes to show that…

Our bodies evolved to automatically coordinate to what we want to do. You never have to ‘do’ your movement, or even basic posture, as some people call it. Here’s a tip - any time you feel a strain or a tension or…

Cities before cars turned them into car parks.

The pandemic has never been a medical or even biological event. It’s a political event. It was caused by and is being prolonged by pathological individualism - libertarianism. The NSW Government are libertarians.…

"Gladys has so spectacularly muffed the pandemic, and ICAC is bearing down on her still, so it is little wonder there is talk of a spill...Yet the Premier of NSW has been enormously popular. Berejiklian has the uncanny…

My grandmother died this month. My last remaining grandparent. Nanna. Because of Covid she got no funeral, though at some point we’ll get together and commemorate her. That’s her on the left, holding either me or Mike…

The government released a ‘roadmap’ out of the pandemic yesterday. The metaphor tells you everything. Nobody uses roadmaps any more, we all use GPS. Real-time data adjusted to constantly changing conditions. Somebody…

As people know, one of my pet peeves. It’s there in the sign, ‘Zero G’. As if these people are suddenly free of gravity. There’s as much gravity on these people as there is on you or I. Even trained scientists…

Can’t help think that the NSW Government taking a global event, and pretending it can fence it off in the poorer parts of Sydney, is going to do lasting damage to the entire city.

That road outside our front door connects us to every other spot on Earth. That sounds great for us. But what it also does is remove any reason for our quarter-acre of Earth, our home, to exist. Transport makes all…

This is a growing pattern in Western democracies. Gated communities. Where the well-off shield themselves from crime and poverty. From the rest of society. Billionaires have bought entire islands and built bunkers to…

People have probably heard a lot about the Doherty modelling in the news, the guide governments are using for the 70% and 80% re-openings. Wanted to share some of it because I’m not sure how many people have actually…

I think Australia is sleepwalking into something it just isn't seeing. Right now it thinks the opening up plans of 70 and 80-% are great, because they think it'll be just more of what they have right now, with extra…

Data from the US is now suggesting vaccination plus infection with the Delta strain is equivalent to being unvaccinated, against the Alpha strain from last year. In other words, we’re heading back to square one. What…

The health system, like most systems, is run at about 60-70% full capacity, to allow for the peaks and troughs that happen each year. Right now, globally, politicians are trying to run health systems at 100+% capacity,…

“Atham-Lebbe Farsith, a waiter in a one-room curry house in Ampara did not understand why the customer was So Fucking Angry. All of the customers were angry. The man at the counter was waving his plate at Farsith,…

Everything about this plan is laughable. Even the title, 'The Australian Way'. Just another book of meaningless political slogans to get him through the election. The man is vacuous, completely devoid of any vision or…

Imagine a road safety strategy that said 'we're getting thousands of crashes a week, but very few people need to go to hospital.' Substitute 'Covid cases' for 'crashes', and you have our national Covid strategy.

NSW has a zero road deaths road safety strategy. Quoting from it: “The NSW road toll isn't simply a number. It is people. Sadly, it's closer to home than you think. It's people like you. Grandparents, mothers, fathers,…

This is a wonderful, digitally-interactive article, describing all of the action that has been long underway by industry to change Australia. Really, really worth your time, don’t believe any of the political nonsense…

Daily Covid stat. Red line is average road toll in NSW. All the other lines are Covid deaths currently in NSW (see the key top left). 'Living with Covid'. In a bad flu season we might lose 600 people. Covid at least…

Look up ‘leader’ in the dictionary, and see if it mentions anything about saying you ‘understand’ protesters threatening to kill a State Premier. Have been warning we’re on our own road to Trump here in Oz for years now.

Omicron data from the rest of the world is dire. But the Dom is on top of it. We can’t fight it, because it will be too onerous for all of those small businesses selling cafe lattes and scented candles. And he’s still…

The regions are very exposed, virtually no ICU capacity out here.

From inside NSW Health. Worth a few minutes. Insight into what’s happening inside pathologies and hospital For the past few days there has been a huge amount of misinformation regarding COVID testing and as a healthcare…

Stadiums are an excellent example of how little space people need, and how much space their cars need. Our cities are big car parks, cars have taken them over.

So all up there’s about $250 million of bushfire relief money to spend. That’s the scale of the emotional tidal wave that followed the fires. It’ll be a mess, it takes huge amounts of coordination to spend that sort of…

These always look scary. But it’s possible we misunderstand that viruses are active agents. It’s not in their best interest to wipe us out, we’re their hosts. They need us to survive. Usually pandemics arise in extreme…

A road is a nothing space. It takes you to another place, its purpose is always somewhere else, any spot on a road is meaningless for itself. Driving on a road makes you immobile with your attention fixed permanently…

Astronomical electricity usage in NSW today, maybe unprecedented for a weekend. The same if not worse predicted for tomorrow. Who put their air conditioner on 24 to ease the load? I haven’t seen that AEMO suggestion…

The news reports about ‘drought relief’ because of drenching rain on the coast 🤔 Major regional centres will run out of water this year. Some have already. There is no answer to this problem. An absolute disaster…

My first training outside school was as a materials scientist. Nobody I knew had heard of it; I’d still recommend it to anybody not sure what to study, it’s the most amazing field. Much of what we call ‘modern…

A huge number of the world’s most successful businesses were started and/or run by engineers. What this shows I think is that the image of engineering as just making stuff is fundamentally wrong. That stuff is as social…

Nobody really knows what this strain of Coronavirus will do, it’s wait and see. But if you end up being one of the unlucky ones who gets really sick with it down the track, here’s what I’d do. Ask for high-dose…

There’s never enough money for new infrastructure, lots of our towns are crumbling, and at the same time millions of people are sweating every day in gyms and other forms of training, with the only outcome their own…

Babies when held in water can walk, they don’t need to learn it. It’s a reflex. Aboriginal Australians, without training or shoes or tracks, could run faster than Usain Bolt. Most of our training and exercise is…

Continuing on a car theme. The transition from horses to cars in cities took only 10 years. The horse manure crisis was a level of pollution absolutely dwarfed by modern car pollution.…

This is a precision fermenter. These may replace most farming in our lifetimes, as they’ll be able to make any food (including meat), and a lot more we’ve never dreamed of, from the microbe level up. Food will become…

Populism to me is far and away the most dangerous virus in society, and I don’t think we see its full symptoms. From a recent post I saw on coronavirus in Oz. Populism includes ‘noble’ things like donating hundreds of…

And the reason the NRL is a financial trainwreck, not mentioned here? Enormous player salaries. Never come between an NRL player and a bucket of money. Like Aussie cricketers. Gobsmacking they want government assistance…

Dr Nick's gym #1. With gyms closed, I'd like to convince people that just by changing some ideas, you can get much fitter and stronger simply sitting at home. Breaking down the ideas a few at a time. Firstly, have you…

A disaster in the making. These handful of ships could undo all the weeks of hard slog in controlling the virus. And hard for Australia to be too precious about it either, because there are thousands of Australian…

Re-watching Smokey and the Bandit (Kell's idea). Bit of fun, Jackie Gleason steals the show. The same theme runs so deep in America, over and over again. The man against the establishment. Got me looking at road…

Elimination. In as little as a month. Go hard, go early, tell vested interests in business to shut their gob. It's not rocket science. Thankfully we did a quick U-turn and followed a similar path. But we wasted weeks…

When you're faced with an impossible situation, it usually means you're looking at it wrong I think. Going back to bats, they show us that viruses are not the problem. How our bodies react to them is the problem. Bats…

A wise epidemiologist asked recently why we aren't asking the humanities about the best way to deal with a pandemic. Pandemics are social phenomena, not just medical, you can't separate the two. The social challenges…

The problem of seeing our current situation as only a medical thing. Have you noticed that as time goes on, a disease caused by the richest parts of the world is being dealt with by cocooning that most privileged part…

I keep coming back to one insight from Camus. Humans are not free, because there are pestilences. The thing that annoys me most is the choice we're being asked to make between 'normal life' and lockdowns. Normal life is…

This is the first time that a modern, democratic country has made killing its own citizens an election strategy. (If you don't follow US politics, this is Trump's last desperate attempt to get his poll numbers up again,…

The reason I left the university sector after nearly 20 years there was this. Supposed to be the custodian of society's ideas, but instead a gravy train milked by senior staff for exorbitant salaries, and utter contempt…

I feel explanations of domestic violence rarely talk about the domestic part of the term, focusing mostly on the violence. To me it's a violence intrinsically linked to our ideas of domesticity, not just to gender roles…

I think it's the 'road' in road to recovery that is the wrong metaphor. When we're sick we rest or shelter, we don't drive somewhere. I don't think we're seeing the vanity and danger of trying to 'control' a pandemic,…

Day 100 of the Economy Virus. In which Josh tells us that if people get sick, it could derail the economy. Looking after people could fix the economy too? It's like they're one and the same thing, hey.

Think I'm exaggerating when I say people don't give a shit about schools and kids? Gladys' daily press conference, talking about getting people off public transport and back into cars, or onto bikes, or walking. Great…

Magic public transport buses! The magic is everywhere.

Magic schools, magic school buses, magic public transport, now magic planes! Magic pliable doctors for hire! Masks optional, for 'peace of mind'. They forgot 'positivity', and 'being nice to each other'.

It's a shambles. Government by press release. I don't think many people see the bull-at-a-gate approach this 'save the economy' obsession is creating. All the caution used to close things has been thrown out the window…

I've noticed in this pandemic the necessary tension between medical people, and public health people. They're not the same. Medical people (doctors, nurses) will tend to be focused on the health of an individual. Public…

We tend to think freedom is the opposite of slavery. If you actually look at what happened though, in history, that bondage of one person to another didn't lift to give us freedom. We enormously expanded and diversified…

Gladys: "For us our stimulation will really be driven by infrastructure first and foremost because infrastructure means jobs". There's no evidence that infrastructure spending creates jobs. There's good evidence it wins…

School often seems like preparation for 'real life'. I think we need to flip that - society (real life) is just a collection of ideas. Working through a set of problems at school is not practice for real life - it is…

Regular sufferers of my posts will know I've been advocating these for years. Could put them on every bus, in every classroom and hospital, for bugger-all money. I carry one with me all through winter, for work or…

Animals teach us that if you have your attention wholly engaged in what you’re doing, everything else follows without effort or strain. This hawk’s attention doesn’t budge for a second, which is what frees its body…

“South Korea’s story sounds disturbingly similar to Australia’s. Its Centers for Disease Control blames the relaxation of restrictions to give businesses a boost. Nightclubs, bars, clubs and other venues were reopened.…

Our main reference point to the planet, an address, is defined by roads, pathways to other places. Our own ‘place’ is defined by movement to other places. We’re not grounded. Our torture in a global pandemic is to be…

If you Google ‘subsistence’, you usually get pics like this, self-sufficiency stuff. It’s revealing for me, because it suggests that to subsist you have to withdraw from society. Society is about movement and economic…

ScoMo reporting on National Cabinet today. Still this idea that what will get the 'economy' moving is removing 'regulation' which is apparently 'constraining' business and the economy. Baloney, that's vested interests…

All in the ideas. When we say ‘bend down’, why doesn’t it occur to us that we’re already on the ground? We can’t get any lower. Young kids don’t bend down, their whole body just changes shape, no strain or effort. ‘Up’…

What bothers me about the whole vaccine thing is that medical experts are poor guides for pandemics. We might get a vaccine that gets us through COVID-19, but there are plenty more pathogens just waiting to whack us.…

If they don't want people moving about, close the places down they go to. Don't ask people not to move about and then leave the places open. The economy Nazis thought letting Australians travel all over the country in…

Have been driving to work because of the pandemic. One thing I’ve noticed again is just how many people completely ignore road rules. Had a person go past me yesterday who was doing about 140 km/h. Couple of P-platers…

Is Gladys following the National Cabinet decision to go for elimination? Or is she and her cabinet of booze, gambling and real estate flunkeys still clinging to the useless suppression strategy?…

A few hundred years ago humans thought the universe revolved around the Earth. Today's version of that vanity is visible in the pandemic right now. We think it'll be defeated only by a vaccine or drug. Microbes live in…

Going back to this reality filter. Society is literally just ideas fighting each other. Not people - ideas use people to further their agendas. Ideas are living things, they're not stuck in books. Unless you train hard…

I said this from day 1 of this pandemic, and was told I hated ScoMo. Australians don’t engage with the ideas, they just line up behind their ‘side’. The ‘balance’ of the economy (feds) and health (States) was exactly…

Yep. Hole in one. New restrictions from NSW, two lots, in the past day. More urgently needed on pubs, clubs, restaurants and regional travel. All big party donors, which is why they haven't done it yet.

I have nothing against the defence forces, but a thought experiment...we would never expect the defence forces to make a profit or even break even. It’d be a ridiculous expectation, we know they’re performing a public…

The beliefs are scary, the fact millions sign up to them is even scarier. Conspiracies abound when you destroy the basic institutional infrastructure of society.

Back to this brilliant research published in the BMJ. I've marked with an X now where schools, public transport, many workplaces, pubs, clubs, restaurants and shops would sit. All extremely high risk in NSW right now.…

One of the debating tricks people who oppose strong public health action against the virus use is to say 'more people are being harmed by the restrictions than by the virus'. That's like saying 'we can't build new…

You run out of words. Scandalous. Corruption. Cronyism. Our Covid recovery commission is stacked with the gas industry. There's a global GLUT of gas. See those pollies in grey suits with solemn faces every day talking…

Imagine how different the world would be if, instead of making education into training for work, we made work into a project for our education.

You can train a Chief Medical Officer to do tricks. Like this one, appearing as an attack dog for the government as head of the Federal Department of Health. Obscenely inappropriate, Department Heads NEVER do press…

Victorian England. Massive building programs, creation of the sewers, the railways, roads. The time of empire. Do we stop to think about what made all of that possible? Today we flog all this stuff off, to give away in…

Did you know there's 30 million cubic kilometres of ice at Antarctica? If it all melts, sea levels rise by about 70 metres. All of our coastal cities gone. Lapstone will be the new Double Bay, but with malarial…

We call the Chinese authoritarian. But maybe their more unified collective system is what they actually want. And what we actually want too, we just won't admit it. "The absence of vandalism is a very appealing aspect…

Proof that the Economy is just people. We imported lots of young, healthy, smart people, it’s why the Oz economy hasn’t tanked in over 20 years. That’s about to stop. The government think building roads and gas plants…

BoJo doesn’t want big lockdowns because it might damage the Economy. Because that’s bullshit, the virus is now teaching him humility. He wanted local lockdowns instead. They don’t work, and on top of that he now has to…

Homes used to be like a folding of the landscape itself, with many paths for walking, plants, animals, and lanes to link different villages. Beautiful spaces, the sort that make people feel joy when they occupy them.…

When we compare public transport with private transport, why don’t we ever question - why transport? Why is that the given? Why do we always have to be moving people around in large numbers? Why does everybody always…

Germans are often seen as efficient, orderly, logical etc. Actually I think that’s a misdiagnosis, you understand so much about Germany when you understand they’re a nation of craftsmen. That’s where their apparent…

Unlike the other construction worker shot, no harness here. This was the Empire State Building construction. Reminds me of Camille Paglia’s point: “It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building…

I think the virus hasn’t been our real enemy in the past year. It’s a population trained for the past 5 decades to see themselves as individual, ‘free’ consumers. Many responded to the pandemic, and still do, just by…

Education isn’t about subjects, it’s about learning to pay attention. And keeping at it past the point where others get bored (Einstein’s advice). Without training your attention, everything in the world will just be a…

It usually takes a decade or so to develop a new vaccine. With funding it’s now been done inside a year. You could make a list of things we’ve been told society can’t afford - free childcare, free dentistry, affordable…

The new 'LNP' strain of the virus. It's the same virus, behaving in exactly the same way it always has. This is just political spin. SA is experiencing exactly what Victoria experienced. It's also borrowed Boris'…

Around 50% of the art in the world’s galleries is estimated to be fake. Nobody even notices. Art in our time, including music, is obsessed with originality, with ‘authenticity’. The worst sin is to do ‘cover’ versions.…

Follow up from yesterday. Another clear example of how politicians distort public health measures. They made up this 'new strain' rubbish to justify going into lockdown, because they knew it was embarrassing to have to…

Today they'll persecute this poor lying sod (everybody lies, first rule of governance) to escape their lie that this is some new strain of virus. Here's a little governance quiz, which strategy will work? 1) A long and…

One of the glorious things about Covid. It's destroyed group work in corporate training.

Have a look how similar a circuit board looks to an aerial shot of a city or town. You could call it an analogy, but actually it’s not. It’s the movement and interaction of things, just at different scales. People, and…

How many years have most workplaces had air con now? Not schools. None of the people wailing about lost education during the pandemic actually give a shit about schools, they just wanted them open as childcare so…

Staff training is so important, even in bookstores.

Do people even notice that every day of this pandemic, offices have been exempt from most Covid Safe requirements? It’s all been about the economy, not the virus or your health. Will we ever realise the beliefs we have…

“Every city that has laboured under the misapprehension that they can carry on with a bit of community transmission has been forced into lockdown when the health system collapsed.” Been saying it for months. You play…

Those who don't want to fight the virus have weaponised contact tracing as the silver bullet that can keep everything open. It won't work, it hasn't worked anywhere, exponential growth quickly swamps the tracers.…

Modern cars are too well made, and too comfortable. I say this because I think the reason cars are destroying our communities is because they’re not just modes of transport. Cars are the way people never have to leave…

A sequence of aerial shots of the Sydney Opera House, at different altitudes. I put this together as an exploration of the idea of ‘local’ and ‘global’, a fundamental idea we use in many areas. I think aerial shots help…

It’s strange that if you want to learn how to play tennis, or to type, or an instrument, or to knit, your body will just figure it out for you, given enough time. But to sit or stand, so many of us are a train wreck.…

US government in shut down because Trump can’t get $5 billion for his ridiculous wall. The wall he said Mexicans would pay for (the man pathologically lies) and which construction experts say will cost at least $20…

Let’s pretend Orange, the town, declared it was going to separate from the rest of Australia. Like the UK is trying to do with Europe. How long would the Orange people know and love survive? Ask that question about any…

Discuss? Camille Paglia (prominent feminist) on whether most of what makes our world 'modern' is infrastructure, built and maintained, often in horrendous conditions, mostly by men. I often think about the invisible,…

Droughts and flooding rains. Mackellar’s line was a bit of misty-eyed fondness. But ironically, droughts cause flooding rains, and flooding rains cause droughts. Both are symptoms of how the Australian landscape has…

How stupid selling of public assets to foreign profit-taking firms gets rebranded, by the idiots who sold it off, as "Lefties/Greenies against coal". Let's be less dumb. Notice how the more privatised electricity gets,…

Tennis was my main sport as a kid. I’ve been interested in Federer regularly being called the greatest player of all time. The statistics don’t bear that out, Margaret Court is like the Bradman of tennis, nobody else is…

We’re taught that ‘life’ is this finite thing, between birth and death. And that death is the absence of life. Some people believe there is life after death. (Interestingly, it’s less common to ask - is there life…

Is it society, or nature, when it takes 2.46 terawatt hours of electricity to keep in touch on social media?

I’m with her. I’d call it an ‘ordinary’ life. Habit, routine, all the things I love the most. To go back to the circle of life, I see the apparent craziness of the world today as pretty simple, the replacing of calm…

Every year engineers release a report card on the health of US infrastructure. (They do the same in Australia.) D+, not pretty. It’d be the same in many countries, we tend to build things and then just assume they never…

Here’s another way to look at a society without tradition and meaningful institutions. Williams describes the end point of doing that, the young, and the old and frail get thrown on the scrap heap, with only the healthy…

Testing the big ScoMo slogan machine. Has anybody actually seen their electricity and gas prices go down?

Do you get anxious about whether you have enough super? Super is I think one of the great shams of the finance industry, who naturally want you to invest as much money with them as you can. The idea of ‘lifestyle’…

What if our mistake with climate change is to think it’s about climate? We’ve used fossil fuels for several centuries to ‘free’ ourselves from the usual constraints of life - our connections to our landscapes, to our…

Part 2 of previous post. This book is a ripper. Authenticity is a key idea in our time, for me, with a very dark core. "Musicians strive to “keep it real”; listeners condemn “fakes”; ... but does great music really need…

I think these experiences show a couple of important things. Firstly that freedom is always freedom TO do something, not freedom *from* something. Whether it’s gravity or taxes, what some describe as limits or…

I hit a safety barrier head on at over 100 km/h about 16 years ago. The only injury was a bruised thumb, from the air bag. Without the barrier I wouldn’t be here. The car lobby is extremely powerful, and extremely…

‘The private sector is always more efficient.’ A slogan I’ve heard since I was a kid. One of the most powerful fantasies of our time. Exhibit A, electricity. Look at how the roles of people in the electricity industry…

Always follow the money. ‘Self-funded retirees’ is an oxymoron, a huge chunk of their wealth is tax concessions, which we all pay for. The political battle of our times is between the old and young, not Left and Right.…

Binaural beats are one of a range of sound technologies used now to target specific mental states. They play a slightly different frequency in each ear, and if done correctly your brain waves become ‘entrained’. So they…

Green parties have never been very successful in politics. They tend to be fringe parties. My sense of why that is, is that their main historical interest - the ‘environment’ - is impossible to define. How could you…

An idea for my LM and Alexander friends, or anybody else. Common ideas about gravity and movement prevent many of us I think from ever experiencing our bodies/minds for what they really are. Take the idea of…

The FB outage yesterday made me think of public squares. Cities used to revolve around them, a place that was a dedicated space for the public, as a group. In modern times I think TV played this role for a long time, it…

I have a daughter now old enough to drive. It's a tension for me, because: 1. I don't think kids should be driving cars. 2. I think society already has way too many cars and drivers. 3. The greatest killer of…

“Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses…

White meat and red meat, it's only in recent years I learned why there two main types. It's all to do with the fibres, fast-twitch (white) or slow-twitch (red). White meat is muscle used for short (anaerobic) explosive…

Kids have to learn to balance. Adults think they don’t. But all human activities need balance, and as we do more complex things as we get older, we should be learning new balancing as we do. But we often don’t, we…

Presence, what does it mean? Here's Freddie Mercury just saying hello to an audience (sorry that FB keeps causing sound and vision to go out of sync). This is presence, it electrifies a situation. Anybody could just say…

Have been discussing the right to silence. I don’t think its importance is well understood, good summary here. Justice is as much about the accused as it is about the victim of crime, that gets forgotten very easily.…

Australians see government as a service provider. Something to make sure the basic infrastructure of society is in place, working and affordable. I think it’s a very healthy framework for government, and have actually…

This happened in Lithgow recently. The investigation as to why turned up the interesting fact that nobody even knew how the Lithgow reticulated water supply works. They still don’t, some of it is still a mystery. The…

I don’t like the term re-wilding, because it’s not about letting the landscape be ‘wild’, just about letting far more things live in it. It turns out all landscapes need as many animals, plants and people in them as…

I love this paradox. If you want a peaceful happy life, you have to debate things. Trying to achieve peace and happiness by avoiding conflict just kicks the conflict can down the road, and when we catch up to it it’s…

Utopia hit a vein by focusing on infrastructure. But it’s interesting to think about why infrastructure has become such a political issue. Maybe because most of the wealth of the country has been channelled to the old,…

Air pollution is finally getting attention as a lethal thing. It's not just a big city problem either, every morning as I travel into a country town, I see this layer of filthy air. We're very complacent about it, it…

We largely banish darkness from our lives today. In a city or even large town you can’t even see the night sky, we’re immersed in light from waking until going to bed. But have a look at this picture. The surface of the…

3 million people per week worldwide move from the countryside to the city. Countrysides the world over are emptying of people, if not already empty, and drones and other equipment are taking over farming. I see this as…

Sometimes people say Usain Bolt had the time to look around like this in a race because he was so good. But what if that's backwards? What if he was so good because he was the runner in the race not narrowed to where he…

Darkness and light. Geometry. The Romans and Egyptians entombed things, some of their greatest legacies are their tombs. But it's not just about death, to entomb is to make implicit, rather than explicit. Knowledge can…

Here's an idea for 'stimulating the economy'. How about diverting the vast rivers of taxpayer dollars flowing to Canberra, to State and local government, where the services people use actually are? At the moment…

The flip side to tax 'relief'. We're absolute dopes not to see this. The more they cut taxes, the more they shift the cost of basic public services back onto us. Anybody noticed the price of education, health,…

The big city crush. All of my friends here at once, party on.

I reckon every behaviour you can see on the road is matched by a different way people live and act in society. Have a look at this, our roads tell us every day how to solve society's problems. (It won't be individualism…

A global map of the internet. I've been driving my family mad excitedly watching the NBN being installed in our street. You see, for me, what holds the world together isn't politics, or love. It's technology. That fibre…

When cars didn't own cities.

Commiserations to those low income earners who stupidly went to university to train for a career. Your tax cut has been eaten up by the lowering of the threshold for repayment of your HELP debt. We need to look after…

Hands up if you plan to use your tax cut to: - upgrade the NBN - pay childcare workers a living wage - reduce hospital waiting times - take unflued gas heaters out of schools - build more public transport - fix the…

It's a long time since Railway Square in Sydney looked like this. The blissful time before cars ate the world.

This is Herbert Benson, revolutionary American cardiologist who recognises that bodies can’t be understood or healed separately to minds. His patients are trained to activate the relaxation response, their…

So, after more than $50 billion of our money, Australia is now 62nd in the world for broadband speed. They could fix the NBN by upgrading it to its original design, but that would mean these failed suburban solicitors…

This dam in Derbyshire is threatening to fail, dumping 300 million tonnes of water onto the town below. You could see this as an engineering or infrastructure problem, but our infrastructure is a group of social…

Even the tiniest country towns built churches as a first priority. My theme at the moment - can we still understand how space and place can be so meaningful to people? At the same time we laugh at people who are…

Those socialists down in Victoria, I dunno. The role of a State government is to help the gambling, alcohol, toll road and property development industries, not to do things like this. Loving that vehicles are being put…

At $51 billion the NBN is Australia’s biggest ever infrastructure project, and it makes some people wince. But just to keep our societies running, an estimated $40 billion a year will be needed on infrastructure. Per…

I still think the real political divide in society isn't Left versus Right. It's old versus young. Wealth is being funnelled to retirees, a time of life that used to be about slowing down. And society has no money to do…

Germaine Greer, as an example of a truth-teller. You can always tell a truth-teller because: 1) what they say doesn’t support any ‘side’ in a debate 2) what they say will reframe a problem in ways that are totally…

This one's been doing the rounds for a while. It made me think about China, how we tend to see it from the outside as an authoritarian country. It is that, sort of, but I think it's the wrong word. In China tradition is…

Circuit boards look a bit like mini-cities. I don't think that's just an analogy, they're cities for sub-atomic particles. The amazing things we do with electronics - talk to people anywhere in the world…

3 minutes of fascination. Tracks the birth of cities over 5700 years. (Watch the explosion of cities around 1900 - fuelled by? Fossil fuels.) Notice cities preceded States by a long way, and some say 'sovereign' States…

Electric cars are a great step. But the bigger problem I think is - there are far, far too many cars. More mass/public transport options is an option, but even more than that is changing cities and towns so you don’t…

I never dated as a teen. 70% of that was me being chronically shy. 30% was me not sure what the point of dating was. I'm still not sure. Relationships, sure, central to life. But it's not clear to me even today that…

Ideas and exercise can't be separated. Why do we strain to go up stairs? Mostly because, I think, we feel that we need to 'climb' them. Climbing as an idea has a set of other assumptions, about needing to pull or push…

Here's a suggestion. Don't do this (in any city). The people who live in Florence don't want bloody tourists now invading their private areas as well.

The long weekend, where homes are relocated through hours of traffic jams to a tent city of other homes. Apparently it's called getting back to nature.

In the 18th century Edmund Burke watched the French Revolution murdering thousands of people. What he took from those events is an idea of freedom opposite to how we've been taught to think of it - he's one of the…

One of the things I think farmers could teach city folk about climate change is that the idea of an 'environment' that we have to 'protect' is a fantasy. Nature, a meaningless term really, makes you work. Climate change…

This little civil engineering cartoon shows multiple amazing things. For decades now the US Army Corps of Engineers have been trying to stop the Mississippi from being captured by the Atchafalaya River, itself a product…

One of the great mysteries and frustrations for planners and people who live in regional areas, is why no matter what they try, people keep moving to big cities. Big cities are getting bigger and bigger. Mega-cities. I…

To me the most extraordinary things in the world are always the most ordinary things. Take pipe. Our entire civilisation would collapse without it. Know that puzzle - what happens when an unstoppable force meets an…

I like walking on roads when they're empty. Part of it is to reclaim the space from vehicles. But it's also because of one property they have that I find interesting. Road space is unbounded space. The function of a…

A car is an institution. I think all successful technologies are institutions. For a car: - the car company itself is an institution - the parts and spares industries are institutions - road building and maintenance are…

Our civilisation is part Greek, part Roman. The Greeks gave us democratic ideas, the Romans built things. Like their roads, in the picture. The Romans survived over 1000 years, the Greeks, just over 300. Maybe there's a…

The 'false consensus effect' is a widespread cognitive bias where people overestimate how many other people agree with their beliefs. It's one of the main reasons people hate pollies, they think there's broad consensus…

I travel through degraded farmland every day. I think NSF is a wonder of the world, slowly making inroads. Everybody wins, farmers, biodiversity, water etc.

I periodically talk about negative ion generators, because they're pretty amazing. Clear evidence now that this simple technology strips the air of pollution like dust and spores, but also bacteria and viruses. In fact…

The next generation of floating wind turbines capable of operating further from the shore could generate enough energy to meet the world’s total electricity demand 11 times over in 2040, according to International…

This is the Katy freeway, in Texas, 23 lanes wide. It now takes 51% *longer* to travel this stretch of road than when it was 8 lanes wide. This to me is the problem with supply and demand thinking, the same is now…

Imagine if trains, buses and planes ignored rules. It rarely happens, those forms of mass transport are strongly regulated in multiple ways. 95% of drivers I see on the road ignore speed limits and other rules all the…

I think stairs are one of the best examples of our bizarre ideas about gravity. Going ‘up’ stairs is often seen as hard work, people strain to do it, or take the lift. Going down stairs people often fall onto each step,…

Opposites are the in thing. Left and Right, city and the bush, quiet Australians and noisy Australians, etc. I think it’s worth trying this thought experiment with all of them. Hot and cold is a good example. If hot…

The Skwish toy is often used as an example of tensegrity. As a structure it just sits there, in any orientation, without strain (in a body you’d call strain ‘effort’). You can imagine your body like that, as a single…

The gooseneck, another classic suspension design. Elasticity at work. In the body the muscles would be analogous to the central spring, and the fascia and other connective tissue would be the soft outer covering to…

I’ve spent a lot of time working in universities. What’s the function of a University? Actually I think it has only one true function. To teach people to tame ideas. Ideas matter because everything we do is an idea.…

I dug back into the crap thrown at Tim Flannery by Straya's culture warriors a few years ago. Flannery predicted dire shortages of water and rain. The crazies were outraged, as in this article below. There are now over…

In 1952 London had a 5-day smog emergency (picture). About 12,000 people died from the filthy air. Sydney is in the middle of a week of filthy air, the rest of us have been too. The damage that does to lungs and blood…

Self-driving cars are already hugely safer than humans driving cars. It's interesting that we hold them up to a much higher standard than human-driven cars. Cars are much more than just modes of transport - they're the…

Cities were so much more interesting before cars destroyed them. Most people alive today would never have experienced life in a city not governed by vehicles. (Thanks to Alex for the photo.)

I see schools are now doing rain dances, does stupidity have no limit? Australia’s problem isn’t lack of rain - ‘drought’ - it’s stupidity. Australia builds its towns and cities on its best agricultural land, flood…

Ideas matter. In the constant arguments about transport, why don’t we question why we need to ‘transport’ so much stuff in the first place, including ourselves? What would change if we flipped our thinking to make *not*…

National parks, part 2. The Australian landscape at the time of European settlement was overwhelmingly described as a ‘park’. But not in our modern meaning of ‘wilderness’, but in the meaning of the sorts of estates…

I think we misunderstood - what if ‘reconciliation’ needs to be with Australia itself? The landscape. Aborigines aren’t separate to the landscape - they created it. With towns and cities almost out of water, and…

I heard a joke once that said a bogan is somebody whose life is defined by the use of petrol. I didn’t realise there are whole websites on the topic. (Some very funny stuff on this site, I hadn’t realised…

The train strike interests me, to see how people respond. The government in this case has been trying to create an impression in the public mind that recent chaos on the trains is due to lazy drivers calling in sick. As…

They’re doing stunning graphics for stats these days, check this out. I was in a serious car accident about 15 years ago and don’t know how I survived, luck more than anything. You always assume these things happen to…

Average speed safety cameras for cars, again in the news. NSW is going it alone in not using them (the Nationals don’t like them). These cameras would change our roads in the most profound way. Much smarter and fairer…

We're away! "“Some, but not all, and none of them a small entity, have said they cannot respond within the time fixed ... The deadline cannot be met due to the amount of material that needs to be reviewed and…

I prefer the old ways in education, where the focus was habit and not our minds and ideas. And we are, in the West, so lacking poise of mind and body. We’re hyper-sensitized slobs, or hyper-sensitized six packs. William…

I think this is one of the greatest fantasies at the heart of modern life. The idea of starting society again from scratch, going off-grid, being more ‘authentic’. Think I’ve mentioned that before, I see the passion for…

If it seems that the world has gone mad, Urban Dictionary can help. All of the talk of ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ in politics is a sideshow. The real clash we’re all living through is probably much deeper, and nothing…

Venice is probably the only major city in the world that can still let you experience what cities were like, before the internal combustion engine. More than anything else, what I noticed in Venice was the quiet. We’re…

Australia has a desperate shortage of piano tuners, and an even greater shortage of people who train piano tuners. It’s impossible to perfectly tune a piano, all pianos are slightly out of tune. Great video explains why.

I love crows, and ravens. Mostly for their amazing intelligence, and for the character that brings with it. Something that’s confused me for a while though is - why do we not see them much except when they’re eating…

Hmm, I accidentally deleted my earlier post on this. We need not just more trees, but more plants in general. Not only do they protect the soil, they actually generate rain. Some argue that climate change could be…

It is interesting how we will tolerate carnage caused by human error, but one mistake by a machine is scary. It says something about how we view identity and machines and moral responsibility. This technology will…

Some of the work being done with autonomous vehicles in Australia. Notice that part of the new world being developed is not just making vehicles individually autonomous, it’s to network them to each other and connect…

Do you have any respiratory problems? Asthma, hayfever, a cold, the flu? Another shout out for vitamin C. For years it’s sort of been known as useful for conditions like this, but it gets caught up in the debates around…

Rather than get rid of Facebook, we should recognise that it’s now a public service, like water or electricity. It should be regulated, as Cook says. That’s how these corporate giants make such enormous sums of money,…

This is what has always struck me as the single most important thing people need from education. Not any individual subject or type of knowledge. The capacity for sustained attention on something.…

Another example of Brian May’s genius. Not the solo itself, which is beautiful, but how May managed to design a guitar and rig which achieved the impossible. Instead of the usual opposites of a ‘clean’ sound and…

“For millennia we have been seeking the secret of the Pyramids...one Indo-European civilization and one Semitic one loved the light, Greece and Israel, developed to revelation by the Word; one Semitic civilization and…

Anybody else love The Good Life? One of those wonderful 1970s TV shows, about leaving the rat race, with the Goods (in the picture) deciding to be self-sufficient. As I got older though, I wondered how healthy the…

The mythologies of small business. I don't actually have anything against small business, what I don't like is the mythologies around it, which this article talks about and traces back in time. There was no such thing…

Hazard reduction burns. Sorry, yes a pet hate. The ‘hazard’ these burns reduces is mostly the risk of stupidly-positioned homes, in the middle of the bush, burning down if there’s a fire. Property damage. The problem…

Like a dog returning to its vomit, I’m back at cars. There’s still more to do. We need our networked villages back. Try walking where you live, be it town or city, and just listen, and you’ll notice we’ve become used to…

Sorry if you’ve just eaten. This is the Black Plague (it really is black), alive and well in the 21st century. This man had removed a mouse from his cat’s mouth, to stop the cat from choking. The reason I posted this is…

Boo hoo? I think betrayal is the heart of not just social life, but of all of reality. In love, we hear what we want to hear and project what we want to see, onto the people we love. Friendship the same. A new road…

More love, because it’s a lovely topic. Proust is valuable because he allows us to strip away what Greer called the ‘wretched cant’ of love. The self-motivated projections we put onto other people, that are really about…

I may be one of the few weirdos who watches the banking Royal Commission, but the guy Westpac put forward today - seriously hopeless. Embarrassing, a train wreck.

I never win this debate, but it’s been a while. HECS. University students pay a contribution for their degree, once they enter the workforce. This is usually justified by saying they tend to get higher-paid jobs, so…

Patterns appear, and nobody plans them or designs them. So they’re pretty mysterious, but maybe also the secret to understanding society, because society is these patterns. They’re not designed or planned by…

So...the proposed tax cuts seem popular. Because government is unpopular, and the silly myth that tax takes ‘our’ money off us. Around the world there’s been a rush to gut government, often through tax cuts which starve…

More tribal mind/patterns. After 9/11, many Americans shifted to their cars to avoid planes for travel. This led to a spike in road deaths of about 1600 above the average. Most of those people would still be alive if…

Our politics looks like society is at war, but actually we live in some of the most peaceful times in human history. It’s impossible to understand that paradox I think if you only look at humans. An example - trains.…

Offshoot of another discussion. Data and visuals suggesting strongly that today is easily the most peaceful time in human history. Also shows that States or governments - the things many have a passion for destroying…

For a long time, the world was divided up into those things with consciousness, and those things without. The first list was very small, the second list huge. A lot of fields are shifting how they think about this now…

Is a hole a thing? It’s nothing, an empty space, but then why give it a name? A hole in a bucket or donut or sock or road - part of the bucket/donut/sock/road, or its own thing? Is the inside edge of a donut part of the…

I think families, organisations and whole societies are really all just conversations. Not as an analogy or metaphor - literally conversations. Even when you think about the more 'solid' things, like buildings and…

More ‘we’. For cooperation to spread, it turns out you don’t want everybody just connected to everybody else. Companies make this mistake a lot, they think connecting everybody to everybody else, and good communication…

I love villages, I think they're the healthiest and nicest form of human settlement. Everything at just the right human scale, not so small as to destroy privacy but not so large that people feel alone. And a balance of…

Immigrants should move to regional areas, again on the TV today. I can't decide where to rank this on the scale of stupidity and hypocrisy. How about some of you city dwellers stop hugging the coast in desperate denial…

Gabriel Tarde on life in a big city, another paradox. Rich social environments are environments of intense imitation, not of thought. Facebook is another rich social environment - do we see much thought on it? Or mostly…

Plastic bag ban ends up with people using more plastic bags. Farmers come out and say hey, those farmers whose stock are dying in the drought and have no feed are just bad farmers. The law of unintended consequences,…

This was a superb story, if you’re interested in drought and drought relief, it should be compulsory viewing. Lots of very smart farmers out there, doing incredibly smart things, and using very different ideas about the…

The bridge collapse in Europe overnight. Stories. The story of the collapse is ‘wasn’t properly maintained’. Which means the story of maintenance wasn’t one that resonated with enough people. Vast amounts of the…

Something about size. If you use a microscope, telescope, or even climb to the top of a building, you’ll feel like you’re seeing more in some ways. But actually that’s not true, you’re definitely seeing things you…

I’m not an ‘exercise’ person, but am still very active. This long (but brilliant) quote from the great Australian scientist Raymond Dart is the sort of exercise I do, every day, in everything I do. It makes your body…

Kidult, the child-adult. Hadn’t heard the word before, but adults with the mindset of adolescents, and adolescents aping what they see as adult behaviour seems very real. People well into middle age, often with no…

Watching Malcolm Turnbull on energy bills. How long will it be until we decide again that essential public services should never be privatised? Not energy, not education, not housing, not superannuation, not roads, not…

Conspiracy theories and urban myths are both fascinating things. David Grimes took a completely different approach to conspiracy theories (which he doesn’t dismiss out of hand), by ignoring the facts involved and…

A gap in our education? If you play sport, it’s obvious that you start pretty badly at it, and then with practice you get better all the time. But with the basic physical things we do every day, like stand, walk, run,…

There are towns in danger of running out of water. Even Sydney has lost alarming amounts from its vast reservoir this past year. (In Australia we tend to think dams somehow magically create water from nothing, in…

An experiment I sometimes ask people to try. We’re all familiar with astronauts floating in space. What’s much less well known is that there is no actual spot where ‘outer space’ ends and Earth begins. When you stand on…

There are 15 people dead for every person alive today. It seems like those nearly 100 billion humans who once lived are gone. But much of what they did in their lives never left us, they shaped our languages,…

Not all feelings have names, some of them are too complex to be easily named or even described. But I think they’re the best guide to life, feelings take an entire situation and wrap it up into a package. (The Germans…

I’m not always the best sleeper, and in the early hours of this morning I was reflecting on the concept of ends and means. The one captured in the expressions ‘means to an end’, and ‘the end justifies the means’. Most…

My first degree was in an area which is hardly even mentioned to young students, but is the cutting edge of nearly all science and engineering. Materials engineering. It’s new materials which have been the real driver…

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by…

I think this is worth looking at again. There’s a very wide fitness and exercise culture now, but this sort of evidence suggests that we’ve forgotten things about the human body and how it works. The body is stronger,…

China has 25,000km of high speed rail services. Let that sink in. My bet is the country that commits to building things will win, over the country that commits to cutting taxes. The Anglo countries live a fantasy that…

I’ve spent a lot of the weekend browsing the Holtermann Collection. Bernhardt Holtermann was a German immigrant in the mid-19th century, and became famous because of the Holtermann Nugget, the largest gold nugget ever…

You can’t feel your body. You are your body. One of the greatest things I ever learned. Weight and breathing as examples. Vid re-posted, cos it’s cool. What you feel as your weight, is not your weight. You can’t feel…

More modern morals. Is shopping a moral activity? (I think all activities are.) For example: - does online shopping screw bricks and mortar retail, but keep thousands of cars off the road and save poor people money? -…

In the news again today, "make new migrants move to regional areas, to take pressure off infrastructure in the big cities." Yeh, because regional areas have such fabulous infrastructure.

Glad this is at least being tried. Though I think just banning cars may not fix things. But look at the difference to the quality of life in the city when they’re gone. Our cities and even towns a long time ago now…

Rest In Peace. Everyday wonders - the origins of that phrase is one of them, I think. For the earliest Christians it was actually dormit in pace - to ‘sleep in peace’. Why is this an everyday wonder? I think I posted…

My trip home every day. First class, quiet comfort, spectacular views. Costs me $2 a trip, can have beer or wine, hot or cold food. Cars nearly destroyed train travel, it’s very sad going past the old unused stations in…

We don’t always see ourselves as a ‘culture’ in the same way we see other cultures. But the defining thing about us I think, as a culture, is that we don’t actually occupy space. We like to move, travel, to go from A to…

One of the aims of feminism was to put a brake on broad stereotyping of women. Women are people, people are individually different in all sorts of ways, etc. One of the things I find a bit disturbing in the debates…

A wonder from the English countryside. The hedgerow. We use fences now, but the hedgerow is way more than just a natural fence. I think it shows an entirely different relationship between people and the landscape. A…

Bit of Henri Bergson magic. Bergson pointed out that space and time aren’t two separate things, they define each other. For example, something ‘far away’ is space, right? No, said Bergson, it’s also time, because it’s a…

I know, I’m a broken record on this. But it’s like Daylight Saving, I think things are changing. Our towns and cities have been ruined by cars, and finally that’s becoming clearer to more people. Have a look at these…

I don't think we're going to fix this until we understand our obsession with travel, which is becoming clearer to me all the time. I say we're a culture who has separated itself off from connection to place. We're…

I couldn't recommend Edmund Burke highly enough. Also John Howard's hero, though I think Burke would have found Howard clueless. This description of Burke describes exactly the world we ended up living in, which he…

I took a not very common pathway through education in the modern world. I studied sciences, maths and engineering, as well as the humanities, music and art. I worked bloody hard in all of them (still do), and did well…

Another example of how perspective drawing fundamentally screws with our experience of the world. Take this standard example, of ‘moving’ from point A to point B. What we call movement relies upon us first isolating…

Bill Shorten's energy announcement today is a slam dunk. He's a skilled operator, mocked continuously but unionists know about politics. We can't get rid of the current LNP idiots fast enough - their entire energy…

I just spent a few days in Melbourne. It made me angry, because it reminded me again of the unforgivable vandalism that was done in ripping up Sydney’s tram network. Walking in central Melbourne is pleasant, the trams…

The idea of ‘mental illness’ came from having to deal with conditions that were beyond the limited understanding of medicine. For example the horrendous injuries many men suffered in World War 1, which couldn’t be…

3 out of 4 Australian homes now have air conditioning. With rising electricity prices (some of which is due to the extra demand from air conditioners), these cost a bomb to run and make the climate warmer in the process…

I'm not popular in thinking tourism and travel are a bit of an unrecognised plague on the planet, driven hugely by Westerners who use up other places to try to relieve a deep existential boredom, that they feel but…

Have been waiting to trial this, saw it first in our winter and now the heat is here, time to give it a go. Zero energy air con.…

Cars need to be reined in, without screwing the poor in the process, who need them the most. Cars are filthy (because the internal combustion engine is shit technology), they take over every space they're allowed into,…

Last night I sat in front of this ultra cheapo fan, and decided to calculate what it costs to run (slow TV night). The answer? 1 cent per hour. That means I could run it 24 hours per day, for a whole week, for about…

Don't believe for one second the bullshit in the news, or from moron politicians carrying big lumps of coal into parliament, about South Australia's power problems. NSW prices are some of the highest in the world, and…

Dyson makes beautiful (and eye-wateringly expensive) things. Their current crop of fans are interesting because they're also air purifiers. For a lot of years air purifiers were mostly for chronic allergy sufferers, a…

Denzel rode the aging gracefully train for so long. He's looking like Pavarotti now.

Hoping they do use average speed cameras for cars and bikes at some point. There's something unhealthy about a law that's barely observed, as a motorist there are days you feel like you're the only person on the road…

Talking about road safety brings up interesting comparisons with air safety. Private planes are nearly as dangerous as cars. Commercial flight (much, much safer) went the way that driving and cars are being dragged…

"It may shock you, but Americans spend more than $2 trillion every year on car ownership — more money than we spend on food. What’s even more staggering is that for all the money we spend on them, the 250 million cars…

The World Health Organisation has now listed air pollution as the greatest threat to global health. Only 8% of the people in the world breathe healthy air, it's killing millions. You can plug in even regional cities to…

Seen the price of sending a package through OzPost lately? Makes your eyes water. And those awful loss-making letters. That's why it was a public service. Ain't the 'efficient' private sector grand, consumers paying…

The dark underbelly of Grand Designs. Architecture is a field that has failed almost completely. To succeed it would have to be impacting on a lot more housing and building than it is. Instead it caters for the wealthy,…

Trump's actual legislative agenda so far, summarised by an American friend. Not much in there for the ordinary downtrodden citizen, he's like Tony Abbott, talks the talk and then walks the jackboot big business and…

If you haven't experienced binaural audio recordings, you need to. Binaural recordings are recordings that reproduce more or less exactly the sounds you would hear if you were actually in a situation, including the…

The Wizard of Oz is not as simple as it looks. The author (Baum) was a political journalist, and the story is full of political allegories and jokes. Here are just some. There was a rise of populism as well at the time…

Young teenager busking. On recorder. Immediate pity for him. Then he started up "We Built this City on Rock 'n' Roll". Spent the money on a pie.

Buildings look like inanimate objects, but notice what happens almost the day they're abandoned. They get trashed. Buildings and people form a sort of ecosystem, they need each other. A building is a living thing, an…

I see a lot of students and even adults holding pens and pencils in sometimes horrendous ways. My own kids included! Maybe it's not as big an issue now, that typing is much more common. But the physical strain some…

If we spent the proceeds of the mining boom (one of my pet ideas, apologies if you've had it inflicted on you before) on building high speed rail WEST from Sydney or Melbourne out into the rest of Australia - that part…

"In a few decades city dwellers will look back on the twilight of the internal combustion engine and ask why governments were so much slower than consumers to read its last rites."

We think we're a bit clever for religion these days, but the true message of Easter is much more profound than all the self-help, self-esteem, self-improvement and status-seeking we've replaced it with in our lives.…

Nomadic Matt trying to assuage his guilt. Not his fault, it's the 'tourists'. He's as much as part of it as anybody else, his solution won't work. Tourism is like the debates around city versus country. In reality the…

Beautiful. For the shy people out there. One gem: "The internet, far from cutting us off from each other, has simply provided more fodder for our own era’s fascination with emotional authenticity and therapeutic…

This is the actual second verse of Advance Australia Fair, which isn't well known. When gallant Cook from Albion sail'd, To trace wide oceans o'er, True British courage bore him on, Till he landed on our shore. Then…

It's strange something as abstract as climate change become such a big political issue. Have often wondered why. It's most likely because there are two main responses to the challenges in the world at the moment, and…

Could be a description of a drug problem. No real difference. "The more you travel, the harder it becomes to hit that 'wow' factor when you venture to a new destination. It's a paradoxical conundrum. Travellers seek out…

So many urban myths.

"Australian banks are upset. Their $30 billion per year gravy train of profits from the Australian people is finally being slowed down...To be clear, the banking system is a regulated cartel. Its primary function is to…

Germaine Greer was one of the only prominent boomers who saw through the emptiness of the 60s 'peace and love' movement. This looks a miserable quote, but it's not at all, and matches what Proust for example saw about…

Can somebody explain why garbage trucks and street sweeper trucks do their rounds so early in the morning, waking whole towns? I can see a possible logic in a big city, to avoid traffic at least on major roads. But…

Sometimes it feels good to pointlessly rail against being gouged.

Ho hum. The worm keeps turning. The article is a good one in that it understands that there is nothing different between everyday tourists and 'authentic' tourism - it's the authentic tourism that opens up new spots for…

So Pauly, listen to the minute or more of explanation starting at 6:18 to hear the genius of Brian May and electric guitar and amp design. I hate that it gets called 'the Brian May sound', as if it's some idiosyncratic…

"The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in…

One of the most difficult things to get for your kids in Australia is good training in foreign languages. I would swap 90% of what kids are taught at school for good training in other languages. Up to 4 or 5 languages…

The real reason electricity prices are going up? Gas prices are going up, the two are directly linked, because gas turbines are the newest additions to the power generation system. Look at the graph, it's a perfect…

"But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she…

We don't often think about the gigantic amount of fuel our passion for flying and travel uses. The larger planes, like the 747 or A-380, carry over 300,000 litres of fuel. So when you take one of these and fly to London…

Bill Shorten has been playing the long game. Now he's made inequality the central plank of his platform, which is both brave and the only thing any politician should be doing right now, it doesn't matter if you don't…

What I like about Europe is that it's smart. And proud of it. https://impact.vice.com/en_us/article/bjx543/european-cities-are-taking-back-public-services-from-private-companies

I've been looking at the research on air ionisers. These suckers really work, they inactivate bacteria and viruses in the air, as well as particulate matter. In a trial in a U.K. Hospital, they reduced the rate of…

Huge week for the LNP. I don't think it's noticed much that the Libs and Nats have almost nothing in common. One is a party of the city, the other the bush. One believes in free markets and free trade, the other loves…

This statement is true whether it's private insurance, or private roads, water, schools, banks, electricity etc. "Private insurance, however, is an expensive way to fund health care. When we look at the relationship…

From a few weeks ago...if you found yourself on a train with Paul McCartney, sitting alone, what would you do?

"I would be very emphatic that our schools, our parishes exist to teach a Catholic view of marriage," he said. I would be very emphatic that they take some of the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars they're getting…

Unregulated doctors' fees and patient choice versus uncontrollable insurance costs. Insurers try to introduce 'managed care' to control costs, doctors push back because it restricts their capacity to treat. The answer?…

Maybe time to put negative ion generators in classrooms, buses, trains, hospitals and other public spaces. Cheap, effective.

‘Base load’ is a term people often use in energy debates. They think it means a basic minimum amount of electricity the community needs, night and day. It doesn’t mean that at all. Like most of the energy debate, it’s a…

The gas 'crisis' is easily solved, and from that electricity prices should come down a lot too (gas is used heavily in electricity generation). Instead we have the idiots going into bat for the big gas companies, who…

Which came first - city or country?

Expensive suburbs are often described as 'leafy'. And with summers getting hotter also a fantastic way to keep places cooler. But so many of our towns and cities have very few trees. It changes the whole character of a…

What worries Australians, graphed over the last 7 years. Look at housing on the rise. Australia is in real trouble. Its economic success in the last 20 years is almost a complete fantasy. The country has been run like a…

Maybe the most magical Christmas I ever had was in Switzerland, here at Arosa. Travelling by train into the mountains, watching the snow outside. And then living here for a week or more. Sigh, snow...

Another tragic story in the news today about a cyclist killed by a motorist, whose attention lapsed for a moment. Bikes on roads is an emotional issue for people. And putting to one side whether there should I be more…

Air pollution in India. It’s not well known that nearly half the air pollution caused by vehicles doesn’t come from the engine. It comes from the wheels. Both shedding the tyre compound, and throwing up dust and tyre…

I think this metaphorically describes the Queensland election, and most politics in the Western world. The conservative side of politics - the LNP here - is a very shaky coalition of people who are in many ways…

This sign is most peoples’ wet dream writ large. But it’s bollocks. Here’s to the bureaucrats, society’s heroes. Why? It’s pretty simple. Every generation lives a certain time. It can’t reinvent history in every…

Sometimes it’s the little things. We need to get rid of friction brakes I think, they’re filthy. The air we breathe is chock full of the rubbish these things produce, and it’s seriously bad for us. There are…

Every politician who offers you a tax cut should be told the same thing. I would rather have: - decent and affordable schools - decent and affordable health care - affordable and effective transport options - power that…

Everything Elizabeth says is (scandalously) true. And similar arguments apply to private hospitals and private health (who also use the same lying excuses, such as ‘it takes the strain off the public system’). I…

Wednesday morning philosophy. One of my hobbies is trying to show that philosophy is as practical and important as building roads, or fixing gutters. Things don’t exist, or not exist. They *happen*. All things are…

A warning about electricity and gas providers. It seems increasingly they don’t even send somebody to read the meter, they’ll use an average or estimated figure instead which can be way off what you’ve actually used. I…

I watch this, but rarely last even one innings. I’m not some traditionalist, but it’s a circus really, one day cricket is now seen to be a bore, and T20 will go the same way. It’s seen as a shot in the arm for cricket,…

It’s not a popular view. But I reckon there are many who hold it, maybe secretly. And I like thinking about the people for whom this time of year is horrible, and who can’t wait for it to be done. (That’s not me,…

The saying is true - it's not what you say (or think), it's what you do that defines you. Huge implications across life and work and dealing with people everywhere. "We should be very careful when taking any notice of…

So beautifully said. Terrible pain and chaos coming all of our way unless we get our heads out of our bums. "It’s clear what needs to happen. There needs to be wholesale change in economic thinking. Forces in world…

In Australia it's more often the other way around. Working with your hands is cool. Doing University-trained stuff is apparently a wank.

People give you a bit of a blank look when you say you trained as a materials engineer. Materials engineering is the cutting edge of all engineering.

Just check out the numbers in this, even if you're not interested in Bernie Sanders. The scale of the ripping off is staggering, almost beyond belief. These same thieves then fund think tanks and shock jocks to make…

Branford Marsalis once said the nice thing about playing in the Dream of the Blue Turtles band was knowing they could go out on the road and kick any other band's arse. Difficult to disagree.

Anybody else in Lithgow getting the push marketing from Simply Energy lately? The con where they knock on your door and make out as if they're just passing on the good news about a cut to the official electricity rate,…

What's frustrating about this is that a high speed rail line from East to West could transform the country. But it will go North-South (if it ever happens) because that's where the population is now. And they already…

The attention given to track sprinters in the Olympics is a shame for me. It's an event that is as full of corrupt drug practices as the Tour de France, and there are other athletes like Michael Phelps who put the…

Being in Melbourne with its trams is always fantastic. What you notice more than anything else is how many vehicles it keeps off the roads, there's noticeably much less traffic and noise and pollution. Sydney is run by…

Love this one, from gizmodo. Private message me if you have an answer, so it doesn't spoil it for others. "At precisely 7:00 a.m., a monk sets out to climb a tall mountain, so that he might visit a temple at its peak.…

Thanks again to Adam Hyland for this one. Sydney once had an extensive network of trams, and it's now desperately trying to restore a small fraction of that sort of transport with light rail, at enormous cost. Let's…

Those T-plates will keep them on the right side of the road for sure. Dumb is winning.

Oh please please please. If you're watching Lithgow City Council. Not one of you useless boneheads even acknowledge an email about internet service in Lithgow. Probably can't use the internet.

I take it back, we do have trains.

Am a big fan of Open Focus work, it's an extremely powerful alternative way to think about use. And the focus of Open Focus is in how we pay attention, so it means you can work with a person's activity out into the…

I reckon trees can hugely change the character of any town or city. It's not surprising that expensive suburbs are often called 'leafy'. But any town or suburb can do it.

The internal combustion engine has done a lot for the world, but it's loud, inefficient and filthy. If you ever get a chance to be in a city that doesn't have it (like Venice), you realise what we've lost. More than…

This should get the dietitians and personal trainers out in force :)

Call me boring but I think point to point speed cameras might be the only thing that will make people pay attention to speed limits. Right now a huge number of people on the roads ignore them completely. That's why…

There's lots of debate around diet now, and people are learning amazing new things about nutrition, and reaffirming some old wisdom about food at the same time etc. What isn't questioned to the same extent, but it's…

Really worth thinking about, should we be allowing houses in some of these places? It not only costs a fortune to constantly replace them, but most back burning is driven by the need to protect properties like this. And…

It's not a toy train, it's a mini-a-ture locomotive. Cutest show on TV.

This is a real biggie, a time bomb. You can feel it queuing behind wealthy, retired boomers getting all-day train, bus and ferry passes for $2.50.…

Automatic driverless train crashes, killing 20 people. It's the fault of the engineer who set up the automatic driver, right.

Interesting: One belief associated with the Australian property bubble is that real estate value doubles every 7 years. However, "Take the city of Sydney - the Mecca of property investing. In 1890, the average Sydney…

People train 4 years for one event in the olympics. I reckon they should make them best-of-3 events, so if they get the nervous nellies they haven't wasted 4 years of effort. Of course the olympics would then run for…

So when Jug Ears parrots on about my electricity bill, beyond my usual first reaction to tell him to fuck off, I remember that in 2008 the average cost was about 15 cents per kWh. Now it's between 25 and 30 cents per…

would pay money to hear new chicken cross the road or knock knock jokes.

thinks watching your kids make their own breakfast is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.